by John Kaye
“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.”
“Who told you that?”
“Lisa Sutter. She overheard Miss Gardner telling Mr. Fields in the library. They said it was a miracle he survived.”
Before the day was half over, more rumors about Clay’s background were passed along between classes and during lunch hour in the cafeteria: he had an older brother who died in Korea (true); the uncle he was living with, Luke Tomlinson, was a professional golfer (false: he managed a driving range in Panorama City); his sister was a dead ringer for Joanne Dru and she was planning to become an actress before her life ended tragically at the age of nineteen (half true: Shirley Tomlinson was blond and almost unbearably beautiful, but at the time of the accident she was engaged to her high school sweetheart and studying to be a veterinarian at Indiana University in Bloomington); and so on.
“Tomlinson always seemed a lot older than thirteen,” Timmy said to PK as he drove west on San Vicente Boulevard. At Ocean Avenue he turned right and they followed a long line of cars down Channel Road to the Pacific Coast Highway. “For one thing he had a beard, plus he smoked like a fiend and he already knew how to drive. I remember one Saturday we saw him cruising through Westwood in his uncle’s raggedy old pickup. He was sittin’ real low in the seat like a pachuco, and he was wearing biker shades like the ones Brando wore in The Wild One.” Timmy laughed and caught Burk’s eye in the rearview. “You remember that, Ray?”
Burk nodded, he seemed disoriented for a moment as his memory jumped backward, past that day to another day, to a cool clear autumn afternoon in 1953. He remembered walking into a room he shared with his brother and finding him facedown on his bed, crying.
“Some new kid at school smacked him around,” Burk’s father told him over dinner. “He busted up his lip and gave him a shiner.”
“Why?” Burk asked.
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“There wasn’t any reason,” Gene told Burk later in the darkness of their bedroom. “I was just going over my math homework with Carla Powers and he walked up and slugged me in the face.”
“What’d you do?”
“I tried to grab his arms but he punched me again.”
“Did you fight back?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid he’d hurt me.”
“He did hurt you, Gene. Look at your face.”
The next day, Friday, between fourth and fifth periods, Clay Tomlinson pulled Gene behind the metal shop and doubled him over with a right hand under his heart. Gene instantly lost his breath, and tears oozed out of his eyes as he desperately tried to gulp air. A crowd quickly gathered and someone shouted “Fight him, Gene!” but, later, all Gene could remember was that split second of pain after the bell rang and Tomlinson’s final blow glanced off his cheekbone, sending him to his knees.
Silence weighted the air that afternoon while Burk and his older brother rode their bikes home from school. Finally, at a stoplight, Burk pointed to the discolored lump that was growing next to Gene’s ear. “Are you gonna let him beat you up every day, Gene?”
“Eventually he’ll lay off.”
“How do you know?”
“He will. As soon as he sees I won’t fight back he’ll lose interest.”
They sat for a while without speaking. Several cars and a bus passed by, the gray exhaust curling in front of their faces. Suddenly Burk stood up on his pedals and peeled off to his right. Over his shoulder he yelled, “I don’t want a coward for an older brother, Gene. That’s not fair.”
It rained in Los Angeles the following Monday, so Burk’s father took the day off to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Yankees in the fifth game of the Wor
ld Series. With the score tied three all and Duke Snider at the plate in the sixth inning, the phone rang. When he picked up the receiver, a voice he didn’t recognize said, “Is this Gene Burk’s father?”
“Yes it is.”
“This is Mr. Lockridge, the principal at Emerson Junior High School. Your son has been injured.”
Nathan Burk’s mind went blank for a moment. “What happened?”
“We’re not sure. Either he fell or he was pushed out of the boys’ rest room on the second floor of the classroom building. The ambulance has just arrived.” Through the other end of the receiver, Burk’s father could hear the radio account of the World Series playing in Lockridge’s office. Snider took a called third strike and Lockridge said, “Fortunately, a hedge broke his fall. Right now it looks like a broken collarbone and some cuts and bruises. They’ll be taking him to St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica. Do you need the address?”
“No. I know where it is. I’ll be right there.”
Nathan Burk hung up the phone and gazed at the TV: Jackie Robinson was trying to score from first on a Gil Hodges single. “He’s rounding third,” the announcer cheered, “and he’s heading for the plate. Here comes the throw from Mantle and—”
“Safe,” Nathan Burk whispered, his fists clenched, barely able to breathe. “Let my boy be safe.”
