Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  35.

  They leave him in the interrogation room—

  —but through the open door he can hear a couple of voices. “… couldn’t even look at the photos,” one of the voices sounds like the chief’s, “how could he have done that to those people?”

  “He’s a freak,” the other voice says.

  “That’s awfully astute, Barnes. But the city is full of freaks and by itself it doesn’t put him on Cielo Drive with five butchered bodies.”

  “I think I like them better when their hair’s down to their asses. Never thought I’d say that …” The voice lowers. “Chief, I can’t say this when Peters is around, but I’m telling you it’s the coloreds on this one.”

  “Don’t say that when Peters is around,” sternly.

  A pause. “Odd about the name thing. That he would lie about that, of all things—that business about ‘Ike’ not being short for …”

  “It doesn’t,” the chief interrupts, “put him up there in the canyon hacking up five people including a pregnant woman.”

  “Fucking Hollywood degenerates. Live freaky, die freaky.”

  “For God’s sakes, don’t go around saying that either.” Another pause. “You know when we located his father, he wouldn’t admit having a son.”

  “Well, chief, would you? What’s with the fucking head, that’s what I want to know. I like all the hair better, never thought I’d say it. The hair down to their asses. Live freaky, die freaky, I’m telling you.”

  36.

  Forty-five minutes later, a patrol car deposits Vikar at Hill and Third in downtown Los Angeles. “I’d stay out of those canyons if I were you,” one of the cops tells him. “There’s something going on up there.”

  “Tell the chief my father was right,” Vikar answers. “He doesn’t have a son.”

  37.

  That night Vikar slips into the Chinese Theatre through a back door and sleeps on the stage behind the screen. All night, images from the movie fly over him, as though he’s lying at the end of a runway, below an endless stream of jetliners landing.

  For four months after arriving in Los Angeles, he works as a handyman at the Roosevelt, riding the elevator with the ghost of D. W. Griffith, who died there twenty years earlier. On his days off, he walks the two miles down Vine to the edge of Hancock Park and the old Ravenswood apartments and the baroque El Royale where Mae West lives, and the orphanage where Norma Jean Baker once could see from her window, a half mile east on Melrose, Paramount Studios and its arched wrought-iron gates just beyond the fountain at Bronson Avenue. When he gets a job at the studio building sets, he rents a $120 second-story apartment on Pauline Boulevard, a secret street in the Hollywood Hills entered only on foot by a long flight of stone steps.

  38.

  Vikar sees an Italian movie in which a father’s bicycle, on which his job depends, is stolen. The father and his small son search the city for the stolen bicycle. When they don’t find it, in desperation the father steals another bicycle and is caught, threatened and humiliated by an angry mob. The father loves his son so much he’s willing to defy God’s laws for him. But for this transgression he’s punished and abased, and the boy learns that it’s a sin for fathers to love their sons too much.

  39.

  Vikar still had his hair when he was a twenty-year-old studying architecture at Mather Divinity and saw his first movie. Actually, having finally summoned the courage to defy his father, he saw his first two movies on the same day, back to back.

  One, about a London photographer who discovers a murder in a photo of what otherwise appears to be a serene park, made sense to Vikar like nothing else had. The second movie was about a family of sirens living in snowy mountains, pursued by police and leaving a trail of malevolent music. Some months after arriving in Los Angeles and after his own experience with the police, Vikar thinks of this movie when another singing family is arrested for the murders of five people, including a woman eight months pregnant, that took place in the canyons on Vikar’s first night in the city. Gazing at the ravines from the window of his apartment on the secret Pauline Boulevard, Vikar can’t shake, no matter how hard he tries, the movie’s refrain, going around in his head. The hills are alive, he shudders, with the sound of music.

  40.

  When Montgomery Clift was living at the Roosevelt Hotel in room 928, Ike Jerome was seven years old in eastern Pennsylvania. One night he heard come into his room his Calvinist father who allowed in the house no books except the Bible, no magazines, newspapers, radio or the then new invention of television. The little boy pretended to be asleep as his father knelt next to him in the dark.

  “Our God the Father,” the father whispered in the boy’s ear, “had one hour of weakness for which He has spent eternity paying, and that was the moment He stopped Abraham from proving to Him his true faith and devotion. Children are the manifestation of the sin that soiled the world with pleasure’s seed, and the Bible teaches us that sanctification lies in the deliverance of children from this life and from the sin of their birth and existence. Our God the Father learned His lesson. When He punished the Pharaoh for his pride and disobedience, did He smite the Pharaoh? No, shrewdly and without further weakness He smote the Pharaoh’s child, as He smote all the Egyptian children. Down through all the Book of Books He has smote the children until in the end he smote His own child, and had He not stopped Abraham in a moment of heedless mercy then perhaps our God the Father would not have had to kill His own child later. Remember that you are bound to transcend the sin of your childhood by finally setting aside the things of childhood for the things of manhood so that you might live down all your days of sin before delivering your soul to Him, unless by some fantastic glory the God our Father should decide to deliver you from this life now, while still in your wretched state of childishness, you … you …” breathing heavily, “you manifestation you, of all men’s sins.”

