The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  Larry was in a silent rage when I got in. The studio and my agent had been on the phone all morning, wanting to know where I was. It was the day of the big scene between Nancy and Adam. I tried to explain to him the good news, that the whole city had been saved from disaster, but he just stared at me, dumbfounded. When I told him that this miracle proved the power of the Space Brothers and that the Watchers had been right, he lost his temper.

  ‘No, Sharleen, no!’ he shouted. ‘It proves the opposite, doesn’t it? It proves that the prophecy was wrong. And now you’ve lost your job with the studio and your agent says he never wants to see you again!’

  Larry loved to think that he had been proved right about Martha’s prophecy. This sense of righteous anger was far more important to him than the possibility that the world had been saved from an apocalypse. But I had lost my job. So I promised Larry that I would find a new agent and not get too involved in anything like the Watchers for a while.

  In the New Year we had some good news. A novelette of Larry’s that had run as a magazine series was reprinted in an Ace Double, a cheap paperback format where two stories are bound together. And, more encouragingly for him, a publishing house offered him a hardback deal for a novel he had submitted, with an option on a second. The Translucent Man got him a thousand-dollar advance and came out in June 1957. We still had to struggle that year but it wasn’t nearly as bad Larry made out. He was half in love with the idea of being the starving artist.

  And I soon found myself another agent. For glamour photography at first, then later for these odd 8mm films. It would be me and another girl, both in corsets and suspenders. She would tie me up and gag me, then make out that she was spanking me hard with a hairbrush or a riding crop. In another one she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and I was on an examination table. She would put on rubber gloves and do all kinds of physical tests on me. I found that I could act in these scenes really easily, as if I was meant to do it. I secretly felt that the devil was punishing me, laughing at me for being a bad actress. I kept the truth about this work from Larry. I told him that I had been making ‘training films’.

  I didn’t want to disturb him. He was working so hard trying to finish his next novel, American Gnostic. He would shut himself away for long writing sessions, fuelled up on amphetamines. He could go three, even four days without sleep. Then he would collapse into bed for forty-eight hours or so, occasionally waking to eat something or scribble notes, then he would be up and at it again. I worried about his health but Larry kept going, writing obsessively, convinced that this thing was to be a major work for him. It was as if there was some evil force driving him on. I suspected even then that there was something bad about this book.

  And I felt lonely. I even considered making contact with some of the Watchers again, just on a social basis. But the group had completely split up. Martha had gone to join a Scientology centre in Arizona. Dr Headley had sold his house and was travelling the country, spreading the word of the Space Brothers. He had joined something called the College of Universal Wisdom and had spoken at a flying saucer convention at Giant Rock, California.

  There was a kind of panic that October, when the Russians launched Sputnik. Fear that the Reds had beaten us into space. Along with many others, we went out to watch the night sky and try to catch a glimpse of this artificial satellite. Larry seemed pleased that the Soviets had been the first to put a spacecraft in orbit. He told me that it felt good to see the masses shocked out of complacency. And as he gazed up into the heavens I saw something of the Larry I had known when we had first met: a childlike wonder at the universe. He had just finished the novel and was happy and calm for once.

  I remember being more affected by the second launch a month later. Sputnik 2 was sent up with a dog inside. Laika was a stray mongrel bitch that had been found wandering the streets of Moscow. She was chosen for the space mission because of her resilience. The American press called her ‘Muttnik’, but I didn’t see the joke. I felt a strange kinship with this poor creature. When I thought of her trapped in that metal capsule, hurtling through the cosmos, I was overwhelmed by despair and emptiness. When Larry asked why I was crying I told him: ‘Laika. I’m like her. I’m a bitch in space.’

  Larry decided that we should go away that Christmas. I think it was because he felt that the previous December had been so traumatic and he was determined to avoid any memory of it. He also had delivered his novel and had received part of the advance. So we spent two weeks in Honolulu. The time passed like a dream: warm sea and cold cocktails, the palm trees fracturing the sunlight. But I felt a static charge, a fuzzing in the head; the distant surf was like TV interference in the next room. Anxiety in paradise. A growing fear of going home.

  I don’t know quite what made me so dread the publication of Larry’s next novel. Maybe it was because he didn’t talk to me about it while he was working on it. Larry would usually show me something of what he was writing or read out sections to me. But not this one. Oh no, this one was a big secret that he wanted to keep from me. And when it came out in the spring of 1958 I could see why.

  American Gnostic is as confused and rambling as any other of Larry Zagorski’s works but there were whole chunks of it I got straightaway. The mystery of Seth Archer, the rocket scientist with occult knowledge assassinated in a laboratory explosion; Lucas D. Hinkel, science-fiction writer and founder of the now-established state religion, the Cult of Futurology; obvious ‘borrowings’ from his past. As usual it was hard to understand what Larry really believed in. He portrays John Six, a humanoid visitor from another planet, arriving at the Sunday Mass of a ‘flying saucer chapel’, using language and information similar to that of the Watcher meetings. It was as if all along he had known that the Space Brothers existed, but he could deal with it only on his own terms. Worst of all for me was the character of Bella Berkeley, a naive and credulous actress in a ‘holovision blip-opera’ who falls in love with Six. It seemed a malevolent transformation of my personality. Bella is a constant victim of cruel comedy, of morbid sexual fantasy. And I realised with horror that this was what Larry really thought of me.

