Fridays at Enrico's (32 page)

Driving around in his Cadillac convertible, he got acquainted with the varieties of Southern California, and loved it. Of course. A Portland kid, he half-expected it to rain every day. When instead it was hot and sweet he just naturally felt good, full of optimism and hope. He drove to the beach towns as far south as Long Beach and north well past Malibu, surprised by the dullness of the beaches themselves compared to the drama and beauty of those in Oregon. Maybe if he got really rich he'd move out here to Malibu, or maybe even up to the Oregon coast, with a huge beach house to entertain all his friends. What had happened to them, his Oregon friends? When he'd been
arrested he'd thought of calling Charlie, asking for help, for bail or a lawyer, but was too embarrassed. Now too many years had passed.

He walked in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Westwood, the only places that seemed worthwhile to stop and walk around. Hollywood, he discovered, was full of bookstores, and his little house began filling with books. He'd never before had so much money, so he bought stuff he only maybe planned to read, as well as a lot of used Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Chandler, Hammett, etc. He looked for any books by Charles Monel but couldn't find one. And nothing by Dick or Richard Dubonet, or by Jaime Monel, but one day he saw a picture of Jaime on the back of a book in a bin of remainders, out in front of a store on Hollywood Boulevard. She'd published under her maiden name, of course. He bought the copy of
Washington Street
and took it home, more excited than he could understand.

It was a hot day, so his first act was to strip and run out and fall into the pool. His scruples about swimming dirty had vanished under the pleasure of hitting that water all hot and sweaty, feeling the explosion of cold. Then, after a nice little swim, he got out, shook himself like a dog, sat down on his big white towel draped over his white wrought-iron chair, and read Jaime's book cover to cover. At first it was like science fiction, so remote was it from his own experience, but Jaime pulled him into her life and the life of her parents and neighbors. Not a thief in the lot, no killings, no chases, no cops, and yet exciting, even thrilling. Jesus, she could really write. Jaime in her Lake Grove kitchen, white tee shirt, jeans, standing at the stove smiling and cooking, her daughter in her high chair, old Charlie sitting there, a big warm smile on his face. Stan felt extraordinary. A gush of feeling like nothing he'd ever felt. Or could remember, anyhow. Was it just the book? No, it was love. He loved those people. They were the only people he loved. He thought of writing Jaime care of her publisher, explaining why he'd so suddenly disappeared six years earlier, and including the happy news of his book and movie possibilities. Everybody thought Charlie was going to be an important writer. Nobody thought about Jaime, although they'd certainly respected her for finishing her little book. Dick Dubonet had called it that, “her little book.”
Were they all still in Portland? He was tempted to call and find out, just to see if they were in the phone book, but didn't. The past was over, remember?

He realized too that they'd not likely be reading his book. They didn't make a habit of reading drugstore pulps.

“Well, fuck 'em,” Stan said to his pool. He felt good. He inventoried his well-kept yard, the shrubs and trees, the red-brown grape stake fence, the patch of lawn. Everything grew down here. He thought about going into gardening heavily, working in the sun. It would help him wait. He sighed. He thought he'd learned all there was to learn about waiting, but no. He looked at himself, naked in the sun. He'd gotten pretty tan in the few weeks he'd been here. He was in good shape, but it wouldn't hurt to buy some exercise equipment. He could afford it. He'd pump iron until somebody called.

In the middle of the night he woke sweating and terrified. What had her book done to him? He sat at his kitchen table in the midnight with a cup of instant coffee, the radio playing low, and tried to figure it. He didn't have to think long. It was obvious. Jaime's book had reminded him of how empty his life was. Because there was no woman. He was afraid of women. Afraid of losing control of himself. Sexual feelings and burglary. He had to face it. He was so scared he was afraid to jack off, much less get into bed with a real live woman. All the rest of this shit was a joke. What matter money and success and Hollywood without a woman? He knew the answer. It meant nothing. He wasn't really waiting for Hollywood to come through, he was waiting for himself to break out of himself.

