Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “What?”

  “The Music.” The clerk turns up the radio. There’s a song playing about a train to Marrakesh: “All aboard the train,” the singer sings. It’s horrible; they’ve forgotten A Place in the Sun for this? Vikar also suspects there’s something narcotics-related about the song.

  “Montgomery Clift’s ghost lives in this hotel,” Vikar says.

  “No,” the clerk answers, “that’s that D. W. guy.”

  “D. W.?”

  “It’s in the brochure. He died here or something, busted.” He adds, “I don’t mean busted like by the cops—I mean broke. His ghost rides up and down the elevators trying to figure out where to go.”

  “D. W. Griffith?”

  “I think that’s him,” the clerk nods, impressed, “yeah, D. W. Griffin.” He looks at the register. “Room 939 is available, that’s in the other corner at the other end of the hall, so it’s like Room 928 except backward.”

  “All right.”

  “By now,” the clerk shrugs, “they may have changed around all the numbers anyway.”

  “The ninth floor is probably still the ninth floor,” says Vikar.

  The clerk seems slightly stunned by this. “Yeah,” he allows, a sense of revelation sweeping over him, “the ninth floor is probably still the ninth floor.” In the register Vikar signs Ike Jerome, which is not an alias. No one, including himself, calls him Vikar yet. He pays cash; the clerk gives him the key and Vikar heads to the elevator. “That was heavy, man,” the clerk calls after him, “that thing about the ninth floor.”

  12.

  When Vikar steps in the elevator and pushes the button for the ninth floor, one by one all of the other floors light up too.

  At each floor, the door slides open. Vikar feels someone brushing past him, leaning out and peering just long enough to determine it’s the wrong floor, before continuing on to the next.

  13.

  Vikar can’t see the Chinese Theatre from the window of room 939, but he can see the Hollywood Hills and the Magic Castle above Franklin Avenue. Houses topple down the hills in adobe and high-tech, some rounded like space ships. Leaning far to the right and staring west toward Laurel Canyon Vikar could also see, if he looked for it, the speck of the house that he’ll live in nine years from now. The morning after his first night in the Roosevelt, he walks down the hallway and finds, as the clerk advised, room 928 at the other end, and peers in as the maid makes it up. From its window overlooking Orange Street, Montgomery Clift couldn’t see the Chinese Theatre either.

  14.

  That first night in the Roosevelt, Vikar has the same dream he always has after every movie he sees, the same dream he’s had since the first movie he ever saw. In his dream there’s a horizontal-shaped rock and someone lying on the rock very still. The side of the rock seems to open, beckoning to Vikar, like a door or chasm.

  15.

  Vikar stays at the Roosevelt three nights. When he checks out, he asks the clerk where Sunset Boulevard is. The clerk directs him south on Orange. “When you get to Sunset,” he says, “see if you can hitch a ride west.” He motions with his thumb. “That will be to your right, man.”

  “I know which direction is west.”

  “That’s where the Music is.”

  “Thank you,” Vikar says, leaving quickly, still inclined to lodge the desk bell in the clerk’s head.

  16.

  He sees phosphorescent cars and vans painted with Cinema-Scopic women with stars in their hair and legs apart and the cosmos coming out of the center of them, bearing travelers and starchildren. At Crescent Heights, Sunset winds down into the Strip’s gorge, and Vikar stands as if at the mouth of wonderland, gazing at Schwab’s Drugstore …

  … he knows the story about Lana Turner being discovered there isn’t true, but he also knows that Harold Arlen wrote “Over the Rainbow” there and that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a heart attack there. Vikar is unclear whether F. Scott Fitzgerald actually died there; he lived somewhere around the block. Actually, he’s unclear about F. Scott Fitzgerald, beyond the fact he was a writer whose work included The Women, starring Joan Crawford, although he didn’t get a screen credit.

  17.

  Across the street, on an island in the middle of the intersection, is a club called the Peppermint Lounge. Another kid with long hair points Vikar north, up the boulevard into the canyon. “Check it out,” he advises, staring at Vikar’s head, “about half way up you’ll come on this old fucked-up house where people crash.” The hippie adds, in a manner at once conspiratorial and breezy, “Lots of chicks up there who don’t wear anything, man.”

  18.

  An hour later, halfway up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, grand stone steps swirl into the trees, to a ruin a little like Gloria Swanson’s mansion in Sunset Boulevard. William Holden’s role in Sunset Boulevard was written for Montgomery Clift, who turned it down because he was afraid the character of a younger man kept by an older actress was too much like him; at the time Clift was seeing an older actress, one of the rare romantic relationships with a woman he had. Someone at the country store in the belly of the canyon tells Vikar the house is where Harry Houdini lived while trying to become a movie star in the twenties, making movies with titles like The Man From Beyond, Terror Island, The Grim … The Grim … The Grim what …?

  19.

  The only chick Vikar finds who doesn’t wear anything is three years old. Standing in the clearing of what was once the house’s great living room, she has dark curls and a preternatural gaze.

