by John Kaye
“Balance.”
“Exactly.”
Burk picked up the phone and dialed room service. He ordered hot cereal, coffee, and a bagel that was heated but not toasted.
Louie moved toward the bathroom. “I want pancakes,” he said, “with a side order of sausage.”
“I miss working at the hotel,” Gus said. “I like where I work now, but it’s not the same. Nothing’s the same.”
“Which doesn’t make it all bad.”
“Most of it sucks.”
“That kind of negativity surprises me,” Bill Gleason said, “coming from a sober man.”
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”
“I’ve seen my share.”
“Take me back to ’fifty-seven. Leave me there. Nothing could make me happier.”
Bill Gleason laughed, a laugh that came out sounding slightly insincere. “Gotta wind things up, Gus. Any last thoughts?”
“I used to love cool spring mornings like this,” Gus said, in a voice that couldn’t hide his sadness. “It was the best time to shoot baskets in the park. I could be by myself then, working on my shots, practicing my moves at both ends, turning and shooting, turning and shooting. Just me alone, dazzling the birds. That’s over. That kid’s gone now.”
“He’s still inside you.”
“No. I’m inside me, and I’m shaking. My hands are shaking. What happened to that calm feeling I used to call peace of mind? Where is it? It’s gone like my wedding band. Okay, so I’m sober. But is this what my life’s about: all-night radio and hoping my radiator don’t boil over when I drive to work? I feel trapped, Bill G. Trapped behind a door where no one knocks.”
“I’m sorry, Gus.”
“You wanted my last thoughts. I’m giving them to you.”
“I know, but—”
“I fell off the joy path. Can’t you hear the pain in my voice?”
“Yes, I hear you. I hear your pain.”
“The music’s over and the hair in my comb is gray. I can’t see the wild daisies in the woods. Tell me what to do.”
“Get on your knees. Now.”
“I’m on my knees.”
“Close your eyes.”
“My eyes are closed.”
“Pray.”
Burk parked the rental car in the lot across from the United Airlines terminal, where Louie’s flight back to New York was scheduled to depart in thirty minutes.
“I’ll see you this summer,” Burk said, when they reached the security checkpoint. His mouth was smiling, but he looked a little worried, too. “Okay?”
Louie nodded. “Ask Timmy about a job.”
“The bookstore or the theater?”
“Anywhere he has an opening.”
They were silent a moment. Their eyes did not meet until Burk said, “Your mom did the best she could.”
“I know she did.”
“She loved you.”
“I know. And she loved you too.”
When they hugged, when his son’s body was pressed against his, Burk could sense the terrible anger and sadness that vibrated his chest. But he knew, also, that there was nothing he could say or do that would make him feel better. He could only tell him that he understood.
Each was holding back tears when they stepped apart. The last call for Louie’s flight came over the public address system. Burk said, “That’s you. Get going. Call me when you get to your dorm.”
Louie walked through the metal detector and followed the other passengers moving toward the gate. After a few steps he stopped and looked over his shoulder. He smiled as if to say everything would be okay, and then he waved and said, “Take care of yourself, Dad.”
Burk waved back. “You too. You take care of yourself, too.”
Western. Wilton. Bronson. Gower. Berendo. Unable to let the past rest, Burk was cruising slowly through East Hollywood in the right lane, making one final farewell loop before he drove back to the airport for his seven o’clock flight. Two hours had passed since he’d stopped for a drink at Ernie’s Stardust Lounge—or what used to be Ernie’s before it changed ownership in 1980. These days it was a gay bar called the Brig.
But the interior had not changed much—maybe the lighting was a little dimmer—and the same tunes were on the jukebox, only now the customers were all slender, good-looking men under the age of thirty, and all of them were dressed in uniforms: firemen, police, postal workers, Boy Scouts, every conceivable group was represented, even the clergy.
To Burk’s surprise Miles was still behind the bar, working side by side with another, younger guy, both of them tricked out like Marine drill instructors. Burk tried to say hello when he ordered a Budweiser, but Miles had his Smokey-the-Bear hat tilted down so low they barely made eye contact. If Miles did recognize Burk, he didn’t let on.
Burk drank his beer down fast; then he shot a game of quarter pool with a darkly handsome young man who was wearing a New York Yankee uniform with the seat cut out, exposing his hairy pink buttocks. He said his name was Lonnie, but his friends called him Joe D.
When Burk said he was straight, Lonnie just laughed. “Like I didn’t know that when you walked in. A lot of straight guys come in here,” he said, nodding toward a young black priest who was seated at a table in back. “Nothing wrong with kneeling before God, especially if he’s got a nine-inch dick.”
“Whatever your pleasure.” Burk shrugged, turning his palms up. “I just dropped in for old times’ sake. I used to drink here when it was Ernie’s. It was a cool place.”
