Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  164.

  Later he’ll tell himself it’s for Dotty, but he doesn’t really believe that. Deep in the bowels of the Paramount archives one afternoon he sees it, there on a shelf like this week’s disposable magazine: place in the sun / stevens scrawled on the edge of the canister; and he stands looking at it a long time as if deciding whether to steal it rather than how. But really he’s deciding how.

  If they hadn’t fired Dotty, I wouldn’t, but he knows he would and feels no guilt. He also knows he cherishes this movie more than its owners ever could. Finally he simply carries the cans out of the building under his arm in broad daylight, making no attempt to hide them; when no one stops or questions him, the theft is only validated. Back in his apartment on Pauline Boulevard, he makes a shrine for it.

  165.

  Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman is next. As the pirated movie collection grows, the shrine grows; soon it’s filled a wall. I’m going to need more walls.

  166.

  He goes to the Fox Venice one night to see an Antonioni double bill. In the first film, a group of vacationers visits an island where one of them vanishes; the woman is never found, and by the end of the movie she is all but forgotten. In the second film, the private eye from Chinatown has become a foreign correspondent who changes places with a dead man, leaving in his wake a successful career and an estranged wife. So really the second half of the double bill solves the mystery of the first, and of the vanished woman on the island, who clearly also has exchanged places with someone. Vikar knows she has become Soledad Palladin, who was originally supposed to play the part. By the end of the double bill the foreign correspondent has assumed not only the dead man’s itinerary but his destiny, and a growing hush falls over not just these movies but all movies—the hush of looming cataclysm, the slow pan of the camera across an empty town square outside a hotel room, where a body lies.

  167.

  Vikar returns to Jayne Mansfield’s headstone at Hollywood Memorial one night and lies on the headstone waiting for her. But she doesn’t come.

  168.

  After three projects as an assistant editor, Vikar hasn’t worked for eight months when he gets a phone call.

  “Mr. Jerome?” The voice on the other line is pleasant and self-assured. “Mitch Rondell with United Artists in New York. How are you?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I’m wondering if we can fly you back here to discuss a project. It would be on our dime, of course.”

  “When?” says Vikar.

  “I don’t mean to be pushy, but as soon as possible. This afternoon or, if that’s not feasible, tomorrow.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “I would rather talk about it in person. It’s pressing and a little delicate.”

  “It doesn’t take thirteen hours, does it?”

  “To New York?”

  “The last plane I flew took thirteen hours.”

  “You must have gone farther than New York.”

  “Spain.”

  “That’s farther than New York. Have you ever been to New York?”

  “No. I’ve been to Philadelphia.”

  “Well, that’s close to New York. It didn’t take you thirteen hours to fly to Philadelphia, did it?”

  “I took a bus from Philadelphia. That took longer than thirteen hours.”

  “I would think so. Can I have my assistant call you back in twenty minutes or so to make the arrangements?”

  “Someone will need to drive me to the airport.”

  “Of course. Someone will be waiting for you at JFK as well, and bring you to a hotel here in the city, probably the Sherry-Netherland, and we’ll take things from there. Everything will be handled on our end.”

  “Thank you.”

  “See you in the next day or two, Mr. Jerome.”

  “You may call me Vikar. With a k.”

  “You can call me Mitch with an M,” although Vikar can’t imagine how else he would spell it.

  169.

  The sign the driver holds the next evening when Vikar arrives at JFK doesn’t say “Vikar” by any spelling, but MR. JEROME. The car takes Vikar to his hotel; he has a small suite overlooking the park.

  The next morning Vikar is driven to the company offices at Forty-Ninth and Seventh. It’s the worst neighborhood he’s ever seen; a porn theater is across the street. He’s wandering the building’s twelfth floor, lost, when someone says, “Vikar Jerome?”

  “Yes,” Vikar says.

  “Your head precedes you,” the man laughs. He looks like one of the actors in Carnal Knowledge, who also was half of a singing duo Vikar once saw on television, with the same blond brillo hair except thinning. “I’m Mitch.”

  “Hello.” Vikar shakes his hand.

  “How was your flight?”

  “All right, thank you.”

  “Not thirteen hours.”

  “No.” Vikar says, “I know New York is closer than Spain.”

  “How is the hotel?”

  “It’s nice. Thank you.”

  “Have you had lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go have lunch.”

  170.

  The two walk along Forty-Ninth to a restaurant called Vesuvio’s, where Rondell has a salad and Vikar orders a pizza.

  “Let me get right to why I called you,” says Rondell, his voice dropping. He looks around. “For some time we’ve been in production on a picture called Your Pale Blue Eyes. Have you heard of it?”

  “Yes,” Vikar says.