Because there were no eyewitnesses and Gene refused to cooperate with the investigation by the police, Tomlinson could not be linked directly to the “accident.” Nevertheless, Mr. Lockridge suggested to Tomlinson’s Uncle Luke that, “given the circumstances, it might be better for everyone if you withdrew Clay from Emerson and sent him to one of the other junior high schools in the district. That way he’ll get a fresh start.”
“I can’t handle the boy,” Luke Tomlinson said, and he decided instead to ship his nephew back to Indiana. And for the next two years Clay was in and out of trouble, spending a six-month stretch at Clinton, a boys’ reformatory in Terre Haute that was later to claim Charles Manson as one of its alumni.
“After Gene had his cast removed, he took the trolley into Hollywood and told my dad he wanted to learn how to fight. That was on a Monday,” Burk told PK after they passed the Santa Monica Pier. They were in a snarl of traffic, and he had to raise his voice over the crash of the waves and the radios playing in the cars around them. “That afternoon there was a speed bag and a heavy bag installed in the back room of Yesterday’s Pages. The next day he went into training with my cousin Aaron.”
Timmy said, “I used to go up there with Ray and watch, and at first it was pretty hilarious to see this tubby kid and this old drunk rope-skipping down Hollywood Boulevard and shadowboxing in the store windows.”
“Gene was overweight but he wasn’t clumsy,” Burk assured PK, “and he picked up stuff quick, too, because Aaron was a helluva teacher when he wasn’t up the street at Ernie’s getting bombed on gin.” Burk glanced toward the ocean; then his head went back and he began to laugh. “You should’ve been there when he taught Gene how to throw a left hook.”
“We just got through seeing River of No Return at the El Rey,” Timmy said, and he was laughing now as his mind went back to that Sunday. “We were walking down the block, and all of a sudden we heard Aaron shouting, ‘Rotate your hips! Rotate your hips! Leverage! Leverage!’ I said to Ray, ‘Is he teaching Gene to fight or fuck?’ We didn’t know what the hell was going on. Then we walked into the back room of Yesterday’s Pages and saw that Aaron had all these pictures of fighters pasted on the walls, pictures of these famous left-hook artists from the past that he tore out of back issues of Ring magazine. Guys like Stanley Ketchel and Benny Leonard and Ike Williams. And there was Aaron with his shirt off, skinny as a string bean, his pants slippin’ down over his butt, firing left hooks at the heavy bag. And each time he would throw a punch he would shout, ‘Rotate your hips!’ Bam! Bam! Bam! I couldn’t believe it and neither could Ray, because Aaron hit that sucker so hard it felt like the store was shaking.”
Burk said, “Aaron trained my brother for a couple of months, but he knew, like I knew, that sooner or later Gene would have to find out if he could execute—you know, take care of himself against someone punching back, not a bag. So one day he took me and Gene and Tim downtown to the Main Street Gym.
“There was this colored guy, Lee Calhoun, who was working out for the Golden Gloves or something, and Aaron knew his trainer, and he asked him if he’d let his fighter spar a few rounds with Gene. It wasn’t supposed to be a real fight—I mean, Gene was only thirteen and this guy already had a bunch of amateur fights—but as soon as the bell rang Calhoun ran across the ring and began pounding the shit out of Gene. By the end of the round he could barely keep his hands up, and blood and tears were running down his face.
“Aaron knew he’d made a mistake, that he’d overmatched Gene, but when he told him between rounds that he was gonna call it off, Gene said, ‘No. Don’t stop it! Let me finish! If I quit now, I’ll always quit.’ So Aaron let him fight, and during the next two rounds he took a terrible beating. But he didn’t go down, and by the end of the third round everyone in the whole fucking gym was on their feet cheering for Gene.” Burk paused, and PK twisted around in her seat to look at him. “You couldn’t believe how proud I was, PK.”
PK nodded her head, her eyes fixed on his. “He’s your big brother, Ray. You should be proud of him.”
When word went out on Friday night that Gene Burk and Clay Tomlinson had agreed to fight the following afternoon, the news traveled by phone through the Southland’s teen grapevine in less than an hour. And by 9 A.M. the next morning, upwards of five hundred kids—all of them vibrating with excitement—began to arrive at Will Rogers State Beach, driving in from cities as far east as Riverside and as far north as Bakersfield.
