Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  Viking Man throws the Bug into reverse and backs out of the lot. He continues driving west on Mulholland, crossing the Sepulveda Pass and winding along mountain roads. All of the freeways are closed and the surface streets are clotted with traffic. It takes two and a half hours to reach Malibu Canyon Road and cut over to Pacific Coast Highway.

  At the sea, Viking Man turns right and heads north, talking about movies all the way.

  71.

  Past the Colony and up the highway until they’re almost to Zuma—

  —where Viking Man finally pulls off PCH, heads up the beach side of the boulevard along a row of water-logged houses until he slides into the drive of one. Pulling the surfboard off the top of the car, without a word to Vikar he strides toward the beach, circling around the house rather than through it.

  Vikar sits in the car a moment, until Viking Man is nearly out of sight, before he gets out and follows.

  72.

  A crowd of about a dozen people, more men than women, are on the beach on the other side of the house. “Viking Man!” one of the guys calls out to him. “Earthquake waves!” All the guys call out to Viking Man and the women ignore him, until one sees Vikar standing alone in the sand. She looks after the other man running toward the ocean with his surfboard. “Uh, John?”

  Viking Man stops at the water’s edge and turns.

  “Is this guy with you?” asks the young woman. She’s lying on a towel in the sun; she has dark hair and is naked and has the largest breasts Vikar has ever seen. Two other women, one dark and one blond, wear bikini bottoms and no tops. Two other women, one petite and the other large, are dressed; the petite one says more bad words in five minutes than Vikar has heard a woman say or all the women he’s heard combined.

  “That’s the vicar,” Viking Man answers.

  The dark-haired woman looks at Vikar. Vikar says, “I’m a friend of Viking Man.”

  “The vicar and the viking,” the woman says, lying back on the towel and closing her eyes, “isn’t that too cute for words?”

  73.

  Vikar stays three days. He can’t figure out how to get home. He loses track of when Viking Man is around and when he isn’t, and he doesn’t want to ask anyone else for a ride into town. The crowd grows smaller and then larger, faces come and then go just as they become familiar; the dark-haired naked woman and the topless blonde are attentive to Vikar, asking now and then if he wants something to eat or drink. He believes no one is paying attention until he turns his gaze fast enough to catch people staring at him. He suspects some of them are taking illicit narcotics.

  They seem only vaguely aware there’s been an earthquake. This is mostly a subject of concern as it applies to the size of the surf or when someone makes a trip to the local market and finds the beer or wine understocked. Everybody is involved in the movies but they’re not like Vikar imagined; none of them looks like a movie star, except perhaps the dark-haired woman and one of the guys who’s not particularly handsome but has a big black beard like Viking Man and also a flashing smile and a matinee manner about him. He wears a safari outfit that he seems to consider debonair. Vikar believes he’s an actor but in fact he’s an aspiring director.

  74.

  All the guys Vikar believes are actors are directors, and all the guys he believes are directors are actors. The women cook the meals and take care of the guys who, as Viking Man said, care and talk about nothing but movies. “The peak of Hawks’ art,” one is saying the first afternoon. “Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals.”

  “Dean Martin is underrated in that movie,” Viking Man agrees.

  “The opening scene,” points out another, “where he’s digging the coin out of the spittoon? All wordless. A kind of American kabuki.”

  “Existential,” someone adds, “in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile.”

  “Angie Dickinson,” Viking Man says, “is the modern incarnation of the quintessential Hawks woman.” The conversation continues like this for about half an hour, until there’s a pause.

  “The Western,” Vikar says, “has changed along with America’s view of itself from some sort of heroic country where’s everybody’s free and shit to the spiritually defiled place it really is, and now you have jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape the past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder.”

  It’s the first thing more than four words long that Vikar has said since arriving. Including the women preparing the meal, the household comes to a stop. After a long silence Viking Man says, “That’s a damned interesting perspective, vicar.”