  “I’m afraid,” Rondell sighs, “many people have heard of it, and have heard all the wrong things.” He glances around him again. “The company is going through an interesting period, Vikar. On the one hand, we’ve won the last two consecutive Oscars for best picture. I would love to say it’s part of a grand plan but of course you know better. Cuckoo’s Nest was kicking around ten years—and a B-picture about a boxer shot in four weeks for a million bucks, starring and written by somebody whose biggest credit was The Lords of Flatbush? On the other hand, the moneymen in San Francisco are making changes, everything is moving west, and soon there probably won’t be any New York office—which, I grant you, if you saw the neighborhood as you were driving in, maybe isn’t such a terrible thing. There’s serious talk that the guy who’s been running the company thirty years is on his way out to start another company. None of which any reasonable movie fan cares about, I know, but that’s the back story. How’s that pizza?”

  “It’s very good pizza.”

  “Now we have this picture. A very New York picture, which made it seem right for us, budgeted at five million. Well, it’s going to cost ten if we’re lucky, likelier twelve-plus. Ridiculous that this picture should cost that, and if we could turn back the clock and pull the plug on the whole thing, we would, but we can’t. Two days ago, the day I called you, the director quit. Do you know who I’m talking about? Don’t say his name if you do, not here, anyway.”

  “He made the movie about the Devil.”

  “Right.”

  “Splendor in the Grass is better.”

  Rondell appears slightly befuddled but says, “That’s probably true.”

  “It’s all right,” Vikar assures him. “Sometimes I vex people.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you told me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “In a lot of ways, we’re not sorry to see him go. Certainly none of the crew is sorry to see him go. The original D.P. couldn’t work with him and quit, and none of the major talent we wanted will work with him either. Now he’s walked off and we’ve had to bring up the second-unit director to finish the picture—it’s just a situation that we have to make work for us. They’re trying to wrap on a soundstage in Queens as we speak.”

  “Is that close?”

  “Forty minutes by car.”

  “Closer than Spain, then.” Vikar says, “I’m being wry.”

  “Closer than Spain,” Rondell laughs.
“None of this I’ve told you has gotten out so far in the press; but of course such discretion won’t last long. It probably won’t last another day. The phone calls from Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and the L.A. Times will start pouring in,” he looks at his watch, “about five minutes ago.”

  “Five minutes ago?” Vikar asks, confused.

  “It’s an expression. We’ll have DGA arbitration and, until the Guild sorts it out, this picture is officially directed by nobody. This is why we needed to see you quickly. We’re unofficially scheduled to screen at Cannes in seven months, and while the rational thing might be to pull out, if we do that then between the official undirector and the unofficial withdrawal of the unofficial Cannes selection, what we wind up with is a very official disaster. How is Dotty Langer, by the way?”

  It takes Vikar a moment to answer. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

  “She worked on that picture, right?”

  “What?”

  “That picture,” Rondell says, his eyes cast slightly upward.

  “Oh.” Vikar touches his head. “I forget it’s up there.”

  “I imagine people remind you.”

  “Yes.”

  “The truth is that if we can get away with it, we would rather go with someone a bit under the radar than some powerhouse editor who will attract attention—I mean,” he laughs a bit, “a different kind of attention than you attract. Please don’t be offended if I say this may prove to be out of your depth, assuming you take it on. But whether you realize it, and I know you haven’t been in the business long, you’re developing something of a reputation for coming into troubled projects and sorting things out.”

  “I’ve only done it two or three times.”

  “We understand that. We also understand that this project requires more than just sorting out. This will be the biggest thing you’ve done—it’s not some madman in the south of Spain who thinks he’s making Lawrence of Arabia—and I hope I don’t offend you again if I say that in the long run we may wind up bringing in that powerhouse editor after all, who may wind up doing no better than you. This is not a reflection of any lack of confidence in you. It’s a lack of confidence in the circumstances.”

  “I’m not offended.”

  “Most of the time we feel like we don’t know what this picture is. We don’t know if it’s a thriller or an art film or—”

  “Perhaps it’s a thrilling art film. I’m being wry again.”

  “We’ll settle for a thrilling art film at this point,” says Rondell. “We’ll settle for salvaging the situation, forget any sort of actual success.”

  “Is there a rough yet?”

  “Someone’s assembling one now.”

  “I hope not too much footage is being cut. I would like to see it.”

  “I appreciate that. Do you appreciate, in turn, that time is of the essence?”

  “Yes.” Vikar says, “You need the movie in the can if the movie is going to be in the Cannes.” He laughs.

  “Six months from now we need something as close to an answer print as possible. An actual booking print would be a dream.”

  “All right.”

  “What about terms?”

  “Terms?”

  “We’ll more than match whatever you’re making now for whatever you’re working on.”

  “I’m not working on anything. I’m probably not supposed to say that, am I?”

  “I’ll pretend you’re being wry again. Let us know what you made on your last job and we’ll increase it twenty-five percent, if that’s acceptable. How’s the room at the Sherry?”

