Stars Screaming (18 page)

“The writer’s telling us a story,” the pudgy man said.

“No. This really happened,” Burk said slowly, as if he was having an inner dialogue with himself. “This is someone real. There was a picture of her in the paper.”

Aldo Ray and the pudgy man exchanged a silent glance. The bartender untied his apron, and a new man came on duty. He was older, in his mid-sixties, with serious eyes and thinning gray hair.

“Bonnie Simpson.” Aldo Ray said her name and shook his head from side to side.

“I think about her constantly,” Burk said once more. “She had all these delicate lines in her face, and when I first saw her I could feel my body needing her hands, my skin needing to feel her touch.”

Aldo Ray said, “That name mean anything to you, Mel?”

The bartender said, “What’s that?”

“Bonnie Simpson.”

The bartender slowly turned back the cuffs of his shirt and checked his watch against the clock on the counter behind him. “No,” he said. “No. I can’t say it does.”

Burk said, “Her mother was an actress. Her name was Grace.”

“I had an agent named Grace,” said the pudgy man. “Grace Foster. Worked for Harry Gold.”

The bartender poured himself an inch of scotch and chewed his lips while he tugged his shirt away from his belt. “Grace Simpson. No. Don’t ring a bell.”

“Elliot. Grace Elliot,” Burk said, his eyes fixed on Aldo Ray’s face in the mirror behind the bar. “She was from Buchanan, Michigan. She liked to wear the color yellow, and butterscotch was her favorite flavor. Elliot was her maiden name.”

The pudgy man said, “We get the picture, but what’s the point?” And from somewhere in the shadows behind him, Burk heard Robert Culp say, “We leave now we can be in Vegas in six hours. Tell me yes and I’ll get us a suite at the Sands.”

“She’s dead,” Burk said, standing up to pay his tab. “She died in a fire. She burned to death.”

It was close to 10
P.M.
when Burk arrived back at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There were four pink phone message slips waiting for him at
the front desk, and he sorted through them quickly as he crossed the lobby, pausing briefly when he noticed Warren Beatty leave the Polo Lounge arm in arm with his latest girlfriend, the beautiful British actress Julie Christie. They were Hollywood’s newest golden couple and Burk slowed his step to bask in their starlight, letting Beatty pass by so close their shoulders nearly touched.

Just before he stepped inside the elevator Burk caught a glimpse of Eddie Bascom. Now dressed in street clothes—a pink rayon shirt and flared cranberry slacks—Eddie was walking down the stairs from the mezzanine with his bellman uniform slung over his shoulder on a wooden hanger. With him was Gus Tolos, the bartender from three to midnight in the Polo Lounge and, according to many sportswriters, the best schoolboy athlete in the history of Los Angeles.

As the elevator closed and ascended to the third floor, Burk recalled the afternoon he first heard the name Gus Tolos. It was in the spring of 1958. Gus was only a sophomore, but he led Hollywood High School to the city basketball championship, scoring forty-six points in the title game.

“The next morning the
LA Times
called me the Golden Greek,” Gus told Burk late one afternoon after most of the lunch crowd had emptied out of the Polo Lounge. “But to the chicks down at State Beach that summer I was Gus God. Now look what I’m doin’.” He glanced down the bar. “You wanna know what happened?”

“What?”

“I became a drunk. A falling-down, tongue-chewing drunk. For ten years I lived on skid row. But not anymore,” he said. “I beat it. In July I’ll be sober one year.”

Burk said, “That’s terrific. Congratulations.”

Gus shook his head. “No. Don’t congratulate me. I had nothin’ to do with it. God just showed me the light, and I’ve been walkin’ toward it ever since.”

In the short silence that followed, Burk’s mind was tugged back to the winter of 1969, when Sandra attended her one and only Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Burk dropped her off at a clubhouse on Ohio Street, just east of Sepulveda, but when he came back an hour later she had disappeared. Around midnight he found her outside the King’s Head, a rowdy Scottish pub on Broadway and Third, in Santa Monica. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and two cops were loading her into the back of a patrol car.

“She threw a beer stein at the bartender,” said one of the cops when Burk identified himself as Sandra’s husband. “He told her she was too drunk to play darts and she freaked out. Almost tore the guy’s head off.”

“Shit like this happen often?” the other cop asked Burk.

Burk laughed softly at this question but did not reply. Then he glanced at Sandra, and with a casual shrug he said, “Sometimes it does.”

Burk dialed room service and ordered up a Caesar salad and a Bloody Mary; then he flicked on the TV and called Loretta three times in the space of an hour, hanging up at once each time her service picked up. Around midnight he dialed the Carousel Escort Service and requested that a light-skinned black woman be sent up to his room.

