Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  Vikar says, “The director of Now, Voyager has a movie out now?”

  “In theaters as we speak.”

  “He must be a hundred years old.”

  “Well, he’s not a hundred, but he’s up there.”

  “What is the movie he has out now?”

  “The Christine Jorgensen Story.”

  “Who?”

  “The Christine Jorgensen Story.”

  “Who’s Christine Jorgensen?”

  “Christine Jorgensen is Christine Jorgensen.”

  “Is that a real person?”

  “Course it’s a real person. It’s The Christine Jorgensen Story. Have you ever heard of The So-and-So Story that wasn’t about a real person?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No, not perhaps,” the burglar says in exasperation, “you’ve got some peculiar notions, even for a white boy. If it’s got The at the beginning and Story at the end, then it’s a real person. Is The Adventures of Robin Hood called The Robin Hood Story? Is Gone With the Wind called The Scarlett ‘White Racist Bitch’ O’Hara Story?”

  “So who’s Christine Jorgensen?”

  “Cat who became a lady, jack.”

  “What?”

  “This cat who became a lady.”

  Vikar says grimly, “You mean one of those men who wears women’s clothes.”

  “No, son. I mean one of those men who becomes a woman.”

  Vikar’s mind races frantically. “What do you mean becomes a woman?”

  “I mean he gets his dick cut off. I can’t explain the whole thing surgically—”

  “Oh, mother.”

  “—it’s sort of out of my area of expertise. But they cut off the dick and balls and—”

  “Oh, mother!”

  The burglar shrugs. “—just tuck the rest up inside. Make a pussy out of it somehow …”

  “Stop.”

  “I’m just trying to expl—”

  Vikar leaps from the couch. “Stop.”

  49.

  He looms over the bound man. Alarm flickers across the burglar’s eyes.

  “Yeah, solid, man,” the burglar says as calmly as possible, “we’re cool.” Vikar sways where he stands. “I’m just trying to update you,” the other man says, as calmly as possible, “on the oeuvre of our boy Irving Rapper here, who directed Now, Voyager which, with all due allowances to Humoresque, may or may not be the apotheosis of the forties ‘women’s picture.’”

  Vikar relaxes a bit.

  “We’re mellow now, right?” the other man says. Vikar sits back down on the couch. For a moment they don’t say anything. “Dig it,” the burglar finally goes on, “Rapper’s last movie before The Christine Jorgensen Story was about Pontius Pilate. So Rapper’s tripping on some extremely intense weirdness or maybe those are just the gigs he’s getting.”

  “Was it called The Pontius Pilate Story?”

  “No, it wasn’t called The Pontius Pilate Story. I didn’t mean every story about a true person is called that.”

  “Pontius Pilate was the great Child killer, the descendent of Abraham as God’s greatest instrument.”

  “Uh,” the burglar says, “O.K.” He watches the movie for a while.

  Vikar says, “Why would that man do that?”

  “What?”

  “Make himself into a woman.”

  “Now, do we want to have this conversation or not?”

  “I just wonder why.”

  “Cause a bit ago you had some volatile shit going on. So are we going to have this conversation? Because if we are, you have to decide.”

  “Just why. Not how.”

  “Check it out,” the burglar wearily shakes his head, “who would you rather be,” to Now, Voyager on the TV, “Bette Davis or Paul Henreid?”

  “Paul Henreid,” Vikar answers.

  “No, man, negatory. You wouldn’t. I don’t believe you. Not a cat as seriously into the cinematic aesthetic as yourself. I’m not talking about real life or faggy shit here, I’m talking about the movies. Dig it, Paul Henreid not only lights Bette’s cigarette, he gets it going for her too.” The burglar laughs. “The movies, man! Shit that would be downright silly in real life, in the movies it’s the most out of sight thing ever. Lighting two cigarettes at once! For years after, women were always stopping Henreid in the street asking him to do that. No, man, if you were in Now, Voyager, you definitely would rather be Bette Davis.”

  “Paul Henreid is in Casablanca.”

  “Exactly! Exactly my God damned point! In Casablanca Paul Henreid, he’s leading the whole Resistance against all those white Nazi motherfuckers, he’s got the whole café singing the Marseillaise and shit, he’s like the noblest stone-righteous cat in the place—and you still would rather be Humphrey Bogart. Check it out,” nodding at Henreid on the TV, “Paul Henreid is the most whipped man in the history of movies, jack! Pussy whipped and he’s not even getting the pussy! Cause I can assure you positively that Bette is not letting him bang her, he’s lucky if he gets to lick her.” He laughs at the TV, stomping one foot on the floor. “All whip and no pussy for you, Paul!”

  “That’s why that man became a woman?” says Vikar.

  “I’m just making an empirical observation,” the burglar sighs, “that in Now, Voyager, anyone would rather be Bette Davis, and some people out there,” he says, “maybe they don’t know life isn’t a movie, they don’t know about playing the hand you’re dealt.”