  Of course he insisted that it was fiction, that he had merely used some aspects of my life, that Bella wasn’t me at all. Writers think that they can write what they like and just by changing the names they can get away with it. And they actually think that they can control it all. Whatever you might think of Martha and her automatic writing, at least she was honest, admitting that she just wrote what came to her. As I said before, Larry stole. He took all these ideas and experiences and claimed it as his own work. His own fiction. His own great novel.

  And we had terrible arguments. He shouted at me that he had to be free to write what he wanted. So I told him what this freedom had cost. I told him what I had done to pay the rent and the bills. I saw the look of disgust on his face.

  I couldn’t bear to be with him any more after that. I told him I was leaving him but he said that I should stay. He would go and live with his mother until he found a new place. It was pathetic.

  So he left. He took a few things, put them in his car and drove away.

  I was alone.

  I started to feel scared. Someone was watching the house.

  Someone was listening in.

  I took some of Larry’s pills that he had left behind. Nembutals. They helped me sleep but when I woke up it took me a long time to work out where I was. What time was it? The sun was going down. I had the vision of an inhuman horizon. A star descending on a distant planet. A dead planet.

  I went for a drive downtown. Bright lights. Messages. A movie-house marquee spelling out: I Married a Monster from Outer Space. I had to get out of the city. I kept driving. I didn’t know where I was. There was a bright light in the sky. Following me. I had that same feeling that I’d had when I saw the saucer over the Hollywood Hills. A message beamed into my brain from the spaceship. Except that it wasn’t the Space Brothers. Oh no.

  Oh no.

 
; It was the Greys.

  They had come for me. I drove faster but the light kept up with me. Hovering. Waiting. I knew then that I had to get out of the car. I swerved off the road and got out. I was in the desert, running, running. Then I fell. I blacked out.

  I woke up three days later in Camarillo State Hospital. I was told that I had been found wandering by the side of the highway by a state trooper. I had been examined by a doctor and was diagnosed as suffering from ‘involuntary psychosis and paranoid-type schizophrenia’. I had been sedated and brought to Camarillo as a mentally ill person.

  It was awful there. I was kept in a locked ward. They fed me with liquid medicine that made me feel like a zombie. They gave me electric shock treatment. They were trying to make me forget what had happened to me. I found out later that one of the doctors there was a memory expert and had been a chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg trials where he tested these top Nazis who claimed to have clinical amnesia. He was part of MK ULTRA, a secret CIA research project into mind-control techniques. It all came out a couple of years ago, in 1975. A congressional committee revealed that the CIA had experimented on ordinary citizens in state institutions without their knowledge or consent. They used truth drugs and brainwashing techniques on them. I was one of these guinea pigs, I’m sure of it.

  But they didn’t stop me from remembering what had happened to me before I had been found by the side of the road. You see, there was all this time unaccounted for, twenty-four hours or so. It came back to me slowly, like all these memories do. There was a beam of light. Then I was inside the alien ship. I was naked and on this sort of platform. All around me was a group of Greys. God, I was scared. The chief Grey came forward and spoke to me telepathically. He told me that they were going to do some tests. They put tubes in my mouth and in my ears. They put these suction cups over my breasts. They stuck probes in my vagina and in my anus. Then the chief Grey picked up a long needle and pierced me right through my navel. I screamed with pain, then he put his hand in front of my eyes. The pain went. I blacked out.

  I was in Camarillo for three months until Larry came to take me home. I was released on ‘extended home convalescence’, given some drugs and a prescription to take to a doctor. When he drove me back Larry said: ‘I can’t go on, Sharleen. It’s all too much. I’m the one who should have been committed, not you.’ He was a weak and useless man in so many ways, but at least he was honest about it.

  We finally divorced in 1960. By then Larry was a big success. The paperback edition of American Gnostic was a best-seller. I saw the cover everywhere. A mock-up of that famous painting of the farmer with a pitchfork, standing next to his spinster daughter, their heads replaced with those of aliens. So Larry could afford alimony. It took a while, though, before I got regular payments, so I had to find work to make ends meet.

  I was in my late twenties and already getting a bit too old for the glamour game but I decided to use it while I still could. Besides, I knew little else.

  I met Cato Johnson when I was working as a go-go dancer in a seedy club on Sunset Strip. He was a guitarist in the house band. Cato acted cool and confident when he was with the other guys but he was shy and nervous really. Sensitive. Beautiful. Such smooth skin that seemed to be pulled tight over his forehead and cheekbones. Bright, sad eyes and a thick pouting mouth that was always slightly open. I’ll admit that I was attracted to his blackness, but he was drawn to me in the same way. I’m so white, after all. It was an electrical charge, you know, magnetic. We were like opposite polarities. And it was a natural thing. I think nature wants us to mix, I really do.

