Fridays at Enrico's

  Every once in a while he’d drink with Jaime, and they’d talk about writing. He wanted to tell her about the amphetamines, but couldn’t. She might lose respect for him if she knew. And then one night he found himself wandering the streets of North Beach with the overwhelming sense that the world was about to come apart. All the people he was seeing were already dead, just walking around, like himself, dead but unable to stop. He felt a great welling love for humanity in the hour of its death, and saw everyone in a shimmering halo of light. And then he found himself face-to-face with Jaime. She was staring at him. It was at night, they were on the street.

  “Help me,” he heard himself saying from a long distance away.

  “Of course,” she said. They drove over to the University of California hospital in her Porsche and waited in the big waiting room. A girl there, with her mother, suffered a headache, and Kenny wanted to die in sympathy. When the doctor saw Kenny he told him he couldn’t help him. The doctor was younger than Kenny and his face wore an expression of dislike. They left the hospital and Jaime said she’d take him home to Mill Valley, but Kenny said no. She drove him to Jackson and Larkin.

  “I’m just fucked up on drugs,” he finally admitted. They parked in front of the laundry. It was six in the morning.

  “Come over to our house,” she said. “Charlie’s in Los Angeles. You can sleep in his office. Just until you get off the drugs.”

  Kenny had to say, “I don’t want to.” He must have been painful to look at, because Jaime turned away. When she turned back there was a beautiful compassion on her face. “Okay,” she said. She touched his cheek.

  Kenny got out of the car and watched it drive off. Beautiful car, he thought, and went into his building and up the stairs, being as quiet as he could. Once inside he washed down a couple of pills and lay down to sleep. But he did not sleep.

  70.

  The first surprising thing about Hollywood was how much he liked it. Ratto’s secretary had gotten him “a suite of rooms” at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica, which turned out to be a dinky smelly pair of rooms with a noisy little refrigerator, stove, a red linoleum countertop that looked as if somebody had been chopping things on it, and a dirty old green shag carpet throughout. The smell was complex. He could identify piss, shit, vomit, stale wine, perfume, and tobacco smoke, but there were other, more elusive flavors. The bed was too hard and the Mexican maid came into the room any time she wanted. There was a little restaurant downstairs that was famous for its breakfasts, but the place was always jammed with the rock musicians who seemed to be the motel’s only other clientele. Charlie loved the place immediately. He felt right at home. The rockers were friendly and always laughed when he said he was a writer. “Writer, huh?”

  He’d hoped to make it through without a car, but that was impossible. He rented a Volkswagen bug from Dollar-A-Day, which cost him six dollars a day, and drove to the studio each morning just like a regular office worker. Fishkin-Ratto was at 20th Century Fox, about two miles from the motel, and Charlie would show up for work at around ten. The day would be spent sitting in either Ratto’s or Fishkin’s office. The boys, as he began to call them in his mind, had several projects other than Charlie’s, but while he was in town they tried to concentrate on his. The first day they sat in Bill’s office with the door shut and talked about war and war movies in general. Ethyl the secretary was instructed to hold all calls, and they put in a full day. At around five thirty Bill pulled a bottle of Jim Beam from his desk drawer and buzzed Ethyl to bring in the setups. They had a couple of drinks, an evening ritual, and talked about casting. Charlie was amazed at the range of actors mentioned to play the character based on him, but after a couple of days he understood not to take seriously anything that was talked about over the evening drinks. By this point phone-call prohibition was breached and somebody was on the phone all the time. Sometimes Charlie had to go out and sit in the secretary’s office. He learned patience from Ethyl, a woman of about forty who’d been a Hollywood secretary all her life. Between phone calls or errands she knitted. “I get a lot done here,” she told Charlie. Fishkin’s secretary shared the office and herself did crocheting.

  Every day they talked about the story. After a while Charlie could see some trends. Fishkin saw it as a hard-hitting anti-war movie, gritty, black-and-white maybe, no stars, just the true-life events of Charlie’s career. “Damned near a documentary,” he would say. “People are ready for this.” Ratto on the other hand seemed more ambitious. He wanted the picture seen by a lot of people. “We need to reach people with this story,” he insisted. “What we have to say is worth their time, but they need to be sucked in.” He wanted John Wayne. Or somebody else of great stature whose name would drag people into the theater.