“Tall or short? Any preference?” he was asked by a woman with a deep, resonant voice.

“Over five feet.”

“Esmeralda is available. She’s from the island of Jamaica.”

“Is she pretty?”

“As a sunset over Montego Bay.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Room number, please?”

“Three-one-seven.”

“It’s now twelve-oh-six. She will be at your door in twenty minutes.”

Under the shirts in his dresser, Burk found a green-tinted vial that was half filled with cocaine. He dumped the contents on the glass covering his bedstand and chopped out several thick lines, using the laminated edge of his Writer’s Guild card. He tooted three right away, planning to save the rest for Esmeralda, but five minutes later, when Loretta called, he said, “One sec,” put the receiver underneath the pillow, and inhaled the rest.

“Do you have company?” she asked Burk when he came back on the line.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, is there someone in your room, Ray? If there is, just tell me and I’ll hang up.”

“There is no one here, Loretta.”

“We’re not exclusive, Ray. You can fuck anyone you want, not that you need my permission. I assume you haven’t been faithful,”

Loretta said, trying to sound indifferent, and Burk took a breath to avoid a quick response. “I know I said we should take a break, but now I wonder what difference it would make. We’re not in love. Why keep up the charade?”

“We don’t have to,” Burk said, the cocaine giving his voice a confident edge; but in another part of his mind he could hear the hollowness of his words, and he knew he would be sorry for them later on, around 4
A.M.,
after he’d fucked Esmeralda and she’d left with his three hundred dollars, when his heart was throbbing with fear and he was pacing back and forth across the room, pulling at his dick, talking to himself, making up movie ideas and wise and funny things to say to Loretta when he called her back to apologize early the next morning.

Into this uneasy silence Loretta said, “We can still be friends.”

There was another long pause, and this time the silence was so deep that Burk thought Loretta had disconnected. When, finally, he heard her breathing into the phone, he said, “Fuck friends. I don’t want you as a friend. I want . . .”

“What do you want, Ray? Tell me.”

Burk shook his head. The coke was wearing off fast. He began to feel panicky, out of control. “I want—” he started, then stopped.

“What? Jesus, Ray.
What
?”

Nine

Wednesday: The Weather Changes AND Burk Drives Back to the Argyle Manor

May 19, 1971

When he awoke on Wednesday morning, Burk was puzzled to see a dead gray sky hanging over the city like a soiled sheet. And, except for a brief period in the late afternoon on Thursday, when a thin blue stripe appeared on the rim of the horizon, the sky would remain utterly unwelcome and empty of light for the next three days, clearing finally on Saturday morning, just an hour before Louie’s plane arrived at the airport.

As soon as he ordered a pot of coffee from room service, Burk sat up carefully and leaned back against the pillow propped up behind him, listening alternately to the pounding inside his head and the phone ringing in the room next door. He closed his eyes, keeping them closed until the ringing stopped, the angry sound replaced by running water and Tom Crumpler’s high off-key voice singing Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.”

Involuntarily, Burk found his mouth being shaped into a smile. He was thinking back to that weekend in 1964 when he and Sandra
saw Dylan in Minneapolis. On the drive up she took Burk by surprise, saying, “I’m your girlfriend now. Okay? Is that what you want?” Burk said yes, and later that night, before they made love for the first time, while he held her in his arms, he said, “I never in a million years thought I could be with someone as pretty as you.”

And Burk remembered Sandra rising up on her elbow and staring down at his face. “You’re a cool guy,” she said, the light from the television flickering over her breasts. “You know that, Ray? You really are.”

Burk recalled how frightened he was of the new feelings of tenderness that surged inside him.

“What’s wrong?” Sandra asked him, when she felt his body stiffen and his face turn inward.

“Nothing,” Burk said. “I’m just crazy about you and . . .”

“And . . . what?”

“And I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

Burk said nothing for a few moments. Then his words came out in a rush: “Scared you’ll leave me. Scared you’ll never love me as much as I love you.”

The humidity had increased, dampening Burk’s neck and back as he drove past the Paramount lot and turned left on Bronson. He continued north to Sunset and turned right. At Western Avenue he turned left again, and two long blocks later he pulled up to a stoplight on Hollywood Boulevard. Next to him was a 1960 Buick Riviera driven by a thin black man with a hawk face and iron-gray hair and sideburns. A hand-lettered sign on the driver’s side door said
I LOVE A WHITE WOMAN
.