He had to laugh, sitting there in the semi-darkness, planning the greatest jailbreak in history. Stan Winger finally breaks out of himself. Suddenly he remembered Linda McNeill. He'd blanked her from his mind. Another thing Jaime's book had done, recalled to him the one woman he could have loved. Now in his emptiness her face floated back to him. He wanted to put his head on the table and cry. Since there was nobody around to see him, that's what he did.

59.

This one would be about a man who kidnaps a woman. Linda. The man would not be Stan, but some poor sap who is egged into it by seeing beautiful women all day, and not getting to touch them or even talk to them, except to pass them in and out of the studio. The rent-a-cop at Universal. Only it wouldn't be Universal, it would be some out-at-the-ass broken-down hack studio where they make cheesy movies for the gutter trade. Red. Red the boob. Red the hungry. Red the dreamer. Red Reemer. One day poor ol' Red just snaps. Maybe it's one of those really hot L.A. days,
The Fifth Hot Day in a Row
, that would be his working title. Poor Red hasn't slept in days. He keeps tossing and turning, this one girl in his mind, the girl that comes in and out of the lot in Stan's Cadillac, or one just like it, a blonde, lots of wonderfully curly hair blowing in the wind, always a big smile and a friendly hello. As Red all but drools down her cleavage, in she comes, out she goes, he has no idea what she does, he assumes she's an actress in one of the sleazeball movies they turn out around here, so one day when the heat is cooking his brain, Red gets his ass chewed off by some fat executive with a cutie at his side, and as he is standing there after a long hard day in the melting heat, swallowing the executive's insults and remembering the little bimbo's nasty smile, here comes the blonde in the Caddy, and when she gives her big friendly smile, something snaps. He gets into the car beside her, pulls out his gun and points it at her. “Turn right and keep driving straight,” he says to her surprised face.

Stan realized the girl in his story wasn't Linda at all, but somebody fresh, somebody he didn't know. A secretary, not an actress. Everything Red thought about her was untrue. So she would be a mystery. This was going to be fun.

He was happy to be back. Work gave focus to his day. He got up early, took his swim, made his breakfast, ate listening to the radio either outside
or in his breakfast nook, and then, dressed only in jockey shorts, went into the bedroom he'd made over into his office. He wrote a chapter every day, each representing an hour in the story, the same as his first two novels. Only in this one he had not only Red and Sissie—the blonde—but Frank Greise, aka Greasy Frank, detective on the LAPD, who is assigned to the case of the missing secretary because nobody thinks it is important. Poor Frank is only a cop because he couldn't get on the fire department. All he wants to do is get through his day so he can start drinking. Frank has a rule, no drinking before sundown. That's because he tends to go nuts drunk. So every other chapter would be about poor hapless Greasy Frank, the last guy in the world you'd expect to solve a crime. Which of course he doesn't. He just falls into it. Although Stan didn't know exactly how he was going to get there, he knew what happened at the end of the story. Red would gradually convince himself that she loved him. She'd give him every reason to think this, and the reader must think it, too. Finally, near the end of the book, when through fumbling and stupidity Red has both the girl and the ransom money, and it looks like they'll flee together to Brazil, he hands her his gun while he zips his fly or something, and since this is actually the first opportunity she's had to shoot him, she does. Just as Greasy Frank arrives, drunk out of his mind. Another triumph for justice.

Finished with a day's work, he'd take another swim, make lunch for himself, or head out. He liked to drive all afternoon. It was creepy, in a way. There were lots of hitchhikers, and Stan had to admit to himself that he picked up girls and drove them places in the hope of getting laid. He was still too shy to hit on the girls, but if one of them should hit on him, that would be fine. None did. Some tried to con him by acting sexy and pretending they were interested, to get him to take them where they wanted, but then jumped out of the car. A lot of them were very young, and Stan was sort of ashamed of himself, and went out of his way to give the young ones lifts so that some other rotten pervert wouldn't pick them up. It was generous of him, but it didn't get him laid. A lot of them called him Pops or Dad or Old Man, and he was thirty.

