Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“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.”

“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.”

78.

“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.”

79.

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.”