THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (2 page)

Loveless shook his head, “Yeah,
and all of this is academic. You can find any of this on Wikipedia without
leaving your bedroom.”

I took a deep breath. “Then
there’s what happened to me.”

Loveless smiled without realizing
he was smiling and leaned over the table. Cold conjecture was going to have him
heading for the door. Theorizing wasn’t going to get him to open up.
Commonality would. I would have to join the
brotherhood of the damned.
The fraternity of the truly fucked. Become his blood brother. Knowing that I
had shared a somewhat similar experience was going to open the door. If the
door was going to be opened at all. It was what Loveless was looking for.

At that moment, the shrew
returned with two cups of burnt java. “Your coffee,” she announced as if we
were blind. The woman took out a pad to take our orders. “What will you have?”

“Coffee,” Loveless said coldly.
He noticed there was no silverware on the table. “Can we have a couple of
spoons?”

The waitress took two poorly
washed, water stained spoons out of her apron and deposited them on the table
harshly. Apparently, she didn’t like Loveless’ attitude. That made them even.
Loveless picked up his spoon and looked at it. “I guess the boiling coffee will
sterilize it.”

The waitress walked away
abruptly.

“Better not order anything to eat
now. She’ll probably fart on it,” Loveless said.

“Not to worry. I just lost my
appetite,” I retorted honestly after inadvertently visualizing the witch
waitress performing such a wondrous task.

I spent the next twenty-five
minutes relating my own brush with the macabre in extreme detail to Loveless.
This mattered. I don’t talk about this incident much. Actually, not at all.
Ever. Frankly, because it is too unbelievable for even my conspiracy junky
Internet audience. Plus, there was a strong likelihood I would be locked up in
a padded cell and given a very strait jacket. Lastly, as long as I didn’t talk
about it,
they
were satisfied to leave me alone. They believed my
Internet site and upcoming college radio talk show worked in their favor. They
fed the public ridiculous disinformation like the World Trade Center attack was
the result of Hollywood computer-generated special effects. This preposterous
theory made all the less extreme theories look slightly ridiculous as well in
comparison. This type of misinformation inevitably ended up on my site too.
There was no denying that. They were counting on me not to be able to tell the
difference. To run around on wild goose chases.

Recently, they had even launched
a smear campaign against me that was impossible to trace back to them. Almost
impossible. I started receiving anonymous messages on my site calling me the
Freak King. Kind of an anti-branding campaign based on my last name Freidkin.
It back-fired on my detractors though, when devotees of my site took it up as a
rallying battle- cry. THE FREAK KING! Enough so, that the producers of my
upcoming radio show want it included in the name of my show. I’m not sure how I
feel about the nickname. But then again, I guess, like it or not, for better or
worse, that’s what I have become: King to all the freaks in the freak kingdom.
God bless Hunter S. Thompson, may he rest in peace in gonzo heaven. It must
piss my enemies off to no end, that they created me. Kind of like the Joker
creating Batman in my favorite version of Batman. Tim Burton’s version. Michael
Keaton and Jack Nicholson. The Joker creates Batman. Then Batman creates the
Joker.

When I finished my story,
Loveless sat back. The waitress started to come over but he warned her away
with a look that said he didn’t want to be bothered. She was street smart. You
had to be when you worked in a neighborhood like this. She took the hint. When
the filmmaker turned back to me, his face was indiscernible. I couldn’t tell if
my story had won him over or lost him all together. I half expected him to get
up and walk away. That’s the chance I knew I was taking when I told the story.

Loveless stood up suddenly.
“Wanna grab a drink somewhere?” He quickly added, “In a better part of town.”

We ended up in one of the best
station casinos in Vegas. Red Rock. A station casino is a casino that’s not on
the Strip. Where the locals go. Within a mile of it was Red Rock, a popular
hiking and rock climbing destination. Loveless used to go rock climbing there,
before things got hairy. We sat at a circular bar that was very red and very
dark. Still, although we weren’t uncomfortably crowded, there was no end of
people flowing through. The female bartenders and waitresses were all young and
either hot or at least buxom. The skimpy outfits helped. A far cry from
Witchie-poo at Denny’s.

Loveless ordered a Stella and a
shot of Jameson Irish whiskey. He held up the shot. “A habit I picked up in
Belfast.” He downed the shot. Next he picked up the beer. “And one I picked up
in Antwerp.” Stella was a Belgium beer. Curiously, Loveless was well-traveled.
I met his toast with my Bud Light.

