Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “Ali,” the director says to the actress, “the line is ‘not ever.’”

  “What?” says the actress.

  “You said ‘never’. The line is ‘not ever.’ ‘Love means not ever.’ Let’s try it again.”

  “Quiet on the set!”

  Silence, then the cameras begin rolling again. “Jenny, I’m sorry,” the actor says.

  “Don’t,” she answers, “love means never—”

  “Cut.”

  The actress glares down the street past her leading man. She becomes less bewitching to Vikar. “I don’t believe they’re very good,” he whispers with some concern to Dotty, who’s smoking again. Viking Man next to her smiles broadly at the spectacle. “Make-up!” calls the A.D.

  “He’s a TV soap-opera star,” Dotty explains, “who got the part after five other actors turned it down. She’s a fashion model who’s sucking the new head of production’s cock until his eyes roll so far back in his head they would be looking at his brains if he had any.”

  “Can we get make-up on Ryan?” the A.D. calls. After a couple of minutes, filming begins again. “I forgot my key,” says the actress.

  “Jenny, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t. Love means never having—”

  “Cut.”

  “What the fuck’s it matter!” the actress explodes. “Who cares whether it’s ‘not ever’ or ‘never’! Doesn’t ‘never’ mean ‘not ever’? It’s a shit line anyway!”

  Viking Man guffaws and people turn to look.

  “I don’t even understand the fucking line!” says the actress. “Where’s Bob?” looking around.

  “Bob’s the new head of production,” Dotty says to Vikar.

  “I want to talk to Bob!” the actress demands.

  “Bob needs to fuck this broad in the ass a few times,” Viking Man chortles loudly. Now everyone turns to look.

  “John has a charming perspective,” Dotty tells Vikar. “He thinks Vietnam is a good idea, too.” She says to Viking Man, “Louder, John. I’m not sure Evans can hear you on the other side of the lot.”

  “Too much cowgirl for this broad,” Viking Man announces merrily, “not enough ass-fucking to put her in her place.”

  “Jesus,” Dotty moans, covering her face.

  “Hey, what do I care?” Viking Man shrugs happily. “I don’t work for this dinosaur,” waving his cigar at the studio. “What junk.”

  “Come on,” Dotty says to the two men, turning toward the trailer.

  “Pork her one in that tight little Wellesley ass,” Viking Man advises the multitude. “She’ll get the line right.”

  59.

  Inside the trailer Dotty turns to Viking Man and says, “Speaking of dinosaurs, I would like to keep this job. I don’t know how many more I’m going to have.” Behind her on a worktable is a moviola.

  “God love you, Dot,” snorts Viking Man, “you’ll be here when the rest of us are long gone.”

  “I worked on a Vincente Minnelli movie and an Otto Preminger movie,” Vikar says.

  Dotty and the Viking regard him for a moment. “Minnelli’s a fairy,” Viking Man finally answers, “and Preminger is a Nazi.”

  “I would think,” Dotty says, “that puts him right in your pantheon, John, but actually Preminger’s a Jew. Can you please go away now? Go shoot someone, as long as it’s not me or someone who might hire me in the foreseeable future.” She says to Vikar, “The man has an arsenal.”

  “Not a Stevens man, myself,” Viking Man indicates the tattoo on Vikar’s head, “Shane’s, a little rarefied for me. Dot here can tell you about that one.”

  “I didn’t work on Shane,” Dotty says. “They thought a woman wouldn’t know anything about a picture like that. I came back for Giant.”

  “I’m more a Huston/Hawks/Ford/Walsh/Kurosawa man,” Viking Man continues.

  “If the screen grew balls and a penis, that would be John’s idea of the ultimate cinematic experience,” says Dotty.

  “But I appreciate the concept,” Viking Man says, still looking at Vikar’s head.

  “He senses in you untapped reserves of psychosis. It makes him all moist.”

  “Dot here will give you my number. Do you surf?”

