Stars Screaming (7 page)

Burk told them everything. But he didn’t tell them that he loved her.

Louie’s Big Wheel was sitting in front of the garage as Burk pulled into his driveway. When he switched off the ignition he heard the phone ringing inside his house, but he waited outside, breathing in the crisp cool air, until it stopped.

Before he went to sleep, he turned on the radio. On KMPC, Radio Ray Moore was speaking to a man with an angry voice.

“I struck my boy today,” the caller told Radio Ray. “Not with my fist. I slapped him. But I slapped him hard enough to flame up his cheek.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I caught him in the garage. He had the top off the paint thinner and his nose stuck inside the can. Those fumes can turn your brain goofy. I told him that before, but he don’t listen to me.”

“How old is he?”

“Twelve.”

“Pretty young for that kind of stuff.”

“Too young. That’s why I had to draw the line. The next time I catch him in there he’s gonna get a real beating.”

“I’d think twice about that.”

“I didn’t call you for advice, Radio Ray.”

“Why
did
you call me?”

“I wanted to get it off my chest.”

“What are you hiding in the garage?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. You sound like there’s something in there you don’t want him to see.”

“What’re you talkin’ about? All I got in there is my camping gear, a lawn mower, and my tools.”

“You got a tackle box?”

“Hell, yes. Of course I got a tackle box.”

“The tray on top, that’s where you keep all your lures and flies. Right? And maybe some hooks. What do you have underneath?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing? Really?”

“I got some leader and a deck of playing cards.”

“That’s it?”

“And some insect repellent.”

“What else?”

“Nothin’.”

“You got something else down below, don’t you? Something you’re ashamed of. What is it, dope? Dirty pictures? Condoms? What do you have in there?”

“Nothin’! I got nothin’! Stop pushing me!”

There was a long pause. Radio Ray waited but the caller didn’t speak.

“Apologize to your boy,” Radio Ray said, breaking the silence. “Go in now and tell him you’re sorry.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Wake him up. Tell him you love him. Do the right thing.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do it.”

“But—”

“Do it.
Now
.”

The next morning, when Burk saw the picture in the
Los Angeles Times
, he knew right away that something was wrong. Two paramedics
were loading Bonnie’s body into the rear of the ambulance, but in the right-hand corner of the picture, in the gutter, Burk saw something that looked like a shoe. “Move aside,” Burk said out loud to the cop in the picture, who was blocking his view. “Move aside or pick up her shoe. That’s her loafer, you dumb shit! Pick it up!
Pick up her fucking shoe!
”

Gene called later that afternoon. He said, “I just spoke to my guys down at headquarters. It’s all bullshit. They checked with the Screen Actors Guild, and they have no record of an actress with the name Grace Simpson. Ellen, Faith, Heather, Helen, yes. No Grace. No one close to that. Zip.”

“Maybe she changed her last name. Actors do that all the time.”

“Ray, listen to me. This chick—”

“Forget it, Gene. I’m not interested.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You don’t want to hear the truth? What’re you, fuckin’ crazy?”

No one spoke for at least a minute. Finally, Burk said, “P-Five.”

“What?” Gene said.

“‘Dream Lover.’ P-Five on the jukebox at Ernie’s Stardust Lounge. That’s where it all started.”

“I’m not following you, Ray.”

“‘Dream Lover,’ Gene.”

“I know the tune. Bobby Darin. B side—”

“P-Five. Palm Springs. The desert. Darin. A lavender sky. Laurel. The chick in the trophy case. It’s all right there.”

“Where?”

“Behind my eyes, Gene. The movie. I just have to splice it together, and you’ll see how all this is connected. All of it. The whine in my power steering, Dr. Cyclops, James Earl Ray, Rheingold, Ricky Furlong—”

“Ricky Furlong?”

“And Clay Tomlinson too. I can’t leave them out, Gene. Clay and Ricky changed our lives. I’ll put them right next to those guys muff-diving at the Bat Cave. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“You don’t know, Gene? You’re my brother.
How the fuck could you not know
?”

Three

Gene and Clay: Throwing Down

From shortly before Christmas in 1941 until he suffered a mild heart attack in the spring of 1972, Burk’s father Nate owned and operated Hollywood’s busiest newsstand. Located eight blocks west of Vine, on the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood Boulevard, the racks at Nate’s News stretched south for nearly an entire city block.