  “Perhaps he became a woman so he can walk into the sea with John Garfield playing the violin in the background.”

  “There you go! Right on! Now you got it. He wanted to walk into the sea with the violin playing and you got to be a lady for that shit to be glamorous. Can’t do it as a man, even if you’re wearing a dress, without it being too pathetic. Especially if you’re wearing a dress.” They hear an approaching siren in the night and stop talking, but then it fades into the distance. Now, Voyager reaches the end and Max Steiner’s music swells. In unison, Vikar, the burglar and Bette Davis say, “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

  50.

  Vikar wakes with a start on the couch. “… check it out,” he hears a voice, “some wicked shit on the tube tonight.”

  Vikar’s prisoner is still tied to the chair, watching the TV.

  “My Darling Clementine,” the burglar is saying. Vikar realizes he’s fallen asleep, and that in his sleep he’s been hearing the other man’s voice as though there’s been no pause in the conversation, as though the burglar has been talking the entire time. Vikar tries to clear his head and wipes his eyes. “John Ford’s greatest movie,” says the bound man, “now I know what you’re going to say …”

  It’s four in the morning, hours since Vikar called the police.

  “… Stagecoach. Right? The Searchers. Well,” the burglar continues, “Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn’t aged well—”

  “Uh.”

  “—though no one wants to cop to it, while The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist honky pigfucker though he may be. I mean he may be a racist pigfucker, but he’s bad in The Searchers, no getting around it.”

  “Bad?”

  “I can see I need to choose my words more carefully,” says the burglar. “I mean Duke gives a performance of terrifying intensity and sublime psychological complexity, whether by intent or just natural fucked-up white American mojo. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on—Ford, he couldn’t direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they’re all versions of the same fox, or as William Demarest puts it down in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, ‘Positively the same dame!’” The burglar stomps his foot and laughs, pleased with himself. “I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings. But now
My Darling Clementine here, it’s practically noir Western, all moody and shit, Ford’s first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn’t in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk-Irish jive-ass mood. Check out my man Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and, dig it, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday and, dig it again, Walter Brennan as Pa Clanton! I don’t mean no Grandpa McCoy from TV, I mean in My Darling Clementine Walter Brennan is one stone fucked-up killer, you hear what I’m saying? ‘When you pull a gun, kill a man!’ Damn! My Darling Clementine, it’s got the inherent mythic resonance of the Western form but in terms post-War white folks understood, figuring they were all worldlier and more sophisticated than before the War. Ford’s creation of the archetypal West, laying out codes of conduct that folks either honored or betrayed—and I’m just trying to give the motherfucker due credit, not even holding against him, not too much anyway, the fact that he played a Klansman in that jive Birth of a Nation bullshit—anyway Ford’s view of the West was so complete by this point that Hawks, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, they could only add to it, you hear what I’m saying? But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking 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 your 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 … what are you doing?”

  Vikar unties him from the chair. “Don’t break into my place again,” he says.

  The burglar looks almost hurt, but he stands from the chair slowly, a bit painfully, and arches his back and rubs his wrists. “O.K., man,” he answers quietly, “solid.”

  “I’m sorry about your head,” Vikar says.

  The burglar’s eyes return to the movie. “It’s cool. Occupational hazard. Hey, uh,” there’s a slight pleading in his voice, “can I just see the rest of this?”

  “Well.” Exhausted, Vikar is due on the Paramount lot in five hours.

  “There’s this scene coming up where Henry Fonda is having a drink in the saloon and,” the burglar starts laughing again, “he says to the saloon keeper, ‘Mac, you ever been in love?’ and Mac answers, ‘No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.’ Oh man!” the burglar slaps his thigh.

  “I’m tired,” says Vikar.

  “I’ve been a bartender all my life!”

  “I—”

  “Hey, go ahead and get some sleep. It’s been a long night.”

  Vikar looks at the room around him.

  “Hey,” the burglar says, “on my honor as a foot solder in the armed struggle against the white oppressor, I’m not touching anything. Go ahead and get some sleep. I just want to see the end of My Darling Clementine. What do you say.”

  Vikar returns to the couch. In his sleep, he hears sirens again. When he wakes two hours later to daylight coming through the window, the other man is gone and so is the television.

  51.

  In Vikar’s dream, the horizontal rock, open and gaping, draws him in, while lying across the top of the rock is someone unknown yet utterly known, awaiting a judgment. The bright night of the dream is always dazzled by an unseen full moon, in the light of which Vikar can, with every passing recurrence, read across the top of the rock something carved in a glowing white, ancient language.

  52.

  After seeing his first film, Vikar forsook divinity school for cinema. He was transfixed by the sight of a beautiful nude woman painted entirely gold; her body was discovered by the spy who seduced and thereby doomed her. It was difficult for Vikar to be certain just how bad the spy felt about this. In another movie, a private eye fell in love with the blonde he was hired to follow. The blonde was haunted by past lives and the memory of once having committed suicide by flinging herself from an Old California mission steeple; when she described the steeple, the private eye recognized it, and told her she had seen it not in any past life but this one. But it was the private eye who didn’t know the truth, a truth he could never suspect.