  But society always wants to keep us apart. And the atmosphere in LA at that time was pretty bad. So much race hatred below the surface. I hardly noticed this before I went with Cato. Things were supposed to be getting better but they weren’t. There was just more hypocrisy. That’s the problem with Los Angeles: the people there pretend to be sophisticated but they can be just as prejudiced as in the South. Especially the LAPD.

  When Watts went up in flames in the riots of 1965, I feared for his life. And though Cato acted like he was some kind of soft-spoken tough guy, I knew that he was scared too. Scared of me. It’s a deep-down thing. Going with a white woman can give a black man a little bit of power but a hell of a lot of danger. And besides all that, he thought I was a touch crazy.

  Getting pregnant by Cato was a big mistake. But it was the best mistake of my life. I never resented Cato going away, because he left behind such a wonderful gift. Martin Stirling Johnson was born on 13 June 1966. For the first time I had a real purpose to my life. A gorgeous baby boy to bring up. And having Martin to take care of took care of me too; it gave me a centre to my existence.

  And I just about managed to make ends meet. The alimony cheques now came in regularly from Larry; he even offered to pay me a little extra. We got back in touch with each other and found that we could actually get on quite well as friends. He was living in this sort of commune in Venice Beach. Larry’s books had become a big hit with the hippies and he became one of them. He was well into his forties but the look kind of suited him, an ambling figure in beads and baggy clothes, long hair and a beard. He was with this young woman called Wanda. Half his age, yet he seemed the child of that relationship. Happy though. He wasn’t taking speed or downers any more; he was a lot calmer. He still smoked dope, though, and had been experimenting with LSD.

  Larry loved Martin and he was very good with him. He confided in me that he was sure he couldn’t have kids of his own (something about side-effects from the mumps he’d had as a child). He asked me if I wanted to move into the house in Venice, saying it would be easier than bringing up a child on my own. But I couldn’t do that hippie thing. I mean, it works for guys because that style can suit any old slob but it’s not a very flattering look for women. It’s fine for the young chicks but I didn’t want to look like an old witch just yet.

  You see, I never got back my figure after Martin was born and I put on a bit of weight. It was a relief, to tell you the truth. People didn’t look at me in that way any more. It made me feel much more relaxed about myself. So, no more glamour work. I certainly didn’t miss it much. When Martin was old enough for school I got a job cleaning houses and apartments. It was simple, easy work that I did part time.

  Now I just had to get used to the looks I would get when I was out with my son. The cold stares that fall upon a white woman with a black child. I started to worry about the world he was growing up in. Poor Martin was only eight when we heard that his father had been shot dead by the police in Detroit. They said that Cato was part of a bank hold-up but I wasn’t sure about that. I think he was involved in something political. Muthaplane, the funk band he was in, recorded songs with secret messages in their lyrics, signals to a mothership from some distant planet.

  I started to get scared again. I didn’t want the fear to get the better of me. I felt that if I didn’t find the right path, the devil might come for me once more. I had managed to keep one step ahead of him for a few years but now he was catching up with me again. Martin would soon be a teenager and I dreaded him getting into trouble and ending up like his father.

  I was on medication for my nerves. I had tried all kinds of therapy to make sense of what had happened to me but nothing seemed to work. I was looking for something to believe in, a simple life, somewhere to settle down, to raise Martin and grow old in peace. I asked the heavens for guidance and I was shown the way.

  A friend took me along to a Peoples Temple service at a big old church in Alvarado Street. I was never much one for church but there was so much joy and hope in that place, I was overwhelmed. And Martin loved it. He was singing along with the choir before long, being very musical just like his father. What really impressed me was the mix of peoples. The congregation was mostly black and coloured so they could never feel that they were a minority at the Peoples Temple. But there were plenty of white folks too. This was the sort of integration white liberals had been going on about for
years but had never made happen. And Jim Jones, the leader, had this incredible aura, full of righteous energy. A handsome man with Native Indian features: high cheekbones, jet-black hair. All the young members of the Peoples Temple called him Dad. He wore electric-blue robes and sunglasses.

  He and his wife Marceline had experiences I could share. They have what they call their ‘rainbow family’ with Korean and coloured children. They were the first white couple in the state of Indiana to adopt a black child. Marceline told me that she had been spat on in the street when she had carried him as a baby.

  So after a while we got on a Peoples Temple bus and came to San Francisco. I’m glad to have left LA behind. I really do believe it’s where the devil lives. It’s certainly a city that promises heaven and gives you hell. Me and Martin are having a much better time up here. We spent a summer in the commune in Redwood Valley. It was pure joy to see my son run free in the countryside.

  It’s 1977 now and I feel that we’re at the start of a new beginning. Martin has been listening to a lot of reggae recently and he tells me that there is a Rastafarian prophecy that great changes will come the year that the two sevens clash.

  A spacecraft called Voyager has just been launched. It will visit the planets and eventually leave the solar system and in thousands and thousands of years’ time it may reach another star. On it is a long-playing record of pure gold that has music from earth: Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry. It also has recorded voices in different languages sending greetings to whoever might be out there.