  “Wallace?” The voice of his mother in the doorway. Ike continued to feign sleep. There was a trembling in his mother’s voice he had never heard.

  “Go to bed,” his father said to her without turning from the boy.

  “Wallace.” Her voice more firm. This was a moment, though Ike didn’t realize it for years, when anything might have happened.

  “As all sons are marked by the destiny of righteous sacrifice,” the father hissed, “so all righteous fathers would be Abraham again, to guide our God the Father’s hand in His hour of weakness.”

  “Wallace,” his mother again, insistent in a way the boy hadn’t heard before, and wouldn’t again.

  41.

  At Paramount, Vikar works for a while on the set of a Vincente Minnelli musical about reincarnation. Then he works on an Otto Preminger movie about a burned woman who happens to be played by Vincente Minnelli’s daughter. He can’t believe his luck to be working on movies by Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger. But no one else seems impressed.

  In the evenings Vikar takes the bus to the Vista, the theater at the fork of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards where he saw his first movie upon arriving in Los Angeles. More than sixty years before, the Babylon set for D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was built on this spot, so monumental that it could be seen for miles around. Vikar catches revival screenings of Scarlet Street, Forty Guns, Humoresque with John Garfield as a concert violinist and Joan Crawford as the woman who loves him. In Written on the Wind, the Four Aces croon a love theme over a drunken Robert Stack careening his roadster through town, haunted by the conviction he’s sterile, as nymphomaniacal Dorothy Malone sits in a mansion stroking the small gold replica of an oil derrick.

  42.

  Vikar buys a small black-and-white television that he carries home on the bus. He even buys a radio. On the television he watches old movies and the news. Asian jungles aflame, a spaceship on the way to the moon malfunctioning, a very famous rock band breaking up … when four students are shot by soldiers on a Midwestern campus, it reminds Vikar of his father, and he turns the news off.
Amid the rest of the music on the radio, occasionally he hears something beautiful.

  Now I’m ready to feel your hand

  And lose my heart on the burning sand

  Now I want to be your dog

  He’s only been living in the Hollywood Hills six or seven weeks when one night around 12:30, as he’s in bed about to fall asleep, he hears the footsteps of someone on the stairs outside that lead to his door.

  43.

  Vikar gets up from bed, unplugs the radio, glides into the dark of the kitchen and waits behind the door.

  The knob turns slowly back and forth. From now on I should remember to lock the door. When the door opens and someone steps through it, Vikar smashes the radio on the intruder’s head.

  I like that song about the dog, he thinks, the unconscious burglar at his feet.

  44.

  Vikar ties the burglar to a chair and calls the police. He sits on the couch waiting, wondering if the movie-star chief will come. The black man with a large afro slumps in the chair.

  Still waiting twenty minutes later, Vikar turns on the television to a Bette Davis movie. Paul Henreid puts two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them both, handing one to Davis.

  45.

  The burglar comes to. He gazes around, disoriented; it’s a moment before he realizes he’s bound to a chair.

  “I called the police,” Vikar tells him. The burglar just grunts. “What are you breaking into my house for?”

  The burglar doesn’t answer at first. Vikar stares at his hair. The burglar finally says, “What are you staring at?”

  “Your hair.”

  “You’re staring at my hair?” the burglar says, nodding at Vikar’s head. “You want to see some strange shit maybe you should look in the mirror sometime.” He studies the ropes around his chest and squirms, grumbling to himself. “Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in the terrace scene from George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun tattooed on this white motherfucker’s head, and he’s staring at my hair.”

  46.

  Vikar sits up on the couch. “That’s right,” he says. “It is Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift from A Place in the Sun.”

  “Yeah, I know that, fool,” the burglar looks back at him, “isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Most people believe it’s Natalie Wood and James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause.”

  “Rebel Without a Cause?” the burglar says in disbelief. “Well, my fresco-crowned, tinsel-towned friend, you’re hanging with a distinctly uncultured class of folks if they don’t know James Dean from Montgomery Clift.” He settles in the chair and stares at the television.

  “He died five years ago,” Vikar says.

  “What?” says the burglar.

  “Montgomery Clift died five years ago.” It was seven months after Vikar saw his first movie. He read Clift’s obituary in the newspaper and saw A Place in the Sun at a revival house in Philadelphia, one of half a dozen people in the theater. “He was forty-five.”

  “Hmpf,” says the burglar.

  “I’m in the Movie Capital of the World,” Vikar says, “and nobody knows anything about the movies.”

  Fixed on the TV, the burglar mutters, “I’ll tell you one thing, Dean wasn’t in Clift’s class as any actor. I’ll tell you that.”

  “All anyone talks about in this city is music.”

  “Best thing that little fag did was smear that faggy little Porsche Spyder of his clean across the highway. But of course he went and stole all Clift’s thunder when he did that …” The burglar squirms more in the chair. “Clift was a homo too,” he allows, “he just didn’t have the good sense to die in his car accident. Fucked up his face—would have been better off dying.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “What?”

  “The music.”

