Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “I’m certain you’re right.”

  “So you’re working in movies now?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “You didn’t work on The Shining, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You see The Shining?”

  “I don’t understand comedies.”

  “You’re getting vexatious on me again, right? Don’t answer, I don’t even want to know. That Shining movie scared the shit out of me. What have you seen lately? I mean besides the golden oldies like Casablanca.”

  “The Elephant Man.”

  “I don’t want to see any movie like that, man.”

  “I believe it’s a very good movie.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine entertainment. I’m sure it’s a mother-fucking peak in the topography of cinematic history, but I’m not seeing any movie like that. Hard enough being born a black man in this world without seeing movies about people born elephants.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “You see Scorsese’s new one?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, man,” says the burglar, who starts walking in circles there on the sidewalk as though the very thought has thrown him into a tailspin, “well, you got to see that one, that’s all I can say. It’s like Tosca wrote an opera about boxing or something. Check it out, what you got here is the confusion of white folks thinking they’re all civilized and shit—arias playing overhead—while the real white thang, which is beating the shit out of folks, by which I mean white folks reaching down into their souls for what they really are, you hear what I’m saying? compared to what they want to be? which is the ferocious animal thing De Niro is because that’s what white America needs, its raging bulls trying to keep the black panther down both in and out of the ring if you can feature that … anyway, what I’m getting at … uh … and De Niro! Watch out! He’s White American Death in our time, jack, until he gets the shit beat out of him by Sugar Ray, who’s a brother, of course … so you got the whole white terror of black power, you got that whole white American jive up against the anti-jive, white America just too fucking mixed up, can’t work out whether to embrace the myth or anti-myth—”

  Vikar says, “Are you going to rob us now?”

  “Uh.” The burglar stops his circling and ponders this. “Man, how much do you have on you? I’m not going to take your credit cards or anything like that.”

  “I don’t have any credit cards.” Vikar takes out his cash. “A hundred and thirty-eight dollars.”

  The burglar seems slightly anguished. “Maybe you could give me the thirty-eight? I’m pretty strapped, I—” He stops. “No, you know what? Fuck that. If you hadn’t let me go that night, my ass would have been on ice most of the last ten years.”

  “Take the hundred,” Vikar says.

  “No, son, can’t do it.” Vikar holds out the hundred; head raised, a slight tone of hurt in his voice, the burglar says, “You’re messing with my self-dignity now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, O.K.,” before Vikar can put the money away, “if you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “For a freaky white man, you’re O.K.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t use the gun around kids anymore.”

  “I’ll reexamine that policy,” the burglar agrees, although he doesn’t put the gun away. Rather he waves it goodbye to Vikar and Zazi before vanishing back into the shadows of the 405. “And kudos on that nomination, man.”

  130.

  Sometimes Vikar hears Zazi crying behind her closed bedroom door. He stands at the door ten, fifteen minutes, wondering what to do, before finally turning away.

  129.

  The panorama of the city below Vikar’s house is swallowed up by the inky cloud of his past, until there’s nothing left of the city that he came to more than ten years before. Shaken loose by a temporal tremor, the house drifts unmoored in the dark. Zazi comes and goes unpredictably; in her room she practices to records by the Doors, who never had a bass player and could have, she feels certain, used one.

  128.

  One afternoon Zazi says, “What’s this?” On the cork bulletin board next to the phone is tacked the original copy of the ancient writing from Vikar’s dream, as he copied it that night in Cannes.

  “It’s nothing,” he says.

  “It’s nothing?”

  “No.”

  She studies the writing. “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It means nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then it must mean something.”

  “No.”

  “Well, where did it come from? It must have come from somewhere. It’s tacked to the board.” She takes it down to look at it more closely. “Didn’t you tack it here?”

  He says, “Yes.” He puts out his hand. “Here.”

  She doesn’t give it to him. “Well, you wrote it and you tacked it up.”

  “Here.”

  “So it must mean something. Is it Latin or Greek or something?”

  “It’s from a dream.”

  “From a dream? You dreamed this?”

  “Here.”

  “You dreamed this and wrote it down and tacked it up?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Here,” and he snatches it from her hand violently enough to make her jump. He turns, stops for a moment but then continues down the stairs, wadding the paper in his hand.

  127.

  Hours later, Vikar comes upstairs to find Zazi sitting in the living room, watching television and smoking a cigarette. She says, “Do you mind if I watch this by myself?” He assumes she’s angry about earlier that day. “All right,” he says. Turning back, he sees A Place in the Sun on the TV.

  126.

