Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

It was on the day he died, the man who quoted poetry, that Llewellyn first became a part of the city in which he now lived. But it was not the city that made the choice, it was not relativity physics that chose who he was rather than who he was not. He chose to let them call him Lee but he did not choose the name himself, and almost any name he had chosen himself, even his own name he hated, would have been better.

He lived in Venice Beach two years, his only address a local café on the boardwalk to which his furious father sent a stream of letters. When Llewellyn’s younger sister drowned that first summer in Lake Michigan, the tragedy reinforced both the son’s alienation and the parents’ burden of heartland dreams. Llewellyn found a group of poets at the beach who published a little magazine and turned their verses into rock-and-roll songs. He wrote his first movie with a local filmmaker who saw his work as personal exorcism; when he felt nothing left to exorcise, he committed suicide by wrapping himself in a bed sheet and lying on the southbound San Diego Freeway just beyond the Mulholland off-ramp. By the time someone got him out of the road he’d been hit by twenty-three cars in less than a minute; the obituary mentioned his ironically titled sixteen-minute movie, Unmarked Graves , which had no narrative or characters or dialogue but rather the hallucinatory images of martial nightmare that were the vocabulary of the day. The “screenplay” was credited to L. E. Edgar.

This bit of dilettantism notwithstanding, in four years Lew found himself, in large part through his proximity to a friend of a friend, working on a screenplay with an Italian director who’d been brought over by a major studio to make his American debut. The project had all the earmarks of disaster; the writer and director disagreed bitterly over a climactic section of the picture. The studios were wary of the director as a successful but mischievous maker of successful but mischievous art films, their wariness justified by the director’s conflict with the writer, who fought for a resolution more in line with what the studios wanted. The director won the conflict because he was somebody and Lew was nobody; but the incident endeared the young man to the studios, who saw in him a possible “quality” writer with the right instincts, that is the studios’ instincts. To Llewellyn this was a peculiar paradox. At that point he still saw in himself someone who might be an artist someday, if anything destined to be at odds with the marketplace; that he wound up on the studio’s side of things in this particular picture was an accident, he’d opted to resolve this particular picture in this particular way because he thought the dynamics of the picture called for such a resolution; the embrace of the studios was quite unforeseen. At least that was what he told himself at the time. Later, in the midst of his ongoing paroxysms of self-doubt, in the midst of the crisis of integrity that was beginning to overwhelm him, he questioned that he’d ever believed such a thing at all. He questioned whether in fact his instincts were not those of the studios and the industry all along, and whether his new crisis was not one that found him at war with those instincts, trying to persuade himself he was not who he was and that he was who he was not.

This movie, which opened in America as White Liars , was a success, the director’s prevalent instincts to the contrary. It proved fortunate for all parties involved, even as none of them was on speaking terms with the others. The studio scheduled a festival of the director’s films at a museum in Pasadena, to be climaxed by a screening of White Liars and a discussion of the film among its participants, warring director and writer included. Llewellyn sat through the event sullenly, barely seeing the movie and contributing nothing to the discussion. Only some months afterward, when he went to see the film in a theater still trying to figure out who was right and who was wrong about it or, more accurately, why he was right about it, did he note the screenplay was credited to L. E. Edward. He never knew if this was the director’s final revenge — which was his immediate conclusion — or a bit of studio machiavellia, the industry having appropriated his soul as theirs and thus giving the ownership a kind of institutional reality by changing his name. He could have taken the matter to the Guild of course. I submitted to it so easily, he would come to tell himself; it absolved me of so much responsibility.

At the Pasadena festival he also met Madeline Weiss, a girl of nineteen who had grown up very much on the right side of Pasadena’s tracks. It was indicative of Maddy’s station and status that working for the museum archives was directed not so much at making an income as accumulating some “life experience,” as her father called it: he considered it part of the business of maturation, somewhere between piano lessons and debutante nocturnes. Of course it had to be the right sort of life experience; she wasn’t slinging hamburgers. Her family, of the upper crust, regarded writing for the movies in the same way as did Llewellyn’s family of the lower crust; contempt for the profession was utterly democratic, crossing all boundaries of class and money. To Maddy’s credit, she didn’t wait for Lew’s success to fall in love with him; she didn’t even wait for his peak before she married him, though by then, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three, he was on a definite ascent. Maddy had a cynicism that seemingly came from nowhere, an errant gene that might have been un attractive in someone else but was enough to keep her from appearing as superficial as most Pasadena girls; it also kept her at odds with her family’s exalted plans, in the way Llewellyn’s romanticism kept him at odds with his family’s practical plans. It did not, however, prevent her from wanting the house in Hancock Park.

The house in Hancock Park was too big for two people, bigger for that matter than was necessary for two people planning on being three, as was to be the case several years after their marriage. It was also beyond the means of even a successful screenwriter. It was barely within the means of a successful screenwriter whose Pasadena father-in-law contributed half the down payment. For Maddy this fact under cut her reasons for wanting the house: Hancock Park was not only not Hollywood, despite the residence of one or two aberrational rock stars, it was the only thing about Los Angeles that old established Pasadena respected and envied. Thus Maddy aspired to the house in Hancock Park to prove something to her father, only to have her father bail out the couple on the finances. By the time she realized that none of this made any sense, by the time she realized that her father had proven something to her rather than the other way around, they’d gotten the house.

Llewellyn didn’t want to live in Hancock Park. Its history denied the ever-transitory truth of the city. He didn’t want the burden of the expense either, meaning he didn’t want the burden of Hollywood success. In his own way Hollywood success was something he wanted to live down, in his own mind it only ascertained his corruption. It proved he was who he really was, he was not who he was really not. He capitulated in the end because Maddy was adamant and because of the house itself: red brick with white edgings, smaller than most of the houses in the park, with a door right in the middle and two large windows upstairs; and though he wasn’t a child, it reminded him of Christmas when he was and the family — Lew and his sister and his mother and father — got in the car at night to drive through the upper-class neighborhoods of the heartland, looking at the lights and decorations. A very similar house of red brick and white edgings, with a center door and two upstairs windows, was bedecked with a string of nothing but white lights that flickered on and off. Llewellyn and Maddy drove up to the house in Hancock Park twenty years later, and he sighed heavily knowing he’d regret whatever he chose to do. Perhaps he believed that his mother and father might relive some memory of their own; he imagined a reconciliation at the airport, and driving them up to the house and sitting there in the front seat of the car watching them, recognizing on their faces dreams the dreamers could not name.