Stars Screaming Read Online Free PDF

screaming, shot past Burk’s car as he crossed the intersection of Gower and Fountain. “Hobart,” Burk said, pointingto a side street. “Three blocks up is Harold Way. That’s where Gail Russell lived right before she died.”
    “Who’s Gail Russell?”
    “This actress. She was in Wake of the Red Witch with John Wayne. She went to Santa Monica High.”
    “How do you know about this stuff?”
    “I pick it up.”
    “Where?”
    “Around.”
    At Sunset and Western they passed a group of venereal men with irrelevent lives who were idling in front of a no-name bar with the windows blacked out. Guarding the darkened doorway was an oversized man sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a porkpie hat and fingerless gloves. A dog-eared Bible was open in his lap and he was drinking bourbon from a large paper cup.
    Sandra said, “What’s that place?”
    “It’s called the Bat Cave.”
    “What goes on in there?”
    “Gail Russell was married to Guy Madison back in the fifties. In 1961 they found her dead in her apartment, surrounded by bottles and vials of pills.”
    “Ray, what goes on in the Bat Cave?”
    “You really want to know?”
    “Yes.”
    “Girls dance naked.”
    “And?”
    “And sometimes a guy will give them some money, and the girl will give him a pencil flashlight to look up inside her.”
    Sandra leaned back against the door. She looked perplexed. “What are they looking for?”
    “I don’t know,” Burk said. “The end of the Vietnam War, maybe.”
    Sandra smiled but her lips remained closed. “You really are weird. You know that?”
    “Yeah, I know. But you know who is really weird?”
    “Who?”
    “The guy who used to live here.” Burk turned left on Normandie and parked in front of a four-story brick apartment. “Dr. Cyclops.”
    Sandra suddenly sat up. “Bullshit.”
    “Seventeen thirty-one Normandie. You can look it up.”
    “Swear to God?”
    Burk nodded. Then he said, “Remember?”
    On their very first date, when they were both students at the University of Wisconsin, Burk and Sandra drove three hundred miles in a snowstorm to see Bob Dylan perform at a club in Minneapolis. After the show, after singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” about a million times in their crummy motel room, they made love for the first time. But years later, what they remembered most about that night was not the sex, which was clumsy at best, but how much they laughed when Albert Dekker, the actor who played Dr. Cyclops on the late late movie, shrunk his helpless victims down to the size of tiny dolls.
    After the movie ended and the night started to fade into daylight, Sandra reached under the covers and said, “Well, I’m sure glad he didn’t shrink this.” She was still laughing when Burk came inside her, and afterward, when the blue sky shone through the flimsy curtains and he apologized for being too fast, she held his shoulders tight and whispered, “No, sweetheart, you were just fine.”
    When their son was conceived later that winter, Burk and Sandra shared an apartment above the Three Bells, a biker bar in Madison. For that entire semester, for hours at a time, two songs were played over and over on the jukebox: “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen and “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
    “I can’t decide,” Sandra said as they listened to the music pound below them.
    “I think we should go with just plain Louie,” Burk said.
    “You sure? What about Louie with Louie as his middle name?”
    “If you really want to,” Burk said, realizing with a pang of doubt that the decision was now final.

    When Burk woke up in the middle of the night there was an unfamiliar odor in the bedroom. “Sandra,” he called out in a low voice. He could hear her breathing, but the space next to him was empty. “Sandra,” he said again, louder.
    “Here.”
    “Where?” Burk sat up and tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness. “Where are you?”
    “Turn on the light.”
    Burk