Zeroville (12 page)

He goes to see
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
at the Vista and is mesmerized by Walter Huston’s demented jig in the swirling dust and gold. One afternoon a few days later, Vikar is passing Book City on Hollywood Boulevard when he stops to look at a battered paperback in the window; the paperback’s cover says it’s by the author of
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. Vikar goes into the bookstore and buys the paperback, which is about a stranded sailor far from home who becomes trapped in the cargo hold of a doomed frigate that sails on and on and on. It’s the only novel Vikar has ever read. For the next several nights, he foregoes the movies to stay home and read it.

Not long after being kicked out of the movie about the Devil, Vikar sees a better movie about possession, from the early sixties. “Spoiled, Mama? Spoiled?” Natalie laughs insanely from a bathtub in the thrall of sexual hysteria, at the mother who questions whether she’s given her virginity to Warren. It’s the most terrifying performance Vikar has seen since Mlle Falconetti as Joan burning at the stake; he shrinks from the screen.

Vikar imagines Natalie lying between his legs, supreme succubus of all, starved on her chastity, drawing him into her mouth until there’s nothing left of him. That night he stares at his head in the bathroom mirror, runs his fingers over the features of Elizabeth and imagines her as Natalie, although not the Natalie of
Rebel Without a Cause
for whom everyone mistakes Elizabeth. Rather he imagines her as the Natalie of another movie, an unmade sequel: In this movie, the shattered young lover of
Splendor in the Grass
flees her bathtub to relocate in Europe and become the dead wife of
Last Tango in Paris
, over whose body Brando rages at a love that forgives nothing.

After three years, Vikar replaces his radio. It broadcasts ongoing coverage of a political scandal that he doesn’t understand. Although he tries to resist it, he prefers the drag-queen music to that of buckaroos:

These cities may change, but there always remains

my obsession

Through silken waters my gondola glides and the bridge,

It sighs

I remember all those moments lost in wonder that we’ll never find again …

Jamais, jamais!

L.A.’s rare rains come in a torrent. Only the steps that lead from Vikar’s secret street make it possible to descend. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights is a lake, as though having risen from a hole in the ground. All the buses run behind schedule, and by the time Vikar makes his connections, he’s forty-five minutes late to the studio. A river runs down Melrose; the parked black Mustang isn’t familiar to him, he doesn’t really remember it when he hears a tapping on the window as he sloshes by.

“Hey!” he hears behind him, and a young girl about eight years old leans out of the car. In the rain Vikar stands looking at her. She opens the door and signals wildly to him to come inside the car; he hesitates. “Come on!” she calls over the roar of the rain and water. “It’s me, Zazi—remember?”

He gets in the car on the passenger side. The girl sits behind the wheel; the key to the car is in the ignition, and the tape player is turned up full blast. “You’re too young to drive,” he shouts over the music. She turns the music down a bit. “Where’s your mother?”

“Over there,” Zazi says, indicating the Paramount Gate, “trying out for some movie.”

“Did she ever get that role in the private-eye film?”

“What?” over the music.

Vikar says, “You mean she leaves you in the car …?”

“… I saw you walking by and said, ‘The guy with the head!’”

He picks up a cassette case and studies it. He believes the person on the front with bright red hair is a man but he’s not sure. “He looks like people I see on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“No,” the eight-year-old points out, “
they
look like
him
.” She turns the music back up. They listen to a song about an aging actor and a woman who stands for hours at Sunset and Vine. “Should you be listening to this kind of song?” Vikar says.

“Oh, I know all about that stuff,” the girl says.

“I liked this song I heard once about a dog.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good song.”

Vikar says, “Is Zazi your real name?”

“Isadora is my real name,” she says.

He nods. “I remember now.”

She says, “Were you born with that on your head?”

“No.”

“Remember that time we got tacos?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“Kind of. Mom left you in the middle of the street.”

“She was just being careful. But I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“I know. I went home that night and started cutting off my hair with some scissors to see what picture was on my head. She got mad. Here’s the best one.” She turns the song up:

Staying back in your memory

are the movies of the past

and Vikar looks at the cassette again. “I like songs about movies,” he says.

She says, “I don’t care about movies. I like the music.”

