Zeroville (3 page)

Then she turns and carries the child across the boulevard to a house on the opposite corner, the small girl watching Vikar over her mother’s shoulder.

Like the wild animal the woman believed he was, Vikar stalks the grounds of the Houdini House in the dark, pounding on the walls, trying to remember.
The Grim
…?

Houdini was related to one of the Three Stooges by marriage. I’ll bet I’m the only one in this Heretic City who knows that.

Vikar later learns that the Houdini House has secret passages leading to all parts of the canyon, although he never finds one. The house across the boulevard on the corner, where the young woman took her daughter, once belonged to Tom Mix. Now it’s occupied by an extended family of hippies led by a musician with a Groucho Marx mustache. Hippies and musicians everywhere …

… but something has happened, it’s become a ghost canyon.

Above the ruins of the house, Vikar sees caves in the hillside. A fire burns in one and he makes his way to it, climbing through the trees. The cave has two entrances, forming a small tunnel. Inside the cave, a young couple huddles around the fire.

Vikar stands in the mouth of the cave. The young man and woman look at Vikar, at his bald illustrated dome, and spring from the fire lurching for the cave’s other opening.

Vikar watches them run off the hillside into the night air, then plummet the rest of the way down into the trees and the stone ruins of the house below.

In the August heat, the lights of small houses in the canyon shimmer like stars while the stars in the sky hide in the light and smog of the city, as though outside has turned upside down.

In the tattoo on Vikar’s head, Montgomery Clift looks away slightly. It’s as if he’s not only rapt with Elizabeth Taylor but hiding from everyone the face that would be so disfigured later upon smashing his Chevy into a tree, when it would be Taylor who first reached the site of the crash and held him in her arms.

When Vikar wakes in the cave the next morning, the campfire is out. Standing in the cave’s mouth he looks out over the canyon; he sees houses and the small country store below, but not a soul. The canyon is abandoned and still. “Hello?” he calls to the trees.

As the minutes pass, there’s not a sign of life for as far as he can see …

… until in the distance, at the end of the canyon boulevard, a police car appears and then another behind it, and another, stealthily winding their way up through the hills, sirens silent but coming fast, determined in their approach.

Vikar watches the police as they grow nearer. They stop below at the foot of the stone steps that lead up to the house, a dozen cops emptying from four cars and fanning out at Vikar’s feet …

… then one looks up and spots him. Then they all stop to look. They draw their guns and charge the hillside.

Below, the closest cop points his gun up at Vikar and tells him to raise his arms. In the mouth of the cave, overlooking the canyon, Vikar is too stunned to move. “Arms in the air!” the cop repeats. Other cops emerge from the trees at the foot of the hill, their guns also pointed. Vikar raises his arms. “Get on your knees!” says the first cop.

“I have to pee,” Vikar says.

The cop says, “Get. Down. On. Your. Fucking. Knees.” Vikar lowers himself to his knees. Looking around, he can see hippies come out of their houses all over the canyon to watch, he can see in the doorway of the house across the street the beautiful woman with the small girl. The cop tells Vikar to lie on his stomach and keep his arms away from his sides, then slide slowly down the hillside on his stomach.

“Slowly?” Vikar says, apparently to no one as he comes hurtling down the mountain, face skimming dirt and rock all the way. When he finally stops at the base of the hill, one cop lands hard on Vikar’s back and another cuffs his hands behind him. Another tells him he’s under arrest and has the right to remain silent and to a lawyer. “Can I pee?” Vikar says as they shove him in the back of the patrol car.

The Grim Game
.

At the police station they draw a sample of his blood. For three hours he waits in a holding cell before he’s brought to an interrogation room.

This is for hitting that man with my food tray, he believes. Or perhaps for the others, the ones before Los Angeles.
It’s the end of righteousness
. But he decided long ago that if righteousness means no movies, he would rather be damned.

Three white men and a black man and a white woman wait for Vikar in the interrogation room. All the men wear suits. A graying man, distinguished looking, like the chief of detectives in a movie, appears in charge. The woman, who never says anything, seems to be a kind of doctor.