It was four in the afternoon and Burk had been driving since noon, circling the same twenty blocks, using the wipers intermittently to sweep away the mist that settled on the glass. He stopped only once, around two-thirty, to purchase some gas and make a collect phone call.

“I’m driving again,” he’d told Timmy Miller. He was calling him from the Chevron station on Beverly and Normandie, one block from where he’d first encountered Bonnie Simpson two years earlier. “And I’m really freaked.”

“I know. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Yeah? You can?”

“You sound weird, Ray.”

“I feel weird,” Burk said, staring across the street at the Hollywood Hacienda Motel. The only car in the parking lot was a mud-splattered white ’66 Chrysler with Oklahoma plates. “Like I could do something out of control.”

“Maybe you should come back up.”

“I can’t. I’m going out to see Sandra on Sunday. That’s why I called. I want you to put Louie on a plane Saturday morning.” There was a pause, and Burk caught himself staring at a woman standing in the motel parking lot. She had thick legs and a hard-looking face. A lean, muscular man stood in the doorway of one of the rooms, speaking to the woman with his arms folded over his naked chest.

Finally Timmy said, “You think that’s a good idea?”

“What?”

“Louie comin’ down.”

“He wants to see his mom. It’s been a long time,” Burk said. “I gotta go. Leave a message with the flight number at the hotel. Tell Louie I love him.”

Burk dropped the phone into the cradle, but he remained in the booth with his hand on the receiver while the fat woman crossed the street. As she angled toward him he could see the flesh jiggle on her thighs and the smirking grin on her doughy face. “Ten bucks for a blow job. Fucking Okie can suck his own dick,” she sneered under her breath, her bleary eyes raking Burk up and down as she lurched up the sidewalk.

The stoplight turned green on Hollywood Boulevard and Burk drove north to Yucca and turned left. At the corner of Argyle and Franklin he found a parking space behind a U-Haul that was filled with furniture.

An old man in a wrinkled black suit was maneuvering a shopping cart up the sidewalk, groaning with each step. On his head was an oversized fedora that nearly covered his ears. As he shuffled by the Mustang, he gave Burk a false smile and Burk smiled back, noticing for the first time the small wooden sign that was stuck in the ice plant in front of the Argyle Manor. It said
APARTMENTS FOR RENT
—
1 AND 2 BEDROOMS
.

Burk lit a cigarette and looked off, down the street. He wondered what the chances were that Bonnie’s old apartment was available. He thought, if it was, it might be a neat place to hide out, to be alone
with his thoughts; not a place to eat or sleep, he’d still use the hotel for that, but a place where he could read or maybe try to begin a new project, a secret place.

The more he thought about this idea the more he could feel something move inside him, a building need to be inside that room, to have his name taped over the mail slot downstairs.

The gray light outside was growing dimmer and Burk started to feel drowsy. In his half-sleep a memory returned, bringing with it a feeling of helplessness.

The building’s owner was a tall, very lean woman in her seventies. Her large eyes were dark and beautiful, and she was wearing a long black evening dress that grazed the top of her black suede pumps. She said her name was Lillian Ohrtman.

“I’m staying here temporarily, until I find a new manager,” she told Burk outside the half-open door to her apartment. “Norman Swain, my former manager, died last Saturday of cirrhosis of the liver and other complications due to alcoholism. What kind of work do you do, Mr. . . . ?”

“Burk. I’m a writer.”

“How delightful. Books? Plays? Films?”

“Films.”

“My second husband was a film writer. Perhaps you may have heard of him. His name was Lionel Lewis.”

“Wasn’t he blacklisted?”

“Yes, he was,” she said, ignoring the phone that started to ring in her living room. “Are you interested in renting an apartment, Mr. Burk?”

Burk felt his body tense. “Is nine available?”

The phone rang for a third time before a man picked up and said hello. Lillian Ohrtman said, “Have you lived here before?”

Burk shook his head, but his eyes moved up to the second floor. “No. But someone I knew once did.”

A young man with wet lips and dark floppy bangs came to the door. He was dressed in a black tuxedo with a maroon cummerbund. “That was Drew,” he said in a cold voice. “I told him we would pick him up in twenty minutes.”

“This is my son, Mark,” Lillian Ohrtman said to Burk, but neither man stuck out his hand. “We’re on our way to the Hollywood Bowl. André Previn is conducting a program of Broadway show tunes. But first we’re going to have a picnic on the grass with Mark’s friend Drew.”

“He’s my lover, not my friend,” Mark said with exaggerated dignity. “Why do you refer to him as my friend? You know I hate that.”

