Authors: John Kaye
Stars Screaming (16 page)
When Burk came back to his bar stool, there was a fresh shot of Cuervo Gold waiting for him. Miles told him it was on the house. Burk thanked him silently with a nod and a woman down the bar said, “How’s your kid?” Burk turned and looked at her: one eye was closed and she was squinting over the top of her cigarette. “He don’t remember me,” the woman said to Miles, exhaling a great cloud of smoke.
“It’s been a long time, hon. Almost two years.”
“My hair used to be blond and wavier. I used to wear it like Esther Williams. This is not my real hair,” she said to Burk.
Miles said, somberly, “Alice’s been sick.”
“I’m sorry,” Burk said.
“Down below. In the hot spot. But I’m fighting it,” she said, her lips twisting into a painful grin. She was silent once more, then: “So, back to your son. Louie, right?” Burk nodded, wondering, How does she know this? “What is he now, six?”
“He’ll be seven in June.”
“I’m sixty-two and a half,” she said, chuckling softly, and Miles was smiling now too. “You still don’t remember me, do you?” Burk shook his head. “Alice. Alice McNair. I worked at Columbia, in wardrobe.”
“Okay,” Burk said, nodding, his memory finally becoming un-snagged. “Sure.”
“We used to talk about the old days. I worked with Rita Hayworth on
Cover Girl.
”
“Now I remember.”
“Before chemo I was like this,” Alice said, making a large circle with her arms.
Miles said, “Alice was at the track the day your wife had the miscarriage.”
“That’s right. I was there,” she said with certainty. “I was standing right alongside her in the grandstand. Of course I didn’t know you guys were married until later that evening. When Miles told me the story I put two and two together.” Alice leaned forward and looked Burk in the face. “Boy, she could sure play the horses.”
Burk stopped a smile and made a thoughtful face. “You know,” he said, “I don’t remember talking about Sandra and Louie in here.”
“Talked about them all the time,” a man behind him said in a sardonic voice. Burk looked over his shoulder: A stringy white-haired man sat alone at a table against the far wall. He wore a dirty tweed hat, and his hands and arms trembled with Parkinson’s disease. “Of course, you were so liquored up you don’t remember.”
“That’s Martin Epstein,” Miles said. “He used to sit here.” Miles slapped the bar with his palm. “Right under the TV.”
“Until my arms started flappin’ and knockin’ over glasses and ashtrays. Now he’s got me down here in the flats where it’s safe.”
“Martin owned the magic shop over on Wilcox,” Alice said. “Martin’s Magic Kingdom. When we lived on Yucca I used to bring
my boy by almost every day after school. He made me buy loads and loads of those little red and blue metal soldiers.”
“The Civil War guys. I had a set of those,” Burk said. “I saved them and gave them to Louie.”
Miles caught Burk’s eye. “Alice’s son died in Vietnam,” he whispered, shielding his mouth with his hand. “Paratrooper.”
Martin Epstein raised the cane that was resting in his lap and pointed the rubber tip at Burk. “I knew him since he was a kid. Him and his brother. Came in on Saturdays. Am I right?” Burk didn’t remember but nodded anyway. “I knew your father, too,” Martin Epstein said. “So did all the big-shot actors—Fonda, Mitchum, the whole bunch. They all got their hometown rags from your dad. ‘I’ll meet you down at Nate’s’—how many times did I hear that? Or ‘Goin’ down to Nate’s; I’ll be back in ten.’
“I remember when he first came to town with your mom. Had the little stand over on Gower and Fountain. Carried the trades and the
Racing Form
and the local dailies. That was it. Then—bingo—couple of years later he’s over on Las Palmas with racks runnin’ from here to Tijuana. If I remember correctly, it was Frank Havana who set him up there.”
“My dad worked his ass off,” Burk said. “Nobody set him up anywhere.”
Martin Epstein made a guilty face. “Havana and your dad were friends,” he said, bowing his head. “I know that for sure. Seen them every week sittin’ ringside at the Hollywood Legion Stadium.” Martin Epstein’s hand jerked in front of his face, pretending to part a curtain that shielded his eyes. “Can see it now, like it was yesterday. Max Baer is fightin’ some colored stiff, and sittin’ on the aisle in the sixth row is Frank Havana. Beside him is your dad and his cousin Aaron Levine. On the other side, Max Rheingold.”
“Max Rheingold?” Burk said the name as if he were hearing it for the first time. Then he laughed nervously, gazing into his glass for several seconds before he finished his drink.