  Now and then in the early morning when it’s still dark, Vikar wakes to the sound of Zazi’s guitar. The next morning when he gets up, she’s still sitting on the edge of her bed practicing. “Didn’t you sleep?” he says.

  “You know what’s weird about that movie?” Zazi says.

  “Which movie?”

  “That Place in the Sun movie.”

  “What?”

  She sets the guitar aside and leans back against the wall. “The truth is, I’ve never liked movies much. I think maybe because of Mom, I just never wanted to have anything to do with them. I’m into music.”

  “We don’t have to go to the movies.”

  “No, I wanted to because, you know, the earliest memory I have as a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guess.”

  “The Houdini House in Laurel Canyon.”

  “That house belonged to Houdini?”

  “Yes.”

  “Houdini the magician guy?”

  “He wasn’t living there then.” Vikar says, “When you saw me there.”

  “I can’t say it isn’t a bit hazy, but you were like a fantastical creature or something, from some story my Mom might have read to me. And I liked living there in the canyon with the Zappas and all those crazy people, though at the time, of course, I didn’t know they were crazy—they were nice to me. Whereas that movie crowd at the beach, they didn’t pay me any attention at all, which I didn’t mind so much, but still.” She shrugs. “So going to the movies with you is different. You know, like there’s a difference between a movie life and a Hollywood life, and the Hollywood life was what my Mom had, and the Hollywood ending that goes with it, I guess.”

  “Montgomery Clift’s life had a Hollywood ending as well.”

  “The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies—you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be different when you don’t watch it with anyone else. And that movie,” she says, “that’s
one fucked-up—”

  “Stop,” says Vikar.

  “—movie, but not in a completely bad way. That’s a movie you see alone and it gets into you—I’ve been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There’s nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply fucked up, yeah—”

  “Stop.”

  “—but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know? I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater—what are they going to do with a movie like that? There’s too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it’s just you alone. It just seems … radical, any movie that, like, demands your privacy, because it’s, you know … a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you’re one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can’t be naked like that with strangers, you can’t even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you’re finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs … so I just couldn’t sleep. That movie’s like a ghost. Watch it alone and you become the thing or person it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else’s. Not even yours, Vikar.” She says, “It may be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. It may almost be as great as the X album or ‘Aerosol Burns’ or Germfree Adolescents.”

  125.

  Vikar says, “Once Cassavetes told me about seeing A Place in the Sun when it came out. He hated it so much that he went back and saw it the next day and then every day for a week, until he realized he loved it.”

  “Who’s Cassavetes?”

  “He is to movies what the Sound is to music.”

  “Isn’t that weird when that happens?” says Zazi. “It’s like the first time I heard the second Pere Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit—and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn’t changed. The movie hasn’t changed. It’s still the same exact movie, but it’s like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn’t know you could understand, it’s like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off—but when you don’t, it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that’s been holding you down or back, because when you hear a really really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn’t before, everything looks different, like what they say when you’re in love or something—though I wouldn’t know—but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.”

  “Yes,” says Vikar, “someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”

  124.

  “Maybe not the absolute pinnacle of Hawks’ work,” Viking Man says, “that would be Red River, of course, but nonetheless a brilliant distillation of themes that Hawks understands to his core.”

  Vikar, Viking Man and Zazi are watching a Western on television one night.

  “In some ways,” Viking Man continues, “if Red River is his masterpiece, then Rio Bravo,” indicating the TV, “is Hawks at his most quintessential, although of all directors Hawks may most defy the very notion of quintessence, inspired renaissance man of film that he was. If nothing else, you might say this is existential in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile, practically Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals, and Hawks knew Hem of course, having directed To Have and Have Not. Dean Martin has always been completely underrated in this—this was around the time he was doing first-rate work in Some Came Running, The Young Lions … for a guy who cultivated, maybe a little too well, his image as a fuck-up … sorry, Zulu …”

  “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s bad language going on in this house,” says Zazi.

  “The opening scene, where Dino fishes the coin out of the spittoon, with all the piss and phlegm, is silent, you may have noticed, all action, everything expressed in action. Someone once called it a kind of American kabuki, and Angie Dickinson is the modern incarnation of the definitive Hawks woman.”

  Half an hour passes in silence, and it’s during a scene when John Wayne goes to visit Angie Dickinson up in her hotel room that Zazi says, “I hate to disturb the rapture with an emperor’s-new-clothes-like moment, but this really isn’t a very good movie.”

  For a moment Viking Man is speechless. “Zulu,” he finally gathers his wits to respond, “the genius of Rio Bravo is in its unprepossessing tone, the leisurely unfolding of familiar motifs in narrative and character interplay.”

