Stars Screaming

by John Kaye

  Bonnie said, “That was—”

  “Faye Dunaway,” interrupted a young man standing on the sidewalk a few paces away. He wore faded Levi’s, a blue T-shirt, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap with the bill turned up. “I got her yesterday on her lunch break,” he said, holding up a leather autograph book with a floral cover. “Today I got my eyes peeled for Marlon Brando. Wouldn’t that be something if I got his autograph, Gill?”

  The guard exchanged a look with Bonnie. Then he winked at her. “Yes, that’s right, Ricky,” he said, talking through his smile. “It sure would.”

  To Bonnie the young man said, “Last week Peter Fonda almost ran me down with his motorcycle. That’s why Gill makes me stand over here, out of the way. I got his father’s autograph here, too,” he said, and he held up a page with a signature scrawled in green ink. “I didn’t get him, my dad did. His name was Benny Furlong. He worked on a lot of his pictures. Grapes of Wrath, The Long Night, Fort Apache, lots of ’em. Was your mom an actress?” he said, looking over her shoulder at the photograph she was holding. Bonnie nodded. “What was her name? Maybe I have her autograph.”

  “No,” Bonnie said. “You never heard of her.”

  “My dad’s got tons of people in here you never heard of: Carla Baxter, Kenny Kendall, Lucy Alvarado. Nobody’s ever heard of them,” he said, and he pushed his face close to hers. “Come on, tell me.”

  Bonnie shook her head. “I gotta go,” she said, backing up.

  “Where?”

  “I got things to do,” she said. “And don’t try to follow me.”

  “Follow you? You’re no one. Why would I follow you?”

  “Just don’t.”

  When she returned to her apartment, Bonnie moved the armchair over to the window and sat staring down at the street until the twilight shadows fell across her patient face, darkening the room.

  “I’m here,” she said out loud, right before she dozed off. “I’m finally here.”

  It was after midnight when she awoke and heard the radio playing in the apartment beneath her. Radio Ray Moore was saying, “Let’s spend an hour talking about our fears, the things that make our hearts pound in the middle of the night. You’re on the air.”

  A woman called in, a high school teacher, and said she was afraid of the noise in the cafeteria at her school. She said, “When I’m in charge during lunch, and I hear loud talking and the plates and trays banging, it puts the fear of God in me.”

  “What are you afraid of?” Radio Ray asked her.

  “I’m afraid something’s going to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Something. I don’t know. Don’t badger me, Ray, I just get afraid.”

  “I’m afraid of dyin’,” a man named Leon said to Radio Ray. “That’s what I fear the most. That don’t make me special, does it, Ray?”

  “No. Of course not. It’s something we all have to face sooner or later. How old are you, Leon?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You’re a young man.”

  The caller said, “What frightens you, Radio Ray?”

  “Bowling alleys and flamingo tattoos.”

  “That’s pretty weird.”

  “And dominoes remind me of tombstones.”

  In the apartment below, Bonnie heard a woman say, “Will you turn that off, please?”

  “I’ll turn it down,” a man said.

  “No!” the woman shouted. “Turn it off.”

  “I’m afraid of fire,” the next caller said, a boy, and Bonnie sat up with her eyes open wide. “I’m afraid of the flames and the smoke. I’m afraid of getting burned. I’m afraid, but I set them anyway.”

  Radio Ray said, “You set fires?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need help.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell someone. Your mom or someone at school. A teacher. They’ll get you help.”

  “Miss Morris knows who I am.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Morris. She called earlier. I recognized her voice. She knows about me. I want to burn down the school.”

  “People would die.”

  “I know.”

  “You need to talk to someone.”

  “I’m talking to you, Ray,” the boy said, and a moment later someone downstairs switched off the radio.

