by John Kaye
“Tight pussy but a room temperature IQ,” he had said, winning from Burk a slightly embarrassed laugh. “Right now I’m staying with my first wife, or more correctly in her guest cottage, where my daughter generally stays when she isn’t spreading her legs for whatever rock-and-roll band she’s chasing around the country.” Sanford mumbled something inaudible and shook his head. “I’m not usually this crude,” he said apologetically. “I’m sorry.”
Burk said, “She’s a teenager. She’s rebelling. It’s a phase.”
“No,” Sanford said, stabbing an anchovy in his Caesar salad. “No. I wish that were true. She’s a slut.”
They each had three more martinis before Maria arrived, as planned, for dessert. By then the discussion had switched back to Burk’s script, which Sanford drunkenly described as a “goddamn brilliant piece of work.”
A man with his back to Burk was sitting on Crumpler’s unmade bed. He and Sanford were listening to another man, who was standing behind the door, out of Burk’s vision. He said, “Look, the last thing we want to do is make it hard for the studio. As far as we’re concerned it was a simple assault. Crumpler thought the kid was making a pass and he belted him.”
Sanford said, “So what you’re saying is we can work together on the drugs business.”
“Absolutely,” said the man behind the door, keeping his eyes on Sanford as he moved into the center of the room. He was short and blond, around forty, and his shirt and coat were pulled tight against his broad chest. His Scandinavian face was both serious and serene. “We don’t make promises we can’t keep.”
“Give me a figure,” the man on the bed said, as he produced a large vial of cocaine and flipped it into the air. His partner reached out and let the bottle fall into the palm of his hand. “Say, five big ones.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Two and a half each. That work for you, Jerome?”
Sanford nodded his head, his face showing no expression as he reached for his wallet. “Yes,” he said. “I think that works fine.”
* * *
At some point before he went to sleep, Burk switched on the radio. The news ended, and Ray Moore took a call from John Beal. He told Radio Ray he was working the graveyard shift at the Norm’s on Vermont and Sunset. “I’m bussin’ tables and washin’ dishes, but I plan to be workin’ on the grill by Christmas. They seen my resume,” he said. “Two years at Chloe’s in Omaha. Three at Shoney’s in Stillwater. Another eighteen months at the Stuckey’s on the Ohio Turnpike. I can cook some food, Ray. You can count on that.”
Radio Ray said, “I bet you make a dandy club sandwich.”
“If the turkey’s fresh I do.”
“At home I use fresh tomatoes from my garden.”
“Only way, Radio Ray.”
“You miss Omaha, John Beal?”
“I miss the sky.”
Burk tuned out the next caller, a cabbie named Fred who told a series of idiotic jokes involving women and fish. The caller after him, a man with a voice full of pain, spoke only three words, “Love the doomed.”
Following a Chevy commercial, a woman who chose to remain anonymous called in to complain about her husband. “I got varicose veins and he says my legs are unsightly. What can I do? He knew I wasn’t Betty Grable when he married me, for cryin’ out loud. I mean, come on, he ain’t no Cesar Romero himself. He’s only five foot four,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Just a little bitty man with a potbelly and a wrinkled butt. Sometimes it’s hard for me to keep a straight face while he’s undressin’. But, hell, I love him, so I try to make the best of it.”
Burk listened to Radio Ray take two more calls, the last from a man named Ted who said he’d been drinking nonstop for three days. “Seventy-two hours straight. I need help,” he said, pleading. “If I don’t stop I’ll crumble up and die.”
Radio Ray said, “The best I can do is give you the number of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Oh, really,” Ted said dubiously. “Is that the best you can do? I need compassion, someone to care about me.”
“I care about you, Ted.”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d offer to come over and be with me, to put a damp washcloth on my forehead and tell me everything’s going to be all right.”
“You sure you’ve been drinking?” Radio Ray said.
“Why would I lie?”
“You don’t sound drunk.”
“Did I say I was drunk? No, stupid. I said I’ve been drinking. Four quarts of Scotch and a case of beer in three days. I’ve been coughing up blood for a week.”
