Fridays at Enrico's (8 page)

The Portland Group

12.

The Portland group formed itself around Dick Dubonet, after he sold a short story to
Playboy
for three thousand dollars.
Playboy
usually paid fifteen hundred for a story, but, Dick discovered, if they wanted to run your story in the front of the magazine they paid double. Dick's rent was thirty dollars a month and he spent about the same for food. Utilities ran about four dollars, telephone another four. By far his largest monthly outlays were for his car, beer, and cigarettes, with an occasional wildcat expenditure for coffee at the Caffe Espresso. Dick was a bachelor and needed these apparently needless expenses in order to catch girls. Since he was not willing to really spend money on them.

He was in fact in bed with a girl when his agent called to tell him the news. A beautiful creature he'd met at a tavern near the college. She'd come home with him because he already had a reputation as one of the few successful writers in Portland, or in the whole state of Oregon, so far as he knew. He had been publishing short stories for two years, in magazines like
Nugget
,
Caper
, and
Fantasy & Science Fiction
. At twenty-five he had sold his first story for eighty dollars to
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, about a writer who gets revenge on editors by poisoning the flap glue on his return envelopes. Which were of course returned to him, leaving no evidence. It was a cute little story, and the editor wrote him a nice letter as well as the eighty-dollar check. A few months later the editor, Robert P. Mills, wrote to Dick that he was resigning to become an independent agent. Would Dick like to be his first
client? Getting an agent was half the battle. Since then Bob Mills had been selling a story a month for Dick, and his career was launched.

“Who was that?” the girl asked. She looked at him slyly from under his covers. He didn't mind her looking at him naked except for jockey shorts. He had a good although small and wiry body, and a pretty good tan. His skin was dark to begin with, his eyes almost black, his hair curly and dark. He knew he was good-looking but it didn't make him conceited.

“Just business,” he said coolly. He tried to remember her name. He thought about getting back into the warm bed and making love to her again. They'd done it twice during the night. This would make it three times, just about the minimum if he wanted her to think of him as a lover. Did he? She was cute, but he couldn't recall anything about her. And there was another problem. He wondered if this sudden good news, amazingly good news, might render him impotent for a time. He would be thinking feverishly about
Playboy
and the possibilities of the future, instead of concentrating on his lovemaking. It was too great a risk.

“Okay, honey, up and at 'em,” he said instead, wearing his Smilin' Jack smile. It took nearly an hour to get her out. She wanted to shower, she wanted coffee and a cigarette, she wanted to talk, but all Dick could think about was his growing relationship with Hugh Hefner. He couldn't get over the fact that the very first story he'd sold to the best-paying magazine in the country had actually gone for double. That was like Herbert Gold or Nelson Algren or somebody. From a small-time hack barely making a living he had become, in one telephone call, a literary figure. With the girl safely gone and the events of the night entered in his journal, Dick got out his carbon of The Story. He needed to know what made this one different from his other stories. They were all pretty much alike as far as he could tell.

Dick's apartment was a large studio on the second floor of an old wooden building near downtown, on SW Fourth Street. There were windows on two sides and plenty of light, important in Portland because of the weather. His bed was a mattress on the floor with a nice crazy quilt his mother had given him. There were a couple of old overstuffed chairs and a kitchen area with a
small old refrigerator and stove. His desk in the corner overlooked the back garden, and now he sat at it, in jeans and white tee, trying to figure out how he'd hit the daily double. The story was about a man tricking a woman into bed by pretending he didn't want to, surely nothing original, just an excuse for humor, he'd believed when he sent it to Bob. He'd hoped maybe Caper would buy it for two fifty. Instead,
Playboy
, king of the girlie books, had paid Three Thousand Dollars!

By the end of the week everybody in Portland knew about it. Dick hardly had to pay for a beer or an espresso, people were so eager to hear about the sale. There were only a handful of writers or artists of any kind in Portland, and they all tended to know each other. Now they all knew that Dick Dubonet, not the most hopeful of the bunch, in fact often looked down on because he was willing to start at the bottom, had hit the jackpot. Even the most egregious Reed College aesthete would have to acknowledge that three thousand dollars was a lot of money for couple of hours of work. Well, five or six hours.

The best part had been telling his friendly competition, Martin Greenberg. Marty was a wonderful guy, tall and thin, with sunken hungry eyes and a small delicate almost female mouth. Marty was contemptuous of Dick's girlie book sales, having himself much higher ambitions. Meanwhile he lived off his girlfriend and if he was writing anything Dick hadn't seen any evidence. He talked a good game, though, and was fun to argue with. And it could not be denied that Marty had a way with girls, especially intellectual girls. Hanging around with Marty had often gotten Dick laid.

They ran into each other in the middle of the Park Blocks, Dick walking to Meier & Frank to buy some new jeans, Marty heading up to Portland State to spend the afternoon in the library.

“Hello,” said Dick in his deepest voice. Marty was wearing his topcoat, and his somewhat thinning brown hair was blowing around. Rain fell lightly, but neither of them paid any attention. They shook hands formally and Dick wondered if Marty had already heard.

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” he heard himself saying. Marty's eyebrows went up. He knew Dick didn't throw money around.

“What happened, did you sell something big?” Smart bastard.

“What makes you think that?”

Marty just grinned, hands in his pockets, and so Dick told him the news. “Three grand?” Marty said.

“Minus commission,” Dick said. Marty did not have an agent.

Suddenly Marty looked serious. “Is this true?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dick said. It was a little infuriating that Marty didn't ask about the story itself. Like most people, he seemed interested only in the money.

“Listen,” Marty said. “I need to borrow some dough.”

“You do?” Dick had walked into this one.