  She looks at Vikar, the pictures of the man and woman on his head, the tattooed teardrop beneath his left eye. She’s undecided whether to laugh or cry. A paternal distress at the vulnerability of the little girl standing alone before him sweeps through Vikar, and he feels a surge of rage at whoever could have abandoned her here. For a few minutes the man and girl study each other there under the cover of the canyon’s trees.

  “Zazi.”

  20.

  Vikar turns to look over his shoulder at the voice behind him.

  The most beautiful woman he’s ever seen off a movie screen calls to the little girl. With long auburn hair and a tiny perfect cleft in her chin, in the same gossamer dress that all of the young women in Los Angeles wear, she smiles at the tattooed man a cool, almost otherworldly smile he’s never seen, its source a secret amusement. At the same time, he’s relieved to sense in the woman the same concern for the girl’s safety that he feels. The woman’s eyes lock his; he smiles back. But she’s not smiling at him, rather she’s smiling at her power to enchant him—and it’s like a stab to his heart for him to realize that he is the reason for her concern, that she would believe for a moment he could hurt a child. When the woman’s eyes fix on his and she softly says the girl’s name again, it’s as if trying not to provoke a wild animal only feet away.

  “Zazi.” This time the young woman glides slowly to the middle of the ruins to take her daughter and back away from Vikar slowly, clutching the girl to her. Neither the woman nor the girl takes her eyes off him. The woman looks at Vikar a moment longer as if to make certain the spell will hold long enough to get the girl to safety.

  Then she turns and carries the child across the boulevard to a house on the opposite corner, the small girl watching Vikar over her mother’s shoulder.

  21.

  Like the wild animal the woman believed he was, Vikar stalks the grounds of the Houdini House in the dark, pounding on the walls, trying to remember. The Grim …?

  Houdini was related to one of the Three Stooges by marriage. I’ll bet I’m the only one in this Heretic City who knows that.

  22.

  Vikar later learns that the Houdini House has secret passages leading to all parts of the canyon, although he never finds one. The house across the boulevard on the corner, where the young woman took her daughter, once belonged to Tom Mix. Now it’s occupied by an extended family of hippies led by a musician with a Groucho Marx mustache. Hippies and musicians everywhere …


  23.

  … but something has happened, it’s become a ghost canyon.

  Above the ruins of the house, Vikar sees caves in the hillside. A fire burns in one and he makes his way to it, climbing through the trees. The cave has two entrances, forming a small tunnel. Inside the cave, a young couple huddles around the fire.

  24.

  Vikar stands in the mouth of the cave. The young man and woman look at Vikar, at his bald illustrated dome, and spring from the fire lurching for the cave’s other opening.

  Vikar watches them run off the hillside into the night air, then plummet the rest of the way down into the trees and the stone ruins of the house below.

  25.

  In the August heat, the lights of small houses in the canyon shimmer like stars while the stars in the sky hide in the light and smog of the city, as though outside has turned upside down.

  In the tattoo on Vikar’s head, Montgomery Clift looks away slightly. It’s as if he’s not only rapt with Elizabeth Taylor but hiding from everyone the face that would be so disfigured later upon smashing his Chevy into a tree, when it would be Taylor who first reached the site of the crash and held him in her arms.

  26.

  When Vikar wakes in the cave the next morning, the campfire is out. Standing in the cave’s mouth he looks out over the canyon; he sees houses and the small country store below, but not a soul. The canyon is abandoned and still. “Hello?” he calls to the trees.

  27.

  As the minutes pass, there’s not a sign of life for as far as he can see …

  … until in the distance, at the end of the canyon boulevard, a police car appears and then another behind it, and another, stealthily winding their way up through the hills, sirens silent but coming fast, determined in their approach.

  Vikar watches the police as they grow nearer. They stop below at the foot of the stone steps that lead up to the house, a dozen cops emptying from four cars and fanning out at Vikar’s feet …

  … then one looks up and spots him. Then they all stop to look. They draw their guns and charge the hillside.

  28.

  Below, the closest cop points his gun up at Vikar and tells him to raise his arms. In the mouth of the cave, overlooking the canyon, Vikar is too stunned to move. “Arms in the air!” the cop repeats. Other cops emerge from the trees at the foot of the hill, their guns also pointed. Vikar raises his arms. “Get on your knees!” says the first cop.

  “I have to pee,” Vikar says.

  The cop says, “Get. Down. On. Your. Fucking. Knees.” Vikar lowers himself to his knees. Looking around, he can see hippies come out of their houses all over the canyon to watch, he can see in the doorway of the house across the street the beautiful woman with the small girl. The cop tells Vikar to lie on his stomach and keep his arms away from his sides, then slide slowly down the hillside on his stomach.

  “Slowly?” Vikar says, apparently to no one as he comes hurtling down the mountain, face skimming dirt and rock all the way. When he finally stops at the base of the hill, one cop lands hard on Vikar’s back and another cuffs his hands behind him. Another tells him he’s under arrest and has the right to remain silent and to a lawyer. “Can I pee?” Vikar says as they shove him in the back of the patrol car.

  29.

  The Grim Game.

  30.