Radio Ray said, “I think Alcoholics Anonymous is the place for you, Ted.”
Ted suddenly lost his temper. “I am not an alcoholic! Don’t call me that name! Forget about me! Butt out! I don’t need your help. My neighbor will help me,” he assured Radio Ray. “Mrs. Otis. Mrs. Candace Otis will care for me.”
“That’s great, Ted,” said Radio Ray, surprised by the sarcasm he heard in his voice. “Let us know how things work out.”
“We’ll drink rye whiskey and watch the fish swim in the fish tank. When it gets light outside, she’ll make flapjacks, and I’ll run back to my place for the pure maple syrup my son sent me from Massachusetts last Christmas. Yessir, we’ll have a fine old time. After breakfast we’ll drink some more and I’ll end up napping on her couch. If I’m lucky I’ll wake up.”
“I’d think about AA.”
“You think about it, Ray. I’m gonna get drunk.”
Ten
Thursday: Burk Seeks Human Warmth
May 20, 1971
Burk switched off the car radio and turned north on Kenmore. At Clinton he slowly pulled around a mangy dog that was lying in the center of the street. One paw dangled helplessly in the air, and blood was caked around a wound in his neck. A boy of six or seven sat dry-eyed on the curb. His elbows rested on his knees and his face was supported by the heels of his hands.
Burk lowered his window. “Is that your dog?” he asked, and the boy looked up at him. Lank dirty-blond hair fell over his ears and dull glassy eyes peered out of a face that was the color of the street. “Is it?” The boy nodded. “Don’t you think you should move him?” The boy shook his head. “Why?”
“My mom said not to touch him,” the boy said and looked away.
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Burk agreed. He told the boy that he had a son his age.
“Does he have a dog?”
“He had one, but he got lost.”
“My dog’s dead,” the boy said, pointing to the dog in the street.
A thin haggard-looking woman with dyed red hair came around the side of a narrow apartment building. Following her was an elderly black man carrying a shovel and a green garbage bag.
“Lester’s gonna take care of Fellow,” the woman said to the boy.
The black man nodded. “Gonna dig him a nice grave. Yes I am.”
“Fellow? Was that your dog’s name?” Burk asked the boy.
The boy remained silent for a few moments, licking his lips. “No. His name was Goodfellow,” he said, giving this information in a toneless, almost dead voice. “We called him Fellow for short.”
The black man moved into the street and poked the dead animal with his shovel. “Yep, he’s gone,” he said.
“Who’re you?” the woman said to Burk. “How come you’re double-parked here talkin’ to my son?”
“I saw the dog in the street and stopped. I thought I could help,” Burk said.
“I told you not to talk to strangers,” the woman said to the boy, kicking him lightly in the hip with the toe of her sandal. “You don’t know who this person is.”
The boy stood up and dusted off his pants. Ketchup and mustard stains covered the front of his T-shirt, and his filthy socks were bunched around his ankles. “I’m going inside to watch Speed Racer," he said.
The woman took a step forward and measured Burk with her eyes. “You mind your own business,” she said, lookin
g down at him. “You understand? Now get outa here.”
Burk continued driving: Hobart, Van Ness, Mariposa, Vermont, back up to Hollywood Boulevard and moving west; he turned left on Cummings and double-parked in front of a nondescript apartment built around a courtyard that was filled with cast-off furniture and other debris. A woman dressed in a nightgown and slippers was standing on her doorstep, brushing her hair.
In the late 1940s, Hollywood tough guys Tom Neal and Steve Cochran shared a flat at this address. Tim Holt lived next door until The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was released in 1948. All three, Miles had told Burk, were regulars at Ernie’s Stardust Lounge.
Bronson. El Centro. Gower. Ivar. Argyle. Vine. Crossing Sunset and Vine always gave Burk a rush of energy. The Greyhound station stood one block south, and he parked in front to watch the new arrivals, mostly young people in their teens, runaways, their faces not quite so fresh and hopeful as they were in ’67, during the Summer of Love, when they came to San Francisco and Hollywood in droves from cities all over the U.S. By 1969 that twinkle in their eyes was fading. By 1971 it was gone. Their faces were hard now, unyielding, their shoulders slumped from the bedrolls on their backs.