  “No,” says Vikar.

  “I’ve got some friends who live out at the beach. Actors, writers, directors—God love them, they’re pinkos and hippies, but they’re O.K. They’ll dig the Liz/Monty trip,” pointing at the tattoo, “if it doesn’t freak them out.”

  “Do they listen to horrible music all the time like everyone else in Hollywood?”

  “A couple of the girls are into music,” Viking Man says at the trailer door, “but the guys pretty much live, breathe, eat and shit movies. See ya, Dot. So long, vicar.”

  Dotty and Vikar look at each other after he leaves. “At least he cares about movies,” Vikar says.

  “If he didn’t,” she says, “he’d be a whack job, all surfing and guns.”

  “I tell people I’ve worked for Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger,” Vikar exclaims, “and nobody cares.”

  60.

  “Well, listen.” Dot lights a cigarette and lowers herself slowly in a chair by the moviola. Next to the moviola is a Jack Daniels bottle. “You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM—all of which will be owned by companies that have nothing to do with pictures—who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather—which means we’re talking Dawn of Man here—feel gripped by a kind of cultural dementia. When my mother was in her last years, in her mid-eighties, she would wake at four in the morning and look out the window and wonder why it was so dark at four in the afternoon. The reasoning process by which you realize it can’t be four in the afternoon but has to be four in the morning had broken down. That’s what’s going on with these gentlemen. Minnelli musicals about past lives or whatever that thing was? Here at this studio we’ve brought in a gigolo to head production and the best we have going for us outside that door is a trite romance with two no-talents who don’t know how to say their lines, and a second-rate Mob picture written by a hoodlum and an egomaniac practically just out of film school. And in these groovy times, who’s going to see those?”

  61.

  Vikar says, “I’ve missed my chance.”

  “Maybe you have,” says Dotty, “or maybe this is your chance and you’re not paying attention, or your chance hasn’t come yet and you should start getting ready for it. I’m not saying forget about Vincente and Otto—you obviously know enough about pictures to know you can still learn from those guys, which is more than the punk who made that biker picture will ever figure out. I’m just saying don’t expect those names to have the magic for most people they have for you. John’s crowd,” she nods at the trailer door where Viking Man just left, “will get it—writing this thing for Huston, he’s as gaga as you are in his own way—but nobody else will. What do you want to do in pictures? I assume not build sets for the rest of your life.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s different. Did you go to school?”

  “I was an architect.”

  “Really.” She says, “Maybe we can get you into production design.”

  “You edited A Place in the Sun,” Vikar says, looking at the moviola behind her.

  “I worked with Billy Hornbeck who edited it. We won the Academy Award. A few years ago they kicked Billy upstairs over at Universal where they’re about to give up altogether and concentrate on television. Now
he’s one of those old men who can’t figure out why it’s dark at four in the afternoon.”

  “I had a television,” Vikar says. “It was stolen.”

  Dotty puffs her cigarette. “Did it exactly leave a gaping hole in your life?” Vikar coughs from the smoke; Dotty puts out the cigarette and waves the smoke in the air. “I have to go back out there now,” she says, “and face the music for letting John on the set. What an asshole.” She pulls from the editing table a scrap of paper and writes on it, then rises from the chair, suddenly seeming even older. She hands the scrap to Vikar. “I don’t always hang around a picture I’m cutting, there’s not really a need unless it’s a massive production on a tight schedule and we have to cut as we go along. But when I know making anything decent of it is going to be impossible, I get this crazy idea that being on the set and seeing dailies will give me some hint how to go about it. You would think I’d be disabused of that notion by now.” She nods at the phone number in Vikar’s hand. “You might give John a call. He is an interesting guy and knows some interesting people.”

  62.

