Zeroville (8 page)

“Margie Ruth?” says Vikar.

“The crazy one with the tits,” the Viking gestures his cigar at the dark-haired woman. “My God, vicar. Imagine getting to fuck those tits for a horror movie. What would she let him do for a good movie? Hitch,” he points at the bearded man in the dapper safari jacket with the matinee smile, “he’s the one who wears the stupid jungle costume all the time—Mr. Big Game Hunter. I call him Hitch because he doesn’t want to be the next John Ford, he wants to be the next Alfred Hitchcock. He’s got Margie thinking she’s going to play Siamese twins in this movie of his,” he snorts, “Siamese twins, vicar! Will they be joined at the tits or have four of them?”

“Are they all actresses?”

“Who?”

“The women.”

“Well, sure,” he shrugs, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you, vicar. The guys want to be John Ford and the girls want to be Siamese twins in horror movies joined at the tits, that’s the difference. What else are they going to be, the next …” he waves his cigar, searching his brain, “…
Donna Reed
? What’s the point, vicar? That’s what I’m saying. These days you’ve got veteran actresses who once won Academy Awards playing gorillas from the future. It’s really not a business for broads. Used to be, of course. But it’s not like any of them is going to be the next Garbo—they’re not even going to be the next Ava Gardner. Janet over there,” he points to one, “had a glory-moment ten years ago, some arty movie about some retarded girl in love with some retarded boy—doesn’t that give you a hard-on, vicar? Isn’t that something you just have to see? It won some festival somewhere and she hasn’t done anything since. Margie was in a Gene Wilder movie a year or two ago, and Jenny, the blonde, is up for some dinky part or other in some movie or other because her dad just won a screenplay Oscar after being blacklisted most of the fifties—so the commies are making a comeback, God love ’em. Not
all
of them want to be actresses—Cass over there,” the large woman in a muumuu, “has nothing to do with the movies, she was in a singing group everyone in the world has heard of except you, probably, and made a fortune in the lifespan of a larva and is already washed up at the age of thirty, living in the next house over with Julia,” the petite woman with short cropped hair in jean shorts, “who doesn’t want to be Garbo or John Ford but the next Jack Warner or Harry Cohn and may just be evil enough to pull it off, now that I think about it. Now that I think about it, Julia’s the one who will show us all up, right before she uses the least of us, whoever that is—there’s about four candidates within a beer bottle’s throw—to pick the rest of us out of her teeth.”

“As for Soledad,” says Viking Man, “where do you start? It’s one crazy story after another. No one is sure how old she is, anywhere between her early twenties and her early thirties, born in Seville to Andalusian gypsies or some damned thing that sounds just silly enough to be true. Legend has it her father is Buñuel illegitimately—if that’s so, then she’s at least three or four years older than she admits to since Franco ran Buñuel out of Spain in the late forties. She may not know for sure about her father any more than she knows for sure who’s the father of little Isadora—Zazi—there. Story has it Sol was dancing flamenco by the time she was eight. Story has it she was in a nuthouse for a while in Oslo, and story has it she was cast as the woman who vanishes on the island in
L’Avventura
and then was dropped at the last minute, for mysterious reasons no one ever has understood or explained. She did some soft-core in Italy or France, came to the States, what? six, seven years ago. Hung around the Strip making the circuit between Ciro’s and the Whisky—story has it she’s a witch and that on Venice Beach twenty miles down the sand here,” he points down the beach, “she gave Jim Morrison the blowjob of all time, channeled from the netherworld. She can be medusa or sweet as candy on pretty much a moment’s notice. It’s hard to know exactly what she feels about her daughter. For a while they were part of Zappa’s commune in the canyon, so of course the story’s gotten around that if Morrison isn’t Zazi’s dad, Zappa is, and if Sol knows, she’s not saying, and if she says, she’s only guessing. Neither seems likely. By all accounts Morrison can’t get it up most of the time and, other than just happening to share the same roof along with thirty other people, Zappa himself is actually a fairly straight arrow about such things, as I understand it. ‘Isadora,’ well, that’s a little elegant, hell, that’s practically blue-blood for a guy who names his kids Dweezil.”