  “How about somebody under fifty?” Charlie suggested without a trace of irony.

  “Of course, of course,” Ratto would say.

  Charlie saw his major task as listening. Ethyl had already told him not to worry about the screenplay format. “I do all that,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Because I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  She smiled. Fishkin and Ratto were each in their offices, taking calls. “You should see some of the stuff we get,” she said. “I have to spend hours deciphering.”

  “I’d like to see some stuff,” he said, and she sent him home with a pile of screenplays, some made into movies and some not. Charlie lay on his hard bed listening to loud music through his walls and reading. At first he was shocked at how stupid they seemed, how flat, how boring and trite. How unliterary. The grammar stunk, the word choices were uniformly bad, etc. This was no place for an English teacher. But after reading a dozen, Charlie had a better idea of the job. Maybe this was going to work out. No room for all the massive bullshit Charlie always seemed to get stuck in, lists of equipment, descriptions, stuff like that. In a screenplay all that stuff is to one side. The writer isn’t troubled by detail, but must stick to raw story and dialogue.

  There was something wonderful about it, once he got over his shock. No wonder all his favorite war novels had been made into such shitty movies. Even the much-touted From Here to Eternity was really a bullshit movie if you looked at it closely. All that realism in the name of some bullshit truth. It was Charlie’s secret wish that his movie not be bullshit. That the realism be in the name of realism. He didn’t want to bullshit, and as for the truth, he didn’t claim to know the truth. Unless, of course, the truth was bullshit. Tricky.

  He soon decided that Fishkin, not Ratto, was closer to his viewpoint. In fact, Bud Fishkin was a nicer person. Pure Hollywood, sure, but that didn’t seem to mean what Charlie had at first assumed. Bud Fishkin was well-read, civilized, a jazz fan, a husband and father of two wonderful girls, whom Charlie had met at the beach. He had a nice little beach house, nothing ornate, but certainly not tacky, and his wife, although an actress by profession, was a great cook and a wonderful conversationalist, somebody Jaime would like immediately. On the other hand, Bill Ratto lived in a luxurious apartment by himself, right down the beach from Fishkin, and seemed to have hardly unpacked from New York. How long had he been here? Five, six years? Still unpacked, his collection of posters, paintings, and drawings leaning against the living room wall next to the fireplace that burned gas. Fishkin at home seemed comfortable and human, Ratto at home was a dog in an animal shelter, friendly but nervous.

  Subtly it became two against one, Ratto acknowledging that his ideas were “a little grandiose.” But he insisted that to set out to make a depressing black-and-white picture wasn’t going to inspire the money people. “This is not an automatic sell,” he said once, objecting to Fishkin’s idea that they use untried boys as actors.

  Fishkin turned to Charlie. “You want to see those same old fat extras in your starvation camp?” A simple point, easily won. They’d have to go with young kids, drama students, to get the right look. Which dictated in turn the ages of the stars. Nobody over thirty, that would be the rule
.

  “I hope the bankers like it,” Ratto said. Fishkin and Charlie exchanged looks. Ratto was really acting like a studio pimp. Then Charlie would get home to the motel, or be sitting in his new favorite bar down the street, the Troubadour, and realize they might be playing him hard cop soft cop. Only he couldn’t figure out why. They all wanted the same thing, didn’t they? They all wanted to win. Charlie knew after only a couple of weeks that he was really on his own. Without waiting to be asked, he began his script, sitting in his smelly apartment, using long yellow legal pads and writing in pencil, as he’d begun so many years ago.

  71.

  When Fishkin and Ratto found out he was already writing they were happy to let him go back to Mill Valley. “Go home, write, send us a thousand pages,” Fishkin said in his deep rich voice. Ziggie the agent explained that Charlie’s weekly paychecks would begin even though the deal wasn’t signed yet, and not to sweat the details. “You’re a new boy,” Ziggie said. “I can’t do much for you. But if you turn in the right script, this town will open up like a diseased asshole.” Charlie was mildly shocked to hear such words coming from the mouth of such a distinguished-looking gentleman. But he flew home with every intention of doing just what Ziggie said.

