Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  Style has an aura that words only diminish. The words follow, trying to explain, but the glamour fades in the glare of opinions and ideas. There is no more Lucifer now, no more Prince of Darkness, no more Angel of Light. There is a return to what was always there before, the silence.

  The front door seemed to recede back into the distance as Anger looked at it, making up his mind. He had framed it with newspaper, putting up sheets around the lintel and the jambs, tucking them around the edges and fastening them down with tape. He had covered the doorknob with more tape, and he’d taped the hinges and the sides of the door itself. It looked violated and alive now, a demented shrine. A newspaper picture of Charles Manson stared numbly out at the room, his body slumped to one side, flanked by policemen. There were pictures of Bobby, Susan, Leslie, Tex, Patricia — the girls with their shy, ecstatic smiles, the boys with their thoughtful, intense stares.

  He spread some more newspaper on the floor, making an improvised carpet from the doorway to the coffee table. Then he took the first can of paint out of the shopping bag. When he opened it, it looked like oil on top, gold oil that was streaked with lines of dark or gilt specks. He turned it slowly with the wooden stirrer, cross-legged on Mick’s floor, bringing up the pigment until it was burnished into a consistent brownish gold, honey-thick, gleaming in the lamplight.

  It would not be something that Mick or any of the others would understand. When they came back, it would just be there: the door painted gold, a kept secret, resonant with silence. Maybe it would seem threatening. Maybe it would seem benign. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if they would think of him right away, or at all.

  The paint went on unevenly, sometimes too dark, dense with glitter, sometimes a sticky, almost translucent smear. He went over a thin patch while it was still wet, but the result was streaky and he moved on to another area. It was important to do it precisely. It would take several coats to get the finish right. It had to look like the door had not been painted but had simply materialized, cast in gold. When it was done, he would peel away the tape and the newspapers and pack them up in the shopping bag to take home with him. He would look at what he’d done: the ordinary door transformed, the violation of the break-in softened into something that was not quite a violation at all. The fact that he had done it and not just thought about it would make the moment when he walked through the door last longer than an ordinary moment. It would stay in his mind for a long time, this disappearance, this ambiguous farewell.

  It is raining in the theater now. There is the rumble of an explosion, so loud that Bobby can feel it rattling inside his body, pressing at his bones. In front of the screen, Anger’s silhouette strides across the stage in its robe, an image flickering above him, a zodiac glyph, then an image of Mick’s face, singing. There is a flag at one side of the stage, a Nazi flag with a swastika at its center, and Anger lifts it in the air, displaying it, shouting words that Bobby can’t understand. The dream calls for blood. That’s why it has always mattered, why it recurs. There is no end or purpose to it, only greater speed, the pull toward the glistening in the darkness. He lights the flag on fire, holding it away from his body. The music behind him is an adrenaline thud, a racing heartbeat, a dream of violence unfolding in a pink neon haze. Onscreen, Mick and Keith play a song to half a million faceless blips. A biker whispers directives into another biker’s ear. An image of Lucifer begins to coalesce. He is a red curtain over still water, a blue gas flame reflected on chrome, a black sky pocked with green specks of light. He is a dead boy spread-eagled on the ground, his arms tattooed with anchors and skulls, blood in his hair. A plastic skull rotates on a pedestal whose base is the intricately spoked wheel of a motorcycle. It bleeds into a massive image of Anger’s sweating, frenzied face, and as Bobby watches, he knows that this will never end, that neither he nor Anger will ever leave this room.

  Projected now is a picture of Bobby himself, sitting cross-legged on a wooden crate, raising his arms in the darkness without knowing why. Patterns of light crawl across his face, generated by a slow strobe held behind a black card punched through with holes. The light bleaches out his features, makes him look even younger than he is. He raises his eyebrows and opens his eyes wide in what might be self-mockery or just an effort to speak. He can’t remember anymore what he would have been trying to say. He can’t remember what it was that he and Anger were trying to accomplish. His image onscreen lifts his arms in the air as if to absolve him of responsibility, or as if to ask what happens next, what he should do.

  It is June 6, 1968. Mick is standing by himself in a vocal booth, one hand pressed to his ear to hear himself better above the backing track, as the tape begins to roll. The news around the world that night is that Robert Kennedy, five years after his brother, has just died of the gunshot wounds he sustained the night before. It is as if the decade itself knows that it can never return, that it has only these few years to live out its own extremes. The light on the sound buffers is a dim beige, a predawn staleness of smoke. Mick hears the music: a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. They’ve spent three days in the studio, fumbling, grasping, finally to arrive at this moment when it works. He backs up and lets out a yelp, a monkey screech, saturated in echo. He makes grunting noises from deep inside his chest, rising on his toes so that his body shakes, his hand moving down his hip to his thigh. On the monitors, the piano strikes a wide, sustained D chord and the song suddenly spreads and hovers, Mick’s lips tensed into a sneer as he begins his delivery, a song about the Devil, about violence, death magic, its glamour and mystique. His head is silhouetted by a floodlight affixed to the ceiling, so that the split ends of his hair glow a bright white, like the filaments in a lit bulb. He is Lucifer — in that moment there is no better word for how he has changed. He is an escape from everything drab, the music behind him shot through with exotic colors that have as little to do with darkness as a stained-glass window. An electric bass thuds out a pattern of syncopated triplets and eighth notes, matching the repetitive pounding of the drums, and with each note comes a twitch in Mick’s legs, a jangle of his spine, a defiant lifting of his chin, a hundred little signs to let you know that it’s not fake this time, that for the three minutes of this song the god will be real. He raises his arms, all sinew and muscle. The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.