On his last night at the beach house, Vikar is trying to sleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs and has dreams of Soledad Palladin as Siamese twins, naked and joined not at the breasts but sometimes at the hip, sometimes at the shoulder, sometimes at the place between her legs. Beast needs beast, Soledad keeps whispering in a Spanish that Vikar somehow understands. When Vikar is shaken awake past midnight by one of the quake’s persistent aftershocks, he hears voices downstairs.

Four or five of the group are still up talking. After a moment the voices take on some clarity; Vikar gets up from his bed. “—out of your mind,” he hears Viking Man, half with laughter and half in disbelief.

“I’m telling you,” comes a woman’s soft voice.

“One of the Manson Family?” says one of the other male voices.

“He’s not one of fucking Manson Family,” answers Viking Man, as Vikar moves toward the bedroom door and the upstairs railing beyond. The woman downstairs says, with what Vikar now recognizes as a slight accent, “He was there in Laurel Canyon. I saw him.” The floor creaks beneath Vikar; downstairs someone says, “Shhh.”

Vikar stops where he stands. There’s dead silence beyond the door, then someone whispers. After another pause Viking Man calls out, not too loudly, “Vicar?”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“You awake, vicar?”

Vikar doesn’t answer or move.

There’s another pause. “He was in Laurel—” the woman starts again.

“
Everybody
was in Laurel Canyon,” interrupts Viking Man, “everybody except, I would remind you, the Manson Family. They were in Benedict Canyon. Those longhairs you were living with had more to do with Manson than the vicar does. Odds are better, Sol, that
you’re
one of the Manson Family.”

“He does seem a bit of a nut job, John,” suggests another male voice.

“Oh yeah, and you don’t, Paul. The rest of us, we’re paragons of stability. Bobby here? He’s perfectly
normal
.” Viking Man snorts. “The vicar’s O.K. He works on sets over at Paramount, I met him through Dotty Langer. She—”

“Is she still around?” someone asks.

“I keep telling her,” Viking Man says, with what sounds to Vikar like the only uncertainty in the man’s voice he’s heard, “she’ll survive all of us, God love her. But I don’t know—”

“The tattoo-head, John,” someone prompts.

“Well, Dot worked on
A Place in the Sun
, you know, with Hornbeck. She thinks maybe she can get the vicar a job in production design … he studied architecture somewhere back east …”

“A set builder?” says a male voice—the one Viking Man calls Hitch—with a tone of scorn, and then another female voice that Vikar recognizes as Margie Ruth answers, “Fuck you, Brian—he makes himself
useful
. More than some people in this room can say.”

“Take it easy, Margie,” Viking Man says, “Hitch here—”

“Don’t call me that,” says Hitch.

“—is above all that, with his Siamese-twin movie …”

“Fuck you too, John,” says Margie.

“I keep meaning to ask you,” Viking Man says, “these twins, are they joined at—”

“John,” comes the prompt again. “The tattoo-head.”

Viking Man says, “We’re driving out here a couple of days ago, day before yesterday or whenever it was—day of the quake—and we’re talking movies the whole way … this guy isn’t a cinéaste, he’s a
cinéautistic
.”

“A what?”

“
Cinéautistic
…”

“It means he’s backward,” says Hitch.

“Nonsense. I tell you he’s got a degree in architecture.”

“So he says.”

“O.K., let’s say he made it up,” says Viking Man. “Even just making up a degree in architecture, you can’t be that backward. No, I’m telling you it’s socially that he’s, uh … he barely knows who the Beatles are. He barely knows there’s a country called Vietnam let alone a war there. I don’t know if he was raised in a fucking monastery—he’s not into drugs and I’d make a wager of some significant amount the guy’s never been laid. But he’s nuts about movies, as obsessive as anyone I know, which in this house is saying a lot—”

“He’s never been laid?” says Margie.

“—but absolutely unschooled, his knowledge and opinions absolutely unmediated … he doesn’t know from Pauline Kael let alone Andrew Sarris let alone James Fucking Agee. I’m not sure he knows who D. W. Griffith is, but he could probably run down for you the entire filmography of John Cromwell.”

“Who?”

Since You Went Away
, Vikar’s mind races.
The Prisoner of Zenda
.
Dead Reckoning
with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. “This guy,” Viking Man continues, “has never been to USC or UCLA or Columbia or any fancy school …” Not Lauren Bacall. Liz Scott. “… for this guy, Film 101 is whatever theater he’s randomly walked into that’s playing whatever movie is randomly playing. An obsession that’s still pure, untouched by cultural cant or preconceptions or—”

Of course I know who D. W. Griffith is. I used to ride the elevator with him at the Roosevelt Hotel.