  Charlie was amazed to see what had been done to his fifteen hundred per week, which by the time a check reached him, amounted to a little less than half. Still, it beat bartender wages, and Charlie didn’t have to dress to go to work. Jaime moved her typewriter and manuscript out of his office, but didn’t move to San Francisco. She set up in their bedroom, at her vanity table, moving a lot of bottles and jars, and Charlie couldn’t figure out how she could sit and write with the mirror to look into. But she did.

  Another little hitch was that either Fishkin or Ratto would call him nearly every day and ask how he was doing, which made him nervous. He didn’t like talking about what he was writing. The phone might ring at ten in the morning or ten at night and without any preliminaries Bud Fishkin would say, “I’ve been thinking about the Montana scenes. You know, it would really be great if there was a girl he was saying good-bye to, you know? A sort of symbol of what he’s leaving behind.”

  “You want me to turn the father into a girlfriend?”

  “No no no no no,” Fishkin would say warmly. “I think we should add a girl. That makes the leaving poignant, touching, you know?”

  “So he gets kicked out of high school, has an argument with his father, kisses this girl, and gets on the bus.” All for a scene they’d planned to go under the titles. And there had been no girl, of course. The girls of Wain and the surrounding countryside hadn’t appealed to young Charlie. That was half of why he left. But he’d learned better than to argue over the telephone with his producers. They always won, using their knowledge of moviemaking to beat him over the head. Nonetheless, most of their ideas were terrible, and so Charlie had to be a diplomat on the telephone and then just go ahead and write his script.

  Which was a lot of fun, once you got over being scared. Just set the scene, put the folks into it, and let them go. Charlie found he’d spent so much of his life thinking about his military career that he knew the scenes by heart even before he wrote them down. He wrote on his typewriter now, because it was easier to see the scenes in print, and found himself turning out ten or twelve pages a day. It was liberating not having to put in all those petty details he’d once thought so important, or the nuances of character. Nobody in a movie is subtle, he was told, and from the scripts he’d read and the movies he was seeing, he was told correctly. He learned to show things instead of having people say them. He began to learn a little about dramatic structure, enough so that twice he threw out all his pages and started again, determined to turn in a first draft they could shoot.

  The calls kept coming. Were his producers even right for his movie? They seemed to have no idea what he was trying to do. They kept coming up with stock characters they wanted to throw into the picture, “to help tell the story.” The girl in Montana, another girl in Korea, a good Chinese and a bad Chinese, a good guard and a bad guard, a nurse he falls for, a foreign correspondent he falls for. Finally Charlie had to call Ziggie and ask what he could do about the incessant calls.

  Ziggie laughed. “They’re paying you for a draft, and they want to get ten drafts for their money. Ignore them. Unless they say something you can use.”

  At the end of his six weeks Charlie was halfway through the story, and the script was already a hundred pages long. “Keep writing,” Fishkin told him, and the checks kept coming. Charlie finished his first draft at the end of ten weeks, looked at himself in the full-length mirror, and discovered to his amazement that the writing had cost him forty-six pounds. Otherwise he looked healthy, except for his eyes, which were bloodshot from marijuana. Of course he didn’t smoke while working, only afterward, before he showered. He wasn’t drinking, it made him muzzy in the morning. How could Jaime still go out and get roaring drunk and then get up at six the next morning and start writing? Charlie was getting old. Maybe Jaime wasn’t.

  He sent the script down to be professionally typed at Barbara’s Place, a typing service they told him to use, and when the copies came back in covers he was surprised to see that the count was two hundred and forty-five pages. Barbara’s Place had sent copies to Fishkin-Ratto and Zeigler-Ross, and Charlie set himself to hear the bad news. Far too long. Too many gloomy characters. Too much profanity. Not enough women. No sex. No good guys. Gunfire without resolution (Fishkin had told him that gunfire had to resolve something or it was exploitative). Ziggie told him to relax, that this often took a couple of weeks, but Charlie wasn’t ready to relax. He’d tossed a hand grenade and he wanted to hear it explode.

