They launched a campaign of character assassination directed toward him that had little to do with the programmatic changes Boniface was proposing. The warlords struck a nerve in Boniface’s tender psyche and his reaction to their actions was so noisy that it roused the sleeping media to sit up and take notice. They called him emotionally unstable, paranoid, and insensitive. But it was really his sensitivity that was the board member’s undoing, resulting in his removal from the post. Ram wrote a profile of the board member and the story revealed to Ram the underside of the operative mentality that resided here in Sagrada. You were indulged so long as you didn’t rattle the cages of the beasts that fed you, the offstage players who pulled the strings and attracted little notice in the newspapers or on local radio and TV stations. If you threatened to expose that, as Boniface had, your days were numbered, mostly by the hour.
When Ram’s story was published, The Stinger and all the electronic media came gunning for Boniface. He was removed from office and the last time Ram had heard, he was running an alternative school for children with attention deficit disorder in New Mexico. Ram received a postcard from him one day. On the back of it was a brief note: “They said I was crazy, but I think a case can be made that anyone who runs for the Sagrada Community College Board has to be certifiable.” The postcard was of Munch’s The Scream. Ram smiled. The board member’s unfortunate end aided and abetted Ram’s ascension. He was sought after on talk radio and gave commentary on TV whenever there was an important issue at hand that might affect Sagrada.
Vera’s ascent in Hollywood wasn’t as meteoric as Ram’s was in the smaller self-inscribed world of Sagrada. But it was nonetheless remarkable, especially so given her temperament which was gaining legendary status.
Her first few films hardly received notice, not nearly as much as her on-set behavior and comments to the working press did. She had a small but choice part in a futuristic Walter Hill film that wound up on the cutting room floor after Vera wagged her tongue to a Hollywood Reporter columnist, exposing the fact that the two stars of the film had been carrying on an extramarital affair fueled by their affection for freebase cocaine. A juicy part in a made-for-TV movie was cut to four scenes totaling five minutes of running time, when Vera refused to do prerelease interviews for the producer, calling him “that fascist cocksucker whose nose for notoriety far exceeds his appreciation for talent.” Another decently-sized supporting part was reduced to a series of establishing shots and three lines of dialogue when Vera pissed off the leading lady who also happened to be the film’s executive producer. The leading lady didn’t care for it when her co-star’s wandering eye wandered from her to Vera. When the film was released and Vera was asked what it was like working with Miranda Owen, a legendary star whose two-decades-old light had not entirely lost its glow, Vera said, “I really don’t feel like talking about that fucking cunt, if you don’t mind.”
While Vera’s uncensored views and unbridled behavior reduced her film time to a minimum, the scandals she caused raised her notoriety to a level that disproportionately exceeded it. She was sought after for her comments on Hollywood, becoming a favorite of the foreign press, especially the French. While the publicity she received in Hollywood was mostly negative, there was, as the old saying goes, no such thing as negative publicity. Vera Dubcek caused notice, and eventually, Hollywood took advantage of her emerging rock-the-boat status, playing to her personality, rather than hiding it. When they did, it made her a star and made her producers a fortune.
The film that pulled her chariot into the heavens was Mariner, an independent feature distributed by a major and piloted by a first-timer, the daughter of a French New Wave producer. The director’s name was Sabine Merisault and she got her shot after directing a number of music videos. The videos were garishly colored, expressively cut, and graphically photographed in downtown L.A., the home turf of the emerging art scene. At a loft party, Sabine was approached by Bill Beardsley, a producer who’d cut his teeth with Darryl Zanuck in the sixties. Beardsley sidled up to her and said: “So, do you think you’re ready for a feature?”
Sabine looked him up and down twice and said, “I am if you’re ready to let me without pissing all over it.” Then she walked away. That was on Saturday. The following Friday, she had the contract to start shooting Mariner six months later. The contract stipulated that Merisault had final cut and total control.