“You mean he’s a virgin?” says Margie.

The next time Vikar wakes, it’s in the middle of what he believes is a wet dream. He’s hard and it’s a moment before he realizes that the hair falling across his belly isn’t a dream and that his cock is somewhere it’s never been. He starts to sit up.

“Relax,” he hears her command in the dark, “lie down,” and he lies back down and Margie puts him back in her mouth. He panics when he feels himself begin to come and she sucks all the more furiously. Do all the women on the beach give blowjobs channeled from the netherworld? “O.K., superman,” she says a few minutes later, kissing him hard, “just wanted to see what you’re made of.”

By the third day, everyone calls him vicar. He never liked “Ike” anyway. He’ll replace the c with a k around the time people start dropping the k from Amerika.

He gets a ride back into the city only when Margie Ruth talks Soledad into it. Vikar overhears the conversation. “For God’s sake, Sol,” Margie says, “he’s not one of the Manson Family. He’s harmless. I promise you,” she says knowingly.

“He is not harmless,” Vikar hears Soledad answer. “He may not be one of the Manson Family,” she concedes, “but he’s not harmless.”

They leave around eight, driving south on Pacific Coast Highway. The road is eerily empty except for the single figure of a young woman stumbling barefoot along the side in what looks like a hospital gown. From the top of the colony, between the dark gray highway and gun-metal sea, in the twilight Vikar can see the brown thread of the beach, like the string of a gyroscope pulled by God. In the front seat of the car, the little girl says to her mother, “I’m hungry.”

“We will eat when we get home,” Soledad says quietly. She looks at Vikar in the rear-view mirror.

“I’m really hungry.”

“In a bit,” Soledad says.

“I’m hungry now.”

The woman checks the rear-view mirror again. “We are going to stop and get something to eat.”

“All right,” says Vikar.

They stop at a taco stand and order fish tacos. They sit at a table outside; although it’s February, it’s warm. Vikar and Soledad drink sangria in plastic cups and for a while no one talks. “Do they have tacos in Spain?” Vikar finally says.

“Tacos are Mexican,” Soledad answers. “They have tacos in Mexico. Mexico is not the same as Spain.”

“Have I been to Spain?” asks the five-year-old.

“No,” Soledad says.

“Was I born in Spain?”

“You were born here in Los Angeles.”

They’re on the canyon side of the highway. Although it’s not dark yet, they already can see, on the other side of the highway, the moonlight on the ocean. On the other side of the highway, from the direction they came, approaches the barefooted young woman in the hospital gown. An aftershock of the quake is followed by a gust as though it’s blown from the earth: and suddenly there’s no one else in the world but the three of them eating tacos and the woman in the hospital gown on the other side of the road. No one else sits at the tables, no one is behind the counter of the taco stand, no other cars are on the highway. “I believed they were alike, Spain and Mexico,” Vikar says.

“Spain is European,” Soledad says.

“Did you make movies there?”

Soledad absently takes her hair and wraps her fist in it. “Yes.” It would be rude, Vikar believes, to ask if Buñuel really is her father. “Art films,” she says. She glances at her daughter, then says to Vikar, “Lesbian vampires.”

“What’s that,” says Zazi.

“Do you want some of my other taco?” Soledad answers her.

“Can I see your movies?” Zazi says.

“No.”

“Can I see them when I’m older?”

“No.”

“She can have more of my taco if she wants,” says Vikar.

“Can I ever see your movies?” says Zazi.

“No,” Soledad says. She says to Vikar: “I’m up for a part in a private-eye film. It doesn’t shoot until later this year.”

Vikar nods.

“I would play a gangster’s girlfriend.”

“What’s a gangster?” says Zazi.

“A bad man.” Soledad says to Vikar, “She gets a soda bottle smashed in her face. It is violent but a good scene.”

“Can I see that movie?” says Zazi.

“No. If I don’t get that part,” Soledad says to Vikar, “they would give me another part.”

“I’ve worked on an Otto Preminger movie and a Vincente Minnelli movie,” Vikar says.

“You build sets.”

“Yes.”

“Someone told me you studied architecture.”

“Yes.”