  Kenny Goss was getting to be a problem. Jaime told Charlie about going looking for Kenny and finding him quite crazy, wandering North Beach muttering about angels. Kenny had wiped himself out on speed. Charlie remembered when speed had first run through North Beach in the late fifties, turning hipsters into murderous punks. Charlie hated speed. It made you think you were smarter and faster, but when you reach for your dick, you can’t find it. He preferred cocaine, a cleaner, clearer high, and also natural. Speed, he’d heard, was something thought up by Hermann Göering and his Luftwaffe scientists, because Göering was afraid the war would cut off supplies of cocaine from South America. Charlie didn’t care. The shit was wrecking Kenny Goss.

  Kenny seemed to have developed a crush on Jaime. He thought she had the answers. Famous, successful, a really fine writer, and yet nothing had spoiled her. She was still a fine human being. These were all Kenny’s words. Kenny reminded him, sadly, of the young thief who wrote pulp stories and then vanished. Charlie couldn’t believe he wasn’t able to summon the name. The thief, too, had come around Jaime wanting to find love. He too had been quiet and secretive. Thinking of him made Charlie recall Linda McNeill and his only act of adultery. Wherever Linda was, he imagined her tanned and beautiful, hauling in sail somewhere out in the deep Pacific. He hoped.

  Many afternoons Charlie would emerge from his office to see Kenny’s white pickup out in the gravel drive, and find Kenny in the kitchen or out in back, talking to Jaime or Kira, or even Mrs. Hawkins. Charlie had to explain to Kira why Kenny was sometimes so strange.

  “He’s taking medicine that’s bad for him,” Charlie said. Kira knew what speed was, and said so. “Well, that’s what he’s taking,” Charlie admitted. “And it makes him crazy.” He didn’t add that he preferred Kira not taking drugs, but she said, “Daddy, all your friends take drugs,” which kind of ruined his moral position in advance. So far as he could tell Kira didn’t even drink. Charlie had started drinking at ten or eleven. Everybody knew he had.

  “How’s your book coming?” he asked Kenny one day, right after he’d turned in his script. They were both at the no name bar in Sausalito, drinking beer on the patio, in the dappled light from the overhead greenery. Kenny smirked down at the table, then said, “I can’t do it anymore.”

&n
bsp; Charlie let that sit. There wasn’t anything to say. Here was a fine young mind blown to pieces by amphetamines. Was there anything encouraging to say? He drank his beer.

  “What’s it like, being married?” Kenny asked him.

  Charlie was surprised. “Why do you want to know?”

  Kenny smiled at him. He was a handsome man, with pale blue eyes. He’d have no trouble attracting women. But Charlie had never seen Kenny with a woman, except talking to them in bars. He wondered if Kenny Goss was homosexual. No, he couldn’t be, he was in love with Jaime. Charlie said, “You looking for a wife? Maybe that’s a good idea. To answer your question, being married is good. For me, necessary. Without Jaime I’d be dead meat.” In saying it he realized it was true.

  “I’m dead meat,” Kenny said. He drained his beer.

  “No, you aren’t,” Charlie lied. “You’re a good man and a good writer. But you need to get off that shit.”

  Kenny smiled sadly and stood. “I need to do something,” he said. Charlie watched him leave the patio and walk through the dark of the bar.

  He saw Kenny again just after getting the call from Hollywood. “Come on down,” said Ratto cheerfully. “We have to pitch this thing.” Kenny wasn’t so cheerful, but he too had good news. He showed up at their house at night, nearly ten o’clock, and had a woman with him. She was thin and freckled, a nice-looking person, maybe twenty-five. She and Kenny stayed next to each other throughout the fairly uncomfortable fifteen minutes of the visit. Her name was Brenda Feeney, and they were to be married. They’d met in a bar in the city and fallen in love in three days. Now they were driving down to Modesto to meet her parents and get hitched. Brenda was a student. After they left, full of good wishes from the Monels, Charlie asked Jaime, “What do you think?”