“It’s still pretty cool,” Lonnie said, wiggling his bare ass as he bent over the table to take a shot. “But it can get a little desperate around closing time, when the old queens show up.”
Burk left the Brig after three beers, but not before he played “Dream Lover” by Bobby Darin. After the first verse, his past descended on him like a light blanket, taking his reluctant mind back to the year 1969, the year that man landed on the moon. It was also the year of the Manson family’s stabbing rage, and the year that Burk spent driving aimlessly through the streets of East Hollywood, contemplating the failure of his life.
“You just drove around? That’s all you ever did?” Lonnie asked him. “Come on, you had to stop occasionally.”
“Just for gas and smokes. And once in awhile if I had a problem with my car. But that’s it,” Burk said, his face clouding over. He couldn’t speak for several seconds as a memory welled from within. He remembered that later in that unsettling year was the afternoon in December when Bonnie Simpson entered his life, holding a map to the movie stars’ homes and a purse filled with apples.
Burk was parked in front of Argyle Manor with the engine running. A tricycle lay deserted in the driveway, and there was a no-vacancy sign stuck in the well-tended ivy by the sidewalk. Overhead two huge clouds came together in the windy sky, and a blackbird landed on a telephone wire, chirping once before it took off, rising over the sad rooftops, a winged signature scribbled across the corner of a blank white page.
Burk felt a renewed sadness as he glanced up at Bonnie’s old apartment on the second floor. He closed his eyes. And suddenly he could see her in that barren room: her honey-blond hair, her haunted eyes, her graceful shoulders, the paleness of her breasts, and the soft curve of her hips as she moved through the changing light. Burk’s memory was so strong that when he opened his eyes she was now standing by the uncurtained window, her face filled with a deep tenderness as she stared down at the street.
In time this mirage of desire dissolved slowly into the shadows of Burk’s mind. But he was still burdened by an unnameable yearning (and a sudden sense of emptiness and loss) as he made a U-turn and started back down Argyle. At Hollywood Boulevard he turned right. When he passed by Las Palmas and the corner where Nate’s News used to operate, he permitted himself another moment of sadness. His father, recovering from a mild heart attack, had sold the newsstand to Larry Havana back in 1972, and now it was called the House of Love, an X-rated porno arca
de blaring disco hits: a neon lighthouse that welcomed the simmering lust of the lonely hearted and the self-loathing.
The following year, when his health returned, Nathan Burk opened another newsstand on Sepulveda that Gene managed until 1978, the year he decided to become a private detective, specializing in divorce and white-collar crime. The business flourished, doing so well that after only six months he was forced to expand his office and hire several new employees. But lately he seemed to spend most of his time on the phone to Berkeley, trying to persuade Burk to write a movie about the life and death of rock-and-roll singer Bobby “I Fought the Law” Fuller.
In 1966, the year before Gene resigned from the force, Fuller was found dead outside the apartment in Hollywood he shared with his mother. He was believed to have killed himself by swallowing gasoline, a police verdict that Gene never supported. And for years after he left the force he continued to investigate the case on his own, following rumors of a mob hit that he could never substantiate.
But now he claimed that he’d developed new leads that linked Fuller’s manager with Jack Dragna, a notorious gangster who ran the gambling and prostitution rackets in Los Angeles during the fifties and sixties. According to Gene, Fuller’s manager was a high-stakes gambler who was into the mob for $50,000.
“They gave him sixty days to pay off,” Gene told Burk. “When he couldn’t come up with the cash, he sold half of Bobby’s contract. Bobby found out and threatened to go to the cops. Two weeks later he was dead.”
As Gene laid it out, the story was intriguing—a rock-and-roll mystery set in Southern California in the 1960s: Raymond Chandler meets the Beach Boys—and Burk loved his older brother, but he had a couple of his own ideas he wanted to develop.
“Then fuck you,” Gene said, his voice taking on a surprising edge when Burk turned him down. “Remember this conversation when I sell the rights for a million bucks.”
Near the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset, the road widened and Burk passed a large traffic island that used to be the site of Pandora’s Box, one of Hollywood’s first beatnik coffeehouses. Mort Sahl was a regular in the fifties, and so were poets Jack Hirschman and Charles Bukowski. And one night coming back from a Drifters concert in El Monte, Burk and Timmy Miller saw Marlon Brando sitting at a table in the cool darkness, playing chess with jazz bassist Charlie Haden.
A block west of Crescent Heights was The Way, a zen macrobiotic restaurant and the former location of The Xanadu, another Bohemian night spot where Burk and Timmy used to hang out in high school— until it became, mysteriously, the meeting place for the Grave Diggers, an outlaw motorcycle gang from Antelope Valley.