“Can you tell me your story now?”

Loveless looked around to make
sure no one was in ear shot and settled in for a long tale he wasn’t sure if he
believed himself.

Sensing something much bigger
than an article or review, I compiled and provided my notes to my good friend
and screenwriter Carlton Kenneth Holder. I thought this parable needed to be a
full-blown novel. A novel with a film-esque narrative. Carlton authored the
rest of this wicked high-octane cocktail you are about to imbibe. The following
chapters of this book are told from the perspective of the filmmaker, because,
in the mysterious case of "The Black Album," J.D. Loveless is the
Midnite Review.

The Midnite Review of a Freak
King.

Chapter
One

Flatlander
in Highlands

Like any good horror story, this
one starts with a road trip.

He awoke right as the road up the
mountain curved north and his car went south. Time bent at the exact instant
before he should have hit the worn guard rail, which would not hold at this
speed. He would have plummeted the full three thousand feet that he had just
ascended up the mountain so far, to his death. In the thick and knotted forest
below, the SUV would quickly be hidden in dense brush and foliage. If a
passerby didn't witness the accident firsthand and no one immediately noticed
the mangled metal wreckage of the guard rail, it would be days before the man’s
body would be found. Probably after the animal and insect population had its
way with his freshly rotting corpse. 

The bending of the time continuum
gave him the added instant he needed to make a last second swerve back onto the
road. He fish-tailed twice and skidded roughly to a stop on the unpaved
shoulder. A beat later, the man was enveloped in a cloud of dirt kicked up by
his vehicle’s tires. Okay, so maybe time and space hadn't displaced. But it
sure felt like it to him. It was adrenaline that had made the world stop. The
fight or flight mechanism had kicked in deep inside his cerebral cortex, making
time seem to move at an altogether surreal pace. A pace where the whole world
went silent, except for the amplified beating of his own telltale heart. He sat
in his SUV on the side of the road and fought to catch his breath. His veins
were pounding in time with his heart. One internal symphony of terror, his
terror. The terror of J.D. Loveless: would be filmmaker. It took him five
minutes to catch his breath, for his hard-driving Techno beat to fade.

Loveless caught sight of the
little pale yellow post-it note stuck to the dashboard and his fear diminished
a little more, replaced by the excitement that newness brings with it. The
post-it read “Lake Arrowhead 2day!” He was getting out of Los Angeles, his
adopted home and object of an ongoing love/hate relationship, for a sabbatical,
a self-imposed writer's retreat. Indefinitely. Actually Loveless no longer
designated himself a writer, even though he had written for a handful of
colorful independent film producers; colorful in this instance meaning crazy
muthafuckahs. The new distinction for Loveless was this: a writer writes. Period!
A director directs scripts that a writer writes. J.D. Loveless now saw himself
as a filmmaker. According to him, a filmmaker was a director who directs
screenplays that he himself writes. Or at least, he wanted to be a filmmaker.

Loveless had a good friend named
Griffin who had a home up in the mountains roughly one hundred miles away from
sunny Los Angeles. He didn't go up there much and offered it to Loveless for a
six or seven month excursion free of rent if he maintained and fixed the place
up a little while living there. Griffin was indebted to the filmmaker for
getting him a key supporting role in a low budget feature film - Loveless knew
the casting director - and enticed him with tales of tranquility and serenity
in a setting of lush nature. Seeing as how the five-day-or-quit notice on the
filmmaker’s apartment door was four days old, he took his friend up on the
offer.

Besides, Loveless wanted to
write. More than that, Loveless wanted to write a screenplay that he could
direct. The would-be filmmaker only had two hurdles. One: he had no idea what
he was going to write about. Two: Loveless didn't know where he was going to
get the money to turn a bunch of words on a page into a tangible motion
picture. Artistic creativity meets harsh reality in a head on collision - sans
seatbelt or airbag.

Anyway, Loveless decided to deal
with one hurdle at a time. His first hurdle was coming up with an idea. So
Loveless suppressed what he referred to as his inner spouse. That's the nagging
little voice in your head that tells you,
You're no good. Stop dreaming.
Grow up and get a real job. I should have listened to my mother and married
Thomas. He was well-grounded, came from a good family and had a steady job.