The first call she made was to Vera. She’d seen her in Moon for the Misbegotten in Refugio and wanted her to play Death in Life. She had no second choice. It was Vera or there would be no Mariner, Merisault told the producer.
“Perfect,” said Beardsley.
The film was a journey to hell as drawn by Kirschner and written by Kafka. It opened at the Berlin Festival and took home three Silver Bears, one of them Vera’s for best actress. When Mariner was released in America later that fall, after holdover runs in Europe where it played all spring and summer, setting records in Paris and making Vera a star there, it became the film critics’ darling. It didn’t do great box office, but it held its own and played long runs in New York and San Francisco. When the Academy award nominations were announced the following March, Vera received a best supporting actress nomination, this despite the fact she was the only actress in the film with the exception of a couple of bit parts. Hollywood hadn’t forgotten her, but they were making her pay for what she’d done. She didn’t win the Oscar but she caused quite a stir, dressed in black lace Ungaro and arriving on the arm of Richard Gere. The tabloid tongues immediately started wagging, peppering them with questions as to the nature of their relationship, to which Vera answered, “Hah!” A month later, she signed a three-picture deal with Paramount and deposited a check for $1 million in her and Ram’s joint account.
She had three months to prepare for a new De Palma film and came home to Refugio to join Ram at the house they lived in on Washington Street, blocks away from their first address on Cedar. Their reunion was happy and amorous, but it wasn’t peaceful. Fans gathered outside the house, lingering on the sidewalk until the wee hours of the morning, calling out to Vera, some drunkenly, some plaintively, all as if they knew her and were piqued at Vera’s refusal to answer. Whenever he exited the house, Ram was besieged. When he went to meet Mad Michael at the Asti, twenty fans followed him in. The only other people inside the bar, besides Ram and Michael and the bartender, were two old vets who looked up as though the place was under attack by the Japs. Michael’s eyes widened, then he threw back his head and laughed.
“Aargh, boyo, methinks you’ve drawn a crowd.”
Ram shook his head. “Not me, Mikey; it’s Vera they’re after. I’m the stalking horse.”
Two days later, Ram and Vera left Washington Street and moved into a big house in the hills. From there, they launched the search that gained them The Arbor.
Vera put Ram in charge of the mission while she prepared for her role in the upcoming film, consulting with De Palma on an almost daily basis, discussing her character and dissecting the screenplay with De Palma and Gere, her costar. The working title was House. It was an exploration into the world of private gambling clubs, with Vera as the owner of one called The Lynx while Gere played an interloper attempting to insinuate himself into the cashbox by romancing her. The part was big, the pay was good, and it was a chance to work with De Palma and Gere, both of whom Vera admired.
While Vera was peeling the layers to get at the core of the character of Mona Monagan, Ram was camped in the downstairs office that looked out onto a horse pasture, calling realtors. There wasn’t much available. The market was down, they said; the pickings were slim. Then Ram said that they might be paying cash and, suddenly, there were plenty of homes available. After two weeks of phone calls, Ram picked a realtor and had her line up six houses to show him and Vera one weekend.
When Ram opened the door to the realtor that Saturday morning, he didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. She was easily the ugliest woman he’d ever seen. She had a huge h
ead, further magnified by her hairdo, a bobbed B-52 dyed jet black. Her neck was long and skinny, her body short and fat, her cheeks brightly rouged, her lips thin, her nose bulbous. When she spoke, her voice creaked like a door in a horror movie. Her name was Mrs. Sweeney. Ram asked her to sit down while he went to fetch Vera, shaking his head when he got to the upstairs hallway.
“Baby, the realtor’s here,” he said, entering the bedroom and finding Vera at the vanity, trying to select earrings. “She’s something to behold.”
“Why’s that?” Vera said, abstracted with her task and not turning.
“You’ll see. Shake it up. Let’s get this done and go see what she’s found.”