Lexington. De Longpre. Leland Way. Back down to Sunset and east again. At Serrano, Burk stopped at the Von’s market for a tin of sardines. In the checkout line he stood behind a dark-skinned woman carrying a straw purse. She said her name was Nadia, that she was newly divorced. Burk took her back to the Argyle Manor. On the way up the stairs she tripped, skinning her knee.
They ate sardines on Triscuits and drank dark beer from Mexico. “You have sad eyes,” she told Burk when she was straddling him.
“I am sad.”
“I can make you happy.”
Burk said they had to leave soon. When she asked him why, he said, “I have to drive.”
In the deepest part of himself, where his own private wisdom burned the brightest, Burk recognized that his compulsive need to drive (and whatever he was searching for in the hot stillness of the street) was entwined somehow with the impossible feeling of loss he woke to each day. And he knew also that all the women he had loved the most had turned away from him and deepened that awful emptiness.
Except for Bonnie Simpson.
Yes, Bonnie had left him in the sleepy comfort of her room in the Argyle Manor back in December of 1969, but she had meant to return; Burk knew that for certain and was bleakly reassured by the knowledge. Still, two years later, the mysterious and sacred joy that he felt during the brief time they spent together was unexplainable to him, one more piece of the strange puzzle that had become his life.
But as he drove through East Hollywood and scanned the faces on the street, a thought came forth that quickened his heartbeat and rocked his mind: Maybe he had been looking for Bonnie all along—and miraculously he had found her. Maybe out of some strange shapeless chain of events that was his life and hers—and the lives of all the desperate and brokenhearted people that the sun outlined each day outside his windshield, their spirits crushed, their footsteps following their narrow shadows—they were destined to have one moment, one single day, where he got to see her laughter light up her eyes and feel the strange magic in her body when they came together in the afternoon light.
For the next few blocks Burk felt a surge of happiness as he recalled Bonnie’s smiling face, and he felt himself smiling, too, as he searched out his eyes in the rearview mirror. In time, Bonnie’s face disappeared and another face came alive in his mind, surprising him as it broke through the layers of time: the gentle, painfully serious face of Laurel Adams.
With Laurel in the desert that first time in 1959, when her clothes came off and he was moving inside her in the backseat of Timmy Miller’s car, Burk felt it was all right to say that he loved her. And Laurel said she felt the same way. “But I can’t say the words. Not yet,” she told Burk. “But I will.”
Incredibly, Burk never spoke to Laurel again once they left Palm Springs at the end of spring break. Whenever he called her house, her mother said she was either in the shower or over at a friend’s. Once her younger sister picked up and claimed Laurel was at the library, studying for a test.
“What time will she be home?” Burk asked her.
“I don’t know,” her sister said, in an oddly detached voice that almost seemed rehearsed. “But I’ll tell her you called.”
For three weeks Burk waited for Laurel to return his call, but she never did. On the night of his seventeenth birthday he got drunk and foolishly dialed her number from a pay phone outside Stan’s Drive-In in Hollywood. It was after midnight and her father was audibly enraged when he found out who was on the line. He told Burk that Laurel was going steady with another boy and not to call their house anymore.
“No. That’s bullshit. You’re wrong,” Burk said, shouting over the traffic that swished by on the street. “She loves me.”
Later that week Burk received a postcard from Laurel. On the front was a picture of the motel where they met. On the back she wrote:
I have a boyfriend, Ray. I lied to you. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. And don’t call me anymore.
Thanks,
Laurel
The following Monday, Burk cut all his classes and took the Santa Ana Freeway south to Orange County. Laurel lived a few miles from Disneyland, in the city of Buena Park, and by eleven o’clock that morning Burk was parked in the students’ lot behind her high school. He sat listening to rock and roll on KRLA until the lunch buzzer sounded. Then, after a quick walk around the block to calm his nerves, he entered the campus through an open gate and boldly followed a stream of students into the cafeteria.