Vikar is seated at a table with the woman on the other side and the men standing around him. “Is Jerome,” the chief asks, “your first name or last?”

“Someone asked me that before,” says Vikar.

“Well, now I’m asking you,” the chief says.

“It’s my last name.”

“Ike is your first name?”

“Someone asked that as well.”

“Well, if you had some sort of identification, Mr. Jerome, like a driver’s license, we wouldn’t have to ask.”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

“Ike is short for …”

Vikar shakes his head:
It’s not short for anything
. “It’s just Ike,” he says.

“You say you’re from Ohio?”

“It’s not short for anything,” Vikar says.

“O.K.,” the chief says, “it’s not short for anything. Where in Ohio you from, Ike? Cincinnati?”

“I didn’t say Ohio. I said Pennsylvania.” He knows I didn’t say Ohio.

“How long you been in town?”

They asked this before as well. “Four days. Five.”

“Is it four or is it five?”

“It depends.”

“Not really, Ike. It’s either four or it’s five.”

“No,” Vikar says, “it depends. Do you count the first day I got here as the first day, or after the first twenty-four hours—?”

The good-looking movie-star chief brings the back of his hand crashing across the side of Vikar’s head, catching Elizabeth Taylor just under the chin. Vikar flies off his chair across the room and crumples against the wall.

The chief comes over and kneels beside him. “Don’t be cute.”

“I’m not,” Vikar says.

“I think you’re being cute.”

“No.”

“What did you come to L.A. for?” says the chief.

“I came to Hollywood.”

“O.K., Ike. What did you come to Hollywood for? Score some weed? You have some sort of big transaction in the works?”

“Weed?”

“Our blood work shows you have marijuana in your system.”

“That’s not true,” Vikar says calmly.

“We know about you. We know about the scores up in the canyon.”

“Scores?”

“People are spooked in the canyon these days. Maybe you noticed.”

“No.”

“No more happy hippie wonderland since a few days ago.” The chief acts as though he’s pondering something. “About the time you came to town, now that I think of it,” as though thinking of it for the first time, but he’s not thinking of it for the first time, and Vikar realizes none of this is about any “weed” or “score.” The chief says, “What did you say you came to L.A. for?”

“Hollywood.”

“O.K.,” irritated, “Hollywood.”

“To work in the movies.”

“Are you an actor?”

“No.”

“What is it you do in the movies?”

“I don’t do anything yet.” He adds, “I just got here. Four days ago. Or five.”

“Let me show you something,” says the chief, “here, let me help you to your feet.”

“It’s all right,” Vikar says.

“No, let me help you.” The chief pulls Vikar to his feet and picks up the chair. Vikar sits again at the table. “Better, Ike?”

Vikar nods.

“Sorry I lost my temper there. I apologize.”

Vikar looks at the others standing around.

“Let me show you something,” says the movie-star chief, and one of the other men hands him an envelope.

The chief opens the envelope and pulls out seven black-and-white photos and lays them out on the table.

Vikar sees them for only a second, it’s all he can look. “Oh mother!” he screams, and topples from the chair as if struck again.

The chief comes back over to Vikar on the floor and, as before, kneels next to him. “This one,” he says, holding up one photo, “was the eight-month-old fetus cut out of this one,” holding up another photo with the other hand. Vikar turns away, sobbing. “Pretty much slaughtered, wouldn’t you say, Ike? Pretty much butchered. This last one,” the chief holds up the seventh photo, “this one of the writing on the door, this business about the pigs … what does it say?” he turns the photo around as though looking at it for the first time, but he’s not looking at it for the first time. “This one about the pigs. Written on the door of the house in the blood of,” waving one photo, “the mother of,” waving the other, “this one. Am I supposed to take it personally, Ike? Was this for me, this about the pigs?” but Vikar sobs, wishing he never had seen it.

Five minutes later Vikar is still on the floor and the police are trying to get him to stop crying. “O.K.,” the chief says. “O.K., God damn it.”

“Oh mother, oh mother …”

“Stop it.” The chief hands the photos back to the black detective who gave them to him. Vikar begins to calm down. “You O.K.?”

Vikar says nothing.

“You O.K.?”

Vikar shakes his head. The chief studies him, disappointed.