  At the police station they draw a sample of his blood. For three hours he waits in a holding cell before he’s brought to an interrogation room.

  This is for hitting that man with my food tray, he believes. Or perhaps for the others, the ones before Los Angeles. It’s the end of righteousness. But he decided long ago that if righteousness means no movies, he would rather be damned.

  Three white men and a black man and a white woman wait for Vikar in the interrogation room. All the men wear suits. A graying man, distinguished looking, like the chief of detectives in a movie, appears in charge. The woman, who never says anything, seems to be a kind of doctor.

  31.

  Vikar is seated at a table with the woman on the other side and the men standing around him. “Is Jerome,” the chief asks, “your first name or last?”

  “Someone asked me that before,” says Vikar.

  “Well, now I’m asking you,” the chief says.

  “It’s my last name.”

  “Ike is your first name?”

  “Someone asked that as well.”

  “Well, if you had some sort of identification, Mr. Jerome, like a driver’s license, we wouldn’t have to ask.”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  “Ike is short for …”

  Vikar shakes his head: It’s not short for anything. “It’s just Ike,” he says.

  “You say you’re from Ohio?”

  “It’s not short for anything,” Vikar says.

  “O.K.,” the chief says, “it’s not short for anything. Where in Ohio you from, Ike? Cincinnati?”

  “I didn’t say Ohio. I said Pennsylvania.” He knows I didn’t say Ohio.

  “How long you been in town?”

  They asked this before as well. “Four days. Five.”

  “Is it four or is it five?”

  “It depends.”

  “Not really, Ike. It’s either four or it’s five.”

  “No,” Vikar says, “it depends. Do you count the first day I got here as the first day, or after the first twenty-four hours—?”

  The good-looking movie-star chief brings the back of his hand crashing across the side of Vikar’s head, catching Elizabeth Taylor just under the chin. Vikar flies off his chair across the room and crumples against the wall.

  32.

  The chief comes over and kneels beside him. “Don’t be cute.”

  “I’m not,” Vikar says.

  “I think you’re being cute.”

  “No.”

  “What did you come to L.A. for?” says the chief.

  “I came to Hollywood.”

  “O.K., Ike. What did you come to Hollywood for? Score some weed? You have some sort of big transaction in the works?”

  “Weed?”

  “Our blood work shows you have marijuana in your system.”

  “That’s not true,” Vikar says calmly.

  “We know about you. We know about the scores up in the canyon.”

  “Scores?”

  “People are spooked in the canyon these days. Maybe you noticed.”

  “No.”

  “No more happy hippie wonderland since a few days ago.” The chief acts as though he’s pondering something. “About the time you came to town, now that I think of it,” as though thinking of it for the first time, but he’s not thinking of it for the first time, and Vikar realizes none of this is about any “weed” or “score.” The chief says, “What did you say you came to L.A. for?”

  “Hollywood.”

  “O.K.,” irritated, “Hollywood.”

  “To work in the movies.”

  “Are you an actor?”

  “No.”

  “What is it you do in the movies?”

  “I don’t do anything yet.” He adds, “I just got here. Four days ago. Or five.”

  “Let me show you something,” says the chief, “here, let me help you to your feet.”

  “It’s all right,” Vikar says.

  “No, let me help you.” The chief pulls Vikar to his feet and picks up the chair. Vikar sits again at the table. “Better, Ike?”

  Vikar nods.

  “Sorry I lost my temper there. I apologize.”

  Vikar looks at the others standing around.

  “Let me show you something,” says the movie-star chief, and one of the other men hands him an envelope.

  33.

  The chief opens the envelope and pulls out seven black-and-white photos and lays them out on the table.

  Vikar sees them for only a second, it’s all he can look. “Oh mother!” he screams, and topples from the chair as if struck again.

  The chief comes back
over to Vikar on the floor and, as before, kneels next to him. “This one,” he says, holding up one photo, “was the eight-month-old fetus cut out of this one,” holding up another photo with the other hand. Vikar turns away, sobbing. “Pretty much slaughtered, wouldn’t you say, Ike? Pretty much butchered. This last one,” the chief holds up the seventh photo, “this one of the writing on the door, this business about the pigs … what does it say?” he turns the photo around as though looking at it for the first time, but he’s not looking at it for the first time. “This one about the pigs. Written on the door of the house in the blood of,” waving one photo, “the mother of,” waving the other, “this one. Am I supposed to take it personally, Ike? Was this for me, this about the pigs?” but Vikar sobs, wishing he never had seen it.

  34.

  Five minutes later Vikar is still on the floor and the police are trying to get him to stop crying. “O.K.,” the chief says. “O.K., God damn it.”

  “Oh mother, oh mother …”

  “Stop it.” The chief hands the photos back to the black detective who gave them to him. Vikar begins to calm down. “You O.K.?”

  Vikar says nothing.

  “You O.K.?”

  Vikar shakes his head. The chief studies him, disappointed.

  The woman and the other men now leave the room, one by one. Vikar is still. “So,” the chief finally says, nodding at Vikar’s head, “what’s with the James Dean and Natalie Wood?”