Free Fridays at Enrico's by Don Carpenter

his pockets, and so Dick told him the news. “Three grand?” Marty said.
    â€œMinus commission,” Dick said. Marty did not have an agent.
    Suddenly Marty looked serious. “Is this true?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œListen,” Marty said. “I need to borrow some dough.”
    â€œYou do?” Dick had walked into this one.
    â€œFifty 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.
    â€œOn 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI’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?”
    â€œHow did you recognize me?” he asked.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI went to high school with Gary Snyder’s sister,” he said at one point.
    â€œI’ll tell him hello for you,” she said.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œSure,” she said. “I’m a good