Stars Screaming (9 page)

Tomlinson said, “You mean you’re ready to die,” and Gene grinned.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and a space around them cleared fast.

Laughing to himself, Tomlinson pinched off the burning end of his cigarette and lunged for Gene, grabbing him around the neck and
wrestling him to the ground. Gene was caught off guard, and, before he could react, Tomlinson was already pounding his head on the concrete. Burk quickly pushed his way to the front of the adrenalized mob and screamed, “Don’t quit, Gene!” and with a sudden burst of strength Gene was able to separate himself and scramble back to his feet.

The next time Tomlinson came at him, Gene feinted to his right and jabbed him in the face. Tomlinson took a step backward and started to spit blood. Gene double-jabbed him again; then he threw a right cross that split open his eyebrow. Tomlinson howled in pain and the crowd behind Burk surged forward, knocking him to the ground. For the next thirty seconds, while a wave of bodies swept over him and a jet streaked by overhead, the air was filled with cheers and screams and the sound of thudding fists.

As soon as he pulled himself to his feet, he saw Gene and Tomlinson trading punches, with Gene getting the best of it, his right hand clubbing the side of Tomlinson’s head. Very soon more fights began to break out. Everywhere you looked, blood was flying and kids were punching and kicking each other and rolling around on the parking lot or down on the warm yellow sand.

By the time the police arrived, Gene had Tomlinson backed up against Timmy’s car, and he was hitting him with punch after punch—not roundhouse punches, either, but neat sharp rights and lefts to the head, the kind of punches he learned in the back of Yesterday’s Pages. Both of Clay’s eyes were closed, his lip was all busted up and lopsided, and blood poured out of his nose, soaking the hairs on his chest.

Finally, when the cops pulled him away, Gene turned and looked over his shoulder at his younger brother. Smiling through a mouth filled with blood and broken teeth, he said, “Nobody’s ever gonna call me a coward again, Ray. Fucking nobody.”

The police ran a check on Clay’s car, found out it was stolen, and loaded him into the back of a black-and-white. Burk and Tim and PK drove Gene over to the emergency room at St. John’s, where it took a doctor and two nurses a good hour to stitch up his face.

On his way home that night, Gene stopped at Billy’s Bop City, a record store on Lincoln Boulevard. He bought an album by The Meadowlarks and a single by Fats Domino. When he finally fell asleep, leaving the ecstasy and terror of that long day behind, “I Want to Walk
You Home” was spinning on the phonograph, playing over and over and over until Burk woke up and finally switched it off. The next morning, after he got up and flipped over the record, Gene realized that his father was standing awkwardly in the doorway of his room. His expression was blank, concealing his worry.

Gene laughed through his swollen lips. “I guess I look pretty bad.”

Nathan Burk nodded his head slowly. “Yeah. You do,” he said, but when he tried to laugh along with his son, the sound was blocked by a swelling in his throat.

Gene stepped forward and put his arms around his father’s shoulders. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s over,” he said. “I won.”

“I know you did,” Nathan Burk said, and Gene could feel his pounding heart. “This morning I was scared. Now I’m just . . . proud.”

Four

Max and Jack

December 6, 1969

When dawn broke on the day that Burk kissed Bonnie Simpson for the last time, a red-lead band of sky flared above the eastern horizon. With the first thin light came the Santa Ana winds, and by 5
A.M.
that morning the sky framed outside Max Rheingold’s bedroom window was streaked with indigo and silver clouds, trailing silky threads the color of sunburned flesh.

Rheingold had already been up several times during the night, roused first by distant sirens and the yowling of neighborhood dogs, later by the warm winds whirling through the canyon. Finally, he was jolted awake for good by a sharp, stabbing pain deep inside his rectum.

“Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath, and he reflexively reached for the bottle of Demerol he kept in the top drawer of his nightstand. He chased down three pills with a gulp of leftover wine and closed his eyes, counting backward from one hundred while he
listened to the bedroom shutters vibrate and the branches of the avocado and lemon trees scrape against the side of his house.

Gradually the painful pounding behind his testicles began to subside, and Max reached between his legs, continuing to count down slowly through the teens until his right leg started to twitch. At thirteen he lost his breath. When he silently shaped the number seven with his lips—which just happened to be the precise age of the little girl with the Shirley Temple curls he was sodomizing in his sexual fantasy—a small puddle of semen suddenly flooded his navel.

After he ejaculated, Max nearly fell back to sleep until a garbage truck backfired loudly as it labored up Tigertail Road. The truck’s radio was tuned to KGFJ, and the driver, a black man with a deep bass voice, was singing along with “Everyday People,” the current hit by Sly and the Family Stone.

