Steve Erickson - Zeroville

99.

He’s captivated by Ann-Margret’s sexual malevolence in Kitten With a Whip . In a fifties Mob movie called The Big Combo , he’s fascinated by Jean Wallace coolly performing oral sex on Richard Conte below the camera frame. In the opening shot of a Godard movie at the Fox Venice, the camera pans the length of a nude blonde, next to the Elizabeth Taylor of A Place in the Sun , the most beautiful woman Vikar has seen in the movies. She reminds him of the same nude he saw years before in the movie about the spy, except now washed clean of the gold paint and resurrected, glowing with an amber of her own.

But it’s with another blonde, less beautiful than Bardot but somehow less resistible as well, that Vikar cheats on Elizabeth. Perhaps Vikar wants the blonde in Strangers When We Meet because, in the way that he has added a k to his name, she could have dropped the k from hers, such was the nova of her career. In three years in the mid-fifties, she went from being Miss Deepfreeze — a small-time Midwest beauty queen selling refrigerators — to the world’s biggest female star, Marilyn notwithstanding. She bruises as easily as Marilyn but is not felled by the blow, as is Marilyn; surviving what Marilyn could not, she’s denied the martyrdom of goddesses. At the end of Strangers When We Meet , a sadness lingers about her both enduring and inevitable. Flung from the Old California mission steeple in the earlier movie about the private eye who’s obsessed with her, it’s as if she somehow peeled herself up off the ground, coolly gathered her dignity, and moved on to another town in another movie, just in time to be devastated anew by Kirk Douglas. Her golden hair in his grip as she lies between his legs, Vikar feels he’s cheating not only on Elizabeth Taylor but Soledad Palladin.

100.

As on the night he left the Japanese gangster movie with an erection, Vikar takes to riding the bus. He rides across the whirling grids of Los Angeles, east to west. He rides into the early morning hours until the buses stop running, at which point often he must figure out a way home. For a while, all the bus drivers watch him in their rear-view mirrors. But soon he becomes a familiar passenger and they ignore him.

With each bus Vikar sails farther into a city of neon lily pads floating on an immense black pond. In this city a person can hide from God a long time. He rides past bars and shops, the Frolic Room and the Formosa and the Tiki Ti, Boardner’s and the Firefly on Vine, he rides past the Body Shoppe and Seventh Veil and Jumbo Clown strip joints and the Pussycat Theater at Western, and the streetwalkers on Sunset who become younger and prettier the farther west he gets from La Brea. He rides over old bridges and is struck by how many there are in Los Angeles that cross no water whatsoever, arching over rivers of dust. He rides past the hotels where the stars stay, the Roosevelt and the Marquis and the Landmark on Franklin and the Knickerbocker on Ivar; he gazes up at the Chateau Marmont’s tower and wonders who might be on its parapets, gazes up at the spinning lounge on top of the Holiday Inn on Highland and wonders who looks down at his bus at that moment.

101.

At one point, he gets off at Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax and walks south. Passing Melrose, he comes to a small wooden theater; at the ticket counter the woman says, “You’ve missed the first two hours.”

“It’s all right,” Vikar says.

The woman sells Vikar the ticket and he goes inside. He has to wind through narrow wooden passages like a fun house. He gets to his hard seat just as the screen is filled with white hoods, the Klan thundering on horseback. At the front of the theater, before the silent screen, a small round man in his seventies plays the accompanying organ.

102.

The tiny theater around Vikar is half full. He finds himself riveted less by the images than by the sound of the organ, which thunders along with the Klan’s horses. He can feel the vibration of the sound in the seat beneath him and in his feet on the floor.

103.

The lights go up and the rest of the audience leaves. The small wooden theater is even less imposing with the lights on. Vikar remains in his seat watching the little old man who played the organ, who smiles at him. “Did you like it?” the old man says.

“I liked the sound,” Vikar says.

“You mean me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, thank you,” he says. He looks at Vikar’s head. “Friends of yours?”

“Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.”

The old man shrugs. “Kids to me. I would have said Janet Gaynor and what’s-his-name from Seventh Heaven . Didn’t he die?”

“Montgomery Clift?”

“I remember something about a car accident.”

“He didn’t die in the car accident. It was after that. Do you play here all the time?”

“Not all the time. I play out at UCLA a lot when they have screenings.” He walks over to where Vikar sits. “I’m Chauncey.” He puts out his hand.

“I’m Vikar. Did you play for silent movies?”

“Can you believe I’m that old?”

“Yes,” Vikar says. Chauncey laughs. “Did you play for this movie?”

“I don’t remember when I first played for this movie.” Chauncey lowers himself into one of the seats in the row before Vikar’s. “The big pictures had orchestras when they opened.”

“I met a man once who didn’t like this movie. He broke into my apartment.”

“You discussed motion pictures with someone who broke into your apartment?”

“He said it’s jive bullshit.”

“Well, there’s probably something to that, I suppose. Of course I’m from a different era, so maybe not the one to ask — I just see the picture, not the politics. We play it for the kids over at UCLA — you know, long hair,” he pantomimes long hair, “they’re actually quite respectful but I’m sure they also think it’s jive as-you-say. Probably the most sophisticated audiences I’ve ever played for, though God knows they don’t look very sophisticated.”

“John Ford played one of the Klansman.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I used to ride the elevator of the Roosevelt Hotel with D. W. Griffith.”

“Is that right?”

“He was a ghost then,” Vikar says.

Chauncey laughs. “Well, that makes sense. I think he did die in that hotel.”

“He built it with Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.”

“You sound pretty sophisticated, too.”

“I don’t know,” Vikar says. “But I know things about movies.”

104.

It seems to Vikar that Dotty already has made some impact on her Jack Daniels bottle and it’s made some impact on her when she suggests they walk up the street from the studio for a drink. On the corner, Nickodell’s wearily bleats in the night its electric pastels. The blood-red booths of the cavernous interior are like the cells of a dead beehive.

Almost no one else is in the restaurant. Vikar and Dotty take a booth in which, twenty years before, William Holden and Lucille Ball had lunch; the waiter comes and Dotty orders a Jack Daniels and Vikar asks for a Coke. “Come on,” moans Dotty, “don’t do this to me. Bring the man a vodka tonic,” she says to the waiter, “maybe a little light on the vodka.”

For a while they drink in the dark belly of the restaurant saying nothing. Dotty leans against the red upholstered booth with her eyes closed; it occurs to Vikar that she dreads going home, wherever that might be. He wonders how many nights she sleeps in the cutting room. “I was thinking,” he says. “What you said about it being a dream.”