They took Mrs. Sweeney to breakfast at Flap’s and the realtor showed them pictures of the houses they’d be looking at. Ram perused the material with greater interest than Vera did, who sat behind dark glasses sipping coffee, alternately scanning the room and the morning paper, offering an occasional comment, to which the realtor sometimes responded. Vera would be of little use in the matter, Ram concluded, not unless something jumped up and grabbed her. It was promising to be a long day.
They spun through the mountains and down into the flats of the beach towns south of Refugio, past Izquell and La Selva, looking at house after house. Some had possibilities, Ram thought. Vera wasn’t taken with any of them. The most promising one was a large sprawling estate near Pasatiempo where they were presently in residence. Although it seemed suitable to Ram, Vera didn’t care for it. “I don’t know, it seems too Rawhide for me,” she sniffed.
Mrs. Sweeney smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ll find something for you, dear.” Vera pulled her shades down and shot her a stare. “I’m sure you will, but the question is when.”
From hill to vale and back again, the trio wandered, considering the available properties, none of which came close to measuring up to Vera’s vague standards. Finally, it was late afternoon, the end of a day whose promise for length had been exceeded by half. Ram and Vera had both grown weary with Ms. Reverse Circe, as Vera called her, and the pitches she made for houses that Vera would never consider living in, much less buying. Now, they were snaking back up the same highway they had first started driving at ten that morning. The realtor stopped at a payphone.
“I have one more idea. It’s a shot in the dark. It’s A bit of an oddball, but maybe you two might like it,” she said, glancing from Ram to Vera with a resigned look. The realtor walked to the phone and dialed, then began a long conversation.
Vera laid her head on Ram’s shoulder and moaned. “This is sheer misery,” she shuddered. Ram laughed softly, told her that it would be fine, they were nearly done.
“Maybe we should just forget the whole Refugio idea and get a rental in one of the canyons in LA and keep an apartment in Sagrada and let the studio and magazine pick up the bills for both,” he said.
“But you said we should have our own home, Ram,” Vera pleaded. “I don’t want to live in that salt mine of LA, and you don’t want to live in Sagrada.”
At that point, Mrs. Sweeney returned to the car and said they’d be meeting the owner of the house in half an hour. “It’s kind of a cute little place and it’s got its own name. It’s called The Arbor.”
Vera moaned. Ram acted as though neither he nor the realtor had heard it.
They drove north up the mountain, turning left on Dell Ridge Road, climbing higher above the incoming fog. They turned right onto a dirt road barely visible from the paved one, then ascended a hill, descended the other side, crossed a creek and climbed another steep hill to a split-rail fence bordering a property posted with “No Hunting” signs. The ground tabled out briefly into a pasture, surrounded by redwoods. They drove into a dense growth of them. In the middle of it was a clearing where the house sat.
In front of the house, a circular driveway wound around a reflecting pond, ringed by redwoods and surrounded by park benches near the water’s edge. Inside the pond was a small group of large koi—gold, calico, blue, and pied—with lily pads atop the water that dragonflies danced over. The house itself was a large two-story affair of hand-adzed, hand-fitted cedar logs with a pair of giant river rock chimneys rising at either end. The house’s rough-hewn nature was counterbalanced by an architectural design that was classically European in nature: a Paul Bunyan marriage to Palladio sort of affair, thought Ram, trying to define it. A steep hill rose directly left of the clearing just above the pond with fifty concrete steps going up it, atop which was a small marble chapel with wrought iron doors and a crooked cross on its roof. Beyond the house, an old board-and-batten barn with an adjoining stable fronted onto a pasture that declined softly to a split-rail fence a couple hundred yards distant. Vera and Ram stood outside the car alongside the reflecting pond, taking it in. They looked up to the open sky above them, surrounded by the interlacing of redwood branches two hundred feet up. Into the open space, floated a pair of Red Tail hawks. The hawks turned, looked down, and keened a cry that split the heavens. Vera’s and Ram’s eyes drifted from the hawks, descended toward the rooftop, then wandered to the chapel, the barn, the pasture, and the distant tree line. Shafts of sunlight knifed through the tracery of limbs, and dust motes wafted in the dandling breeze. When their gazes were at ground level again, they turned and looked at one another. Ram remembered how rosy Vera’s cheeks were and imagined that his were the same. They grinned widely at one another, laughed and both said: “We’ll take it,” at the same time.