Nathan Burk sold all the major dailies and newspapers of record, both foreign and domestic, but it was really his wide selection of oddball magazines (some stashed under the counter) that kept the sidewalk on Las Palmas crowded with customers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Along with the familiar newsweeklies like
Time
and
Life
, Nate’s was the only newsstand in the city to stock such maverick journals
as
,
Naked Church Choirs
,
Amputee Love
, and
Coffin & Tombstone
, the monthly trade magazine for the mortuary industry.

But unlike other news dealers, Burk’s father rarely returned his unsold magazines. Instead, every Saturday morning Burk and
his older brother, Gene, would box the leftovers and hand-dolly them over to Yesterday’s Pages, the used book and magazine store that their father owned on the corner of Cherokee and Selma. Yesterday’s Pages was managed by Nathan Burk’s cousin Aaron Levine, an ex-prizefighter and occasional movie extra who grew up next door to gangster Buggsy Siegel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Aaron was also an alcoholic, the kind of blackout drinker who would disappear for days or sometimes even weeks at a time, ending up hospitalized or incarcerated in cities as far away as Galveston, Texas, or Tacoma, Washington, with absolutely no memory of how he got there. After these binges, Nathan Burk would always pay for Aaron’s transportation back to Los Angeles, sometimes even hopping on a plane himself to serve as his personal escort. But whenever he demanded that his cousin stop drinking, threatening to fire him if he didn’t comply, Aaron would just shake his head and stubbornly say the same thing: “I’m just a punch-drunk drunk and that’s all I plan to be, so if you don’t like me the way I am, Nate, you can just tell me to get lost.”

But that was something Nathan Burk could never do.

“Because he’s your cousin, Dad. Right?”

“No, Ray. Not because he’s my cousin,” Nathan Burk told his younger son on a muggy Saturday afternoon during the summer of 1949.

They were sitting at a window table in Mike Lyman’s Vine Street Delicatessen, eating corned beef and chopped liver sandwiches. A block away was the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, where Burk had spent the morning watching cartoons and a Western serial starring Hopalong Cassidy and Buster Crabbe.

“Because he saved my life.”

“He saved your life?” Burk’s eyes opened wide and his lips were poised over the straw inside his bottle of Brown’s Cream Soda. “Really?” Burk’s father nodded. “How?”

Nathan Burk took a bite out of his sandwich and followed that with a fork piled high with cole slaw. “There was this big dumb Irish
kid in our neighborhood,” he said, speaking around the food in his mouth. “Jack Moriarty was his name. He was a bully, the kind of bully who used to beat up on kids for no reason. He just liked to hurt you. If you fought back he hurt you worse. Of course, he would never mess with me if I was with Aaron. But if he caught me alone on the street, he would either pinch my nipples or knuckle-punch me in the small of the back. I hated that boy,” Burk’s father said sharply. “I used to pray every night that he would die.”

Nathan Burk paused for a moment and let his eyes travel around the restaurant. His narrow lips were working silently, and Burk could see a tiny speck of mustard in the corner of his mouth.

“One Saturday morning,” he went on, pushing aside his plate and shifting his attention back to his son, “I was sitting in the subway station waiting for the train up to the Polo Grounds. I was on my way to see the Dodgers play the Giants. When I heard the subway I stood up, and that’s when Moriarty grabbed me from behind in a bear hug. ‘Look what I got,’ he yelled. ‘I got Big Nose Burk, the Jewish Jerk.’ Then he began to laugh like a madman while he carried me over to the tracks. I screamed for help, but everyone ignored us or figured we were just a couple of kids horsing around. I’m absolutely certain he would’ve thrown me in front of the train if Aaron hadn’t shown up right at that very moment. A split-second later, and I would’ve been dead.”

Burk’s father stopped speaking and glanced at his reflection in the delicatessen window. Outside, a gray-bearded man dressed in a hooded black robe walked up the sidewalk, carrying a white owl in a cage. Across Vine Street, movie producer Max Rheingold was standing in front of the Brown Derby smoking a long black cigar. With him was a woman wearing skin-tight red toreador pants and six-inch red spiked heels. A large red leather purse hung from her shoulder, and when she stepped to the curb and ducked inside the waiting limousine, Nathan Burk realized it was the aging ingenue who regularly came by his newsstand each week to pick up her hometown newspaper, the
Buchanan
(Michigan)
Bugle.
Her name was Grace Elliot, and he first saw her one evening in the spring of 1942.

She was remarkably fresh and innocent looking then, her face round and glass-smooth, and her long, very auburn hair was tied behind her head in a ponytail. But now her once-clear face had a rough
and unfinished look, and there was purplish eye shadow on her eyelids and carmine lipstick slashed across her shapely mouth.