No one spoke for a while, and the only sound was the whir of the ceiling fan and the clink of beer glasses as Miles stacked them behind the bar. “I’d like to hear a song,” Alice said at last.
Burk took out a coin and turned it over in his hand several times, examining it closely. “I’ll play P-Five,” he said. “That’s ‘Dream Lover.’”
“You just played that,” Miles said.
“That’s okay. I like that song,” Alice said.
“No. I’ll play something else,” Burk said.
“Play something by Gogi Grant,” Martin Epstein piped up. “‘The Wayward Wind’ is one of my favorites.”
“That fella’s changed,” Miles said, speaking in a low voice as he watched Burk feed quarters into the jukebox. “The first day he came in here, he was wearing a coat and tie. Hardly said a word. When he did open up, he talked about his wife, how much he loved her, but that sometimes she acted so queerly he didn’t think he knew her at all.”
“You can’t ever know a woman,” Martin Epstein said. “Even without her clothes on, she’s one of God’s great mysteries.”
Miles glanced at Martin Epstein and they stared at each other until Alice said, “That day at the track I noticed her right away. She had one of those faces that was beautiful and miserable at the same time. She had four winners and the Daily Double.”
Miles absorbed this information with a nod as he poured himself a slug of gin and knocked it down neat. Burk came back to the bar and Alice smiled at him, but he turned away from her watery eyes. A moment later the front door opened and a black sailor peeked inside and scanned the bar.
“Can I help you?” Miles asked him.
“I’m lookin’ for my partner. He ain’t here,” the black sailor said, his face looking embarrassed as he stepped back outside.
As the blade of sunlight vanished from the floor, Burk let his mind carry him back to that exhilarating afternoon when he met Bonnie Simpson for the first time. Behind his squinted eyes he saw her walking next to him, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her unbuttoned coat, her laughing face raised to the sky.
Miles reached out and patted Burk’s shoulder. “What’s goin’ on?” he said. “You look a little lost.”
Burk nodded and swallowed hard. Bonnie’s sunlit face was gone, but he could still hear her laughter in the back of his head. “I feel lost,” Burk said, surprised by the pain gathering in his stomach. Then he stood up and dropped a five-dollar tip on the bar. On his way out he said, “I’m not sure I’m ever coming back to this place.”
* * *
That night around 2
A.M.
Radio Ray received a call from a man named Clark. He said he was a graduate of Princeton University.
“I graduated with a degree in Library Science,” he said. “Right now I’m working at a local university, which I will not name. I’m having a difficult time at my job. Why? Because I’m in love with a colleague. Her name is Diana.”
“Diana. That’s a pretty name. Does she—?”
“Please let me finish.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“I know what you’re going to ask me,” Clark said in a high voice. “No. She does not know I love her. We have never spoken.”
“But you did say you were colleagues?”
“She works in Periodicals. I’m in the History section.”
“Maybe you should introduce yourself.”
“No. No matter what I said it would be wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Then by not speaking to her—”
“Not speaking to her is ecstasy!”
There was a long pause. Then Radio Ray spoke firmly. “You said at the beginning of this call that you were having a difficult time. Maybe you would like to explain what—”
Clark cut in. His voice trembled. “I want to follow her home at night. In the morning I want to watch her run. Later, I want to surprise her in her house—”
“Wait a sec—”
“Naked, sweating, her eyes filled with raw fear.”
“Clark—”
A pitiful moan, then softly: “I need to be inside her secret heart.”
Eight
Tuesday: Burk Goes Back to the Set AND Bobby Remembers Omaha
May 18, 1971
Burk woke up on his back with a hard-on tenting the sheet above his waist. While he amused himself with his right hand, his empty mind was filling slowly with erotic images left over from his last dream. In one he saw himself standing naked against a stark white wall. Kneeling in front of him with their eyes half closed were two women, a brunette and a redhead, both with hair reaching to the middle of their backs. They were fondling him—the redhead stroking his balls, the brunette licking his cock. In the background other unseen women were speaking softly, murmuring encouragement.
Burk climaxed violently, his face grimmacing with each convulsion. When he finally opened his eyes he saw drops of semen sliding through the hairs on his chest, glistening like the trail of a snail. In the corner of his vision he also noticed the message light blinking on the phone beside his bed.
After he lit a cigarette and ordered coffee from room service, he dialed the hotel operator. “You have a message from Boyd Talbott,” she told him. “He said you could reach him on the set.”
“Is that it?”
“Loretta Egan also called.”
“When?”
“Nine-thirty.”