  Six

  Becoming a Writer and Losing a Wife

  December 13, 1969

  One week after Bonnie’s death and Sandra’s miscarriage, Burk was sitting in the living room of his house on Valley View Lane, surrounded by open boxes and wrapping paper and the wooden tracks for the Hot Wheels set he was trying to assemble for his five-year-old son. When the phone rang in the kitchen, Louie dropped the metal race car he was building and shouted, “Mommy!” and for a split second Burk, too, thought it was Sandra, but then he remembered that his wife was unable to speak over the phone, that her jaw was still wired shut.

  “Happy Hanukah, Ray.” It was Timmy Miller, calling from Berkeley, where he’d been living since 1963, the year he graduated from Cal and opened a used book store on Telegraph Avenue. Burk and Timmy had spoken often on the phone, but the last time they saw each other was in June, when Timmy flew down for their tenth high school reunion, an event that Burk chose not to attend.

  “I was thinking about you, Tim.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No shit.”

  “Daddy.”

  Burk put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I’ll be off in a couple of minutes, Louie.”

  “Is that Mom?”

  “No. It’s Uncle Tim. Mommy’s still in the hospital. She can’t talk on the phone yet, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. But when her face stops hurting, she can. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t mean to hurt her, did you?”

  “No. I was trying to save her life.”

  “Ray?”

  “Sorry, Tim.”

  “You want to call back?”

  “No, that’s okay. Louie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you watch Gumby. When I’m through on the phone, I’ll finish putting together the Hot Wheels.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tim?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was thinking about PK. We had some cool times, didn’t we?”

  “Sure did.”

  Louie turned away from the TV and stared at Burk. “Are you talking about Mom?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “This girl I knew in high school. She and I and Uncle Tim were friends. We took a trip once.”

  “Is she gonna live with us now?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Good.”

  “Tim?”

  “What?”

  “I think I have a great idea for a movie.”

  * * *

  “Now what? The Wedge? Dana Point? San Diego?” Timmy asks Burk. They are sitting at a corner table in the Blue Pelican, a dilapidated diner that is built on weather-worn pilings overlooking the ocean near Capistrano Beach. On the jukebox the Shirelles are singing “I Met Him on a Sunday,” and outside the sun has fallen behind the thick dark clouds massed on the horizon, casting an eerie purplish light over the solitary surfer still riding the waves. “Or we could go to TJ, then drive down to Baja and surf Rosarita on Sunday.”

  “Whatever you want,” says Burk, shrugging, his attention shifting to the sway of PK’s hips as she walks out of the ladies’ room and crosses back to their table.

  “Or we could zoom.”

  “Zoom?” Burk glances at Timmy, who is now grinning slyly. “What’s that?”

  “This thing we do.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and PK. It’s kinda hard to describe. She’ll tell you,” Timmy says as PK sits down in the chair next to him and plucks a Pall Mall out of the pack lying in the center of the table.

  “Tell him what?” she says, lighting up.

>   “About zooming.”

  PK takes a long drag and exhales slowly, looking away as she lets the smoke come out a little at a time. “I met him on a Sunday and my heart stood still,” she sings, her voice off key as she tries to imitate the Shirelles’ lead singer.

  Timmy says, “Come on, PK, show him.”

  PK glances at Burk. Then, yawning, she says, “I don’t know.”

  “You have to. He’s my best friend.”

  PK, after a short silence, reaches into her purse and removes a harmless-looking nasal inhaler, a two-inch plastic cylinder with one end rounded off to fit snugly into a nostril. In 1959, this particular inhaler—brand name Rexall Nasalex—had been banned by the FDA and pulled off the shelves of every drugstore and supermarket in the state. But it took several weeks for the directive to reach some of the more remote communities in Northern California, and there were still isolated pharmacies in Humboldt and Trinity counties where the Rexall Nasalex had not been replaced by Rexall Mist, a four-hour spray containing the benign active ingredient oleic acid, rather than the pure Benzedrine that PK’s father discovered one evening on a Bonanza location, when he and a couple of his actor buddies cracked open the Nasalex and squeezed the speed-saturated cotton filter into their coffee.

