Passing Through the Flame (12 page)

But when one of the hash pipes came back to the black man, he walked over to Star with it, executed the ghost of a bow, and placed it between her lips. For an instant, some senseless fear played across her face. The black man held a match over the little bowl of the brass pipe. Star sucked reflexively.

“How is she supposed to save
you?”
Horvath said in a cold, sarcastic voice.

“Hey man,” the black man said. “I don’t want anything from you people that you haven’t given me already. Except maybe to thank the lady for being on the planet. Is that cool?”

Star exhaled slowly, and as the smoke poured out of her mouth, tone came back to the muscles of her face, her back straightened, and that bright emerald glow returned to her eyes. When she handed the pipe back to the black man, her smile was radiant. She seemed transfigured, filled with herself again.

The black man held the pipe for Horvath. “I love you people,” he said. “You’ll never know how, but you were there when I needed you. I’d like to do that for you sometime, if I ever can.”

Horvath handed back the pipe, his expression softened. “Pass it on,” Star said. “Sometime someone will need you. Be there. That’s love, you pass through it, it passes through you. Ride it, and pass it on: you can’t pay it back, dig?”

“Dig.”

And the two of them walked slowly across the room, reinvigorated, transformed. Across the room and into an archway filled with hard, blinding flashes of light and blackness. Paul and Velva followed them through the strobe room. Star and Horvath, backs straight, personas glowing, strode side by side through the alternating flickers of light and darkness. The strobe effect stylized their movements into archetypes of themselves, turning reality into a movie of itself, giving their visual presence a mythic dimension.

Paul would’ve sold his soul for a camera as he watched them swim through the syncopated time stream of the strobe room, an uncanny, mystical effect born of the conjunction of their feeling of the moment with the magic of the strobe effect. Paul knew with despairing certainty that that magic moment
would
come across on film if only he had a camera in his hands with which to record it.

There was a strange floating moment of transition as they emerged from the flickering universe of the strobe room into the cool, aquariumlike world of the blue room—dark-blue rug, ice-colored walls, blue pneumatic furniture, suboceanic blue light.

An inspiration pierced Paul’s brain: a new form of filmic transition. You could strobe-wipe from one scene to another, using a three-cycle cutting. Old scene, black, new scene, black, old scene, black, new scene, black, new scene. You could show the two realities interpenetrating. Not a wipe, or a cut, or a fade. Something really new that would be easy as pie to do on a simple Moviola.

The people in the blue room were following their own private and subdued orbits. The albino black and the tiny woman in the sari were leaning together on a large cerulean balloon of a couch, whispering to each other. Four other couples sat together inhaling each other’s eyes, and ignoring everything else. One of these couples consisted of a wispy little man with curly blond hair and beard and an athletic-looking dark man in a tight-fitting black satin T-shirt and blue jeans. All cool and blue, musky and quiet.

Star and Horvath seemed to blend into this atmosphere, turn blue, and turn to each other, become another private snuggling couple. Paul felt like a meter reader in a nudist colony standing there with Velva, like a voyeur with his ectoplasmic camera in his hand. Out-of-It. It was like a dream he sometimes had of finding himself in the New York IND subway at rush hour without his pants. Everyone pretended not to notice so they wouldn’t ruin the take, but that made it only more embarrassing. And what was worse, standing there in a roomful of couples with Velva confronted Paul with the unpleasant reality of just how much of a couple they were
not
, with their essential separateness.

And then, moving in behind this quick one-two combination from the gods of taste and chance, Star abruptly turned and spoke to him: “Why are you following us around?”

She looked him full in the face as she said it. She was so staggeringly beautiful, and her eyes were so friendly, and she said it as if she were saying something like “Would you like a piece of chocolate?” Paul found that he had no way to react; he stood there with his face and mind hanging open.

“You’ve been following us around,” Star said, “and you probably think your reason is too weird to tell. Well, believe me, there’s nothing you can lay on me that’s weirder than what’s been laid on me already.”

She touched his hand ever so lightly; Horvath floated a half-step backward. Paul felt himself falling into what was almost a light trance state. The synaptic connections between his mind and his mouth had shorted out, and he found himself speaking his dialogue before he made it up.