  At the Vista Theater, Vikar sees a black-and-white Japanese gangster movie about a contract killer hired by a mysterious woman to carry out a hit. As the gunman is about to dispatch his target, a butterfly lands on the barrel of the rifle and diverts his aim, resulting in the murder of an innocent bystander. It’s also the first movie Vikar has seen that shows people having sex. “We are beasts,” the woman moans in the Japanese movie. “Beast needs beast.” Vikar leaves the theater with the most unforgiving erection he’s ever had. He waits in the shadows of the lobby for sundown and catches a bus.

  63.

  On the bus, the erection doesn’t go away. A pretty girl gets on a few stops after Vikar, and then at the next stop a Latino mother with a small child, and when the bus reaches Vikar’s stop and he still has the erection, he’s too embarrassed to rise from his seat, so he goes on riding …

  64.

  … into the night—

  —west on Hollywood Boulevard and then cutting down La Brea to Sunset, turning right. The mother and child get off and then the pretty girl, but Vikar continues on until he’s the only one on the bus and he can see the driver watching him in the rear-view mirror. By the time the bus reaches the Strip, Vikar’s erection is finally gone. The driver still stares at him in the rear-view mirror.

  65.

  The bus winds past the Continental Hyatt where rock musicians throw pianos off the top floor, toward Tower Records and the Whisky-a-Go-Go. The Strip is a corridor of glimmering broadcasts from other times, each corner set on a different channel: intergalactic geisha houses and flophouse chateaux, Persian flying saucers and supersonic English Tudors. When Vikar departs the bus, the blue-deco Sunset Tower looms above him; he looks up at it awhile because he happens to know George Stevens lives there. Vikar crosses the street and waits until a bus arrives, heading east to take him back into Hollywood. When he gets on, it’s the same bus with the same driver.

  66.

  It’s only after several attempts that Vikar gets an answer. “Oh yeah, the vicar!” the voice booms on the other end of the telephone. “George Stevens man! Never was a Stevens man. A bit of a pussy Western, Shane, if you don’t mind my saying so.” They plan to see a foreign movie about Algiers that Viking Man already has seen four times, but on the appointed day he doesn’t show.

  Two weeks later, at a minute past six in the morning, almost eighteen months to the day since arriving in Los Angeles, Vikar is thrown from his bed by a terrific jolt. He believes a bomb has gone off. The bedroom bends to a new geometry; beyond the windows is the flashing of electrical wires collapsing. Vikar can hear in the kitchen a tremendous crash of dishes flying from their cupboards, and the light he leaves on in the kitchen at night, ever since the burglar broke in, goes out.

  67.

  Among the rubble flung from shelves and cupboards, Vikar searches for only one thing until he finds it: the small model of the church with no door, with a crowned lion holding a gold axe on the steeple, and a blank movie screen inside where an altar should be. One of its walls is slightly folded, but otherwise the model survives intact.

  Outside Vikar’s apartment, people slowly emerge from their houses to survey the aftermath. After a while Vikar makes his way gingerly down the outer stairs that are no longer aligned. He’s standing on the lawn watching everything when a Volkswagen pulls up, a surfboard on top. The window on the passenger side rolls down. “Vicar!” a voice calls out.

  Vikar strolls into the street and peers into the car.

  Viking Man’s hair is wet and crusted with salt. “My God,” he says, cigar between his teeth, “I was out in the ocean, water like glass, and there was this …” he thinks a moment, “… shift, like someone had pulled the plug at the bottom. And I look up, vicar, and there’s the grandest wave I’ve ever seen. Hop in,” he says.

  “I have to work today,” Vikar says.

  “Vicar,” Viking Man explains patiently, taking the cigar from his mouth, “nobody’s working today. We’ve just had the biggest fucking earthquake in forty years. Get in the car. I need to stop at my place first, if you don’t mind.”

  68.

  In Viking Man’s apartment, a large closet he’s made into a movie library is strewn with reels of film. The reels have unspooled into a sargasso of celluloid; a projector stares from the end of the closet. Outside is the sound of sirens. Viking Man assesses the destruction calmly; he flicks a switch by the door but no light comes on. “I would say let’s watch a movie,” he continues flicking the switch, “but we don’t seem to have power.”