  “So whattaya think?” Timmy says, catching Burk’s eye as he and PK roll the Nasalex back and forth across the Formica table. “You want to try it?”

  The plastic cylinder stops in front of Burk. He picks it up and closes his hand around it. “What happens to you?”

  Timmy and PK look at each other. “Everything.” PK laughs. “Everything that you ever wanted to happen.”

  At 9 A.M. the next morning, Burk drove his dented Chevy down to the neighborhood Thrifty Drugs. He bought ten 8-by-14-inch yellow legal tablets, an electric pencil sharpener, and four boxes (of one dozen) No. 2 Ticonderoga pencils. When he arrived home he made a second pot of coffee, drank a cup while he reread the sports section, and then walked into his den and wrote Fade In on the top left-hand corner of a blank yellow legal page.

  Six weeks later, Burk completed the first draft of Zoomin’, a lightly fictionalized account of the drug and sex-soaked odyssey that he and Timmy and Patty Kendall took ten years earlier, in the winter of 1959.

  “I bet it’s terrific,” Sandra said. “When can I read it?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll wait till I hear from some agents.”

  “If you don’t want to show it to me, that’s okay too.”

  “No,” Burk said, “I do. I just want to wait.”

  That night Burk and Sandra made love for the first time since she’d been released from the hospital. It was quick and tense, and the warm excitement he used to feel when she kissed and fondled him was gone. After she came in a series of quiet spasms, there was a sad silence in their bedroom, a silence that was more intense, it seemed to Burk, than if he were truly alone.

  Finally Sandra said, “That wasn’t one of our best, was it? I bet right now you wish I’d disappear off the face of the earth.”

  “That’s not what I’m feeling.”

  “What are you feeling, Ray?”

  “Scared.”

  “Of what? Of being stuck with me for the rest of your life?”

  “Sandra—”

  “Stuck with a wife who has a miscarriage at the races and tries to stab herself to death. A normal wife doesn’t do that. And a normal mother misses her son when she’s away.”

  “You love Louie, you know you do.”

  “I don’t feel like I belong here anymore, Ray. I feel like I belong somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandra cried out suddenly. “I just don’t know.”

  The following day Burk mailed his script to five agents. Of the five, two—Ben Marino from Creative Management Associates and Ronny Gold at William Morris—he knew from CBS. Both were second-tier variety agents, assigned to hand-hold the singers and comics who appeared on the Red Skelton Show and the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, two of the shows that Burk covered when he was a censor.

  Burk called them personally, and each promised to pass Zoomin’ along to their literary departments as soon as it arrived at their offices. As it turned out, they were the first two agencies to reject his screenplay.

  “A few interesting scenes but, on the whole, this story is unbelievable,” wrote a junior agent at the Morris office. The following day the script came back from CMA with the word NO stamped across the title page in huge red letters.

  By the end of the second week the rest of his scripts had been returned in the mail. Ziegler-Ross and the Sunset Plaza Group dismissed his efforts in identical language: Sorry, this is not the kind of material we’re looking for. The only encouragement came from Irving Kaplan of Premiere Artists. He wrote:

  I enjoyed reading Zoomin’ very much. For a first draft this is extremely well conceived. Good luck. Irv.

  On Friday afternoon, Burk drove down to the post office and mailed off ten more copies of his screenplay. When he returned home, Sandra was sitting at the dining room table in the muted light, still in her bathrobe. By her elbow was a vodka Collins, and his script was open in front of her. She said, “I’m on page eighty-three. I think it’s really good.”

  The tension in Burk’s face slowly disappeared, replaced by an expression of surprise. “You’re kidding?”

  “No, Ray, I’m not.”

  “It works?”

  “So far it does.”

  “It’s not getting slow or anything?”

  “Ray?”

  “Yeah?”