Burk checked the alarm clock on his nightstand. It was ten-fifteen. Although he was a heavy sleeper, he rarely slept through a ringing phone. “Did you put her through?”
“No. You instructed us to hold all calls.”
“That’s strange,” Burk said. “I don’t remember doing that.”
The
LA Times
arrived with the coffee and Burk drank three cups, two quickly, but savoring the third while he browsed through the sports page. Soon his serenity was interrupted by a commotion in the room next door, followed by Tom Crumpler’s angry voice: “Get the fuck out of here, you stuck-up cunt! Now! And don’t fucking come back!” A door slammed, and Burk swung his legs out of bed. It was not a good sign when a featured actor in your first film was either drunk or going through cocaine withdrawal at ten in the morning, two hours before he was due on the set.
The phone rang and Burk dropped the newspaper on the rug before he put the receiver to his ear. Loretta said, “I think we should give this a rest for a while.” Her voice vibrated, slightly out of control. Before Burk could speak, the hotel operator broke in, saying, “I’ve got an emergency call from Boyd Talbott.”
Loretta cleared the line and the phone clicked twice before Talbott spoke. “Ray, you on?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“You’re tough to reach.” Talbott’s voice was cold and deliberate, with a trace of the British accent he’d picked up while he attended the London Film School between his junior and senior years at Yale. When he graduated, Paramount hired him as an intern, assigning him to
Pledging My Love
as Warren’s assistant. “Jon would like to know if you could knock off a short scene at the bar, before Crumpler arrives.”
Burk waited for Talbott to go on. When he didn’t, Burk said, “What kind of a scene?”
“Just something brief, to give us the flavor of the place.”
“I thought I did that with the dart game.”
“Perhaps, but—”
“And later when the waitress gets pissed off at the stuntman who—”
“What Jon thought would be interesting,” Talbott said, cutting in cautiously, “would be a scene between a couple of out-of-work actors. They’re both drunk, complaining about all the stuff they’ve had repossessed over the last few months. One guy has lost his car, a convertible he bought when he was a regular on a series; the other actor—he’s younger, just married—has had his living room set pulled out. Maybe the bartender chimes in about his Master Charge, how he went five hundred over the limit and the marshal showed up on his doorstep to reclaim it in front of his kid. A quick two-pager.”
“You’re sure we need it?”
“Absolutely. See what you can work up,” Talbott said. “When you’re done, bring it by the set.”
Later that same morning (while Burk labored over a scene that would never be filmed), Bobby Sherwood sat listlessly by the window in the room he shared with Ricky Furlong, watching the traffic pass by in front of the St. Francis Arms. Up the street a bus pulled to the curb in front of Ernie’s Stardust Lounge, discharging a blind black man wearing a lemon-colored suit and a panama hat.
A large-boned and clumsy-looking nurse stepped off next and began walking up Hollywood Boulevard. She was in her sixties and her gray hair was pulled into a bun, except for one loose strand that fell across her face. The way her shoulders rolled when she walked reminded Bobby of Mrs. Hooten, a guest from California who stayed regularly at the Hotel Sherwood during the month of August.
“I don’t have any relatives in Omaha,” she tells Bobby one morning when they ride down in the elevator together. She is wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a wide-rimmed straw hat. “They’re all dead, or they moved away like I did. But I like to come back every year, especially during the harvest season when the memories of my childhood are the fondest.”
Mrs. Hooten never speaks of these memories to Bobby, but late one evening when the dining room and the Cornhusker Lounge are closed, he sees his uncle chatting with her in a quiet corner of the lobby. They are seated on a small banquette, so engrossed in their conversation they don’t hear Bobby crawl slowly across the worn carpet to a hiding spot behind a large potted plant. “I was there that night. I was at the Orpheum,” she tells Bobby’s uncle. “My dad took us, my big brother and me. I was nineteen and Dave was twenty-two.”
“David became a doctor, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did. A radiologist. We were both home from college that summer. He was a senior at Nebraska and I was a sophomore at Creighton, majoring in journalism. We finished bringing in the wheat on Friday, and seeing the vaudeville show that night was Daddy’s treat. I had never seen a live stage show before, and in the back of my mind was the possibility that I might write about it for my journalism class.”
“A review?” Daniel Schimmel says, smiling.
“Possibly.”
“Did you?”
Mrs. Hooten pauses before she replies. “No, I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“It was too painful. Why they hated you so much I never understood.”
Here Daniel Schimmel loses his smile. “We weren’t funny.”
