Fridays at Enrico's

  Jaime shrugged. “Maybe a little nookie will do him good.”

  Charlie had to laugh. Women were something.

  72.

  Charlie’s weekly pay had come from Fishkin-Ratto’s own bank account. Now the job was to take the gigantic mess Charlie had written and turn it into a “selling document.” Something to show the bankers. Something that would excite their greed. “What we need is a treatment,” Bud Fishkin said. Charlie sat in one of the red leather chairs opposite Fishkin. In the other, a fake Thompson machine gun, a prop from Fishkin’s last movie. Charlie wondered at the symbolism of the machine gun resting barrel-up in Bill Ratto’s chair. Bill was in New York. “We don’t need him for this, do we?” Fishkin asked Charlie slyly.

  “What’s a treatment?” Charlie asked. “I mean, technically.”

  Fishkin shrugged. “Whatever we want it to be,” he said. “The point is, we want something on paper we can leave with them, that they can read over in our absence. But make no mistake, we have to sell the story.” Charlie understood that he and Fishkin were eventually going to have to walk down the corridor of the third floor to the office of the head of the studio and pitch their movie.

  “But first, there’s somebody I want you to meet, another writer. If you guys get along, maybe you can work together on pulling this script together.” Charlie must have made a face. Fishkin smiled. “I know, you’d rather work alone. You’re a novelist. But in the movies nobody works alone.”

  “I don’t mind,” Charlie said. “I can use all the help I can get.”

  Fishkin looked at his watch. “He should be here soon. You’ll probably get along. This guy’s an ex-con.” Fishkin gave Charlie a deep look. “But he’s also a writer with three books, very tough pulp stuff.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Stan Winger,” Fishkin said. “Have you read any of his stuff?”

  How strange. Charlie had so recently been trying to summon that name. He grinned happily. “Yes, I have.”

  Even so Charlie didn’t recognize him when he came into the room. Charlie remembered Stan as a twenty-four-year-old with an unformed face and a body without definition. The man who entered the room was lithe and muscular, darkly tanned, with a face both hard and humorous. He wore a faded blue workshirt and faded jeans, and suddenly Charlie knew where Fishkin got his taste in clothes.

  Charlie stood. It was obvious Stan didn’t recognize him. Of course Charlie was older too, and bearded now, and even slimmed down was heavier than he’d been in Portland. He held out his hand and saw the polite expression on Stan’s face, felt his hard grip. “Stan Winger,” Stan said.

  “Charlie Monel,” Charlie said.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Stan said. He hugged Charlie.

  “You crazy asshole,” Charlie said. They looked at each other, still holding onto each other’s shoulders.

  “Charlie,” Stan said, his eyes glistening.

  “Ex-con, huh?”

  “Sorry I didn’t write.”

  Fishkin came up to them, smiling. “You know each other?”

  “This guy was my creative writing teacher in Portland,” Stan said.

  “And this guy was my best student.”

  “Well look at this,” Fishkin said. “I must be a genius.”

  Once they’d finished with Fishkin they walked down the third floor corridor to the stairwell, Charlie with his arm over Stan’s shoulder, like he didn’t want to let him go again. The meeting had fallen apart, of course, and they agreed to come back and try tomorrow. All Charlie wanted to do was sit with Stan and talk. Once outside, they crossed the wide, sunbaked lot to their cars.

  “How’s Jaime?” Stan asked. “How’s Kira?”

  “They’re fine. How about you? Married?”

  Stan smiled at the ground and said, “Well, sort of,” and Charlie shut up about that. Stan had published three books and Charlie hadn’t even heard of them, but Stan knew all about Jaime’s career. Nothing had to be said about Charlie’s. At his rental Volkswagen, parked in the shade of one of the big sound studios, Stan said, “Let’s go in my car.” A brand new Cadillac, Charlie noted, a black convertible, whose top automatically folded back when Stan pushed a button on the dashboard. They drove out through the gate and Stan said he knew a bar.

  “I’m new to Los Angeles,” Charlie said. “You can take me anywhere you want.”

