Fridays at Enrico's by Don Carpenter Page A

boosting clothes for a guy. The guy had a regular list of businessmen customers he stole for. The customer told the guy what he wanted and the guy told Stan and Stan went into the store wearing old stuff from the Salvation Army and walked out wearing the items requested. It was easy but took nerve. It wasn’t like house penetration but it was fun, exciting. You had to be careful you didn’t get all heady and start boosting everything in sight. “Never grift on the way out,” was good old con advice.
    One day he walked into Sichel’s, the best men’s store in Portland, to pick up a camel’s hair coat, size forty-two, when he ran into Marty Greenberg, standing in front of the triple mirrors admiring himself in a new topcoat. Marty smiled slyly and modeled the coat. “How do you like it?”
    â€œUh, fine,” Stan said. He wondered how Marty could afford a hundred-dollar coat, but didn’t ask. He couldn’t steal anything now. He felt the energy he’d worked up flushing away, leaving him empty and depressed. He watched Marty trying on stuff, realizing that the guy was just having some fun. Stan pretended he too had come in just to look around.
    â€œBest store in Portland,” Marty said.
    â€œSo I’ve heard.”
    They were around the corner from Jolly Joan’s. “Let’s go say hello to my girlfriend,” Marty said. It was sunny out, a nice spring day except for the cold wind. They walked together, hands in their pockets, heads bent intothe wind. For some reason just seeing Marty made Stan feel like a different man. He could always go back and get the jacket later, although he didn’t want to try Sichel’s again so soon. Fahey-Brockman across Broadway had good jackets.
    â€œHow’s the writing going?” Marty asked him. He held open the glass door to Jolly Joan’s and Stan moved into the billowing warmth and clatter.
    â€œIt’s going great,” he said.
    Meeting all these new people had made Stan self-conscious about sitting up all night scrawling in his notebooks. Before, he’d just been fucking around. Now he was writing . And these other guys had their own women, they were easy around women. In fact, unless he had things wrong, both Marty Greenberg and the famous Dick Dubonet had women who worked, and Marty didn’t even have the excuse that he was writing. Marty was a philosopher, and when he did decide to write down his thoughts, it would be a huge work the whole world would have to pay attention to. But meanwhile he let his girlfriend or roommate or whoever she was do the working and pay the rent. Stan knew a couple of pimps from jail. They were funny entertaining guys, like Marty. When they weren’t in jail they hung out at the Desert Room and talked about their big plans. Just like Marty, only Marty’s big plans were philosophical rather than entrepreneurial, if that was the right word.
    Stan didn’t stop writing. He made sure he wrote two hours a night, recalling Dick’s scornful inquiry. But he got tired of bending his short stubby fingers around a ballpoint and writing with his pad on his knee. If he was serious about this, he’d have to teach himself to type. He thought about stealing a typewriter and immediately backed away from the idea. The stealing was one part of his life. He wanted the writing to be different. All right, pure. Not part of his sickness, which he admitted ruled his life. The sick sexual desire that came over him on stealing days. The thing that was going to put him away. Bizarre, sick, unspeakable. Marty thought he was a hero for robbing houses, although he didn’t know any details, only that Stan had “done a little stealing now and then.” Said with a sly grin, as if Stan was Jesse James.
    So he went down to the typewriter store across from Gill’s, the big bookstore, and bought himself a used Underwood portable. He didn’t tell Marty. He went up