“Well, then, he’s
my
friend,” she said with a little laugh, but still keeping her eyes on Burk. “Last week Drew and Mark and I saw Harry Belafonte at the Greek Theatre. We had a lovely time. The night was so clear we could count all the stars in the sky. I despise weather like this,” she said, frowning. “Don’t you, Mr. Burk?”

“It’s okay once in awhile. For a change.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “Oh, Mother, will you stop? He doesn’t want to talk about the stupid weather. He wants to rent an apartment.” He turned and walked back inside, leaving Burk and Lillian Ohrtman alone on the front steps.

In the window of the apartment next door Burk could see a woman dressed in a white bathrobe. Pink rollers were in her hair, and the stub end of an unfiltered cigarette dangled from her lower lip as she pushed a vacuum across the rug. When she caught Burk staring at her, she stopped and looked back at him with her hands on her hips.

Burk dropped his eyes and Lillian Ohrtman said, “Once, in the summer of 1931, when I was living in Venice, there were forty-two straight days of overcast skies. Roger Armstrong, my first husband and Mark’s father, ran a ride at the pier. Of course, the attendance was way down and we almost starved. I was studying painting at UCLA, but I had to quit and become a saleslady at the May Company. I was terrible at selling, and ultimately I was fired. Things became so desperate that I entered one of those dance marathons. A movie was finally made about those contests.”

“
They Shoot Horses
,
Don’t They
?”

“Yes. That’s it. A wonderful film,” Lillian Ohrtman said, the color rising in her cheeks. “The Fonda girl was superb and so was Gig
Young. What a ladies’ man he was! For a short time he went out with an actress friend of mine. Her name was Lucille Vickers. Metro had her under contract until she was blinded by a klieg light during
Apache Warpath
, her first film. A terrible accident.”

Mark reappeared on the front steps. He was holding a full-length mink coat and a small black purse. After he slipped the coat over his mother’s shoulders, she said, “Number nine is vacant. If you would like to rent it, it will be two hundred and fifty dollars per month, plus a fifty-dollar security deposit.”

Once more, Burk glanced at the apartment next door. The woman in the white bathrobe was gone, but a small lapdog was standing on the back of the couch with his paws moving up and down on the window, scratching the glass. “Can I write you a check?” Burk asked.

“Can’t this wait until morning?” Mark said, his breath smelling of rum as he swung his face toward Burk. “I told Drew to be waiting in front of his apartment. He’ll be freezing cold.”

Lillian Ohrtman opened her purse and took out a ring of keys. She slipped off one key and took hold of Burk’s arm and moved him toward the sidewalk. “We’re going to hear songs from
Showboat
,” she said, pressing the key into his palm. “And
Oklahoma
and
Porgy and Bess
. We’re going to have a glorious evening.” Lillian Ohrtman turned and smiled at her son. “Well, my boy, are you coming or not?”

“Are we bringing him too?”

“No, of course not,” she said, and to Burk she said, “Spend the night if you like. The apartment is clean, and there are fresh linens in the closet.”

They shook hands and Burk said, “I’ll give you a check tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“It certainly is.”

Bonnie’s apartment was just as small and dingy as Burk remembered. The only changes were in the kitchen, where a new refrigerator hummed softly and the faded yellow walls were now covered with wallpaper that was vertically patterned with pink and yellow roses. Next to the sink was a jar of instant coffee and a painted ceramic cup with ducks parading around the circumference.

As he waited for the water to boil, Burk stripped off his clothes and began to masturbate standing up in the center of the living room. Exciting himself was difficult in this joyless atmosphere, and as he
rocked back and forth, jerking himself violently, his elbow caught the lamp next to the window, toppling it to the floor. The bulb shattered, sending shards of glass across the room, and seconds later, when he came, a cat began to meow on the landing outside his door.

Burk used the soles of his feet to rub his semen into the rug; then he carefully swept up the glass with a whisk broom he found underneath the sink. For the next few minutes he lingered in the kitchen over his coffee, listening to a radio that was playing in a distant apartment. The song, “Back in My Arms Again” by the Supremes, was one of those tunes Burk and Sandra had heard over and over on their trip across the country in 1964.

Burk shook his head to erase Sandra’s face from his mind. Then he looked back into the living room and saw his bunched-up clothes sitting in a pile. Marlboro cigarettes from a pack in his shirt had spilled on the floor, and the blue-striped tip of one sneaker was peeking out from underneath the couch.

Two years earlier, on the day they met, Bonnie was standing where he was now, leaning back against the kitchen counter with her blouse open, grinning slyly, a breast balanced in each hand while Burk sucked on the hardening nipples.