  They got roaring drunk at a little neighborhood bar out in the middle somewhere, not in Hollywood or Westwood or any of the places Charlie knew. After they were drunk, Stan whispered to him that it was a thieves bar, and everybody in it except he and Charlie were thieves. Charlie looked around. They looked ordinary to him. “Sometimes I just have to be among thieves,” Stan said.

  As they drove back to the lot for his car, Charlie was reminded of their project. His former book. “Can we do this thing?” he asked Stan.

  “They didn’t tell me anything except that they had this new writer who needed help,” Stan said. He told Charlie that Fishkin-Ratto wanted to produce his new book, which was due out in a year.

  “What’s it about?” They pulled up next to Charlie’s Volkswagen.

  “Some guy in prison,” Stan said, almost shyly. They agreed to meet in twenty minutes at the Troubadour. Charlie felt wonderful, drunk as he was, and waved cheerfully at the cop as he went out the gate. The Troubadour wasn’t open yet, and Stan stood arguing with some guy at the door. Charlie parked.

  “He won’t let us come in and sit down,” Stan said.

  “We’re not open for twenty minutes,” the guy said. A tall thin hippie with a leather hat and greasy yellow curls.

  “Can’t we just come in and sit down?” Stan asked. “We won’t make any trouble.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie.

  “The place is closed,” the guy said.

  “Fucking Hollywood,” Stan said. “Let’s go to Dan Tana’s. More high class.”

  “Aren’t we too drunk?” Charlie asked. “We could go to my motel. Two fucking blocks away. Pick up a sixpack, drink beer, and talk over old times.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Stan said. He’d certainly changed a lot, good old Stan Winger. They got into Stan’s car and drove to Dan Tana’s, which turned out to be an Italian Restaurant where a lot of Hollywood people drank and even sometimes ate. Seated at the bar, they began putting away Wild Turkeys. “Let’s get really drunk,” said Stan. “I’m not on parole anymore. I can do any fucking thing I want.”

  “Okay,” said Charlie happily. “We have to call Jaime.” The place was noisy as hell, and he had to cover his free ear to use the payphone. Kira answered, and Jaime wasn’t home. “Guess who I met in Hollywood?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” Obviously Kira didn’t care.

  “Stan Winger,” he told her anyway. “An old friend, from when you were a baby.”

  “Oh, I remember him.”

  “You couldn’t possibly,” Charlie said. He told her to wait and brought Stan to the telephone. “Here, it’s my daughter, she says she remembers you.”

  Stan took the phone, looking at Charlie. “Hello?” he said. He listened for a while, and then a smile appeared on his face. “My God,” he said softly. “You do remember.” When he handed the instrument back to Charlie there were tears running down his face. At the bar they ordered fresh shots. “She remembers me carrying her down the hill, over at Latourette’s. Jesus Christ.” He turned to Charlie. “I thought about you people, when I was in the joint.”

  Charlie drank his shot, enjoying the burn down his throat.

  “You saved my life,” Stan said. “I would have gone crazy without some real people to think about.”

  “You’re perfectly welcome,” Charlie said. “Any fucking time.”

  73.

  As they sat, nursing drinks at Dan Tana’s until closing time, it struck Charlie that Stan’s story would make a great movie. He’d matured into a smart cool guy, quietly competent, but still the same nice kid, somehow, that Charlie had known i
n Portland. Smiling without irony he told Charlie about his life in Hollywood before he’d been violated. He described how Carrie Gruber, a sweet blonde Valley girl, had watched in horror as the parole officer, crazed by envy, had put Stan back into the system. “She did everything,” he said. “She took care of my Caddie, she hired a lawyer, she moved into my house, took care of my business, wrote me every week . . .”

  “Jesus,” Charlie said.

