Zeroville (7 page)
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.”
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.”
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.
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 years, 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.”
Viking Man throws the Bug into reverse and backs out of the lot. He continues driving west on Mulholland, crossing the Sepulveda Pass and winding along mountain roads. All of the freeways are closed and the surface streets are clotted with traffic. It takes two and a half hours to reach Malibu Canyon Road and cut over to Pacific Coast Highway.
At the sea, Viking Man turns right and heads north, talking about movies all the way.
Past the Colony and up the highway until they’re almost to Zuma—
—where Viking Man finally pulls off PCH, heads up the beach side of the boulevard along a row of water-logged houses until he slides into the drive of one. Pulling the surfboard off the top of the car, without a word to Vikar he strides toward the beach, circling around the house rather than through it.
Vikar sits in the car a moment, until Viking Man is nearly out of sight, before he gets out and follows.
A crowd of about a dozen people, more men than women, are on the beach on the other side of the house. “Viking Man!” one of the guys calls out to him. “Earthquake waves!” All the guys call out to Viking Man and the women ignore him, until one sees Vikar standing alone in the sand. She looks after the other man running toward the ocean with his surfboard. “Uh, John?”
Viking Man stops at the water’s edge and turns.
“Is this guy with you?” asks the young woman. She’s lying on a towel in the sun; she has dark hair and is naked and has the largest breasts Vikar has ever seen. Two other women, one dark and one blond, wear bikini bottoms and no tops. Two other women, one petite and the other large, are dressed; the petite one says more bad words in five minutes than Vikar has heard a woman say or all the women he’s heard combined.
“That’s the vicar,” Viking Man answers.
The dark-haired woman looks at Vikar. Vikar says, “I’m a friend of Viking Man.”
“The vicar and the viking,” the woman says, lying back on the towel and closing her eyes, “isn’t that too cute for words?”
Vikar stays three days. He can’t figure out how to get home. He loses track of when Viking Man is around and when he isn’t, and he doesn’t want to ask anyone else for a ride into town. The crowd grows smaller and then larger, faces come and then go just as they become familiar; the dark-haired naked woman and the topless blonde are attentive to Vikar, asking now and then if he wants something to eat or drink. He believes no one is paying attention until he turns his gaze fast enough to catch people staring at him. He suspects some of them are taking illicit narcotics.
They seem only vaguely aware there’s been an earthquake. This is mostly a subject of concern as it applies to the size of the surf or when someone makes a trip to the local market and finds the beer or wine understocked. Everybody is involved in the movies but they’re not like Vikar imagined; none of them looks like a movie star, except perhaps the dark-haired woman and one of the guys who’s not particularly handsome but has a big black beard like Viking Man and also a flashing smile and a matinee manner about him. He wears a safari outfit that he seems to consider debonair. Vikar believes he’s an actor but in fact he’s an aspiring director.
All the guys Vikar believes are actors are directors, and all the guys he believes are directors are actors. The women cook the meals and take care of the guys who, as Viking Man said, care and talk about nothing but movies. “The peak of Hawks’ art,” one is saying the first afternoon. “Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals.”
“Dean Martin is underrated in that movie,” Viking Man agrees.
“The opening scene,” points out another, “where he’s digging the coin out of the spittoon? All wordless. A kind of American kabuki.”
“Existential,” someone adds, “in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile.”
“Angie Dickinson,” Viking Man says, “is the modern incarnation of the quintessential Hawks woman.” The conversation continues like this for about half an hour, until there’s a pause.
“The Western,” Vikar says, “has changed along with America’s view of itself from some sort of heroic country where’s everybody’s free and shit to the spiritually defiled place it really is, and now you have jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape the past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder.”
It’s the first thing more than four words long that Vikar has said since arriving. Including the women preparing the meal, the household comes to a stop. After a long silence Viking Man says, “That’s a damned interesting perspective, vicar.”
“Uh,” someone else says, “let’s go surfing!” The room immediately clears of everyone except the women. The dark large-breasted one studies Vikar for a moment and returns to the cooking. After that, Vikar doesn’t say anything else. The only person who talks as little as Vikar is an intense dark man in his late twenties who sits on the couch staring at him and at his head in particular; he has a strange smile. Five years later Vikar will remember the man, and the way he looked at Vikar’s head, when Vikar sees him with a mohawk in a movie about a cab driver who goes crazy and kills everyone.
The beach house is shabby, the plywood walls warped from moisture, the garish shag carpet blotched and worn. There are three bedrooms upstairs, and a balcony circles and overlooks the downstairs, which is organized around a fire pit in the center. Sofas and chairs line the walls. His second day in the house, sitting in the living room and staring at the blue necklace of the sea stretched across the breast of the sky, Vikar turns to see a five-year-old girl standing next to him, looking at his head.
It’s only when the girl’s mother calls that Vikar realizes it’s the same child he saw in the ruins of the Harry Houdini house in Laurel Canyon, after first arriving in Los Angeles.
“Zazi.” Vikar turns to the same soft voice and the same beautiful young woman with the auburn hair and the perfect cleft in her chin who hurried the little girl across Laurel Canyon Boulevard that day a year and a half before. Now the beautiful woman wears only a bikini bottom.
The little girl reaches out to Vikar’s face, to wipe away the red teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye.
As she did that day in Laurel Canyon, the woman appears to float across the room to take the girl back, just as the girl’s finger almost touches Vikar’s face. Perhaps there’s more urgency in the rescue this time, the hubbub of this house lending itself not so much to the woman’s gifts for casting spells. The mother carries Zazi through the sliding doors of the house out onto the deck, looking—as she did in Laurel Canyon—over her shoulder at Vikar.
“Soledad Palladin,” Viking Man explains to Vikar later that afternoon.
“I would never hurt a child,” says Vikar.
“How did a three-year-old wander across Laurel Canyon Boulevard anyway? Who was Soledad fucking or what drug was she inhaling when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on her kid?” They sit on the deck watching everyone. “They’re really not a bad lot, vicar,” says Viking Man, “for a bunch of hippies and pussies and over-indulged bohemian brats. The guys all want to be the next John Ford and haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that
I’m
the next John Ford, and the only reason I’m the next John Ford is because I’m not the next Howard Hawks, who made the greatest movie of all time,
Red River
, with your Mr. Montgomery Clift. Of course Monty was a fairy. Are you a fairy, vicar?”
“No,” says Vikar.
“I wouldn’t want to offend you if you were.”
“Thank you.”
“You got to hand it to Monty. For a little fairy he near pulls it off, you almost accept in
Red River
he actually could hold his own in those fisticuffs at the end with John Wayne, when hard logic tells you it’s patently preposterous. He had presence, Clift did, there’s no taking that away from him. But I can’t be the next Howard Hawks because I could never make a musical or screwball comedy—I know my limits, vicar, you got to give me that. So I have to settle for being the next Ford, and there you have it in a scrotum sac: what all these other pussies would kill for, I’m just
settling
for. You can’t blame them for the profound disappointment, vicar. It must be damned disconcerting. The women all want to fuck me, that’s obvious, you can’t blame them for that either.” Looking at the women, Vikar isn’t so sure it’s obvious. “I’m too overpowering and, after me, where would they go? Marty? Paul?” He points to this guy and that. “Margie Ruth fucks Hitch because he’s writing her a horror movie, of all things.”