“Everyone in Hollywood,” he says, “likes music better than movies. I hope your mother is coming back soon.”

“Why?”

“Because you shouldn’t be out here a long time by yourself.” He says, “I should go before she returns.”

“O.K.”

“If I see her on the lot, I’ll tell her to come back.”

Zazi looks at Vikar. “I want a picture on my head.”

“It’s from the movies.”

“You picked the picture you wanted?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get one of Bowie,” she says, waving the cassette.

He wanders around the studio in the rain looking for Soledad but doesn’t find her. When he goes back out to the gate to check on Zazi, the Mustang is gone.

On the television news is a story that the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been kidnapped. The story says at least one or two of the kidnappers were black, but Vikar is certain some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks. It’s not clear whether they have kidnapped the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane because they believe
Citizen Kane
is a very good movie or not a very good movie; Vikar wishes he could ask the burglar who broke into his apartment about it. He imagines all of the kidnappers watching
Citizen Kane
on television together in the middle of the night, while the granddaughter lies writhing on the floor, bound and gagged.

When he’s finished reading
The Death Ship
, Vikar returns to Book City and buys whatever catches his attention. He reads all the Brontës,
The Book of Lilith
and the
Arabian Nights
which confounds him because it’s written by the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor,
The Ogre
by Michel Tournier and
Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne de France
by Blaise Cendrars,
The Memoirs of Fanny Hill
, a book called
Les Diaboliques
by Barbey d’Aurevilly,
Memoirs of an Opium Eater
and Theodore Sturgeon’s
Venus Plus X
,
The Alexandria Quartet
and the Freak Chronicles of one Charles Fort as catalogued in
The Book of the Damned
, with its accounting of a “super” Sargasso Sea in the sky from which reptiles, animals and elements fall to earth. He reads a book by a man named Bataille called
Blue of Noon
that he likes very much except he doesn’t understand the politics, this as the radio announces that the President of the United States has resigned.

Nocturnally he begins to tour all the crypts and cemeteries of Los Angeles. Marilyn Monroe is buried in Westwood and Bette Davis is buried in Burbank along with Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton; below Bette’s name on her tomb Vikar might expect the inscription to read,
Let’s not ask for the moon, we have the stars
. Rather, it says:
She did it the hard way
.

Vikar goes to the graves not to pay his respects. He pays his respects in the movie theater. He goes so that he can, futilely, try to come to grips with a revelation that unsettles him and that he can’t articulate. In an old cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard he finds Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. De Mille, Marion Davies, Tyrone Power, Peter Lorre and, just recently interred, Edward G. Robinson. When he reaches Jayne Mansfield’s headstone, he sees in the fluttering dark of clouds passing the moon the forms of people moving, and realizes only after a moment what appears to be a man and woman having sex.

Then he realizes there are two men, and the whimpers from the woman sound to Vikar like cries of distress.

Later he’ll wonder whether the rage that surges in him is from the act of rape or that it’s taking place on Jayne Mansfield’s headstone. Within seconds he’s yanked one man from off the woman and kicked in the face the other just as he looks up from what he’s doing. In the confusion of sex and surprise, neither of the assailants gets his bearings. Vikar kicks the second man again and takes the first by his hair and smashes his face into the headstone.

The man lies still, blood spilling around the
1933 – 1967
. In the dark the woman leaps to her feet, stops for a moment to take one look at the very still man on the headstone and another at Vikar, and bolts.

The one man collects the other and drags him off in the dark. It’s hard for Vikar to tell whether the man whose face he smashed into Jayne Mansfield’s headstone is conscious or alive. Oh, mother, Vikar says to himself. He rips off his shirt and for the next hour cleans the headstone, mopping up the blood in the moonlight. Vikar tries to think when his last violent episode took place: Was it the morning he first arrived in Los Angeles, that hippie he hit with the food tray?
No, the burglar I hit over the head with the radio. I had violent thoughts as well about the kid behind the front desk at the Roosevelt.
When the headstone is clean, light begins to rise over the eastern hills and Vikar can read what’s inscribed:
We live to love you more each day
. Years later he’ll learn Jayne Mansfield is not buried here at all but in Pennsylvania where both she and Vikar were born, and then he’ll wonder about all the tombs and headstones, and how many hold phantom bodies. The movies are in all times, but the people are in no times.