  There was a pause. Then, looking up, Sandra said, “Did this stuff really happen?”

  “Some of it did.”

  “The motel is real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this girl PK, she fucked all those marines. That’s true?”

  “We were high, Sandra.”

  “Yeah, I guess. What about the boy who dies when Timmy takes him surfing in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s made up. No one dies.”

  “Did you fuck her too?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl, PK.”

  “Finish the script.”

  “I mean in real life. Did you fuck her, Ray?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Just tell me.”

  Burk nodded just perceptibly. “Yes,” he said. “I fucked her.”

  Ten days later, Burk received a call from Maria Selene, an agent at Rheinis and Robins, a small but prestigious literary agency in West Hollywood. “I read Zoomin’ over the weekend. I found it quite interesting,” she told Burk, in a voice that was cool but not unfriendly. “You may have some talent, Mr. Burk. I think we should set up a time to talk. How does three-thirty on Wednesday sound?”

  “Three-thirty? That’s fine.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “I think so,” Burk said, scanning the submission list that he kept taped on the wall above his desk. Checking the address, he said, “You’re at 9255 Sunset, right?”

  “The penthouse suite. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  After he put down the phone, Burk felt light-headed. A warmth spread throughout the center of his chest, and the phrase you may have some talent kept repeating itself inside his head as he wandered from room to room in a semidaze. On his third pass through the kitchen he saw Sandra pull her car into the driveway. Next to her on the seat was a basket of laundry. Before she turned off the engine she bent forward and her head fell out of sight, searching, Burk was certain, for the pint of Smirnoff that she kept under the seat.

  Moments later, when he met her on the front porch, she slid past him quickly and silently, making no sign with her eyes that she even recognized him. In the bedroom where he followed her, he said, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  Saying nothing, Sandra put the laundry on the bed. Then, as if in a trance, she unzipped her skirt and walked into the bathroom. Turning away from the o
pen door, Burk said, “I have some good news. I just got off the phone with an agent.”

  There was no reply. When he heard the toilet flush he turned around. Sandra was standing in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection while she squeezed skin cream from a tube into the palm of her hand.

  Burk said, “Did you hear what I said?”

  Sandra nodded, almost smiling now as she pulled up her blouse and rubbed the viscous white liquid into the thick scars that crosshatched her stomach.

  “She thinks I have talent. I’m going to meet with her on Wednesday.”

  Sandra’s fingers slowly crept inside her underpants, and her knees buckled slightly as she started to stroke herself.

  “You’re not gonna say anything. You’re just gonna stand there, staring at me while you jerk off. Is that what you’re gonna do?”

  Sandra hunched her shoulders and a few ragged locks of hair fell over half her face. Then, closing her terrified eyes, she whispered, “Leave me alone, Ray. Just leave me alone.”

  “Small and dark, with big ears. That’s how I imagined you.” Those were Maria Selene’s first words after Burk walked into her office. “I guess I was wrong.”

  Maria held out her hand and Burk sized her up. She was pretty but older than he’d imagined, at least forty-five, with salt-and-pepper bangs and a big sexy mouth.

  “Producers hate tall writers. They’re harder to intimidate. You sit here,” she said, pointing at a low gray couch against the far wall; then she followed him across the room and sat in an armchair facing him. On a glass table between them were a bowl of mixed nuts and a pile of movie scripts. Burk’s draft of Zoomin’ sat on top of the stack with an official Rheinis and Robins label attached to the cover.

  Maria pointed at the script. “Don’t get your hopes up. I can’t sell it. It’s way too bizarre.”

  “Most of it’s true,” Burk said. “It really happened.”

  “So did the plague. Zoomin’ goes in the drawer,” Maria said sternly. She reached for a handful of nuts and popped several into her mouth. “However, we would be extremely interested to know what you’re planning to write next. Any ideas?”

  “Nothing full blown, just a character I’m interested in.”