Free Stars Screaming by John Kaye Page B

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,