by John Kaye
“That’s good. Too many fuckin’ actors in this town.”
“And not enough good writers,” the pudgy man said. “How’d you know about Fuller? You’re too young to remember that flick.”
“My dad knew him. He used to come by his newsstand.”
“Which one is that?”
“Nate’s News on Las Palmas.”
“So you’re Nate’s kid? No kidding.” Aldo Ray said, smiling for the first time. “I liked Nate. Good man. He had the only place in town that carried my hometown paper. The Crockett Courier. Crockett, California. Good town. Clean. Good people. The opposite of this shithole.”
The door to the restaurant opened and Robert Culp walked inside with a stunning dark-haired woman hanging on his arm. She was wearing blood-red lipstick, and a red velvet jumpsuit that was at least a size too small.
Burk and the pudgy man both turned and watched the hostess seat them in a booth across from Mike Connors.
“You working on anything?” Aldo Ray asked Burk.
Burk nodded. “A movie I wrote is in production at Paramount.”
Aldo Ray arched an eyebrow. “As we speak?”
“It started shooting on Monday.”
“What’s it called?”
“Pledging My Love”
The pudgy man glanced at Burk, his face showing more interest. “The Jon Warren picture. I was supposed to read for something next week. Some kid’s stepfather, I think. You wrote it, huh?” Burk smiled. “Congratulations. Maybe you could put in a good word.”
“Give the kid a break,” Aldo Ray said.
“I just saw you in a Wild, Wild West," Burk said to the pudgy man.
“Two weeks ago. I played a Russian strongman in a traveling circus.”
From down the bar, Burk heard a short, humorless laugh. When he turned he saw a man hunched over his drink, one eye closed, the deep lines in his face visible in the unsteady light. “I haven’t worked in a year,” he said. “Twelve goddamn months since I’ve had a fuckin’ part, and these no-talent cocksuckers waltz in here like they own the world.”
The bartender took a step in the man’s direction and said, “Easy, Kenny. Settle down.”
“Settle down, my ass!” the man said. “Don’t tell me to settle down or I’ll wipe up the floor with your skinny ass.” The man lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the ashtray. “What the fuck you lookin’ at?” he said to Burk. “Huh?”
“Nothing,” Burk said and glanced at Aldo Ray, who just shrugged.
The man dragged on his cigarette and angrily shook around the ice in his glass. Picking up the phone, the bartender said, “I’ll call you a cab, Kenny.”
“Okay, Petey-sweetie,” the man said with an exaggerated lisp. “You call me a cab and I’ll call you a train.”
“Guy was a hell of an actor,” Aldo Ray said, dipping his shoulder toward Burk as he lowered his voice. “You recognize him?”
“Kenny Kendall,” Burk said, trying to keep his lips from moving too obviously. “I knew his daughter back in the fifties.”
“PK,” the pudgy man said, nodding. “She hangs out at the Melody Room. Nick Adams used to fuck her. Hell, everyone used to fuck her.”
Kenny Kendall made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pointed it at the pudgy man. “Bang, you’re dead!” he said, and pulled the imaginary trigger. “Bang! Bang! Bang! You’re all fuckin’ dead.”
After Kenny Kendall’s cab arrived and Pete the bartender and a busboy helped him outside, Burk used the pay phone to call in for his messages. “Maria Selene, that’s all,” the hotel operator said. Burk tried her office, but Nora told him she’d left for the day.
On his way back to the bar, Burk saw Mike Connors sitting alone in his booth. On television his face had a strength that was missing in person. He winked at Burk, smiled, and quickly averted his eyes.
The blonde with the ample chest was now standing next to Aldo Ray, hugging his arm. “I told Mike I recognized you,” she was saying, “but I wasn’t sure, so I thought I’d come up close for a better look.”
The pudgy man elbowed Burk lightly in the ribs. “They were neighbors in the same apartment building when Aldo first came to town.”
“The Argyle Manor,” said the blonde. “That’s when you were dating Wanda and I was going with Rory Calhoun. Aldo fixed my fridge one afternoon,” she said, grinning slyly as she peeked over her shoulder at Mike Connors. “One thing led to another. Right, Aldo?”
Aldo Ray nodded as he stubbed out his cigarette. He pointed at Burk. “This is Ray Burk. He’s a writer.”
“He’s too cute to be a writer,” the blonde said, squeezing Aldo Ray’s arm; then she tossed her hair behind her shoulder and Burk noticed a large irregular mole beneath her left ear.
“I knew someone who lived at the Argyle Manor,” Burk said. “She was from Michigan. I met her a couple of years ago.”
“This was back in the early fifties,” the blonde said.
“She was here then too,” Burk said. “In 1949.”
The blonde reached across the bar and placed her hand over Burk’s wrist. “Was she your girlfriend, Ray Burk?”
“Who?”
“The girl from Michigan.”
“No,” Burk said, wincing when he felt her nails bite into his skin. “Just someone I knew.”
Mike Connors called out the blonde’s name. It sounded to Burk like Arlene. She released Burk’s hand and said, “I gotta go” then she slipped a business card into Aldo Ray’s pocket. “That’s my service,” she said, moving away. “Call me.”
Aldo Ray looked at the bartender. “I thought you said her name was Cherry.”
The bartender shrugged. “That’s what she called herself last week,” he said. “Maybe she’s got two names. Maybe that’s her nickname. What do I know? I just mix drinks at this joint.”
“Don’t get hot,” the pudgy man said.
“Her name was Bonnie Simpson,” Burk said, and Aldo Ray turned and gazed at him with a confused expression.
The pudgy man said, “He’s talking about someone else, Aldo.”
“The day I met her it was hot and muggy. She was wearing a camel’s hair blazer and lilac perfume. On her feet were brown penny loafers with soles that were worn thin. I think about her constantly.”
“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 som
ewhere 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.