  “Uh,” someone else says, “let’s go surfing!” The room immediately clears of everyone except the women. The dark large-breasted one studies Vikar for a moment and returns to the cooking. After that, Vikar doesn’t say anything else. The only person who talks as little as Vikar is an intense dark man in his late twenties who sits on the couch staring at him and at his head in particular; he has a strange smile. Five years later Vikar will remember the man, and the way he looked at Vikar’s head, when Vikar sees him with a mohawk in a movie about a cab driver who goes crazy and kills everyone.

  75.

  The beach house is shabby, the plywood walls warped from moisture, the garish shag carpet blotched and worn. There are three bedrooms upstairs, and a balcony circles and overlooks the downstairs, which is organized around a fire pit in the center. Sofas and chairs line the walls. His second day in the house, sitting in the living room and staring at the blue necklace of the sea stretched across the breast of the sky, Vikar turns to see a five-year-old girl standing next to him, looking at his head.

  76.

  It’s only when the girl’s mother calls that Vikar realizes it’s the same child he saw in the ruins of the Harry Houdini house in Laurel Canyon, after first arriving in Los Angeles.

  “Zazi.” Vikar turns to the same soft voice and the same beautiful young woman with the auburn hair and the perfect cleft in her chin who hurried the little girl across Laurel Canyon Boulevard that day a year and a half before. Now the beautiful woman wears only a bikini bottom.

  The little girl reaches out to Vikar’s face, to wipe away the red teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye.

  77.

  As she did that day in Laurel Canyon, the woman appears to float across the room to take the girl back, just as the girl’s finger almost touches Vikar’s face. Perhaps there’s more urgency in the rescue this time, the hubbub of this house lending itself not so much to the woman’s gifts for casting spells. The mother carries Zazi through the sliding doors of the house out onto the deck, looking—as she did in Laurel Canyon—over her shoulder at Vikar.

  “Soledad Palladin,” Viking Man explains to Vikar later that afternoon.

  “I would never hurt a child,” says Vikar.

  “How did a three-year-old wander across Laurel Canyon Boulevard anyway? Who was Soledad fucking or what drug was she inhaling when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on her kid?” They sit on the deck watching everyone. “They’re really not a bad lot, vicar,” says Viking Man, “for a bunch of hippies and pussies and over-indulged bohemian brats. The guys all want to be the next John Ford and haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that I’m the next John Ford, and the only reason I’m the next John Ford is because I’m not the next Howard Hawks, who made the greatest movie of all time, Red River, with your Mr. Montgomery Clift. Of course Monty was a fairy. Are you a fairy, vicar?”

  “No,” says Vikar.

  “I wouldn’t want to offend you if you were.”

/>   “Thank you.”

  “You got to hand it to Monty. For a little fairy he near pulls it off, you almost accept in Red River he actually could hold his own in those fisticuffs at the end with John Wayne, when hard logic tells you it’s patently preposterous. He had presence, Clift did, there’s no taking that away from him. But I can’t be the next Howard Hawks because I could never make a musical or screwball comedy—I know my limits, vicar, you got to give me that. So I have to settle for being the next Ford, and there you have it in a scrotum sac: what all these other pussies would kill for, I’m just settling for. You can’t blame them for the profound disappointment, vicar. It must be damned disconcerting. The women all want to fuck me, that’s obvious, you can’t blame them for that either.” Looking at the women, Vikar isn’t so sure it’s obvious. “I’m too overpowering and, after me, where would they go? Marty? Paul?” He points to this guy and that. “Margie Ruth fucks Hitch because he’s writing her a horror movie, of all things.”

  “Margie Ruth?” says Vikar.