  53.

  As his graduating thesis at Mather, Vikar designed the model of a small church. He woke one morning seeing the church perfectly in his mind. He saw the church’s unusual steeple and its carving of a crowned lion holding a gold axe, with which a beautiful nude woman might be struck and turned to gold herself. Vikar’s vision of this church was so perfectly realized in his mind that he worried it was something he had seen and forgotten, as though in a past life.

  When the review committee became angry at Vikar’s presentation, at first the architecture student believed it was for some sacrilege having to do with the crowned lion and its golden sacrificial axe. In fact the committee chairman’s fury had nothing to do with the lion or axe but with the fact that the small model church had no door. “There’s no way in!” the chairman thundered, and even as the years passed, by the time Vikar got to Los Angeles he couldn’t be sure whether leaving out the door had been inadvertent: “I believe,” Vikar had answered in all innocence, “it’s more that there’s no way out.”

  54.

  For a moment Vikar thought that, in his fury, the committee chairman might hurl the model to the floor and shatter it.

  If he had, the committee would have seen that where an altar should be was a tiny blank movie screen, blank because the image that belonged there was from the movie of his dreams, the scene of the mysterious figure lying on the horizontal rock.

  55.

  That was the night Vikar shaved his head. The tattoos would come later, at a bus stop on the outskirts of Las Vegas, on the road to Hollywood.

  56.

  After finishing a Jack Lemmon comedy, Vikar is assigned by Paramount to a love story about a rich boy and a poor girl. At the end of the movie, the girl dies. “It’s like A Place in the Sun except reversed,” Vikar whispers one afternoon on the set to a tiny older woman who has about her the smell of bourbon. “In A Place in the Sun, he’s poor and she’s rich and he dies at the end.”

  “You look stupid and rich,” the actress says to the actor in the scene that’s shooting.

  “Well,” the actor answers, “what if I’m smart and poor?”

  The older woman next to Vikar smokes a cigarette and looks at him dead-eyed. “Yes, it’s like A Place in the Sun,” she whispers back, “except she,” pointing at the actress, “isn’t Liz Taylor and he,” pointing at the actor, “isn’t Monty Clift and,” glancing at the director on the other side of the set and dropping her voice even lower, “no disrespect to poor Arthur, but he’s definitely not Mr. Stevens.”

  “I’m smart and poor,” says the actress.

  “Well, what makes you so smart?” says the actor.

  “Mr. Stevens?” says Vikar.

  The actress answers, “I wouldn’t go out for coffee with you, that’s what.”

  “Well,” says the actor, “what if I wasn’t going to ask you to go out with me?”

  “Well, that’s what makes you stupid.”

  On the other side of the set, the director calls for a cut. The woman next to Vikar rolls her eyes. “Still think it’s like A Place in the Sun?” she says to Vikar.

  57.

  Vikar says, “You knew George Stevens.”

  “He’s still with us, you know,” the woman says. “He’s not past-tense yet.” She puts out her cigarette on the arm of a stranded chair. “Saw him about eight months ago over at Fox, as a matter of fact, making another picture with Liz. Monty,” she says, “Monty’s not still with us, of course. It’s Warren in the new one. Liz will survive all her men,” then, thinking a moment, “except maybe Warren.” She reaches her hand out to Vika
r. “Dotty Langer,” she says, and as they shake hands she reaches up and gently rubs Vikar’s bald head like the little old mother she appears to be, before walking off to a nearby trailer and closing the door.

  58.

  For a week Vikar watches Dotty Langer go in and out of the trailer during and after each day’s shoot. The next time they talk, an exterior street scene which Vikar helped build is being shot with the same actor and actress. The actor has so little presence it seems to Vikar as though at any moment he’ll disappear into thin air. Vikar is more captivated by the actress, whose brown eyes remind him of a faun.

  Dotty stands by the door of her trailer talking to a burly black-bearded man. In red bermuda shorts and an unbuttoned white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he smokes a cigar; his Volkswagen bug is parked in the distance with a surfboard on top. When they finally walk over, Dotty says to Vikar, “Place in the Sun, meet Red River.”

  “What do you say, vicar,” the bearded man laughs, sticking out his hand. Vikar has no idea why the man calls him this; he’s never been called it before. “Viking Man,” the bearded man introduces himself.

  Dotty rolls her eyes. “The ‘Viking Man’ here is writing a Western for Huston over at Warners.”

  “Quiet on the set!” someone yells.

  “Quiet!” someone else yells. The set goes quiet. “Action,” calls the director.

  “I forgot my key,” says the actress.

  “Jenny,” answers the actor, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t. Love means never having—”

  “Cut,” calls the director. He consults with the A.D. in the chair next to him, who consults with the script supervisor in the chair next to him. “You’re writing a movie for John Huston?” Vikar says to the black-bearded man.