Former child actors Dean Stockwell and Bobby Driscoll rolled up together in a shiny new Corvette, and Brandon de Wilde, the kid from the movie Shane, was spotted drinking straight vodka from a silver flask, surrounded by a pack of slender surfers with dark suntans and bleached-white hair. By noon the parking lot was filled and several legendary street fighters from years past were making their presence known, swaggering through the milling crowd, knocking people aside: bad asses like Jack Boise, Eddie Del Campo, and the notorious Dockweiler twins, two giant mulattos with sweat glistening on their bulging muscles and their crudely shaved heads. Even Carl Linger rode up from Long Beach, along with ten members of the Hell’s Angels chapter he joined after he was paroled from San Quentin.
Clay Tomlinson was off to the side, leaning against the fender of his ‘53 Olds Starfire, dragging on a Pall Mall, his lean and long muscled arm around “nympho” Nancy Leeds, a skinny cocktease from Tarzana, who was shaking her hips and grinding her pelvis to the rock-and-roll music blasting over the car radio. Idling nearby, watching her with an air of contempt, were a knot of Mexicans from Boyle Heights, part of the White Fence, LA’s oldest and largest street gang.
When Gene came through the crowd, followed by Burk and Timmy and Patty Kendall, a girl shouted, “Here he comes! Here comes Gene Burk!” and suddenly all the voices and laughter and conversations ceased, leaving only a murmuring silence and the scuff of feet as a narrow lane was formed that opened into the center of the parking lot.
Taking his time, but moving confidently and with no anger showing in his face, Gene walked right up to Tomlinson and said, “I’m ready when you are, Clay.”
Tomlinson said, “You mean you’re ready to die,” and Gene grinned.
“I don’t think so,” he said, and a space around them cleared fast.
Laughing to himself, Tomlinson pinched off the burning end of his cigarette and lunged for Gene, grabbing him around the neck and wrestling him to the ground. Gene was caught off guard, and, before he could react, Tomlinson was already pounding his head on the concrete. Burk quickly pushed his way to the front of the adrenalized mob and screamed, “Don’t quit, Gene!” and with a sudden burst of strength Gene was able to sep
arate himself and scramble back to his feet.
The next time Tomlinson came at him, Gene feinted to his right and jabbed him in the face. Tomlinson took a step backward and started to spit blood. Gene double-jabbed him again; then he threw a right cross that split open his eyebrow. Tomlinson howled in pain and the crowd behind Burk surged forward, knocking him to the ground. For the next thirty seconds, while a wave of bodies swept over him and a jet streaked by overhead, the air was filled with cheers and screams and the sound of thudding fists.
As soon as he pulled himself to his feet, he saw Gene and Tomlinson trading punches, with Gene getting the best of it, his right hand clubbing the side of Tomlinson’s head. Very soon more fights began to break out. Everywhere you looked, blood was flying and kids were punching and kicking each other and rolling around on the parking lot or down on the warm yellow sand.
By the time the police arrived, Gene had Tomlinson backed up against Timmy’s car, and he was hitting him with punch after punch—not roundhouse punches, either, but neat sharp rights and lefts to the head, the kind of punches he learned in the back of Yesterday’s Pages. Both of Clay’s eyes were closed, his lip was all busted up and lopsided, and blood poured out of his nose, soaking the hairs on his chest.
Finally, when the cops pulled him away, Gene turned and looked over his shoulder at his younger brother. Smiling through a mouth filled with blood and broken teeth, he said, “Nobody’s ever gonna call me a coward again, Ray. Fucking nobody.”
The police ran a check on Clay’s car, found out it was stolen, and loaded him into the back of a black-and-white. Burk and Tim and PK drove Gene over to the emergency room at St. John’s, where it took a doctor and two nurses a good hour to stitch up his face.
On his way home that night, Gene stopped at Billy’s Bop City, a record store on Lincoln Boulevard. He bought an album by The Meadowlarks and a single by Fats Domino. When he finally fell asleep, leaving the ecstasy and terror of that long day behind, “I Want to Walk You Home” was spinning on the phonograph, playing over and over and over until Burk woke up and finally switched it off. The next morning, after he got up and flipped over the record, Gene realized that his father was standing awkwardly in the doorway of his room. His expression was blank, concealing his worry.