“You were awful. True. This is very true.”
“Max was drunk. You remember that, of course?”
“Max? You mean—”
“My partner, Max Rheingold. The fatty with the stovepipe hat and the oversized shoes. You must remember him vomiting onstage.”
“Yes, of course. We thought it had to be part of the act. And such profanity,” she says with disgust. “They beat him, didn’t they?”
“They beat us both. And not just the people who were in the audience.”
“The police?” Daniel Schimmel nods. “Mr. Rheingold exposed himself,” Mrs. Hooten whispers, “didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“We couldn’t believe our eyes.”
“It was the last vaudeville show in Omaha, ever.”
“I remember a clown called Sad Sack and a gentleman with a dog act.”
“Elmer Freedom. He beat me bloody with his fists. His dog took several chunks out of Max’s legs.”
“Elmer Freedom. What a wonderful name. My lover Miriam will laugh so when she hears it. There was also a lady with birds.”
“Celia and her doves, but she never got to go on. We were the last act.”
“Yes. But I remember seeing her afterward, outside the theater, running down the street toward the bus station with a cage in each hand. What a queer sight.”
“Max was on the same bus, on his way west with three dollars in his pocket. Me? I spent two days in the hospital, then two more days here recuperating, before I went downstairs to work in the kitchen.”
“You told no more jokes?”
Daniel Schimmel shakes his head. “None.”
“They threw tomatoes at you.”
“And two days later I was peeling them into boiling water for the vegetable soup.”
“A comedian in the kitchen.”
“I was a fraud, but Max was a bigger fraud.”
“His Johnson was formidable, as I recall.”
“His Johnson?”
“You’ve never heard that term? His dingus, how about that?”
Daniel Schimmel laughs. “That I understand.”
“It was formidable,” she repeats.
“What did your father say?”
“He said, ‘Sometimes it never pays to leave the farm.’”
This time they both laugh.
“What happened to that man?” Mrs. Hooten asks Daniel Schimmel, her face becoming serious.
“What happened to Max Rheingold?” Daniel Schimmel leaves the question in the air, while he removes his glasses and gazes off into the blur of the lobby. When he turns back toward her, he says, “That’s a long story.”
“I bet it is,” Mrs. Hooten says, and smiles. “Why don’t you begin and I will let you know if I become bored.”
Burk circled the block twice before he found a metered parking space in front of the Mayfair Market. Directly across the street was the Raincheck Room, where crew members were milling about or drinking coffee in small huddles, obviously on a break. An overweight cop loaned to the production for the day was waving cars around the cables and lights that blocked off the lane by the curb.
Burk used his Levi’s to dry his palms before he got out of his car. When he looked up he saw Talbott appear in the open doorway of the Raincheck Room. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, knife-creased chinos, and shiny cordovan loafers without socks. The script he was holding against his chest was protected by an expensive leather binder.
The light flashed to green, and a white Cadillac glided to a stop in front of the bar. The woman driving had jet-black hair and a sharp profile. Jon Warren was sitting in the passenger seat. He was wearing dark shades and a straw cowboy hat, which he tilted back on his head when the woman leaned to kiss him on the lips. There was some good-natured whistling and scattered applause from the crew, and when Warren opened the door and stepped into the sunlight he bowed deeply, removing his hat in a sweeping gesture. Then he threaded his way through the cables and lights, nodding to Talbott in a perfunctory way before he disappeared inside the bar.
Snake Myers loped out of the Mayfair Market and caught up to Burk in the middle of the crosswalk. “What’s shakin’, my man?” he said, clapping Burk on the shoulder. “Snake Myers, remember?”
Burk nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
“So, what’s up?”
“Not much.”
“Just in the neighborhood?”
“Not really,” Burk said. He held up his script. “I’m dropping off some revisions.”
“New pages. That’s cool,” Myers said, and a goofy smile worked
its way across his face. “Give ’em to me and I’ll make sure they get to Warren.”
“Talbott wants to see them first.”
“Talbott’s a punk,” Myers said, looking around impatiently once they reached the other side of the street. “Fuck him.”
“He works for Warren, so—”
“He’s a studio snitch. He works for himself.” Myers turned away, and Burk saw a pint of Old Grand Dad in the pocket of his jeans. “See you around.”
Burk was moving toward Talbott when Warren stepped outside the Raincheck with his arm around Chickie Green. They went off to one side and spoke in hushed voices, deciding which lens to use for the next shot. When there was a lull in the conversation, Burk said to Warren, “I’ve got the scene worked out.”