  “The crazy one with the tits,” the Viking gestures his cigar at the dark-haired woman. “My God, vicar. Imagine getting to fuck those tits for a horror movie. What would she let him do for a good movie? Hitch,” he points at the bearded man in the dapper safari jacket with the matinee smile, “he’s the one who wears the stupid jungle costume all the time—Mr. Big Game Hunter. I call him Hitch because he doesn’t want to be the next John Ford, he wants to be the next Alfred Hitchcock. He’s got Margie thinking she’s going to play Siamese twins in this movie of his,” he snorts, “Siamese twins, vicar! Will they be joined at the tits or have four of them?”

  “Are they all actresses?”

  “Who?”

  “The women.”

  “Well, sure,” he shrugs, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you, vicar. The guys want to be John Ford and the girls want to be Siamese twins in horror movies joined at the tits, that’s the difference. What else are they going to be, the next …” he waves his cigar, searching his brain, “… Donna Reed? What’s the point, vicar? That’s what I’m saying. These days you’ve got veteran actresses who once won Academy Awards playing gorillas from the future. It’s really not a business for broads. Used to be, of course. But it’s not like any of them is going to be the next Garbo—they’re not even going to be the next Ava Gardner. Janet over there,” he points to one, “had a glory-moment ten years ago, some arty movie about some retarded girl in love with some retarded boy—doesn’t that give you a hard-on, vicar? Isn’t that something you just have to see? It won some festival somewhere and she hasn’t done anything since. Margie was in a Gene Wilder movie a year or two ago, and Jenny, the blonde, is up for some dinky part or other in some movie or other because her dad just won a screenplay Oscar after being blacklisted most of the fifties—so the commies are making a comeback, God love ’em. Not all of them want to be actresses—Cass over there,” the large woman in a muumuu, “has nothing to do with the movies, she was in a singing group everyone in the world has heard of except you, probably, and made a fortune in the lifespan of a larva and is already washed up at the age of thirty, living in the next house over with Julia,” the petite woman with short cropped hair in jean shorts, “who doesn’t want to be Garbo or John Ford but the next Jack Warner or Harry Cohn and may just be evil enough to pull it off, now that I think about it. Now that I think about it, Julia’s the one who will show us all up, right before she uses the least of us, whoever that is—there’s about four candidates within a beer bottle’s throw—to pick the rest of us out of her teeth.”

  78.

  “As for Soledad,” says Viking Man, “where do you start? It’s one crazy story after another. No one is sure how old she is, anywhere between her early twenties and her early thirties, born in Seville to Andalusian gypsies or some damned thing that sounds just silly enough to be true. Legend has it her father is Buñuel illegitimately—if that’s so, then she’s at least three or four years older than she admits to since Franco ran Buñuel out of Spain in the late forties. She may not know for sure about her father any more than she knows for sure who’s the father of little Isadora—Zazi—there. Story has it Sol was dancing flamenco by the time she was eight. Story has it she was in a nuthouse for a while in Oslo, and story has it she was cast as the woman who vanishes on the island in L’Avventura and then was dropped at the last minute, for mysterious reasons no one ever has understood or explained. She did some soft-core in Italy or France, came to the States, what? six, seven years ago. Hung around the Strip making the circuit between Ciro’s and the Whisky—story has it she’s a witch and that on Venice Beach twenty miles down the sand here,” he points down the beach, “she gave Jim Morrison the blowjob of all time, channeled from the netherworld. She can be medusa or sweet as candy on pretty much a moment’s notice. It’s hard to know exactly what she feels about her daughter. For a while they were part of Zappa’s commune in the canyon, so of course the story’s gotten around that if Morrison isn’t Zazi’s dad, Zappa is, and if Sol knows, she’s not saying, and if she says, she’s only guessing. Neither seems likely. By all accounts Morrison can’t get it up most of the time and, other than just happening to share the same roof along with thirty other people, Zappa himself is actually a fairly straight arrow about such things, as I understand it. ‘Isadora,’ well, that’s a little elegant, hell, that’s practically blue-blood for a guy who names his kids Dweezil.”

  79.

