Fridays at Enrico's

FRIDAYS AT

ENRICO'S

Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Don Carpenter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carpenter, Don.

Fridays at Enrico's : a novel / Don Carpenter;

[edited, with introduction, by] Jonathan Lethem.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61902-376-5 (eBook)

1.
  
Beat generation—Fiction. 2.
  
Authors, American—20th century—Fiction. 3.
  
San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. 4.
  
Portland (Ore.)—History—20th century—Fiction.
  
I. Lethem, Jonathan. II. Title.

PS3553.A76F85 2014

813'.54—dc23

2013043960

COUNTERPOINT

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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CONTENTS

PART ONE:

Jaime and Charlie

PART TWO:

The Portland Group

PART THREE:

The Golden Gate

PART FOUR:

C Block

PART FIVE:

Freedom

PART SIX:

The Literary Life

Finishing Carpenter:

An Afterword

FRIDAYS AT

ENRICO'S

PART ONE

Jaime and Charlie

1.

Jaime and Charlie got married in a log chapel in South Lake Tahoe the night before their last finals. Heading back to San Francisco the next day, hung over and drinking bottles of Miller's, Charlie decided that college was a fraud, and although he was one final from a master's degree, an easy final, he was damned if he would take the damned test. Charlie wasn't driving. He didn't have the strength. Jaime was erect behind the wheel, barely able to see over it, only five feet tall, her nose up, her bloodshot blue eyes hidden behind dark glasses, the hot wind blowing her blonde, almost white hair. She was nineteen years old.

“I'm not gonna take that goddamn final,” he said. He had seen through college. The time, he now realized with hungover chagrin, would have been better spent just lying around reading. He explained this to his new bride as they drove across the flat hot Sacramento Valley.

“Or I could just veer into the oncoming traffic,” she said, after he finished.

Charlie rummaged around in the glove compartment, looking for something to take away the pain. Beer was not enough. He found an Alka-Seltzer in its ragged foil package. It would help, if he could find a way to get it down. He thought about crumbling it and dropping the fragments into his bottle of beer. He thought about putting the wafer on his tongue and taking a big swig. He thought about James Joyce's “Grace” and smiled.

“Are you serious?” Jaime asked him.

“About what?” he asked.

She loved Charlie, but in many ways he was a big baby. He had the nicest smile she had ever seen, wide, bland, easy, the smile of a man who had seen some life and enjoyed what he saw. Charlie was one of the Korean War veterans in the department. He was writing a long novel about his experiences in the war. He was self-educated but brilliant, and everyone thought that of them all, Charlie was the one who would probably become famous. Not that any of that mattered to Jaime. She knew herself to be a better writer than Charlie, but she lacked his life experiences. They had fallen together quite naturally. Charlie sat behind her in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's literature class. It had been Jaime's first day of classes at San Francisco State and she was nervous. Walter Clark, a big bear of a man wearing a faded old sweatshirt instead of the usual suit and tie, was telling the thirty students in front of him which books they would be reading. Jaime was trying to take notes, but she smelled liquor breath coming from behind her and for some reason it irritated her. She turned to glare at Charlie.

“Would you please not sigh so loud?” she heard herself saying to this smiling man of about thirty.

“Sorry,” he said. His voice was thrillingly deep. She could not help noticing the legal-sized pad of yellow paper on which he was drawing cartoon pictures of naked women. She raised an eyebrow to let him know what she thought of his art abilities, and turned back to her note-taking. After class as she was walking out of the HSS Building into the small courtyard facing Nineteenth Avenue, Charlie caught up to her. He was dressed in an old fatigue jacket, jeans, and dirty motorcycle boots. San Francisco State in 1959 was pretty informal. Most of the students worked part- or even full-time, and a lot were vets, but Charlie really looked like a bum. His dark brown hair was too long and seemed barely combed, but when he spoke to her in his deep friendly voice, Jaime felt something.

“You read any of them books?”

At just that moment they broke out into the open sunlight and for no reason at all, Jaime felt wonderful, no longer lonely.

“You mean
Moby Dick
? Have I read
Moby Dick
?”

“Yeah, and them others.
Passenger to India
? You read that?”

Jaime stopped walking and turned toward him, holding her books up to her chest. He smiled down at her like a friendly old dog. She was about to correct him when she decided he was putting her on. Why this should thrill her she did not know. She laughed and they sat down on one of the concrete benches in the patio and shared her last cigarette. Their Clark class was the last class of the day for both of them on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. They began meeting before class, out on the patio. After a few weeks of sitting together talking Jaime realized that Charlie did not know her name. He called her “Babe,” but he probably called most women “Babe.”

“My name is Jaime Froward,” she said one day just as they were walking into class. She spelled it for him.

“That's great,” he said. “I'm Charlie Monel.” He reached out and shook her hand warmly. She could not tell if he was putting her on or not. In class Charlie never volunteered, never spoke up, just sat, head bent, drawing pictures in his notebook. By midterm she had no idea whether he was paying attention or not. The midterm exam was a single essay question, the hardest kind of test. Jaime chose to write about
Death Comes for the Archbishop
, and filled three little blue books with her precise handwriting. She had sweated freely while writing, which was a good sign. When finished she turned to see Charlie bent over his blue book, scribbling, his face an inch from the paper, pencil clutched awkwardly in his hand. He seemed to be writing furiously. The bell rang. Jaime turned in her books and walked out of the class. Charlie and a couple of the others were still writing. She went out to the patio and sat down, lighting a Pell Mell, as she liked to call them, and waited. He came out nearly twenty minutes later, his face bland, hair all over the place. He grinned at her and sat down.

“Got a smoke?”

She handed him her pack. “What did you write on?” she asked.

“
Moldy Dick
,” he said. “It's mah favorite book.”

When the midterms came back, Jaime was infuriated to find that she had
gotten only a B+. Charlie had gotten an A and a whole column of comments from Clark, in his tiny blue pencil script. The only thing Clark had written on Jaime's book was, “You have a nice appreciation of Cather.”

“Can I read your paper?” she asked Charlie. She knew her face was red with anger. Back at Drew she had been the best literature student they ever had, or so they told her.