  Part Four

  Q: Do you believe in God?

  JOHN LENNON: Yes, I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he’s the supreme power, and that he’s neither good nor bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it.

  — from a press conference given in Montreal, December 1969

  RISE, 2002

  OVER THE YEARS, Anita kept in touch with Anger sporadically. She had put some money into his last film, in the seventies, but he wasn’t easy to be with and so for periods of time she would let the friendship lapse. The last time she saw him was five years ago, when she was in Los Angeles. His apartment was over a dry cleaner in a two-story stucco building in the run-down neighborhood of Echo Park. Some boy let her in. He didn’t introduce himself, and after answering the door he disappeared into another room. It was very dim inside, the curtains drawn, the walls painted a harsh red, the ceiling a glossy black. All of it was lit by old lamps that cast a pale bronze light that would have been the same shade day or night.

  Anger was sitting in a chair in the living room, his legs crossed. He wore a black suit and black police shoes. He must have been at least seventy, she thought. There was a thin trace of eyeliner around his eyes.

  “Hello, Kenneth,” she said.

  She bent over and gave him an awkward so
rt of half hug, more a patting of the shoulders, and he felt resistant and dry. He looked down at his hands. Beside his chair was a Japanese folding screen and a nightstand cluttered with plastic cups.

  “I was expecting you a little later,” he said. He turned away. “But you’re here now.”

  “Yes, I’m here now.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  She sat down and put her bag on the floor. The room was decorated with old Hollywood memorabilia: pictures of stars from the silent era, Day-Glo posters from the thirties and forties, a pair of brocade curtains with gold tassels. There was a still from Anger’s own film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which showed a close-up of a woman’s face, lit by a pink light, her red hair cut short like a man’s. Jezebel, Anita remembered. The Whore of Babylon. It was such a long time since she’d last seen the image, more than thirty years.

  “Would you like some tea or something?” Anger asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “The host is supposed to offer the guest something to drink. It’s a gesture of hospitality.”

  “I’ll have some tea, then. Whatever you want.”

  The room had a museum stillness when he went into the kitchen. Everything was immaculately silent, watchful. He came back with the tea on a tray: a blue and white ceramic pot, two bright green cups without handles. The cups were ornamented with tiny white and black cranes. In the dimness of the living room, they almost glowed.

  She told him she had moved back to London, back to Chelsea. She hadn’t seen Keith in a long time. They had split up many years ago. She was glad to be back in London, though. New York had never felt like home.

  “And what about you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been here.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough. I’ve been trying to work again. There’s not much to show for it yet.”

  He told her he’d moved back to L.A. at the end of the nineties. When he’d lived in New York, he’d been badly mugged several times. It was the crack years, and he’d lived through all that in East Harlem, 110th Street, in two rooms with sealed windows. It was a different city then. He’d been glad to get out. They talked about New York for a while: the way it had changed, both of them saying disparaging things that they didn’t really believe. Overhanging it all was the awareness that in the years they’d both lived there, probably ten years, they had never seen each other at all.

  She looked around at the room, at the images of Valentino, the gaudy illustrations of science-fiction characters. There was nothing you could say about the past that didn’t ring false, she thought. She didn’t feel regret or nostalgia about it. Mostly she was happy that things were less urgent now, less intense.

  “You’re one of those people I was always curious about,” she said. “Why you disappeared. Why you stopped doing films.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “You called me a self-absorbed bitch in one of your interviews. I read those things.”

  “I say a lot of things.”

  “We weren’t thinking, most of the time you knew us. You never really understood that, how little thinking we were doing.”

  “I thought you were beyond thinking. I thought you were interesting to watch. I just got tired of it. Struggling, I mean. The money. Thinking it was important to make films.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then he raised them, looking at her with a slightly hostile appraisal. “We’re all still alive,” he said. “That’s the surprise. That was the one thing the world was always counting on, that we would all just die.”