  Stan gave a wry smile and rubbed at a wet spot on the black vinyl bar top with his finger. “Yeah.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Actually, she’s really smart,” Stan said. Carrie had tried every way to get Stan out of the system. When nothing worked she went ahead with her plans, to start her own business. She wrote Stan asking if she could borrow from his savings. Stan sent her a power of attorney, giving her virtually unlimited use of his money. “What the fuck,” he said to Charlie. “If she was going to rip me off, this was the time to find out.” She didn’t. She was a methodical person, and she continued looking for the right business to go into. Carrie didn’t want to set the world on fire, she just wanted a little blaze for herself. Not the laundry business. Too boring. Something she could put her heart into. She settled on candy.

  “Candy?” Charlie asked. “I would have thought liquor.”

  Stan laughed. “For that you need a license.” He explained that Carrie wanted to travel the world, sampling exotic candy. She’d reasoned that rich people love treats, and that even in the worst of times people ate candy. It was a cheap high and made you feel rich. She wanted her stores in the rich neighborhoods because why fuck around? The rich had all the money. So being the matter-of-fact person she was, she took a job in a candy factory in Torrance, rolling chocolates for three dollars an hour. Working among Mexican women she improved her rudimentary Spanish. She also learned a lot about candy making. She read the industry magazine, Great West Candymaker, and she ate, slept, dreamed, and lived candy for six months. She sent Stan boxes of chocolates she’d rolled herself, and looked around for a perfect location for her first shop. Meanwhile Stan cut brush and lived in a barracks. Carrie sent him detailed accounts of how she spent his money, but he didn’t care. He trusted her.

  She’d always loved Malibu, even just the name, and against her better judgment she began looking for a location along the Pacific Coast Highway. The building she found was just south of the actual Malibu, well, considerably south, but it was on the PCH and included an apartment upstairs where she and Stan could live if they chose to. The location was expensive, but the dream of Malibu turned out to be stronger than the dream of world travel, so Carrie decided her shop’s specialty wouldn’t be candies from around the globe, but expensive chocolates, rich people chocolates. She rented the location, bought four thousand dollars worth of used candymaking equipment, hired a couple of her Mexican friends from the Torrance factory, and went to work.

  “By the time she picked me up in Los Padres she had a going business,” Stan said. In fact, Malibu Candy had been an immediate hit with the beach crowd. “We’re paying the rent, paying off the equipment, and cutting a little profit.”

  “We?”

  Stan smiled. “We got married five days after I got loose. We live over the store. The beach is a block away.”

  “Well,” Charlie said drunkenly. “You fell into a tub of shit and came out smelling like a rose.”

  “Well put,” Stan said. “So let’s get out of this Hollywood dump and head for the beach. You’ll stay in the guest room. If there’s a God in heaven Carrie and I will repay some of the hospitality you showed me years ago.”

  “You’ve certainly learned to talk like a gentleman,” Charlie said as they stood to go.

  “You fuckin’ aye.”

  But they didn’t drive to the beach. They were too drunk. Stan stayed on the couch in Charlie’s suite. Drunk as he was, Charlie couldn’t sleep, and lay listening to Stan snoring in the next room. Running into Stan was hard to absorb. Stan’s life was hard to absorb. Charlie’s own hell had lasted only three years, counting the time on the TB ward. The rest of his life had been soft and smooth. Stan’s horror show had gone on for years and years. That terrible moment, on the way to the beach with his girl, suddenly slammed back into prison. Stan hadn’t said much, but it must have been horrible, far worse than anything that had happened to Charlie. He imagined Stan out in the hot sun, bent over hacking at brush with a cutter, his naked back red and wet with sweat, his face closed, his mind closed, his heart cold. Stan sitting in solitary confinement all those years, memorizing his novel. Yet here he was, married, owner of a candy store, and Hollywood’s hot new young writer. Or words to that effect. And a published novelist. Charlie’s former pupil had passed him by. The tortoise and the hare, but no, that was ungenerous. He was no tortoise, and Stan no rabbit. Charlie only hoped he wouldn’t be jealous, and could enjoy Stan’s books.

  74.

  Stan offered, practically insisted, that Charlie come live at the beach. If not in Stan’s spare room, then a rental. “What do you pay at that hotel?” he asked Charlie.

