Stars Screaming

by John Kaye

  “I don’t want any part of this.”

  “Why don’t you just say hello.”

  “Oh, please.” Barbara stood up. “Get a ride home from Timmy.” Burk reached for her arm as she tried to work her way toward the aisle. “Don’t,” she said, twisting away but not looking at his face. “Don’t touch me.”

  Barbara’s car was not parked in the driveway when Burk arrived home that evening. On the table in the dining room was an envelope with his name printed on the front. The short note inside said:

  Ray,

  The movie was sweet and funny and moving. You’re a wonderful writer. I’m sorry I bailed out, but I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Sandra. I don’t know why I despise her so much, but I do. Maybe it’s because of Louie, because I’ve grown so very attached to him and don’t want to see him hurt. I’m going down to Big Sur for the rest of the weekend. I need some time to myself. I still . . .

  Love you,

  Barbara

  Once Louie was asleep, Burk called Gene, and with the sound of panic still in his voice he told his brother what had happened after the screening.

  “The movie played great, much better than when you saw it. Big laughs, big applause at the end. Louie was sitting with Tim and Juliet. He was really proud and excited. Before I could get to him, this publicist from Warner’s grabbed me. She needed some information for my bio. She said it would just take a minute.

  “Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sandra pushing her way through the crowd, bumping people aside. There was this strange,

  almost desperate look on her face. I knew something was wrong, but I thought Timmy could handle it.”

  Gene said, “That was your mistake. Right there.”

  “I know. I fucked up. Timmy went to get the car, leaving Juliet alone with Louie. That’s when Sandra came up from behind and put her hands over his eyes. Juliet assumed she was the mother of a classmate or one of Barbara’s friends. She didn’t realize who she was until Louie spun around and she saw the startled expression on his face.

  “Sandra said she had a lot of things to tell him. She grabbed him by the wrist and started to lead him up the street. Juliet could sense something was off. She grabbed Louie’s other wrist. Now there was a tug of war in the middle of the sidewalk. Sandra was screaming and cursing, losing it, punching Juliet in the face with her fist.”

  Gene said, “This is unbelievable.”

  “I know.”

  “And all the time you were talking to this publicist.”

  “Hey, I didn’t know what was going on. I thought Timmy had it covered. I told you, I fucked up.”

  “What happened? Go on.”

  “The theater manager called the police. By the time I made it outside, Sandra was already in the backseat of a black-and-white with her feet up, raging like a lunatic, trying to kick out the rear window. She kept screaming, ‘Let me talk to my son! Let me talk to my son!’ I swear to God she was actually foaming at the mouth. Finally, when I said I’d bail her out, she started to calm down.”

  “Forget about bail. They’re gonna put her on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. The whole thing is really sad, Ray.”

  “I know.”

  “Did Louie talk to her at all?”

  “No.”

  “What a drag,” Gene said. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. For you, I guess. For the way things turned out.”

  “Things turned out okay. Hey, I think I got a hit movie,” Burk said, laughing, trying to sound lighthearted and confident. But when Gene remained silent, Burk felt suddenly ridiculous, because he realized then that his brother had been speaking about his marriage to Sandra, really about her life, a life filled with furious suffering, a life that went all wrong.

  After they hung up Burk stayed awake, smoking, not really thinking about anything as he stared at the shadows on the ceiling. In the hallway he heard Louie’s familiar footsteps before he saw him standing in the doorway, pulling at the waistband of his pajama bottoms.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Yeah. Same here,” Burk said, and found a cigarette and lit it.

  “You should quit smoking, Dad.”

  “I know.”

  Louie came forward and Burk pulled him down on the bed next to him. As he caressed his son’s back and shoulders, he thought of the many times he’d woken from a terrifying dream, his heart racing, wanting to be held, to be comforted. And once more he relived a memory from his childhood.

  It’s the middle of the night. He’s twelve, Louie’s age, and he’s standing outside his father’s room, dizzy and disoriented in the deep silence. The door is open slightly and there are two bodies sleeping underneath the blanket. He knows the woman is not his mother, because he can see the silver Speidel watchband and red polish on her nails. His mother’s nails were colorless and she never wore a watch.

  He does not move, not even when he feels his brother standing behind him in the darkness. At some point the woman sits up and takes a sip from a glass by the bed. She never sees him, or, if she does, she shows no interest in his hate-filled face.

  Louie’s voice, worried but soft, nudged Burk out of the past. “Do you think Mom will be okay? Will they hurt her?”

  “No.”

  “People in jail get beat up all the time.”

  “She’ll be okay, Louie.”

  “Will you get her out?”

  “I’m gonna try,” Burk said, and he ground out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray in his lap.

  “Try your best.”

  Louie’s flight left New York’s Kennedy Airport at 8 A.M., which put him into Los Angeles a little before noon, Pacific Daylight Time. That gave him an hour to kill before his father’s plane from Oakland touched down at one.

  The plan was to meet downstairs at the baggage claim, rent a car, and drive directly to the Hillside Cemetery, where Gene would be waiting with the rabbi. The funeral for his mother was scheduled to begin at 2 P.M. and, as far as Louie knew, they would be the only mourners at the gravesite.