Every two weeks he drove downtown to visit his parole officer. This one was named Bob Gomez, a man of about fifty who was enthusiastic about Stan's chances in the movie business. He seemed impressed by Stan's book sales and told Stan that if he ever did need a real job, Gomez would do his level best. “Lots of folks try the movie business,” he said. He showed his gold tooth. “I'd try it myself if I didn't already have a good job.”

Evenings were difficult. This was temptation time. Time to hit the bars. Stan wasn't specifically prohibited from drinking, only from drinking with thieves. But this thing about women was starting to get to him, and he could see himself getting nice and tight and hitting on the wrong lady, ending up back in the joint. He'd heard rumors about Hollywood all his life, so why didn't his Hollywood friends fix him up? They didn't even call. He wondered at their easy friendliness, their apparent honesty and openness. Why weren't they getting him dates with actresses? He laughed. He was turning into Red. Well, Red wasn't such a bad guy. Just a fuck-up. Red would have been hitting the bars, trying to get his pimply ass laid. Stan was smarter. He stayed home reading. When he did go out, he went to movies. Generally he was sleepy by around ten or so.

He finished
Heat Wave
in six weeks, two full drafts. He let it sit for a day, read it over, and liked it. He took the manuscript down to a typing service on Highland near Franklin, where it was typed and a copy sent to Knox Burger. He'd still not heard a word from either Bud Fishkin or Evarts Ziegler, so he took a copy to Ziegler's office on Sunset, and left it without asking to speak to his agent. He'd never been up there before. It seemed a lot like a doctor's waiting room. Or a dentist's. More like a dentist's, and he was glad to just leave the thing and go.

Ziggie called two days later. “I think I can sell this,” he said. Stan hung up after a few minutes of pleasant conversation about his book, and wondered what to do with the rest of his day. He hadn't thought to ask about Fishkin, and Ziggie hadn't said anything. He had plenty of time and money. And freedom. He had to laugh. If he didn't find a girl to at least talk to, he was going to go crazy. It was really all his fault. It took some guts to pick up a girl.
His problem was that he lacked guts. He had to go into a bar, yes a bar, and sit down, drink some drinks, size up the single women in the place, single women were everywhere, then go up to one of them and saying something inviting. “Hi!” Or, “Oh my goodness, you are certainly attractive!” Or, “Say, baby, how's about it?”

The trouble with getting manners out of pulp novels is that they don't really supply you with any good pickup lines. Stan was sure he needed a good pickup line. The truth in this case wouldn't work. “Ahem, I'm a fairly well-to-do young writer, here in Hollywood to work in movies.” Sure you are, Bozo. Like the last ten guys who tried that line.

With a sigh and rap on his kitchen table, Stan decided to just go ahead and try it. If his voice broke in the middle of his pitch, so what? What could they do? Stick him in the hole?

60.

Driving around L.A. he'd seen plenty of bars, but they were nothing like the friendly taverns of Portland. Most were really restaurants, the others full of men in suits and women dressed for office work. Just walking in made him walk out red-faced for no reason. He tried some of the bars on the Sunset Strip, but there was too much action, and on the weekends you couldn't even drive, there were so many hippies walking around. He tried mingling with some of these weekend crowds on Sunset, but had felt the presence among the hippies of a large number of both cops and criminals. Too much heat, again. And everybody so young. Guys his age were predators. He walked Sunset only a couple of nights and then gave it up.

Ziggie called one morning when he was going crazy trying to start a new book, and told him that Fawcett loved
Heat Wave
. But now that Ziggie was in the game, things would be different. Instead of paying a flat thirty-four
hundred dollars and publishing as a Gold Medal Original, Fawcett was being asked, by Ziggie, to pay Stan fifty thousand for the paperback rights alone, farm the book out to a hardcover publisher for the initial publication, half that price going to Stan, and of course Stan would own his own film rights, TV rights, foreign rights, and so forth. “It's time to get you out of the slave pen,” Ziggie said in his dry voice.

“Do you think they'll go for it?” Stan asked.

“If they don't, they're crazy.”

“What's going on with Bud Fishkin?” Stan remembered to ask. He was amazed at how calmly he was taking all this.