It was there in 1964 that actor Lee Marvin came in drunk and sucker-punched Billy Valentino, the lead singer of the Droogs, LA’s premier garage-punk band. Later that night Marvin was attacked in the parking lot as he climbed inside his brand-new Corvette. The windshield was shattered and he was beaten so badly that filming on Cat Ballou had to be delayed for eight weeks.
Burk stopped at a red light at the end of the Sunset Strip. The last building, a high-rise at 9255 Sunset Boulevard, contained the offices of his former agents, Rheinis and Robins. Burk fired Maria Selene back in 1972, when he discovered that she had sought out Loretta Egan as a client behind his back. She even secretly negotiated Loretta’s deal to polish Pledging My Love and later took Loretta’s side when she petitioned the Writers Guild for shared credit.
The day Burk won the arbitration he had a dozen roses delivered to Jon Warren’s house on Alta Way, where Loretta was living. On the card he wrote a two-word message: Nice try.
South of Sunset three blocks were the Shoreham Apartments. Actor Kenny Kendall lived at the Shoreham until 1974, when he was found shot to death outside the elevator on the ninth floor. The LA Times reported that Kendall had been arrested twice in his last year, both times for possession of cocaine. An obituary ran the following day in the Hollywood Reporter, listing several films in which he had appeared. Included was Careless Love, a gangster flick Max Rheingold produced in 1948. The obituary also mentioned a daughter, Patty, who was living in New Orleans.
Burk felt a tingling in his neck, then a hot burning sensation, as his mind was teased back to that sweet afternoon in the summer of 1959—an afternoon that was later converted into myth—when he and Timmy and Patty Kendall saw Gene fight Clay Tomlinson in the parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach. All it took was the fury of his quick fists—machinelike fury, executed with a bloody vengeance— and for months Gene’s name was on everyone’s lips. Everywhere he went people smiled at him or shook his hand.
Siblings. Burk and Gene. That summer of 1959 ended their childhood together. From then on they moved in different directions.
A photograph comes into Burk’s mind like a sudden flash: He and his brother are standing side by side. Burk is taller by two inches, though he is two years younger. They are in their backyard with the midafternoon sunlight slanting through the treetops. A flawless day. But there is nothing peaceful in their faces, just stillness, the absent mother feasting silently on their insides with her malignant lips.
A woman walks away from her family, from the two boys who were formed in the cavern of her body. Why did she do that? Burk wonders, her face just a blur in his memory, a faint smudge rubbed into the mirror of his soul. Goddamn you, Mother.
Burk was on the freeway, just minutes from the airport. Off to his left was the Hillside Memorial Cemetery. Behind a cluster of trees, Sandra was lying underneath the soft earth, her very cells broken down into four or five pounds of bone and ash, the drama of her shattered life finally over.
“So long,” Burk whispered, and, as soon as he released Sandra’s face from his mind, he felt a panic come over him. On the screen in front of his eyes raced the events of his life. The fifties, sixties, seventies—gone in a flash. Years. Days. Months. Decades. All the ordinary and extraordinary moments. Gone.
“No!” Burk screamed, his body lurching toward the windshield in a spasm of terror, the thought of his own death locked around his throat like a necklace of iron spikes. “Not yet!”
And in that terrifying moment Burk dared to ask himself this question: What happens when the last person who has loved someone is gone? Who will remember them?
Who will remember Sandra?
Who will remember Bonnie?
Who will remember . . . ?
“It doesn’t matter,” Burk said to himself almost defiantly, answering the voices that were still chanting inside his head. Outside the window of his airplane he saw a searchlight move slowly across the fathomless sky, a slender silver finger pointed toward the stars. “Because right now I am still alive, and I’m going home. I can remember them. I can remember them all.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this novel was a long, slow journey, most of it trudged through canyons of deep darkness, where the cold wind of fear fanned my face and every other step was backward. Without the love and support of the following people—and God’s good grace—I would not have made it home.
These are my friends, and I want to thank them all: Jeremy Larner, Anne Lamott, Katherin Seitz, Michael St. John Smith, Sean Blackman, Michael Blodgett, George Stelzner, Rosie Shuster, Ned Wynn, Steven Isenberg, Margot Kidder, Judy Coppage, Michael Wolf, Lydia Cornell, Thorn Mount, Josh and Cathy Kramer, Priscilla Newton, Teresa Tudury, Penny Peyrot, and Iris Black.
This book could never have been started (or completed) without the encouragement and optimism of my good friend, Terry McDonell. Thanks, Terry.
I am also deeply grateful to my editor and publisher, Morgan Entrekin, whose patience and sage advice helped me to write the best book I could.
To my agent, Amanda Urban, I thank you for your honesty and invaluable insights, especially at the end when they counted the most.
Special thanks to Carla Lalli, Judy Hottensen, Elisabeth Schmitz, and everyone at Grove/Atlantic who made me feel so welcome.
Finally, I would like to thank my brot
her, Mike, who was there from the beginning. He knows the real story.