  The choice was his to keep things small. “I don’t want people there who didn’t really know her,” Louie told Burk when they spoke over the weekend. “Does that make sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “But if you want to bring Barbara you can.”

  “She doesn’t want to come.”

  “What about Timmy?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Let’s make it just family.”

  “Fine.”

  “Did you talk to Grandpa?”

  “He’s not feeling so hot. I think it would be too much of a strain.”

  “I feel really sad.”

  “So do I.”

  “But I can’t cry.”

  “You will.”

  “I want to. I just can’t yet.”

  Louie bought a hot dog at the snack bar and ate it standing up while he paged through a leftover copy of that morning’s LA Times. Because he wasn’t looking for it, he was taken by surprise when he saw his mother’s name listed among the obituaries in the Metro section.

  Sandra Burk

  Funeral services for Sandra Burk will be held at the Hillside Cemetery in Culver City at 2 p.m. today.

  Preliminary autopsy findings indicate that Ms. Burk died of acute alcohol poisoning in her apartment at 1102 Huntley Drive in West Hollywood. She was 39.

  Since she moved to Los Angeles from Santa Rosa in 1981, she had worked as a cake decorator, a veterinary assistant, and a part-time receptionist for Apex Pest Control. She was also a volunteer for the American Red Cross and coordinated the Bloodmobile Drive for her neighborhood.

  Burk, a graduate of West Central High, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, spent two years at the University of Wisconsin, where she planned to major in philosophy before she dropped out to marry her former husband, Raymond Burk, the screenwriter and playwright. They were divorced in 1971.

  Her son Louis, a student at New York University,
is her only survivor.

  Louie stood uneasily at the counter, his face looking slightly troubled as he read over the obituary for the second time. When he was done he pushed the newspaper aside and rolled his neck a little before he looked up. Standing across from him, sipping coffee from a paper cup, was a thoughtful-looking black man with horn-rimmed glasses and a small goatee. A large black case that was shaped to contain either a stand-up bass or a cello was propped up against the counter next to him.

  “My mom died on Friday,” Louie said, his voice cracking. “It’s in the paper.”

  The black man put down his coffee and his blank face underwent a change that softened his features. “You mind if I have a look?”

  “Go ahead,” Louie said, pointing. “She’s the fourth one down. Sandra Burk.”

  The black man ran his finger slowly down the page. “Tarzan died yesterday,” he said. “How about that?”

  Louie looked confused. “Tarzan?”

  “Buster Crabbe. He was in all these serials when I was a kid. Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. My mom used to take me,” the black man said. He took out a pack of Kools and fired one up. When he finished reading Sandra’s obituary, he frowned and shook his head. “Thirty-nine. She was a young woman.”

  “It’s just a bunch of words. That’s not who she really was.”

  The black man made a sound of agreement as he adjusted his glasses. “That’s right. Just words. Too bad there wasn’t a picture. I bet she was good-looking.”

  “She was . . . when she took care of herself.”

  “Tall?”

  “Five-eight, I think.”

  “Good-sized. Dark hair?”

  “Except during the summer, when the sun bleached it out. I didn’t see her all that much. She left when I was little.”

  “How little?”

  “I was five.”

  “Yeah? That’s how old I was when my daddy took off. His name was Louis, too. Just like you.”

  “That’s not my name,” Louie said. “They spelled it wrong. It’s Louie without the s. I was named after the song, ‘Louie, Louie.’”

  “No kidding?”

  “Really.”

  “Whose idea was that?”

  “My mom’s.”

  The black man smiled as he inhaled on his cigarette. “The more I hear about your mom,” he said, “the more I like her.”

  “Everyone liked her. Everywhere she went she made friends,” Louie said. “That newspaper doesn’t tell you anything about her.”

  “Tell me about her, Louie.”

  Louie stared at the black man, holding his gaze for a second before he turned around to check the clock. “I have to meet my dad’s plane at one.”

  “We got fifteen minutes. Tell me some things, anything you want. Right off I know she liked music, because she named you after a song. Right?”

  Louie nodded, smiling. “Yeah. And she liked to dance, too. One time she danced for money,” he said.

  “For money? You mean like—”

  “She danced naked in this bar,” Louie said, surprising the black man, who raised his eyebrows while he maintained an amused grin. “My dad got fired from his job and we needed the money. She did it to give him time to finish this script he was writing.”

  “Takes a fine woman to do something like that,” the black man said, nodding. “I’m a jazzman. Took me ten years and three wives before I could make a living with my ax. Not many women want to suffer through the hard times with a man. Sounds like she was willing to give it a shot.”

  “But she still left. She just took off one night while it was raining. I didn’t see her again for almost two years. By then she was in prison. She shot a guy,” Louie said, looking closely at the black man’s face to see if he believed him. “She killed him.”

  The black man returned Louie’s stare as he stirred the end of his cigarette into the coffee pooled in the bottom of the cup. “My father killed a man,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Killed him with a knife after he caught him cheating at cards.”

  “Did he go to jail?”