After he’s cleaned the headstone, he begins wandering south, away from the direction he originally came and into which the woman and two men ran. A few minutes later he’s stunned to reach the end of the cemetery and find himself at the back of the Paramount lot.

He stashes the bloody shirt in a dumpster in the back of the lot and washes in the men’s room. Mid-afternoon he returns to his apartment on his secret street and waits for the police and movie-star chief of detectives who interrogated him on his fourth (fifth?) day in Los Angeles. He watches a movie on TV about a man who is abused as a boy and becomes an arsonist, and then meets a beautiful blond high-school majorette and tells her he’s a spy working on a top secret operation. When he commands her to have sex with him in order to prove her loyalty, he believes he has her under his power. But it becomes clear that she has him under her power, involving him in a scheme to murder her mother, after she’s already killed several others in an orgasmic rush.

Vikar watches this young blonde in a kind of hypnosis. With her wild-child beauty and demeanor, she’s an American Bardot. She made this movie when she lost the role in another movie of a young mother pregnant by the Devil. The studios refused to cast her: Who would believe the Devil ravished this girl when everything about this girl gave every indication of having ravished the Devil? With the death of her father, at the age of three the actress supported her mother and two older sisters by modeling for catalogs; by the age of twelve, she attempted suicide. Was it on a Tuesday, whose name she then took for her own? As Vikar slumps in the couch in front of the TV, he dreams of her on her knees, mad between his legs. As he comes, her mouth curls into that smile of murder, her eyes glow red and he wakes in terror.

When the phone rings, Vikar hasn’t seen or heard from Viking Man in nearly a year. “George Stevens man!” booms the voice on the other end. “Kind of a pussy, Stevens, if you don’t mind my saying. I’m off to Spain to make a movie.”

“I heard.”

“I’m psyched, vicar, I must confess. Same part of Spain where Leone’s shot a bunch of stuff. A few casting matters to sort out still … I was going to see if I could coax you over to design some sets for me, but Dot tells me you’re editing now.”

“She’s teaching me.”

“She says you’ve got an eye. Big compliment, considering the source.”
My eye?
Vikar wonders, touching the tattooed red teardrop beneath his left one. “Maybe we can bring you in on some of the cutting when we get back.”

“Thank you.”

“Huston’s in Morocco shooting his Kipling thing. Maybe I can get you on that too, once they’ve wrapped.”

“I would like that very much,” Vikar says.

“Morocco is India in his movie and Spain is Morocco in mine. There’s movie-making in a scrotum sac, vicar.” There’s a long pause. “Take care of Dot, O.K., vicar?” he says.

“All right.”

“To the extent she lets anyone take care of her.”

“All right.”

“You see Margie’s Siamese-twin movie?”

“Yes.”

“A fucking hit, so that shows what I know.”

“Yes.”

“Too bad about separating the twins before the story starts. Really wanted to see Margie Ruth joined at the tits.”

“Film history will have to survive.”

“Ha! God love you, vicar, you’re getting wry. O.K., I’m off to Spain. If I tell you I’ll send a postcard, I’m probably lying, so I won’t. Hang in there on the editing gig, O.K.?”

“All right.”

“Keep an eye on Dot.”

All the Los Angeles movies are the same movie, Vikar thinks riding the bus at night into the city of the wrong turn, where there’s no love just obsession, which lovers would choose over love even if they had a choice. A hitchhiker gets to L.A. and finds himself at the end of a leash, coiled around the hand of an actress named Ann Savage (…
lose my heart on the burning sand / Now I want to be your dog
); blond and bland, not a line of character in his baby face, the actor playing the drifter will spend the end of his life in jail for murdering his wife. A private eye who makes a living pursuing L.A.’s infidelities finds himself at the center of its most forbidden secret, when the woman he’s sleeping with is her own father’s lover, from whom she’s desperately trying to protect the daughter she had by him. Later, the actor playing the private eye will learn his mother is his grandmother and his sister is his mother. God has seeped into Los Angeles after all, and found His instruments there by which to sacrifice the city’s children.