“I’m not making a movie.”

And hearing the words form on his lips without prior scripting in his mind, he was confronted with the realization that all too often he
did
craft dialogue in his head and then deliver it like an actor, rather than speak spontaneously.

Star stood quietly before him, an expectation, a pool of calm, a presence drawing his depths up to the surface of his being.

“I’m a filmmaker, and I watched your waves as you walked through the party, and I wanted to be making a film of it, but I didn’t have a camera, so I shot the film without one. What the hell did I just say?”

“It sounds like you said you live your life like a movie you’re making,” Star said. “You record reality instead of living it. You step out of your own flow and watch. Too much of that and you lose your own center.” There was such sadness in her voice, such tenderness. And such truth.

“It’s very easy to get caught up in the trip you’re creating and then find you don’t know how to get out,” Horvath said with bitter authority in his voice.

Filmmaker’s canard, Paul thought. Make a movie, be a movie. One of the bummers of not being able to make straight features, where you can create a reality, record it, edit it, and leave it. You have to record what’s going on around your life for footage, and you start to experience everything as
material.
Which is sure as hell what I’ve been doing tonight. But on the other hand, without that compulsion to live on the interface between film and reality, your stuff would be lifeless and dead. Your life had to be the raw material of your art, you had to eat your own substance. But if you went too far, the only thing left of you would be the Cheshire cat’s smile.

“It’s the most dangerous game there is,” Star said.

“But it’s the only game in town,” said Paul.

Star sighed, then brushed Paul’s lips with her own, a soft, warm gesture that tingled his bones and made the skin of his face, the liquid of his eyes, smart pleasantly for a moment. How easy it would be to fall in love with her! And how unreal....

“Keep a bit of you for yourself,” she said. “You’re all that you’ve got. When you’ve used yourself up... when you’ve been eaten by the thing you think you want to be....” A shudder racked her body; pain danced across her eyes. Instinctively, Paul reached out to her, but she intercepted his hand with her own, squeezed it, and whatever had taken hold of her was gone.

“At least don’t get hung up in making a movie when you don’t even have a camera in your hands,” she said. She let go of his hand, nodded. It was good-bye. Horvath took her hand, and they walked out of the blue room into the corridor that fronted onto the big balcony.

Paul found himself standing there with a Velva who suddenly seemed a stranger, an intruder in the private universe boiling around his undigested and perhaps indigestible encounter with Star. With the real thing, whatever that thing might be.

“What was all that silly bull—”

“Please,” Paul said harshly. Then, more gently: “I feel kind of strange. Let’s go get some air.”

Velva’s expression softened. “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

Paul could only nod.

Velva smiled sympathetically, squeezed his hand. “I’ve been there,” she said. “The class president in high school, from the richest family in town, and a better ball than a sixteen-year-old could ever imagine. Well, he turned out to be the phoniest—”

“It’s not like that at all.”

“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. Either way, Paul, she’ll just screw up your brain. Don’t you know a Virgin Mary act when you see one?”

“A Virgin Mary who balls people who need it, or so the stories say?”

“Listen, you think there’s a guy in the world who wouldn’t be turned on by the idea of balling the Virgin Mary? A chick who knows that can really get off on playing the part, especially if she also gets off on screwing guys up. I could do it myself, but you gotta draw the line somewhere or you’re just some kind of awful slut.”

“But what if she’s the real thing?”

“Then I’d go down on her myself. But she isn’t, and I won’t. It’s all a cheap act. Couldn’t you
tell
how phony it was?”

Paul sighed in exasperation, knowing that what he had felt was not phony. It was
something
real, God only knows what. He realized that he had no firm memory of
why
Star had impressed him so profoundly or even exactly how she had done it. He only knew that he felt altered, more whole, more in contact with his own inner reality She had flipped him through a satori with a few words and a touch, and that was one thing nobody could ever fake!

“Let’s just go get some air,” he said. “Whatever happened is over anyway.”