  “White hippie bullshit.”

  “A lot of it is about illicit narcotics.”

  “I’m not into that hippie jive bullshit,” says the burglar. “Well, Sly is a hippie, but he’s a brother. ‘I Want to Take You Higher.’”

  “That sounds like it’s about illicit narcotics.”

  “Bebop man, myself. Bird, Mingus, Miles. In a Silent Way. Some of the old cats too. Ben Webster. Johnny Hodges.”

  “I heard a good song about a dog,” says Vikar. “Right before I smashed my radio on your head.”

  “I don’t want to hear about any song like that.”

  “Sorry about the rope. The police will be here soon.”

  The burglar shrugs. “No rush on my account.”

  “You weren’t going to kill me and write ‘pig’ on the door in my blood, were you?”

  “Are you being funny, jackass?” the burglar glares at Vikar. “Don’t you read the papers? That was some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks.”

  A silence falls between the two men as they wait for the police. For about ten minutes they watch Bette Davis on TV.

  47.

  The burglar says, “Here’s the scene. I love this part. The looks on their faces when she goes from being the frump to the fox. Or as foxy as Bette got, anyway.”

  “Now, Voyager,” says Vikar.

  “Yeah, I know it’s Now, Voyager, man. You think I don’t know that? The apotheosis of the forties studio system’s so-called ‘women’s picture’? Like I don’t know it’s Now, Voyager.”

  “I like the music in Now, Voyager. The music in Now, Voyager and the song about the dog.”

  “I told you I don’t want to hear about any song like that.”

  “John Garfield playing the violin when he walks into the sea in Humoresque, I like that as well.”

  “Joan Crawford walks into the sea in Humoresque,” says the bound burglar.

  Vikar says, “Are you sure?”

  “Course I’m sure.”

  “I saw it not long ago.”

  “Well, you didn’t see it very well.”

  “I believe it was Joan Garfield who walks into the sea. I mean John.”

  “You can’t even keep your Joans and Johns straight. Why would John Garfield walk into the sea? How is John Garfield going to play the violin if he walks into the sea? You ever seen anybody trying to play the violin while walking into the sea?”

  “He could. He could play the violin while walking into the sea.”

  “No, man,” the burglar shakes his head.

  Vikar says, “I guess I’m not sure, to be honest.”

  “It’s Joan Crawford who walks into the sea, take my word for it.”

  48.

  Watching more of Now, Voyager, the burglar continues, “Garfield’s violin parts in Humoresque were by Isaac Stern, though Franz Waxman did the score.” The burglar nods at the TV. “The music for Now, Voyager here is by Max Steiner. Waxman and Steiner were both of the German/Austrian persuasion but Waxman came over right before the War while Steiner was here earlier. Waxman also scored your Place in the Sun,” nodding at Vikar’s head, “copped himself an Oscar for it, while Steiner composed the music for that racist Gone With the Wind jive. Maybe if Steiner had Hitler on his ass like Waxman, he’d have had a different outlook on things.”

  “I don’t believe Gone With the Wind is a very good movie.”

  “So aren’t you enlightened,” the burglar says. He lapses into silence. “Bette didn’t dig it one bit,” he says after a moment.

  “Gone With the Wind?”

  “Steiner’s score for Now, Voyager. She actually bitched to Jack Warner it was upstaging her performance.”

  “Really?”

  “Tried to get the music dropped, that’s a stone fact.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, you’re hearing it, aren’t you? So they must have used it, right? Got to be the only time in the history of the movies that one of the biggest stars of all time lost a creative power struggle to the composer,” the burglar laughs. “Steiner wound up getting his Oscar for it, while Bette lost hers that year to Greer G
arson—so that must have really fried Bette’s ass. It’s a complete Puccini rip but that’s the thing about the movies. If the music was just a little better, it wouldn’t be as good, you hear what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  “I mean that’s the whole thing about the movies,” says the burglar. “Bigger than the sum of the parts and all that? If the parts are too good, the whole is somehow less. I mean, you can’t have, you know, Trane doing the score for Now, Voyager.”

  “Trane.”

  “I mean, if he had been around then, which of course he wasn’t. But if he was, what would Coltrane sound like on Now, Voyager? Wouldn’t be the same, would have been too good. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “What movies did he score?”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know Trane. What did he score?”

  The burglar stares at Vikar evenly. “You’re trying to vex me now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you got me tied up here and shit, but that’s cold, trying to vex me that way.”

  “I’m not trying to vex you.”

  “Man,” the burglar closes his eyes, wincing, “what did you say you hit me with?”

  “My radio.” Vikar says, “Your hair probably saved your life.”

  “Don’t start in on the hair, O.K.?” The burglar tries to shake his thoughts clear. Turning his attention back to the TV, he says, “Now, Voyager was directed by Irving Rapper after Bette got Michael Curtiz thrown off, so dig it,” he laughs, “she could kick Curtiz’s ass but not Max Steiner’s. Course, next picture Curtiz did was Casablanca, so he didn’t do too badly. Rapper here did Glass Menagerie later and has a new movie out right now.”