Stars Screaming (4 page)

Burk was searching for “Cool Daddy” by the Thrills, a regional R & B hit from 1956 on the Proud Dog label. This particular 45 would not be considered valuable were it not for the B side, “Daddy’s Big Dick,” a studio-party outtake that was unintentionally recorded and mistakenly distributed in parts of west Texas and New Mexico. Seventeen copies were sold before the master was destroyed and the record pulled off the racks.

King Kong, a drug dealer Gene busted during the Watts riots, had a copy in his safe along with four kilos of heroin. “That spade skated a year in the joint when I saw that maroon-and-gold label,” Gene told Burk when he brought the record by his house. “I even let him keep the smack.”

Before dealing in rare rock-and-roll records and, later, in autographs and other memorabilia, Burk’s brother had been a cop for seven years, joining the force right after he flunked out of college in 1960. A tenacious investigator and absolutely fearless, Gene had risen quickly through the ranks and twice was nominated for Policeman of the Year, the last time in 1966, the year before he resigned.

“Law enforcement is not for me anymore,” he told Burk the day after he came back from the Monterey Pop Festival. “I’m gonna hang it up.”

And that was that. The next day Gene turned in his badge.

Burk wondered what Gene would do if he found out someone stole one of his prized records. He had killed two men in the line of duty, but Burk doubted that Gene would shoot his own brother. “Screw it. I could use the money, but it’s not worth the risk,” he heard his voice say out loud, and he decided to put the record back.

“Daddy!” Louie shouted from upstairs. “Where are you?”

Burk snapped off the light. In the dark! he wanted to scream.

Doctors and nurses wearing sea-green surgical masks hurried past Burk as he stepped off the elevator on the second floor of Brotman Hospital. As he had been directed, he turned left at the nurses’ station and nearly collided with two orderlies who were backing a stretcher out of the radiology lab. On the stretcher was a boy around Louie’s age, with a shaved head and a long thin tube inserted into his throat. Using some fancy footwork, Burk was able to maneuver around the little guy, who stared up at him with pale, pain-ridden eyes that looked ready to cry. When he arrived at room 207—Sandra’s room—the door was partly open, and the overpowering odor of bourbon wafted into the hallway.

“Come on in,” Sandra said, without looking up from her
Racing Form.
Her plastic ID bracelet was still fastened to her wrist, but she was sitting, fully clothed, in a chair by the bed. “I only have one more race to scope out and we can split.”

“No rush,” Burk said. “Take your time.”

Sandra scribbled some numbers on a note pad.

Burk stared at his wife. She was missing a sock, and her maternity dress was ripped underneath the arm. “I think Louie’s having some problems at school,” he said.

“That Screwy Louie business.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Awhile.”

“He’s upset by it.”

“Kids can be jerks at that age,” Sandra said, still not looking up. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“My dad is the one who’s worried,” Burk said, and he drifted over to the window facing the parking lot. Down below he saw a young black girl on metal crutches flanked by her parents. Her pelvis was curved by some terrible disease, and she slowly and painfully dragged herself toward the hospital entrance. “And he’s worried about you, too. He thinks you should see a psychiatrist.”

For a while they were silent. When Burk turned around, he noticed the empty pint of Wild Turkey that was sitting on the dinner tray. “Do you think I’m crazy?” Sandra finally said.

“I don’t know. Maybe talking to someone isn’t such a bad idea.”

“I talk to people every day. I talk to you. I talk to Louie. I talk to the guys at the track. I—”

“Sandra?”

“Huh.”

“Look at me.”

“What?” she said, and she raised her eyes for the first time. “What do you want, Ray?” He pointed at the empty bottle of Wild Turkey. “Hernando brought that,” she said.

“Who’s Hernando?”

“Just a friend. A jockey I know. He cashed my ticket for me in the fifth.”

“You had the exacta?”

“I had it up the ying-yang, Ray,” she said, and she folded up her
Racing Form.
But her hands were trembling when she stuck it inside her purse. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me?”

“Ask what? How much you won?”

“No. About the baby. It was a boy,” she said, as she stood up. “A baby boy.”

Burk’s body faltered a moment. He closed his eyes and tried to get his mind cleared. Then he took a deep, quieting breath, letting it out slowly as he followed her out of the room. While they were walking toward the elevators, Sandra let her head rest against his shoulder. “So how was your day?” she asked him.

“Not so good.”

“What happened?”

“Well . . . I got fired.”

“That’s awfully strange.” Sandra lit up a Marlboro while she studied Burk’s reflection in the windshield. They were on the Hollywood Freeway, traveling north toward the San Fernando Valley, toward their home. “You’re telling me the truth? You haven’t been to work in the last six weeks?”

“I check in.”

“Then you leave. And you start . . . driving?”

Burk nodded. “So where do you go?” she asked.

“Hollywood. East of Vine. I have this special route I take.” Burk started to draw a map in the air. “Sunset east to Gower, north to Franklin, east again to Western, south to Hollywood Boulevard, east to Normandie, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Around and around you go.”

“More or less.”

“Without stopping.”

“I stop for gas,” Burk said. He flipped on his turn blinker and edged into the right lane. “And sometimes I stop at this bar for a few drinks. But mostly I just drive. I have to.”

Sandra said nothing for several seconds. Then: “You have to.”

“Yes,” Burk said, and he struggled against the urge to be up there right now, on the boulevard, cruising slowly in the right lane, contemplating the bewildered and humorless men and women as they moved in and out of the bars and the cafeterias and their thinly furnished rooms: Hollywood’s lowlife, the dispossessed and the checkmated, surrender splashed on their faces like birthmarks.

“No wonder you got fired, Ray.”