  On his last night at the beach house, Vikar is trying to sleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs and has dreams of Soledad Palladin as Siamese twins, naked and joined not at the breasts but sometimes at the hip, sometimes at the shoulder, sometimes at the place between her legs. Beast needs beast, Soledad keeps whispering in a Spanish that Vikar somehow understands. When Vikar is shaken awake past midnight by one of the quake’s persistent aftershocks, he hears voices downstairs.

  Four or five of the group are still up talking. After a moment the voices take on some clarity; Vikar gets up from his bed. “—out of your mind,” he hears Viking Man, half with laughter and half in disbelief.

  “I’m telling you,” comes a woman’s soft voice.

  “One of the Manson Family?” says one of the other male voices.

  “He’s not one of fucking Manson Family,” answers Viking Man, as Vikar moves toward the bedroom door and the upstairs railing beyond. The woman downstairs says, with what Vikar now recognizes as a slight accent, “He was there in Laurel Canyon. I saw him.” The floor creaks beneath Vikar; downstairs someone says, “Shhh.”

  Vikar stops where he stands. There’s dead silence beyond the door, then someone whispers. After another pause Viking Man calls out, not too loudly, “Vicar?”

  Vikar doesn’t answer.

  “You awake, vicar?”

  80.

  Vikar doesn’t answer or move.

  There’s another pause. “He was in Laurel—” the woman starts again.

  “Everybody was in Laurel Canyon,” interrupts Viking Man, “everybody except, I would remind you, the Manson Family. They were in Benedict Canyon. Those longhairs you were living with had more to do with Manson than the vicar does. Odds are better, Sol, that you’re one of the Manson Family.”

  “He does seem a bit of a nut job, John,” suggests another male voice.

  “Oh yeah, and you don’t, Paul. The rest of us, we’re paragons of stability. Bobby here? He’s perfectly normal.” Viking Man snorts. “The vicar’s O.K. He works on sets over at Paramount, I met him through Dotty Langer. She—”

  “Is she still around?” someone asks.

  “I keep telling her,” Viking Man says, with what sounds to Vikar like the only uncertainty in the man’s voice he’s heard, “she’ll survive all of us, God love her. But I don’t know—”

  “The tattoo-head, John,” someone prompts.

  “Well, Dot worked on A Place in the Sun, you know, with Hornbeck. She thinks maybe she can get the vicar a job in production design … he stud
ied architecture somewhere back east …”

  “A set builder?” says a male voice—the one Viking Man calls Hitch—with a tone of scorn, and then another female voice that Vikar recognizes as Margie Ruth answers, “Fuck you, Brian—he makes himself useful. More than some people in this room can say.”

  “Take it easy, Margie,” Viking Man says, “Hitch here—”

  “Don’t call me that,” says Hitch.

  “—is above all that, with his Siamese-twin movie …”

  “Fuck you too, John,” says Margie.

  “I keep meaning to ask you,” Viking Man says, “these twins, are they joined at—”

  “John,” comes the prompt again. “The tattoo-head.”

  81.

  Viking Man says, “We’re driving out here a couple of days ago, day before yesterday or whenever it was—day of the quake—and we’re talking movies the whole way … this guy isn’t a cinéaste, he’s a cinéautistic.”

  “A what?”

  “Cinéautistic …”

  “It means he’s backward,” says Hitch.

  “Nonsense. I tell you he’s got a degree in architecture.”

  “So he says.”

  “O.K., let’s say he made it up,” says Viking Man. “Even just making up a degree in architecture, you can’t be that backward. No, I’m telling you it’s socially that he’s, uh … he barely knows who the Beatles are. He barely knows there’s a country called Vietnam let alone a war there. I don’t know if he was raised in a fucking monastery—he’s not into drugs and I’d make a wager of some significant amount the guy’s never been laid. But he’s nuts about movies, as obsessive as anyone I know, which in this house is saying a lot—”