  “Maybe we don’t like the same movies anyway,” says Vikar.

  “Vicar,” Viking Man says, “there’s five hundred movies here. If there’s not one we both like, one of us is the Antichrist.”

  69.

  Back in the Volkswagen, Viking Man cuts up to Sunset Boulevard which is still dead, until they hit Crescent Heights where traffic becomes more congested with every passing minute. He turns the Bug up Laurel Canyon and now traffic is heavy, particularly coming down the canyon from the other side; they pass the Houdini House where Vikar spent his first night after leaving the Roosevelt Hotel. A fallen eucalyptus partially blocks the boulevard. Brazenly, Viking Man scoots his Beetle around it. At Mulholland Drive, police are turning traffic back; just as brazenly, Viking Man zigzags left and heads west along Mulholland until he finds a place to stop in a vacant patch of dirt overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

  70.

  The Valley looks like the crater made by a dead star. On the car radio is continuous news about the quake. At one point the broadcaster announces plans to evacuate the Valley west of the 405 freeway, due to a ruptured dam in the north.

  “Get this, vicar,” Viking Man exclaims. “They’re saying an eight-foot wave is going to come roaring through that ravine up there—” he points to the Santa Clarita Pass on the other side of the Valley, “—at a hundred miles an hour. Can you fathom that?” He can hardly contain his excitement.

  “Are we all right here?” says Vikar.

  “Hey, I’m ready,” Viking Man smiles, reaching out his window and slapping the surfboard on top. “I’ll just hop my board and you can roll up the windows and float to Redondo Beach.”

  “You’re making a joke,” Vikar finally says.

  Viking Man looks at him. “Yes, vicar, I’m making a joke,” he says quietly. “Eight feet, a hundred miles an hour, it’s still not going to reach Mulholland Drive. But it will be righteously holocaustic if it happens,” he says wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give for a tab of acid right now. This may be as close to the Bomb as we ever get.”

  Vikar studies the scene.

  “You know, vicar,” Viking Man says, tossing away his half-devoured cigar, “for some reason I feel like maybe you and you alone would understand this, but God loves two things and that’s the Movies and the Bomb. Of all the monuments we’ve made to God over the last five thousand yea
rs, have there been any that so nearly communicate our awe of Him? Have there been any that so nearly approximate His majesty? With the Movies and the Bomb, we’ve offered gifts that are worthy of Him.”

  “God hates children.”

  For a moment Viking Man is too lost in his reverie to have heard, but then he turns to the other man. “Can’t say I ever thought of it that way, vicar.”

  “God is always killing children in the Bible or threatening to,” says Vikar. “He kills His own child.”

  Viking Man nods slowly. “That’s a hell of an observation,” he says. “Listen, vicar, can you hand me something from the glove compartment?”

  Vikar opens the glove compartment. There are maps and an old note pad and pen. There’s also a small package of something wrapped in foil.

  “Hand me that small bit of tin foil there, will you?” says Viking Man.

  Vikar takes the foil from the glove compartment. Under the maps is a gun. “There’s a gun,” says Vikar.

  “Smith & Wesson .38. Go ahead and hold it if you want.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Good for you, vicar,” Viking Man says, unfolding the foil and carefully beginning to roll a joint in his lap, “it’s not a damned toy. Schrader already would have shot one of us by now, the stupid son of a bitch.” He lights it and draws in the smoke and offers it to Vikar.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Good for you again. It’s a hippie pinko indulgence, basically fit for fairies with flowers for cocks and spade musicians, for some of whom I have an extraordinarily high regard, I should add. But some sort of mind alteration is called for in these circumstances, and in lieu of the lysergic sacrament or a bottle of half-decent Cuervo, this will have to do.”