Fridays at Enrico's (38 page)

Just as bad a job as dredging sand, except for one thing. His boss, Calvin Whipple, who'd been doing the same kind of work all his life, first for his grandfather and then for his father and now for himself, kept a large fishbowl brandy glass on his desk about half full of white pills. Kenny was welcome to take as many as he wanted. The pills kept you alert, and at first naïve Kenny had thought they were NoDoz or some other caffeine stuff. They certainly helped with the work, but then he had trouble writing nights unless he took a pill first, and then he found that instead of getting four or five hours of sleep at night, he got none. He'd work all day, go home and write all night, then shower, eat some white sugar or something, and head up for work again. On his days off he'd drive over to Sausalito in his old white Chevy pickup and try
to relax, drinking beer and looking out the window at the tourists. He told himself he was looking for girls, but since the advent of the little white pills he'd not been horny, and all he was really trying to do was drink enough beer to make him sleepy.

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.