Out on the balcony, the heady perfume of the Santa Ana roared through Paul’s brain like incense. The huge sweep of coruscating lights that was Los Angeles shimmering at the feet of the mountains whooshed on a subsonic level. The balcony was much more crowded now, a large perambulating party of its own. People promenaded about consciously unaware of the overwhelming image that dominated their visual universe, like the strollers he remembered from his childhood, crowding the Coney Island boardwalk on a warm summer night, awash in the rhythms and vibrations of the taken-for-granted sea.

Star leaned her back against the balcony railing, framing her body against the electric brilliance pulsing up from the lights of the city below. About a dozen people were clustered around her and Bill Horvath, basking in her sun. Despite himself, Paul moved to the periphery of this minicrowd. To observe. To make a conscious choice to observe, to be shooting a fantasy film and to be knowing it, to live in that moment fully aware of its parameters, and thus remain whole.

“—greatest thing I’ve seen since—”

“—every one of your records—”

“—perhaps the best thing I’ve ever been in—”

“—singing ‘Take This Body,’ the night we met. It brought us together and I’ve always—”

“—been in love with you for years—”

They babbled and gushed around her like puppies, moonstruck teen-agers, would-be disciples. They were eating her like a box of birthday candy, but without consuming her substance, for she was radiating more energy than they could devour. Her green eyes seemed to fluoresce like two jewels in the dark sky behind her head, lit as they were by the overwhelming light from below—a great chance piece of dramatic lighting on the part of fate. She just stood there silently, her body arched towards the little crowd, smiling absently, favoring them with an occasional nod. She simply allowed herself to be the blank focal point of the fantasies, longings, lusts, and memories that they projected onto her, and did it effortlessly, riding the wave of their emotional energy like a surfer, making its power her own.

And Bill Horvath stood quietly in her shadow, obscured in the curl of the wave.

Then Paul noticed a commotion moving along the balcony toward them: a change in the Brownian movement of the strollers, so that now people seemed to be clustered along the path of an invisible someone moving across the balcony toward Star. Someone who commanded attention, who brought an increase in noise level along with him as he approached, like the sonic-boom bow wave of an oncoming jet.

Then Paul saw the man himself. He was tall, with an enormous well-trimmed hedge of black hair. He wore a milk-white suit with brown suede piping, a matching brown suede ascot, and high alligator-skin boots into which his tapered pants legs were tucked. Two beautiful but very hard-looking women trailed a step behind him: a Caucasian with blond hair, and a black with a large afro. Both wore tight black leather blouses and pants decorated with rows and whirls of silver studs, and both wore high alligator-skin boots that matched the man’s.

Velva whispered in Paul’s ear, “That’s Jango Beck.”

Beck approached through the crowd, nodding, smiling, and talking to movie stars, dope dealers, directors, writers, bikers, studio executives, rock critics, assorted weirdos, pornographers, stars of the underground, and hippies. Or so they appeared through the lens of the phantom camera through which Paul’s eyes saw them. His face was sharply angular, but his skin was baby-soft. His manner was at once genial and ironic. A predator lurking behind your extravagant host? Or a shark with a heart of gold? It was impossible to tell which.

The two women trailed wordlessly behind, exchanging private glances, and little touches with each other, flinging occasional steely looks at the people around Beck.

“—Jango. When do you think you’ll be able to book them into the Den?—”

“—got to see you about some heavy business—”

“When the stars are right. I’ll cross your path again in an hour or so: and I’ll wear a red carnation in my lapel so you’ll recognize me, okay?”

“—more money to the Movement, turn some of that rip-off profit back to the people—”

“—up in Pacific Palisades next Tuesday night, a lot of important money people from the East Coast—”

“—about financing a movie, I’ve got a dynamite script and two or three top directors hot to do it—”

“—if you dig that kind of scene—”

“When the Movement shows me some style, it can ask me for money, I don’t back losing propositions. I’ve got a meeting Tuesday evening, but if you can stall them around till about nine, maybe I can make it. Financing anything with my own money is against my religion, I don’t even own the record company I own except via the fourth dimension. You’ve got yourself a fourth for Friday.” Jango Beck moved gracefully but rapidly through the crowd, talking to everyone at once, managing to keep on the move without ignoring anyone or cutting him off too sharply. The technique made Paul think of a handshaking politician or an Italian Renaissance prince dancing the razzle-dazzle with his scheming courtiers.