  “Not for that.”

  “For what?”

  “Other things. Burglary. Armed robbery. He held up a bank,” the black man said. Then he lit up a fresh Kool and smiled. “How’d you get me talkin’ about my pop?”

  “Do you ever see him?”

  The black man waited for a second, recoiling slightly before he said, “No. He’s dead. He died in the joint.”

  “Did he ever see you play?”

  “Nope. But he heard me on record.”

  “I’m an actor,” Louie said, and cringed when he heard the boasting in his voice. “I mean I’m studying to be an actor.”

  “That’s cool.”

  They were quiet a moment. Then, in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he were talking to himself, Louie said, “I’m scared.”

  The black man looked at him, unblinking. “Go on. Tell me about it.”

  “My mom. She’s dead, okay. But I never really knew her. I maybe have seen her four times since I was a little kid. I know I’m supposed to be sad, but I don’t feel anything.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re angry.”

  Without hesitating, Louie said, “I want to smash someone in the face.”

  “That’s good. Feeling angry is good. You can feel angry and not act angry. I learned that. It took me a long time.”

  Louie nodded. Then he said, “I want to cry, too.”

  “After my pop died, I couldn’t cry for a year,” the black man said. “Then one night I was gigging at this place down in the Village. Right in the middle of this tune, out of nowhere, tears started leaking out of my eyes, big-ass crocodile tears I couldn’t stop. I cried through the whole set and an encore. Cats in the band knew some shit was comin’ up but they didn’t say a word. God knows what the audience was thinkin’.”

  “I wish I could have told her I loved her before she died.”

  “She knows you loved her.”

  “I don’t know that for sure.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “I just do. Black jazz guys know things like that. Your dad’ll say the same thing.”

  “My dad’s white.”

  “He’s a writer. They got a sense of things.”

  Louie glanced at the black man, who nodded toward the clock.

  “You got five minutes. You better get movin’.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Nice rappin’ with you.”

  “Same here,” Louie said, and started walking out of the snack bar. Before he pushed open the door he turned around. “You know my name but you never told me yours.”

  “Louis. Louis Jackson, Jr. But my friends call me Louie.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Swear to God?”

  The black man raised his left hand and put his right hand over his heart. “Swear to God.”

  A smile slowly spread across Louie’s face. “That’s weird. No, that’s really weird,” he said, still smiling as he stepped through the door.

  Sandra’s simple burial plot was located in a small patch of grass directly in front of the Al Jolson memorial, a huge monument on a hill just across from the main mausoleum. Gene and an attractive woman dressed in black were already at the gravesite when Burk and Louie parked in the lot next to the chapel. Burk assumed she was Naomi Levin, the rabbi who had called him earlier in the week.

  “Tell me about Sandra,” she’d said, in a voice that was both cautious and caring. “The more I know, the easier it will be to speak about her at the service.”

  “She was kind,” Burk said. “That’s where I would start.”

  “With her kindness.”

  “Yes.”

  “In what way was she kind?”

  “If she liked you, if you were her pal, she would do anything for you.”

  “And you were her pal, Ray?”

  “Yes.”

  “And these things she di
d, describe them.”

  “She helped me believe in myself.”

  “In what way?”

  “As a writer, as a father, as a . . . lover.”

  “And yet—”

  “What?”

  “She left you and your son.”

  “Yeah, she did. She left us.”

  “But you always knew she cared.”

  “Always.”

  “Always,” the rabbi said, repeating the word in a way that reassured Burk, making him feel absolutely certain he was right. Then she changed the subject. “I spoke to your son.”

  “When?”

  “Just before I dialed your number. He was very sweet, very helpful. At the end of our conversation he said he didn’t want me to read the Twenty-third Psalm at the funeral. He wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “He has a thing about numbers. Twos and threes together. It goes way back to when he was a kid.”

  “I see.”

  “A good-luck bad-luck thing.”

  “That he never grew out of.”

  “Apparently not,” Burk said, and the conversation stopped for several seconds. Then, pushing gently, the rabbi asked Burk if Sandra was a good mother. “Yes,” he said. “She was a wonderful mother.”

  “Louie said she loved horses.”

  “She liked to go to the track. She was an expert handicapper. But she loved all animals.”

  “You guys had a dog for a while, didn’t you?”

  “A beagle. He got lost. Did Louie tell you the story?”

  “I wasn’t sure whether to believe him.”

  “It’s true. It happened. The dog jumped out of the car in traffic. It was hot and all the windows were down. Louie screamed. Sandra didn’t hear him. She had the radio turned way up.”

  “What a terrible way to lose a pet. Maybe that’s why she volunteered at the animal hospital, to make amends. I talked to the owner. He said she was witty and smart. All the customers were charmed by her, especially the gay men. He said she loved to bathe the animals and tie bright ribbons in their hair. But he had to let her go when he found out she was stealing pills and making long-distance calls at night.”

  For a moment there was silence. Gradually, Burk felt a vast loneliness spread through his body and surround his unhealed heart. “I miss her,” he said. His voice was smaller now, harder to hear. “I miss her a lot.”