  “It’s nice.”

  “We keep it for situations like this. Maybe not lavish, but a month from now you won’t feel like the walls are closing in on you, either. Can you be comfortable there for a while?”

  “Yes. There’s something else.”

  171.

  Rondell says, “What’s that?”

  “Old movies.”

  “Old movies?”

  “I collect old movies.” Vikar believes it sounds better to say he collects them than that he steals them. “Prints of old movies. Can I get prints of old movies you’ve made?”

  “Are there any you have in mind?”

  “I wouldn’t sell them or anything. I would keep them for myself.”

  “It would depend on what you have in mind. You know, Broken Blossoms, probably not.”

  “Not that old. The private-eye one at the beach,” he says, “The Long Goodbye. Is that yours?”

  “Yes, that’s ours. I might be able to get you that.”

  “Kiss Me Deadly. Sweet Smell of Success. Those are yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Especially The Long Goodbye.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  172.

  He’s in New York through the end of the fall, into winter. The winter reminds him of Pennsylvania, bitter mornings rising in his room back at Mather Divinity. As when he was in Madrid, for a while he doesn’t go out into the city, beyond shuttling between the hotel at Fifty-Ninth and Fifth and the editing room at Forty-Ninth and Seventh, where he works nine, eleven, sometimes fourteen hours a day.

  173.

  Then one Sunday, the cold breaks and he leaves his suite and walks out into the city. He believes he’s going to cross the street over to the park; instead he turns south, down Fifth past the Empire State Building all the way to Union Square, cutting down Broadway to the Bowery. The afternoon passes and he wanders along St. Marks Place; there aren’t any hippie buckaroos or even many space-age drag queens. People wear motorcycle jackets and jeans with holes in the knees and T-shirts with pictures of Captain America, and Mickey Mouse doing something strange to Minnie, and the words I KILL MOONIES. What are Moonies? Some wear rings in unusual parts of their bodies, and their wrists are wrapped from suicides attempted or postured or postponed.

  At one point, Vikar and a girl on the street with cropped, dyed-black hair stop and stare at each other, she at Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, he at the words on her chest. GABBA GABBA HEY, says her shirt. “Hey, man,” she calls to someone across the street, “check this out.” It’s difficult to know who finds the other more mystifying. As these people are nothing like he’s seen, he is nothing like they’ve seen; and then, as dark falls, he hears something for which—he realizes in retrospect—he’s been listening for years.

  174.

  It’s not just a music, rather it’s the Sound, the real Music everyone has tried to tell him over the years that all the other music was when it wasn’t.

  Vikar is standing on the Bowery outside what seems to be a tunnel cut into a bunker. The sidewalk is crowded with more kids like he saw on St. Marks Place, as well as old people sleeping under newspapers and drunks stumbling through the crowd asking for money. A dirty barefooted woman shivers under a yellow awning in nothing but the paper-thin gown that patients wear in hospitals.

  The address on the awning is 315. There are nonsensical letters on the awning that spell nothing. A mystifying handwritten cardboard sign on the black glass doors says

  HEARTBREAKERS

  MAXXI MARASCHINO

  SIC FUCKS

  SHIRTS

  and while nothing about this is comprehensible to him, the illicitly narcotic Sound is irresistible and he goes inside, the doorman eying him with wonder.

  175.

  Inside, the club isn’t much bigger than Vikar’s hotel suite. There are two stages, the main one in front, a smaller and lower one off to the side. There’s a pool table and a couple of pinball machines. The walls are peeling and needles litter the shadows and wafting clouds of urine collide with clouds of beer. The Sound, made by the band on the main stage, is overwhelming; people at the front fling themselves wildly into each other. Something wells up in Vikar. There’s a break, then a singer who reminds him of Brigitte Bardot or Tuesday Weld.

  176.

  It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there�
��s no way for him to understand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now because, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god—or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.

  177.

  Vikar returns to the club the next night and the next, and the next five after that. There’s never a moment when he says God I hate this music before he admits God I love this Sound. By his third night, when he steps over the woman in the hospital gown sleeping in the doorway and walks into the club, everyone turns to look and in the din he catches stray fragments of buzz, “He’s here …” and people part before him. When the audience begins its tribal smash-ups, the thing in him wells up and he lurches into the crowd, slamming into everything and everyone, toppling over the edge of the stage. He feels people’s hands on Liz and Monty. Later behind the club, a feline Asian named Tanya and her “slave” Damitra take turns putting him in their mouths, and as he leans back against the wall he can feel the vibration, like the vibration he felt when he went to the silent-movie theater one night on Fairfax, and Chauncey played the organ to the ride of the Klan in The Birth of a Nation. Returning to the editing room in the mornings he glows with a bruised blue, and the secretaries and assistants regard him even more strangely than usual.