Mrs. Sweeney looked at Ram and Vera fearfully, then asked: “Don’t you even want to see what it looks like inside?”
When they did, they were equally pleased. The rooms were large, airy, well-lit, and well proportioned. Ram and Vera had found their home, their nest, their aerie. When the owner arrived ten minutes later, Ram already had the check written. That was almost five years ago, thought Ram, recalling the moment, looking into the mist…
“…Yo, Ram, mind if I join you?”
Tom Toll stood before him, a mug of coffee in his meaty hand. Before Ram had a chance to respond, Toll was in a chair. “So what are you working on, Le Doir?”
Ram looked at Toll, he was grinning. Then Ram saw Bill Ranger and Tom McKinley come outside with mugs in their hands, heading toward Ram and Toll. Ram stacked his newspapers, retrieved the clips from his hat, and put them in the zipper pocket of his shoulder bag. Ranger and McKinley pulled up chairs and settled in, turning the conversation to local topics. They filled Ram in on what they felt was important.
“Solozzo has a new land rezoning bill before the council,” said McKinley, who was older than Ram and once worked in child welfare before politics overtook him. “Do you think you could take a look at it? It’s one of Solozzo’s bait-and-switch numbers, I’m pretty sure. We could use you on this, Ram.”
“Don’t think so, Tom. I’m all tied up now.”
Their respective concerns centered on the singular passions that were coming to define them. For McKinley, it was the phenomenon known as the new urbanism. For Toll, it was solar power, and for Ranger, it was his dream of starting a New World café that would help define the coming cosmopolis they all believed Sagrada would soon become. All were passionate in their devotions, and Ram did not disagree with their philosophies or beliefs of what should or could be in Sagrada. But their focus on these issues approached an obsession that Ram didn’t share, and it wore him out being around them.
Whether at coffee, a nightclub, a movie, or watching Monday night football, the conversation would eventually be steered by one or the other of the three, down the one-way streets that each of them occupied and seemed to own exclusively. Ram could only say so much about solar power, only speculate so much on what it might entail to alter Sagrada’s urban development codes and policies, only guess what the significance of how a great café might symbolize the new Sagrada, and frankly, Ram didn’t see how any of this had any cosmological import, although he was loath to say so for fear of the filibuster length debate that would ensue. The one time
he tried to point out a fly in Bill Ranger’s café ointment, it resulted in a loud discussion on the sidewalk in front of Ranger’s apartment that went on for two hours and was only concluded when police arrived to end it, called there by complaining neighbors.
“So this is all about a café?” an incredulous officer inquired.
“I guess you could say that,” said Ranger.
The same thing happened with Toll one night, when Ram was forced to slip out the back door of a downtown Japanese restaurant because of Toll’s refusal to let a solar power discussion drop. And more than a few times, Ram had asked Tom McKinley to quit praising him in public as “the Lewis Mumford of Sagrada” because Ram had written a few stories on urban development for The Stinger.
One night, they went to see Stranger than Paradise at Monument. Afterwards, they went across the street to Emile’s. When Ram interrupted Toll’s solar sermon to ask what he thought of the movie, Toll looked back at Ram as if he was asking him to recall a previous life. “It was okay,” he finally said.
So it was with this crew. When their obsessions crossed into mania, Ram began looking for opportunities to escape. This morning, they were calm, the conversation light and casual.
“What are you working on?” Toll asked.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really; what’s your next story?”
“It’s actually two things. One is a profile of Barry Bailey for Golden State Magazine. The other’s something personal.”
“Tell us what it is,” Toll insisted.
“I’d rather not.”
“Come on, Le Doir. We’ll be reading it anyway,” said Bill Ranger.
Windwhistle Bone Page 37