He recognized Laurel’s flirtatious laugh before he saw her at a table sitting next to a boy dressed sharply in pressed Levi’s and a blue button-down shirt. In a moment they were joined by a pack of happy-sounding kids—jocks and student government types—the same elite social crowd that ran Burk’s high school and every other high school in Southern California.
Burk went through the food line and found a seat at a table that was not quite in Laurel’s line of sight. As he secretly watched her and her boyfriend holding hands and cracking jokes, he felt his face burn and twitch and his mouth curl into an angry grimace. For half a minute he cursed her under his breath, ignoring a fat sulky girl who took a seat across from him, blocking his view. When he stood up to leave, Laurel turned her head and Burk was certain that she saw him drop his serving tray in the rack by the door and walk outside.
Burk wept all the way back to Los Angeles, and it was close to four when he pulled off the freeway on Vine and circled the quiet streets of East Hollywood for two hours, letting the monotony of the moving cars and his unconnected impressions calm his throbbing mind. When he got home that evening and his father asked him why he wasn’t in school—the vice principal had called the newsstand twice that day—Burk told him the truth.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan Burk said, putting his arm around his son’s shoulder. “It’s a terrible thing to lose someone you love.”
“Is this the way you felt when Mom left?”
“Yes.”
“How long does it take to go away?”
“The pain? I don’t know. But it will go away, Ray. Eventually.”
Burk stopped at White Horse Liquors to buy a pint of scotch and some cashews and drove back to the Argyle Manor. He was standing in the kitchen, pouring his third drink, feeling oppressed and confused and wanting to weep, when he heard someone knocking lightly on the door. He went into the living room and pulled aside the curtain. Through the veiled light he saw Lillian Ohrtman staring at him. She wore a white linen dress and a matching pillbox hat.
“Today is my thirtieth wedding anniversary,” she said to Burk, once he opened the door. “Lionel would still be here, too, if those cowardly bastards didn’t drive him to an early grave. My second husband was a screenwriter like yourself. I told you that, didn’t I?”
Burk nodded. They were both standing j
ust inside the doorway to the apartment.
“He committed suicide. They found him slumped over his typewriter. He died in Mexico, in the Yucatan. He drank rat poison, mixing it with one-fifty-proof rum. The last words he typed were ‘Nothing ever felt this good.’” Lillian Ohrtman took off her hat and walked around the room once before she sat primly on the couch. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
The phone rang in the living room while Burk was in the kitchen.
“Yes?” Lillian Ohrtman said, picking up the receiver in the middle of the second ring. “Who? No, Steve Caudabeck is not here. Well, yes, I’m sorry also. No, this is not Rita Bledsoe and no, you cannot suck on my pussy.” Lillian Ohrtman slammed down the phone and made a clucking sound with her tongue. “The nerve,” she said, straightening her back.
Burk came back into the living room with two glasses of scotch. He sat down on the couch, and Lillian Ohrtman reached out and rested her hand on his thigh. They were both silent for a while, and then she leaned close and said, “I got married at the Methodist Church on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills. The reception was at the Ambassador Hotel in the Coconut Grove. All the major mucky-mucks were there: Zanuck, Cohn, Warner; Louella and Hedda, of course; and Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda. All of them. You could not believe what I looked like. I have pictures. They don’t lie.”
Lillian Ohrtman studied Burk’s face as her arthritic fingers labored to unbutton his Levi’s.
“I was ridiculously lovely. My body was perfection. All the men wanted to dance with me, and I remember the heat of their bodies as they drew me in close. In my ear they told lewd jokes, and when my back was turned away from Lionel I allowed their hands to rub my buttocks. I obliged them because they were drunk and overstimulated, like I am now.” Lillian Ohrtman’s head sagged into Burk’s lap. “Later that night—my wedding night—in the penthouse suite, Lionel and I made great love. I remember when I did to him what I’m going to do to you now, he said, ‘Good Lord, Lil, you’re going to suck the paint right off the goddamn walls.’”