  Her eyes fell again on the picture of the woman with the short red hair. The image had been made decades ago, and yet even now the way the woman looked was daring. If she were alive at all, she would be in her seventies or eighties. Probably she was dead. Time — it had become a big subject for Keith and Mick, a vein of pathos in their last work that was any good. For a long period of her life, she’d had no sense of it — it had had no power to scare her. Later it had seemed that time went back so far that nothing could ever last long enough to matter very much. She would think of geologic time, or the time reckoned by astronomers. But it was better not to think about time at all.

  “You’ve been feeling bored,” he said. “That’s why you came here.”

  “No, not really. Things have been going well.”

  “Wondering what the point of it all is. Wanting to stir up the old ghosts.”

  “They’re still there. It’s just that there’s no point in talking about them anymore.”

  He bent down to sip his tea, showing the crown of his head. She saw the tattoos on his wrist, the dark ink mottled and slightly faded. It occurred to her, as it had often occurred to her in the past, that the way he looked and acted was a pose, a kind of private joke that kept him at a distance from the world. But it was a long time to hold such a pose. Surrounded by his movie props, he seemed more than ever like someone she would never understand. The room was thick with his past, an agglomeration of dust and souvenirs. It was hard to imagine him leaving it.

  In the Lucifer film, the sequel to Invocation of My Demon Brother, there is a scene in which a woman who looks just like Anita climbs a mountain in the closing dusk, a full moon overhead, clouds passing in front of it. Ahead of her in the darkness are four torches that lead the way over a narrow suspension bridge that connects two stone cliffs. She crushes a sprig of lilac blossoms in her hand, throws them aside, staggering a little. The path is made of large stone blocks that slant and buckle, leading to the high span of the bridge and the ancient monolith that lies beyond it. Her role is Lilith, goddess of the unacceptable, the dying, the discarded. She looks like Anita, but in fact she is Marianne, dressed in rock-and-roll clothes: a black fur coat, platform shoes. It is 1972 and, like Anita, Marianne has a heroin addiction that there is no reason to believe she will ever overcome, though she will overcome it, both of them will be all right. She forces herself up the hill, the gray light on her face, her hand at her throat, head down.

  When she reaches the summit, it is just before dawn of the winter solstice, the year’s lowest ebb. The sun begins to shine dimly on the rocks, casting a purple glow over the horizon, the hills below. There is a raised stone at the edge of the cliff that she stands on, a perfect circle cut out of its center. Every year on this day, at this moment, the circle’s circumference is entirely filled by the rising sun, the beginning of the new pagan year.

  She can hardly look at it. It’s been a long climb and she feels faint, nauseated, in need of dope. She raises her hands as directed, trying to embrace the sunlight coming in through the hole in the rock, but she looks almost repelled by it, her eyes narrow with censure. She used to be fascinated by things like the monolith — by magic, mysticism, fantasies of all kinds. Now there is physical pain, craving, no more idle wishing for life to seem more mysterious or important than it is.

  She sits down, half collapsing, bracing herself with a hand stretched out beside her hip. Her head hangs down from her shoulders, her black fur coat twisted around her back. She closes her eyes and waits for it to stop and doesn’t move.

  It went on for a long time. It was like if I kept walking, everyone might still be where they were supposed to be and we’d all just go back to the way we were before. Only I knew it wasn’t true. I knew everything had changed. There was just this endless little moment where I didn’t have to face what had really happened yet.

  When she wakes up, she’s sitting in the sand before the pyramids of Giza. She is wrapped in a pale linen shroud, her skin and clothes covered in dust. She is a shade, no longer alive. Motionless, speechless, perhaps faintly smiling, she holds a lotus blossom in her hand and she stares at it, chin raised, as if staring continuously into a mirror. Her face looks like Anita’s, so it also looks like Brian’s, a sixties face, a kind you no longer see.

  Isis awakens on a white cliff. Osiris rises from his cave, his face painted blue. They salute each other across a desert
valley, each raising a single arm in the early morning light. They are so beautiful that it’s tempting to forget they are actors: her naked breasts, the gold bands around his arms. They go through a series of benedictions — he raises his staff, she raises hers — and then they disappear, as does Marianne, nothing left now but rocks and sand and the ruins of the ancient temples. There is a dreamlike calm, the calm of barren landscapes under sunlight, clouds passing over, as if all of the turmoil we call history has taken place on some infinitely distant, even imaginary plane.

  The sun is beginning to set. Time is moving more quickly now, the film almost over. There is a psychedelic image, flying saucers coming over the desert, vintage crafts of nuclear orange, neon green. Their beams shine down on the empty expanse of sand, on the ruined temples, on the rubbled face of the Sphinx. They hover and rise like some last wish, not darkness but a final surge of color.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Among the sources I consulted while doing research for this book are: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones by Tony Sanchez, Keith Richards by Victor Bockris, Faithfull: An Autobiography by Marianne Faithfull, Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties by A. E. Hotchner, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi, Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger by Bill Landis, Kenneth Anger by Alice L. Hutchinson, and the films One Plus One by Jean-Luc Godard and Gimme Shelter by David and Albert Maysles.