Fridays at Enrico's (40 page)

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 in 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.

“Where does it say that?”

Since nobody was checking up on him, Charlie could have left too, but he had nowhere to go. Easier to stay in the little office and try to write. It didn't come as easily as everyone said it would. It had been one thing to generate what he now understood was a loose, novelistic two-hundred-and-fifty-page draft, but he had a harder time reducing his ideas to the kind of clichés, the recognizable gestures, that screenplays seemed to be made of. Still, he plugged away, listened to Stan, and turned in his pages at the end of the day. What he got out of Ratto, when he finally spent some time with him, was
unsatisfying. The meeting was for five thirty, and as he walked into Bill's office, Ethyl came in with a bottle of whiskey, two glasses, and a bucket of ice.

“Casting time,” Bill said, and they sat sipping whiskey and trying to decide which actor could best play Charlie.

“Brando, of course,” Bill said, staring at his glass. “But I think he's gone crazy or something. What do you think about Paul Newman?”

Finally Charlie asked how Bill liked his pages.

“Just keep plugging away,” Bill said. “If you have any questions, ask Ethyl or Stan Winger.” He shrugged and grimaced, the light bouncing off his glass. “Wanna smoke a joint?”

When Charlie got back to the hotel in the evening he would call home. Jaime worked at home now, in his old office, and her book was coming along. Kira talked about moving to Hollywood, living in the hotel with Charlie. “What would you do?” Charlie asked her. “I'm away at work all day, just like anybody else.”

“What do I do here?” she asked. Her voice was getting deep, he thought. “I'm sick of this, daddy,” she said one night. “When are we going to have a real family life?”

Never, Charlie thought, and changed the subject, knowing he hadn't gotten away with anything. After one of these calls he'd have a drink or smoke a joint, then go for a walk on the Sunset Strip. During the week Sunset wasn't so crowded, and it was pleasant to stroll along, thinking about nothing more pressing than where he should have dinner. There were several restaurants he'd come to like, especially the Imperial Gardens, an ornate three-story Japanese restaurant where the waitresses were all Japanese girls right off the boat, most unable to speak English. Charlie liked trying out his rusty Japanese on them. If he didn't feel like Japanese food there was Schwab's Drugstore, across the street, where he could have a hamburger or a salmon steak. His evenings were otherwise intensely lonely, spent reading in his room. He read Stan's published novels and was amazed at their quality, though they sometimes lacked in any basic reality. The action was good, the dialogue great, and Stan's sense of irony was delicious. Stan was a much
better writer than he'd ever be. He knew what Charlie had never learned, how to slam those words down on paper. Charlie felt an outrageous twist of envy at Stan's ability to capture the commonplace, while Charlie himself was hung up on high ideas that never came out right. Or maybe Stan was writing pop trash, and Charlie was after so much more. Literature, High Art. Move over Leo. Step aside, Herman.

At the end of six more weeks Charlie hadn't solved the draft, as Bill Ratto put it.

“Am I fired?” Charlie asked.