“What happened, Dad?”

Burk’s father turned away from the window and stared at his son, puzzled. “Where?”

“At the subway station. What happened at the subway station with the bully?”

“Oh, there,” Burk’s father said, closing his eyes, straining to bring that part of the past back into focus. “Well,” he said, “Aaron was going to the ball game that day too. And he brought along his favorite bat, figuring that afterwards, if he was lucky, he would get one of the Giants to sign it. But when he got to the subway station and he saw what was going on, he—”

“Aaron let that kid have it,” Burk said, sitting up straight. “He smashed him with his bat. Right?”

“That’s right,” Burk’s father said. “But once Moriarty let me go, Aaron dropped his bat and used his fists to sock him in the jaw. He went down real hard, but he got back up with a big smile plastered on his face. He said, ‘Try to hit me again, sheeny,’ but when Aaron cocked his right hand, Moriarty laughed and said, ‘Screw you, Jew,’ and he turned around and jumped in front of the train.”

Burk was silent. He looked stunned. Finally, he said, “You mean he committed suicide?”

“Yes, he did,” Burk’s father said, and he signaled the waitress for the bill. “And that, my son, is the end of the story.”

Ten years later, on the Saturday afternoon that Burk’s older brother Gene was scheduled to fight Clay Tomlinson in the parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach, Timmy Miller’s aquamarine ’55 Chevy turned the corner on Las Palmas and idled in front of Ruffino’s, the take-out pizza joint that sat directly across the street from Nate’s News. “Maybe Baby” was playing on KRLA, and nestled underneath Timmy’s arm was a sharp-featured girl wearing dark sunglasses, and very tight white shorts.

“This is PK,” Timmy said to Burk, as he climbed into the rear seat.

Burk nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

“Same here,” PK said, without turning her head.

PK’s name was really Patty Kendall, and later that day Burk would learn that her father, Kenny Kendall, was an out-of-work actor and that she’d recently moved to the west side from Canoga Park, a suburb on the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley. Timmy had picked her up that morning, hitchhiking into Hollywood.

“That’s where I work,” PK said to Timmy, as they cruised past the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “I got the job because my mom knows the manager. She’s a waitress at the Cinegrill,” she said, pointing across the street at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. “Before that she was a cigarette girl at Ciro’s.”

Burk leaned forward and rested his arms on the front seat. “My parents used to celebrate their wedding anniversary at Ciro’s.”

“No kidding,” PK said. “Maybe my mom sold them cigarettes.”

“Maybe.”

“I bet they noticed her for sure. She’s got really long dyed blond hair and boobs out to here. Some people think she looks like Mamie Van Doren, except she’s older. My mom, that is.”

Timmy said, “PK was in Goody-Goody last week when Tomlinson knifed that guy from Westchester.”

Burk felt his heart begin to thump. He glanced nervously at PK. “You were there?”

PK nodded, her back to him. Then she lifted up her sunglasses and swiveled around in her seat: Freckles were sprinkled across her forehead, and up close her blue eyes were as soft as faded denim. “You’re scared. Aren’t you, Ray?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“I would be too.”

Burk felt slightly embarrassed. They pulled up to a light, and he shifted his eyes away from PK’s face. “I just can’t fuckin’ believe he’s back in LA. What’s it been, Tim? Five years?”

“At least.”

“Nobody thinks Gene will show. But they’re wrong.”

There was a long pause. Timmy lit up a Marlboro and took a drag, waiting for the traffic to move before he glanced into the rearview mirror. “Don’t worry, Ray. Gene’s gonna kick his ass.”

Gene Burk turned thirteen on August 27, 1953. Summer ended two weeks later, and he rode his new sky-blue Schwinn two-wheeler across the schoolyard at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School. A muscular boy that Gene didn’t recognize was standing alone near the bike rack. His hair was the color of brick, and he was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and jeans that were ripped in both knees.

“Hi,” Gene said, after he parked his bike. “My name is Gene Burk.”

“Who cares what your name is?” the boy sneered, and he walked away without shaking Gene’s hand.

By the first recess it was common knowledge that the new boy, Clay Tomlinson, had moved to Los Angeles after both his parents and his older sister were killed in a car wreck on the Indiana turnpike.

“It happened over the Fourth of July,” Suzy Farrel whispered to Gene during homeroom. “They were coming back from the state fair in Indianapolis.”