Max reached for the telephone and dialed time. “Six-fifteen and thirty seconds,” announced the recorded voice and Max yawned, relaxed in the knowledge that he still had two full hours before his meeting with Jack Rose. But as his lungs filled with air, Max noticed a seed of discomfort begin to grow in the region of his sphincter. “Not again,” he whispered, and then, as the pain expanded and a mist of tears covered his eyes, he screamed, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Not to worry,” Artie Schlumberger had told Max earlier in the week, after he slipped his finger out of Max’s anus and stripped off the latex surgical glove. “I don’t feel any lumps or masses and, as far as I can tell, the bleeding is from one of your hemorrhoids.”

“What’s that mean, ‘as far as I can tell’?”

“It means I’m a urologist, Max,” Artie said carefully, “not a proctologist.”

“But everything seems okay?”

“Yeah,” Artie said, and he hesitated for a moment, debating whether to send Max up to see Herman Frick, the rectal guy on the seventh floor. “Of course you’re a little enlarged up there, but that’s standard for a guy your age.”

Max grunted. “Don’t give me ‘your age’ bullshit. I probably get laid more than you do, putz.”

Artie grinned good-naturedly, forgetting about Herman Frick as he now remembered how much he despised Max Rheingold.

“So what about something for the pain?” Max said as he hitched up his pants and tightened his belt.

“Aspirin should be all you need, Max.”

“But just in case.”

Artie took a seat behind his desk and swiveled his chair so he could gaze out the open window behind him. The northern sky, a bright ceramic blue when he awoke that morning, was now smeared with a rust-colored haze. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he finally said.

“I’m not interested in what you think. It’s not your asshole.”

“That’s true, Max.” Artie spun round and opened the top drawer of his desk. He took out a prescription pad and held it up. “But it’s my medical license.”

“Be serious, kid.”

“I am serious. This is it,” Artie said while he scribbled a prescription and passed it across the desk. “No more scams.”

“What scams? What’re you talking about?” Max said, grinning innocently as he pocketed the prescription. “I would never ask you to write a bogus script for me, Artie. Ever.”

Bogus script
. The irony in that statement was not lost on Artie as he watched Max Rheingold light up a long cigar and waddle slowly out of his office. Because twenty years earlier, during the Red Scare, when the House Un-American Activities Committee came to Hollywood to root out Communists and Communist sympathizers in the motion picture industry, Artie’s father, Samuel Schlumberger—a highly sought-after scriptwriter who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was an earnest supporter of all good liberal causes—was suddenly denied employment.

But Schlumberger (like many Hollywood writers who were blacklisted in the fifties) continued to turn out movie scripts for a small group of independent producers. Sometimes he wrote under a pseudonym, but more often than not a friendly but politically untainted writer would allow his name to be used on Schlumberger’s work. For a small fee, of course.

One of Samuel Schlumberger’s scripts, falsely credited to Amos Solomon, was a low-budget noirish tale of revenge that Max Rheingold produced for Keystone Pictures in 1948. Starring Kenny Kendall and
Ellen Hamel,
Careless Love
did unexpectedly well at the box office, especially in the South and Midwest, and Max (in a gesture that was uncharacteristically generous) rewarded Schlumberger with a small share of the movie’s profits.

The day he received his bonus check for ten thousand dollars, Samuel Schlumberger placed the money into a trust account for his eight-year-old son, Artie.

“For his education,” Samuel Schlumberger told his family.

“What about me?” Artie’s older sister, Maria, asked.

“With your looks, who needs money?”

“But Dad,” she protested, “that’s not fair.”

Her father laughed. “Who said life is fair?”

Samuel Schlumberger died suddenly of a brain aneurysm on September 9, 1963, and that Sunday a small funeral was held at the Hillside Memorial Cemetery, the favored final resting place for Hollywood’s well-known Jews.

Artie flew in from Baltimore, where he was attending medical school at Johns Hopkins University. He took a taxi from the airport to the cemetery, making one quick stop at the Paradise Lounge, a strip joint on Century Boulevard just west of the airport. With his cab double-parked by the curb, he sat on a ripped vinyl bar stool, surrounded by pimps and prostitutes, watching an impassive, unsmiling Oriental woman dance topless to the jukebox. After three watered-down drinks, he walked outside and bought a pint of scotch to go at the cut-rate liquor store on the corner.

He drank openly throughout the Kaddish, but he never shed a tear. “I was crying inside,” he explained to his sister afterward, while she drove him back to the airport. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

Over Christmas vacation Artie flew back to Los Angeles. Maria picked him up at the airport, and once again they drove over to Hillside, where they said a silent prayer over Samuel Schlumberger’s grave. While they were walking back to the car, Artie told his sister that he felt guilty about the money he’d received from their father. “You were right. It wasn’t fair. You should’ve got something too,” Artie said.