  “Twenty-five a day, but I don’t pay it,” Charlie said. “Fishkin-Ratto pays.” He liked Stan’s place, and he probably would have enjoyed riding in to work with Stan every morning, like a commuter. But he wanted to keep his hotel suite. In his first place, he liked living in a hotel, even one with no real room service and an unheated pool. The other reason was Carrie.

  Her smile had been warm, but her eyes and hand cold. Charlie understood. Keep off. Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Violated. She wasn’t that beautiful, more like handsome, with strong clear-cut features, a real peasant face. The blonde hair was short and straight, the figure shapely and sturdy. Here was a woman who could fuck all night and then spring up in the morning to do a day’s work. Carrie Gruber was that. She looked like a Gruber. He liked her.

  The apartment over the candy store made Charlie reflect on Stan’s life in prison. The place was all windows and light, filled with plants in windowboxes and hanging from the ceiling, ferns and begonias and orchids, African violets on tables and avocado plants luxuriating out of terra cotta pots. The furniture was simple, mostly Danish modern, a big Mexican carved mahogany sideboard in the dining room, a glass-topped coffee table in the living room, several prints on the walls, all landscapes without human figures. The spare bedroom was also Stan’s office at home, with a wall of books, mostly paperbacks, an IBM Selectric typewriter and a single bed, covered with magazines. There was also a small portrait of a black man on a piece of red cloth, tacked to the wall next to Stan’s typewriter.

  “Who’s that?” Charlie asked.

  “Malcolm X,” Stan said.

  “Friend of yours?” Charlie joked, but Stan just laughed and said nothing more. Back out in the living room they sat down to coffee and cakes, which Carrie brought them on a tray. On the coffee table, beside three copies of the New Yorker, was a .45 automatic, just sitting there. It looked like an army Colt, but Charlie couldn’t be sure. He wanted to ask about it, but didn’t, and Stan said nothing. It might as well have been a sculpture, an art object. That whole first weekend nobody mentioned the pistol on the coffee table, and after a while Charlie decided that the gun was a symbol. Stan wasn’t a gun guy. It said, “I’m free. I’m not on parole. Fuck you.” Charlie bet it was loaded, too.

  While Carrie ran her store downstairs, Charlie and Stan were on their own to take walks on the wide sandy beach or down to the Venice Pier. Their immediate favorite place was a little beer bar on the pier with a couple of pool tables and a really loud jukebox. Despite the sawdust on the floor, the longhaired scraggly-bearded pool players often played while on roller skates. Nearly everybody in the joint wore skimpy bathing suits and was years younger than Charlie or Stan, who sat unbothered at the bar, drinking beer, and marveling at their surroundings.

  “It’s like Portland, only insane,” Stan said.

  “Here’s to Portland.” Charlie raised his beer glass
. “Don’t you wish this beer was Blitz-Weinhard?”

  By Sunday night Charlie and Carrie had come to a peaceful settlement, entirely without words. Charlie made it clear he wouldn’t be an unsettling influence, and Carrie that she’d protect Stan no matter what. They were on the same side, but Charlie wondered how Stan liked being the object of such an intense protectiveness. It was like having a big mean loyal pit bull. At the weekend’s end Charlie was glad to be winding his way across to the Valley, to his home away from home.

  At Fox things settled into a routine. Fishkin and Ratto were developing at least five pictures that Charlie knew about, so he didn’t see much of them. Ratto’s secretary, Ethyl, brought him coffee or tea in his bare little office and otherwise left him alone. Stan worked on his own project down the hall, and although Ratto had said Stan would be working with Charlie, that never actually happened.

  “I get it,” Stan said. “When they found out we knew each other, they decided I’d probably help you without being paid to.”

  “Counting on you to be a good guy.”

  “Exactly,” Stan said. And Fishkin-Ratto won their bet. Stan showed up every day at twelve thirty and took Charlie to the commissary. At lunch they talked over Charlie’s project. After lunch Charlie would go back to work and Stan would leave the lot.

  “Aren’t we supposed to work all day?” Charlie asked.