“Fifty bucks,” Marty said, with a little of the New York guttural in his voice.

Dick sighed. He'd lend his friend the fifty dollars. The price of success. Or, to be more accurate, the price of braggadocio.

13.

Too late. He'd boasted too much. When he walked into Jerry's Tavern every head turned, or so it seemed. He showed his teeth in a smile. He even went up and ordered a beer, which he hadn't intended doing unless there was somebody, preferably female, he wanted to sit with.

“On the house,” said Nick the bartender, sliding the fifteen-cent glass of Blitz-Weinhard over to him. The first taste was delicious, as always. When he lowered his glass and licked the beer off his upper lip he found himself looking into a pair of eyes almost as dark as his own.

“I'm Linda McNeill,” she said. Her skin was incredibly white, her hair black, cut in a pageboy bob. “I'm a friend of Marty Greenberg's,” she said and smiled, showing deep dimples of amusement.

How did you recognize me?
he wanted to ask, but didn't. Marty had been seeing a girl who played in the Portland Symphony.

Dick signaled for two beers and escorted Linda McNeill to a booth. She seemed to have a nice figure under her winter clothes.

“I'm glad I ran into you,” she said. “I'm leaving for San Francisco in a couple days, just to see some friends, you know, and here you are?”

“How did you recognize me?” he asked.

“I've seen you around. Here, the old Lompoc House, Caffe Espresso, you know, the regular places.” She went on to explain that while she wasn't much of a writer herself, she knew a lot of writers, and was going to see them, a lot of them, when she went to San Francisco. In twenty minutes or so she mentioned Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. Apparently she knew them all, was one of the supporting figures of the Beat movement, which she discussed eagerly and incessantly, while Dick bought her round after round of beer. She'd removed her scarves and hat and dark blue coat, revealing a promising figure. Talking with great enthusiasm, she also from time to time lifted her hair in the back, showing a beautiful slim neck and also pushing her breasts toward him invitingly. She was taking a sheaf of her poetry down to give to Don Allen, San Francisco editor of
Evergreen Review
, and the reason she'd wanted to run into Dick was to see if he had any stories she could carry to Don Allen. Apparently she and Allen were close friends and he willingly took her advice on what to publish.

Which Dick didn't exactly believe. But Linda was such a vivacious talker and was so pretty and seemed to be flirting with him, though not in an obvious way, that he played along. Not that he wanted to be published in
Evergreen Review
. They paid almost nothing, he knew from reading
Writer's Digest
. And though the Beat writers were getting a lot of attention, they were not his kind of people.

“I went to high school with Gary Snyder's sister,” he said at one point.

“I'll tell him hello for you,” she said.

“I do have one story that might fit in,” he said later, when they were both a little soused and he'd gone through three dollars. “Would you like to read it?”

“Sure,” she said. “I'm a good judge of material.”

“I'd love to read some of your poetry,” he remembered to say. “I'll take you home, if you like, and on the way we can stop at my place and pick up the story.” She agreed and they drained their glasses and went out of the tavern into a wet cold night. They drove the few blocks to his apartment in his little yellow MG, his pride and joy, and she was properly appreciative. “What a cute little car! I can't get over how cute it is!”

“Would you like to come up for a minute, get warm?” he asked as he parked outside the building.

“I could wait right here,” she said. “Will you be long?”

“Well, I'm not exactly sure where the story is.”

He helped her out of the car. Her hand was warm and dry. Which meant she wasn't at all nervous. A good sign, because Dick had every intention of making a pass. He was getting excited. He loved the chase. He followed her up the dark stairs not touching her. He did not want to make any mistakes now, no stupid moves. You had to herd them carefully into place, not spook them, then let the natural consequences of proximity do their work.

“I love your apartment,” she said, when he turned on the light. “This is a real writer's pad.”

“Would you like to use the bathroom?” he asked politely. “I'll start looking for that story.” She went into his bathroom, which he kept neat for just such occasions, and he looked into his refrigerator. One quart of beer. He hoped it would be enough. “Would you like a glass of beer?” he called out.

“Do you have any coffee?” she asked through the door.

“Good, I'd rather have coffee too,” he said, to put them both on the same side. He started boiling water, got out two cups and saucers, and spooned a heaping amount of Folger's Instant into each cup. He wondered about all those famous poets she claimed to know. And Kerouac. She talked about Kerouac as if she had lived with him. He wondered what she was doing in Portland. Of course a lot of the Beat movement came out of Reed College, but that was all over with.

She came out of the bathroom and stood in the middle of the apartment,
her hands at the back of her neck, lifting her silky black hair. “I've been thinking about wearing my hair up,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I think you're the most beautiful woman in Portland.”

She laughed. “No, really. Up or down.”

“I like both.” He moved toward her and she did not tense up but smiled shyly and lowered her eyes, raising them again as their lips touched. He didn't push it, just a nice gentle kiss, but as he was about to pull away he felt her hand on his cheek. That was the sign he'd been waiting for. He put his tongue into her mouth and she put her arms around him and pressed her pelvis into his, causing his penis to begin swelling immediately.

“Oh, you feel good,” she said.

It is so great being an adult, he thought, as they easily and happily went to bed. But while he might have gotten into bed with Linda McNeill feeling adult, by morning, after hours of lovemaking, he felt like a child. A happy child. The sex exceeded anything Dick had experienced, and Dick had been a ski instructor in Aspen, Colorado, and considered himself fairly sophisticated. But this girl was something else. It wasn't the moves. He knew the moves. It was the passion, the spirit. All he could think of was the Kama Sutra, the Thread of Passion. She had lazily, sensually, humorously, lovingly, joyfully wrapped him in the silk threads of her passion, and made of him a cocoon.