Nevertheless the filmmaker’s
excitement was running high. He had never actually been to Lake Arrowhead
before, so this was all grand adventure. Grand adventure was sure to spark
creativity. There was something about uncertainty and the lack of routine that
got the juices flowing. In his mind, he would be cranking out page after page
on his laptop keyboard in no time, like Amadeus obsessively banging out
"Requiem" on ivory piano keys. Yeah! Loveless thought to himself,
this would be just like the time he was flown out to Belfast, Ireland to write
a screenplay about the Irish Republican Army. Loveless had been set up in a
flat with a bunch of  IRA members, or rather, former IRA members. The other
three Americans were the maverick producer/director who wanted to film this
ultra-violent art-house gem, his cinematographer, and his vice president of
development, i.e., assistant. After a few weeks though, they had to hightail it
out of there, chased out by death threats. From whom they didn’t know. But at
three o'clock in the morning, they hastily tossed their belongings into a black
van and drove down to Dublin. Later, they took a ferry to Wales and a train to
London. Loveless basically wrote the screenplay on the run. The day it was
done, he handed it off to the producer and took a plane back to America.

Juices flowed another time when
Loveless was in Antwerp, Belgium doing rewrites on a World War II movie about
the V-1 rocket program - the Vengeance rockets that Hitler used to bomb Europe
at the end of his mad run. It was good times, hanging with raging Frenchmen, Dutch
artists and Swedish actresses. Juices. Beer. Brainstorms. Women. Story ideas.
Beer.

But since Loveless had been back
in Los Angeles, nothing was flowing. Before, in Europe, when ideas were oozing
out of him like blood out a wound, he didn't have the time to write. He was too
busy living the adventure. Now that Loveless had all the time in the world,
nothing materialized. Zilch! He had even been denied employment at Starbucks.
Maybe they already had their quota of struggling writers and out-of-work actors.

A trip out of town to parts
unknown was just what the doctor ordered. The question was, is the doctor a
quack? Loveless’ writer's block was so severe that he couldn't even decide what
genre he wanted to choose for his directorial debut.

Relax, J.D. You're getting ahead
of yourself. It's all waiting up there for you,
he told himself as he drove. He
looked up ahead and saw the mountain tops, his “Stairway to Heaven." It
was a long ascent. Arrowhead sat at an elevation of roughly 5,500 feet. It was
the first of October and Loveless was feeling optimistic. October was his
favorite month of the year because he loved Halloween and horror movies.
Loveless particularly liked possession stories and zombie flicks. “The
Exorcist” and “Night of the Living Dead” were two of his all time favorites.

The road was winding and locals
returning home up the mountain, whizzed past Loveless at break-neck speeds. At
about 4,000 feet elevation, the filmmaker encountered something he hadn’t
expected. Fog. This was not Los Angeles canyon fog either. This was mountain
fog, thick and scary. Loveless had never seen anything like this. It was
straight out of John Carpenter's eighties horror classic "The Fog."

‘They say when the fog comes
rolling in, the dead shall rise again.’

The filmmaker half expected a
pirate hook up the ass. Still, he marveled at this expression of nature. You
couldn't buy production value like this. Being the only one on the road without
fog lights, Loveless had to pull over more than once to let a line of locals drive
past who tossed him scornful looks. The filmmaker’s evil black stare back said,
Give me a break, fucknuts! First time up the mountain, okay?
Loveless
had found out from his friend Griffin that the locals called people who didn't
live in the mountains “flatlanders.” He thought,
They probably just call us
that so we would reciprocate by calling them highlanders. They must love that.
This brought to mind one of the filmmaker's favorite eighties cult films
“Highlander,” a fantasy about immortals who do battle with one another
throughout the ages. The classic song “Who Wants to Live Forever” from the
movie soundtrack by the iconic rock group Queen popped in Loveless’ head. He
hummed it the rest of the way up the mountain.

Loveless reached the top and
followed the sign that said Arrowhead. As he got closer to town, the fog peeled
back. The town was small, smaller than Loveless expected. There was only one
movie theater on the mountain. It played all of four movies and didn't have the
latest releases. That was the filmmaker's idea of roughing it. There were only
two supermarkets in Lake Arrowhead. Loveless grabbed a burger in a greasy spoon
restaurant frequented by locals, half of whom looked like lumberjacks, women
included. It seemed the mountains township was made up of two factions. One
faction was well-to-do older retired couples, the types who had resided in
places like the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. They were living out their
twilight years in scenic and rustic Lake Arrowhead - the Beverly Hills of the
mountains. The other faction was the people who had lived there all of their
lives. They populated the poorer surrounding areas - Twin Peaks, Crestline, and
Running Springs. Places where the average public school education stopped at
fifth grade. They definitely had that small town vibe. In Loveless’ head he
heard the fiddle music from the movie "Deliverance."