  “Oh, is that it?” Zazi says. “I thought it was basically wankers on parade. A kind of, you know, pointless exercise in guyness. Really, don’t you have to have a dick to—”

  “Stop,” says Vikar.

  “—to even pretend this is a good movie? A testosterone level somewhere north of growing hair on your back?”

  “They learn young, don’t they, vicar?” Viking Man snarls. He gets up to leave. “The woman is fifteen years old—or,” he says to Zazi, “however old you are—and she’s already busting our balls.”

  “Perhaps this is one of those movies you hate now and you’ll wind up loving,” Vikar says to Zazi.

  “But that’s it, I don’t hate it. I don’t feel anything about it one way or the other. You know this isn’t A Place in the Sun, Vik. I mean, you said yourself,” she says to Viking Man, “that basically what makes this movie so fucking—”

  “Stop.”

  “—great is its comfort level. There is no comfort level in A Place in the Sun. No movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.”

  “Well,” Viking Man says, “you’ve wrecked it, Zulu.” He actually sounds annoyed. “You’ve gone and fucking wrecked Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. When did you turn into Pauline Fucking Kael? Remind me not to see Red River with you.”

  “Is it Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculine values and rituals?” says Zazi.

  “Montgomery Clift is in Red River,” says Vikar.

  “Then I might actually want to see it,” says Zazi.

  “Not with me,” says Viking Man, and storms out of the house.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” Zazi calls after him.

  123.

  Out at the car with the ever present surfboard, Viking Man says, “Ah, hell, she’s just a smart-ass teenager, vicar. I know that.”

  “She used to not like movies at all,” Vikar says. “Because of her mother.”

  Opening the door, Viking Man pauses for a moment before he says, “You’ve sort of dropped out of the world.”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess your Joan of Arc project is dead, huh?”

  “It wasn’t actually about Joan of Arc.” Vikar says, “Perhaps they’ve given it to another director.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I believed,” Vikar says, “perhaps they had given it to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Viking Man says, shocked. “First of all, I don’t want to direct a movie about Joan of Arc—”

  “It wasn’t actually about—”

  “—and second of all, Mitch Rondell hates me.”

  “He always called you the ‘madman.’”

  “But third, haven’t you heard? Aren’t you even reading the trades?”

  “No.”

  “UA’s gone under. Or been sold to someone, or something. Mirron is dead, Rondell is going over to CAA to be an agent. The movie business has bigger problems than you these days, vicar. That hermaphrodite cowboy up in Montana ran it all into the ground with his cowboy Gone With the Wind. Most expensive movie of all time and it was pulled after one screening in New York—just a colossal stink bomb in terms of money
and press. Of course it’s one of those things where everyone talks about what a shame it is when secretly they’re in the throes of joy. In principle I’m all for whatever anarchy can be wrought upon the studios, but the truth is UA was the best of them, Rondell notwithstanding, and in the long run something like this, well, it’s just not that great for movies in general. The hell of it? The hermaphrodite’s movie is really not bad. It’s rather good. Not forty-million-dollars-and-a-hundred-miles-of-film good—a hundred miles, vicar!—but good as a thing unto itself. No one can see that now, of course—all they see is all that money and a director who thought he was Erich Fucking von Stroheim. In twenty-five years, when Vincent Canby is an asterisk in film history, they’ll see the movie as a thing unto itself.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Fantasy heroes, vicar! Comic-book characters! That’s the movies now in a scrotum sac—glorified afternoon-serials and cute little robots. Who’s to say it’s right or wrong? Maybe this is the age we need new myths. I don’t know,” resignation creeping into his voice after the futile effort to hold it back, “once we all thought we were going to make grand movies. Me and Francis and Marty and Paul and Hal and Brian and the others, even George and Steven. But then George and Steven fucked it up, and it’s not that they’ve made bad movies, you could almost wrap your mind around that. It’s that they’ve made really good versions of bad movies, while the hermaphrodite cowboy went and made what everyone figures is a really bad version of a good movie, though what he really made is a pretty good version of a grand movie, which is the sort of ambiguity that confuses the fuck out of everyone, including me. Anyway this thing I’m doing now is my Alexander Turgenev, vicar, with a little Genghis Khan tossed in—we’ve got Max Von Sydow and James Earl Jones and a whole Nietzschean slant, and the main character is this barbarian-type in animal furs with horns on his head as played by this preposterous Austrian body-builder so muscle-bound he literally can’t hold the sword, but he is getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, rumor has it.”