The woman and the other men now leave the room, one by one. Vikar is still. “So,” the chief finally says, nodding at Vikar’s head, “what’s with the James Dean and Natalie Wood?”

They leave him in the interrogation room—

—but through the open door he can hear a couple of voices. “… couldn’t even look at the photos,” one of the voices sounds like the chief’s, “how could he have done that to those people?”

“He’s a freak,” the other voice says.

“That’s awfully astute, Barnes. But the city is full of freaks and by itself it doesn’t put him on Cielo Drive with five butchered bodies.”

“I think I like them better when their hair’s down to their asses. Never thought I’d say
that
…” The voice lowers. “Chief, I can’t say this when Peters is around, but I’m telling you it’s the coloreds on this one.”

“Don’t say that when Peters is around,” sternly.

A pause. “Odd about the name thing. That he would lie about that, of all things—that business about ‘Ike’ not being short for …”

“It doesn’t,” the chief interrupts, “put him up there in the canyon hacking up five people including a pregnant woman.”

“Fucking Hollywood degenerates. Live freaky, die freaky.”

“For God’s sakes, don’t go around saying that either.” Another pause. “You know when we located his father, he wouldn’t admit having a son.”

“Well, chief, would you? What’s with the fucking head, that’s what I want to know. I like all the hair better, never thought I’d say it. The hair down to their asses. Live freaky, die freaky, I’m telling you.”

Forty-five minutes later, a patrol car deposits Vikar at Hill and Third in downtown Los Angeles. “I’d stay out of those canyons if I were you,” one of the cops tells him. “There’s something going on up there.”

“Tell the chief my father was right,” Vikar answers. “He doesn’t have a son.”

That night Vikar slips into the Chinese Theatre through a back door and sleeps on the stage behind the screen. All night, images from the movie fly over him, as though he’s lying at the end of a runway, below an endless stream of jetliners landing.

For four months after arriving in Los Angeles, he works as a handyman at the Roosevelt, riding the elevator with the ghost of D. W. Griffith, who died there twenty years earlier. On his days off, he walks the two miles down Vine to the edge of Hancock Park and the old Ravenswood apartments and the baroque El Royale where Mae West lives, and the orphanage where Norma Jean Baker once could see from her window, a half mile east on Melrose, Paramount Studios and its arched wrought-iron gates just beyond the fountain at Bronson Avenue. When he gets a job at the studio building sets, he rents a $120 second-story apartment on Pauline Boulevard, a secret street in the Hollywood Hills entered only on foot by a long flight of stone steps.

Vikar sees an Italian movie in which a father’s bicycle, on which his job depends, is stolen. The father and his small son search the city for the stolen bicycle. When they don’t find it, in desperation the father steals another bicycle and is caught, threatened and humiliated by an angry mob. The father loves his son so much he’s willing to defy God’s laws for him. But for this transgression he’s punished and abased, and the boy learns that it’s a sin for fathers to love their sons too much.

Vikar still had his hair when he was a twenty-year-old studying architecture at Mather Divinity and saw his first movie. Actually, having finally summoned the courage to defy his father, he saw his first two movies on the same day, back to back.

One, about a London photographer who discovers a murder in a photo of what otherwise appears to be a serene park, made sense to Vikar like nothing else had. The second movie was about a family of sirens living in snowy mountains, pursued by police and leaving a trail of malevolent music. Some months after arriving in Los Angeles and after his own experience with the police, Vikar thinks of this movie when another singing family is arrested for the murders of five people, including a woman eight months pregnant, that took place in the canyons on Vikar’s first night in the city. Gazing at the ravines from the window of his apartment on the secret Pauline Boulevard, Vikar can’t shake, no matter how hard he tries, the movie’s refrain, going around in his head.
The hills are alive
, he shudders,
with the sound of music
.

When Montgomery Clift was living at the Roosevelt Hotel in room 928, Ike Jerome was seven years old in eastern Pennsylvania. One night he heard come into his room his Calvinist father who allowed in the house no books except the Bible, no magazines, newspapers, radio or the then new invention of television. The little boy pretended to be asleep as his father knelt next to him in the dark.