‘You've got a purdee mouth there,
boy.’

Loveless was told by one
chatty-katty young waitress with a mouthful of braces that there were a number
of shops and restaurants by the lake mainly for the tourists. But any
exploration would have to take place tomorrow. Loveless wanted to find his
buddy's cabin home before nightfall. The fog had buoyed that decision.

As soon as Loveless left town,
headed in the direction of his soon-to-be dwelling, the fog picked up again.
There were strange sights in the rapidly darkening night. He saw a teen boy and
girl hitchhiking. It had been a very long time since Loveless could remember
seeing anyone hitchhiking, at least not anyone who wasn't an aged hippie relic
from a long dead peace movement or a crack whore looking for a totally
different type of ride. The two teens, not more than thirteen or fourteen,
definitely weren't hippies. They were heavy metal rocker types with a smidgen
of Goth, replete in their regalia of ripped jeans, black concert tee-shirts,
dyed jet black hair, stud belts and bad attitudes. The boy wore an army surplus
jacket. The girl had a beat-up denim jacket covered with band patches. Loveless
didn't pick them up, but looked back in his rearview mirror with mild adult
concern. They were walking along a blind curve with no shoulder or sidewalk,
just hills and cars zooming by. The filmmaker soon found out that hitchhiking
was the cool and accepted mode of transportation for the underage youth of the
mountains.

Something was trotting along on
the shoulder beside Loveless’ car. There was a break in the fog and he saw what
it was. A coyote. It looked at him without an ounce of concern, then trotted
nonchalantly down the hill, into the woods.

Loveless found the cabin home,
which like many of the homes on the mountain, was built on the side of a steep
hill. The filmmaker had to park at the top of the hill and take a long series
of rickety old wooden steps down to the house. He made a note to himself to
replace a number of these steps before he tripped and broke his neck. Loveless
could see from the top of the staircase that there was a carport on the other
side of the house. Use of the carport was discouraged by the condition of the
pavement, which was badly cracked by the steady growth of a large tree whose
massive roots had, over time, created an upheaval in the cement. The utility
road that led to the carport was also twisted, unpaved and full of rocks of varying
and intimidating sizes. Loveless saw the tiny sprinkling of homes, none closer
than a quarter of a mile, then dense woods. It was already dark from the fog.
Now the sun was setting. Which meant in a few minutes it would be pitch black.

It took several tries before the
key Griffin had given Loveless opened the door. The filmmaker prayed the
electricity was still working. The prospect of walking into a dark house that
he didn’t know his way around at night didn’t sound like fun. He should have
thought about this before and set out from LA earlier in the day. Loveless had
the flashlight from the car in hand. Expect the best, prepare for the worst.
What if some mountain lion had made the uninhabited cabin home its den for the
winter? The filmmaker’s imagination picked a bad time to suddenly start working
on him. He squelched these thoughts and opened the door. Loveless stuck his
hand in and tried the light switch by the door. Click! Illumination failed him.
Griffin had told Loveless where the power box was. The good news was that it
was located on the outside of the house. Now the real question was, would it
work? He flipped all the circuits. Loveless saw a light shine instantly through
the half open front door. On the way in, he walked through a thick web, eating
a mouth full of cobwebs and possibly a small spider.

Inside, the filmmaker was greeted
by a quaint living room with a vaulted ceiling. To the right was the kitchen
and a hall that led to a bedroom and the master bedroom, which was smallish,
and a bathroom at the end of the hallway. A staircase led down to what he
guessed was the basement. Loveless would investigate that last. The filmmaker
flipped lights on as he moved through the house. Back in the living room, he
saw there was a fireplace, complete with wood and starter logs. Next to it was
a glass door that led out onto the balcony. The large balcony,  which was above
a lower deck directly outside the basement, looked down onto the carport in the
back and out into the woods. Loveless went out onto the balcony. Boards creaked
under his feet. Some of these would need replacing as well. To the left of him
was a much larger home, three stories. It was the nearest house to his cabin
home, but was still at least a quarter of a mile away.