“But I did get something,” Maria said, and she opened her wallet and displayed a photograph of a dust-colored pony standing inside a small corral. “I got Emma,” she said, pointing to the picture.

“Dad got you a pony?”

“No. Max Rheingold did,” she said, flipping to a picture of herself sitting on the same pony. She was wearing white tennis shorts, sneakers, and a blue T-shirt that was pulled tight across her scrawny chest. Standing next to her, frowning, was a little girl with amber-colored hair and apple-green eyes.

Artie said, “How come I never knew?”

“Because Dad told me never to tell anyone. Not even Mom. He swore me to secrecy.”

“Who’s the girl with you?”

“Her name was Bonnie. She was with Rheingold when the chauffeur picked me up from school. Her mother was an actress,” Maria said, her face growing serious. “That day, while we were out riding, we got caught in a thunderstorm. We got drenched and the chauffeur took us back to Rheingold’s house so we could take a hot bath and get some clean clothes.

“While we were sitting in the tub, Max walked into the bathroom with this weird smile on his face. When he unzipped his pants and started to masturbate, Bonnie leaned over and whispered, ‘Don’t cry,’ and when I tried to climb out of the tub she held my wrist tight. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Just let him do it till he’s done.’ After thirty seconds or so he came, and a big glob of semen jumped out of his penis and landed on my knee. Bonnie put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, keeping it there until he finally left the bathroom.

“As soon as I got home that afternoon I told Dad what happened, but he didn’t say a word until it was time to go to sleep. Then, while he was tucking me in, he said, ‘I don’t think it would be such a good idea to go riding anymore.’ I said, ‘Neither do I,’ and he turned off my light and kissed me good night.

“Before I closed my eyes I could hear Mom and Dad listening to the
Lucky Strike Hit Parade
on the radio downstairs in the living room. I fell asleep right after they played the number-one song for the week. It was sung by Patti Page.”

Artie said, “Let me guess. ‘The Doggy in the Window’?”

“No.”

“‘Changing Partners’?”

“No.”

“‘Mockin’ Bird Hill’?”

“Nope.”

“What?”

“Tennessee Waltz.’”

Max’s meeting with Jack Rose did not go well.

“I don’t need a partner,” Jack said, after Max casually suggested they produce a picture together. “I’m doin’ fine.”

“Things could change, Jack.”

“Then I’ll adjust.”

Several heads turned as Glenn Ford entered the Polo Lounge. As he passed by their table he nodded to Jack, and Max said, “He still looks good.”

“Good enough to eat,” said their waitress, a middle-aged woman with a long jaw and slightly crossed eyes. After she took their order, Max said, “Remember that sneak we went to back in ‘forty-two? That Rosalind Russell picture—”

“
My Sister Eileen
.”

“That’s the one. He was there that night.”

“Who?”

“Ford. He sat right in front of us. You were with that Mexican broad you used to represent. Lucy Something.”

Jack shook his head. “You lost me, pal.”

“Come on, Jack. You guys were an item.” Max snapped his fingers. “Lucy Alvarado, that was her name. I used her in
Bleeding Kansas
, the gangster flick I shot up in Lone Pine.”

Bleeding Kansas
made a modest profit and Max used Lucy in two more films, both quickie Westerns; then she caught Harry Cohn’s eye at the Trocadero one evening and he put her under contract at Columbia Pictures. But three months later he changed his mind and decided to put the studio’s effort behind his other Latin discovery, Margarita Cansino, better known as Rita Hayworth.

“She’s a great fuck,” Harry Cohn told Jack Rose on the day he dropped Lucy’s option, “but she can’t sing and dance like my other spick.”

Max saw Lucy next at Eartha Kitt’s opening at Ciro’s, and from time to time he would run into her at the Florentine Gardens or the
Colony Club, always drunk and dressed to kill with a different man on her arm, usually some garishly dressed musician that she would introduce as “my new lover boy.”

He last heard from her on Halloween night in 1950, when she left a message with his answering service. “Pray for me, Max,” she said, in words so slurred that she could hardly be understood by the operator. “Pray for Lucy Alvarado.”

The next morning she was found dead on the floor of her apartment. The coroner’s report said she’d overdosed on morphine.

“I need a picture,” Max said to Jack while they were waiting for their cars. The wind had increased along with the temperature, and dead autumn leaves danced and cartwheeled down the long sloping driveway in front of the hotel. “You listening to me, Jack?”

“Be realistic, Max.”