“I shouldn’t be a censor. You know that.”

“What should you be?”

Burk pulled off the freeway. “I don’t know. Something else. Something creative.”

Before Burk took the job at the network, he was working as a research assistant for Hornaday Productions, a documentary film company that specialized in making educational and industrial films for large multinational corporations. It was a highly respected outfit, destined to move into commercial television and feature films, and everyone told Burk he was crazy to quit, even though the network was doubling his salary.

“A fucking censor?” Gene said, stunned, unable to look him in the eye. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

But Joe King, the network honcho who recruited Burk, convinced him “it would be for six months max, a corporate pit stop before they move you over to the creative side, into program development, where a high-octane guy like you can really take off.”

That was eighteen months ago.

An ambulance, siren screaming, shot past Burk’s car as he crossed the intersection of Gower and Fountain. “Hobart,” Burk said, pointing
to a side street. “Three blocks up is Harold Way. That’s where Gail Russell lived right before she died.”

“Who’s Gail Russell?”

“This actress. She was in
Wake of the Red Witch
with John Wayne. She went to Santa Monica High.”

“How do you know about this stuff?”

“I pick it up.”

“Where?”

“Around.”

At Sunset and Western they passed a group of venereal men with irrelevent lives who were idling in front of a no-name bar with the windows blacked out. Guarding the darkened doorway was an oversized man sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a porkpie hat and fingerless gloves. A dog-eared Bible was open in his lap and he was drinking bourbon from a large paper cup.

Sandra said, “What’s that place?”

“It’s called the Bat Cave.”

“What goes on in there?”

“Gail Russell was married to Guy Madison back in the fifties. In 1961 they found her dead in her apartment, surrounded by bottles and vials of pills.”

“Ray, what goes on in the Bat Cave?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Girls dance naked.”

“And?”

“And sometimes a guy will give them some money, and the girl will give him a pencil flashlight to look up inside her.”

Sandra leaned back against the door. She looked perplexed. “What are they looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Burk said. “The end of the Vietnam War, maybe.”

Sandra smiled but her lips remained closed. “You really are weird. You know that?”

“Yeah, I know. But you know who is
really
weird?”

“Who?”

“The guy who used to live here.” Burk turned left on Normandie and parked in front of a four-story brick apartment. “Dr. Cyclops.”

Sandra suddenly sat up. “Bullshit.”

“Seventeen thirty-one Normandie. You can look it up.”

“Swear to God?”

Burk nodded. Then he said, “Remember?”

On their very first date, when they were both students at the University of Wisconsin, Burk and Sandra drove three hundred miles in a snowstorm to see Bob Dylan perform at a club in Minneapolis. After the show, after singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” about a million times in their crummy motel room, they made love for the first time. But years later, what they remembered most about that night was not the sex, which was clumsy at best, but how much they laughed when Albert Dekker, the actor who played Dr. Cyclops on the late late movie, shrunk his helpless victims down to the size of tiny dolls.

After the movie ended and the night started to fade into daylight, Sandra reached under the covers and said, “Well, I’m sure glad he didn’t shrink this.” She was still laughing when Burk came inside her, and afterward, when the blue sky shone through the flimsy curtains and he apologized for being too fast, she held his shoulders tight and whispered, “No, sweetheart, you were just fine.”

When their son was conceived later that winter, Burk and Sandra shared an apartment above the Three Bells, a biker bar in Madison. For that entire semester, for hours at a time, two songs were played over and over on the jukebox: “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen and “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

“I can’t decide,” Sandra said as they listened to the music pound below them.

“I think we should go with just plain Louie,” Burk said.

“You sure? What about Louie with Louie as his middle name?”

“If you really want to,” Burk said, realizing with a pang of doubt that the decision was now final.

When Burk woke up in the middle of the night there was an unfamiliar odor in the bedroom. “Sandra,” he called out in a low voice. He could hear her breathing, but the space next to him was empty. “Sandra,” he said again, louder.

“Here.”

“Where?” Burk sat up and tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness. “Where are you?”

“Turn on the light.”

Burk recognized the iron smell of blood a split second before he saw her standing naked in the corner of the room. She was holding a straight razor by her side, and blood was flowing freely from a large
X
she had carved in her stomach. “I had a baby ghost in my tummy,” she said in a small voice, “and I had to let it out.”

The punch that knocked Sandra unconscious also broke her jaw.

“It was the only thing I could do,” Burk tried to explain to the paramedics after they loaded her in the ambulance. “I thought she was going to kill herself.”

“If you say so,” one of the paramedics said.

“You don’t believe me?”

“We’ll believe anything,” said the other paramedic. “Isn’t that right, Terry?”

“Whatever.”

Burk called his brother from the hospital.

“Sounds like she’s pretty fucked up,” Gene said.

“Her jaw’s gonna heal okay, but she’ll have scars on her stomach.”

“No big deal.”

“I’m not crazy about scars, Gene.”

“What difference does that make? You guys are through.” Burk didn’t say anything. “Right?”

“I guess.”

“You guess. Come on, Ray, your wife is mentally ill.”

“She’s my best friend, Gene.”

“Yeah, I know. But she belongs in a nut ward.” Burk didn’t disagree, but he suddenly felt terribly alone. “Ray?”

“I’m here. I’m thinking.”

“Don’t. You’ll get a headache.”

“I’m pretty fucked up behind all this.”

“You’ll pull it together. You have to. You got a kid.”

Several seconds passed in silence. Burk spoke first. “I got fired today.”

“That had to happen.”

“Yeah, I know. It was the wrong job.”

“I told you that. Go home and get some rest,” Gene said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“I’ll be out.”