Steve Erickson - Zeroville

122.

After he’s cleaned the headstone, he begins wandering south, away from the direction he originally came and into which the woman and two men ran. A few minutes later he’s stunned to reach the end of the cemetery and find himself at the back of the Paramount lot.

123.

He stashes the bloody shirt in a dumpster in the back of the lot and washes in the men’s room. Mid-afternoon he returns to his apartment on his secret street and waits for the police and movie-star chief of detectives who interrogated him on his fourth (fifth?) day in Los Angeles. He watches a movie on TV about a man who is abused as a boy and becomes an arsonist, and then meets a beautiful blond high-school majorette and tells her he’s a spy working on a top secret operation. When he commands her to have sex with him in order to prove her loyalty, he believes he has her under his power. But it becomes clear that she has him under her power, involving him in a scheme to murder her mother, after she’s already killed several others in an orgasmic rush.

124.

Vikar watches this young blonde in a kind of hypnosis. With her wild-child beauty and demeanor, she’s an American Bardot. She made this movie when she lost the role in another movie of a young mother pregnant by the Devil. The studios refused to cast her: Who would believe the Devil ravished this girl when everything about this girl gave every indication of having ravished the Devil? With the death of her father, at the age of three the actress supported her mother and two older sisters by modeling for catalogs; by the age of twelve, she attempted suicide. Was it on a Tuesday, whose name she then took for her own? As Vikar slumps in the couch in front of the TV, he dreams of her on her knees, mad between his legs. As he comes, her mouth curls into that smile of murder, her eyes glow red and he wakes in terror.

125.

When the phone rings, Vikar hasn’t seen or heard from Viking Man in nearly a year. “George Stevens man!” booms the voice on the other end. “Kind of a pussy, Stevens, if you don’t mind my saying. I’m off to Spain to make a movie.”

“I heard.”

“I’m psyched, vicar, I must confess. Same part of Spain where Leone’s shot a bunch of stuff. A few casting matters to sort out still … I was going to see if I could coax you over to design some sets for me, but Dot tells me you’re editing now.”

“She’s teaching me.”

“She says you’ve got an eye. Big compliment, considering the source.” My eye? Vikar wonders, touching the tattooed red teardrop beneath his left one. “Maybe we can bring you in on some of the cutting when we get back.”

“Thank you.”

“Huston’s in Morocco shooting his Kipling thing. Maybe I can get you on that too, once they’ve wrapped.”

“I would like that very much,” Vikar says.

“Morocco is India in his movie and Spain is Morocco in mine. There’s movie-making in a scrotum sac, vicar.” There’s a long pause. “Take care of Dot, O.K., vicar?” he says.

“All right.”

“To the extent she lets anyone take care of her.”

“All right.”

“You see Margie’s Siamese-twin movie?”

“Yes.”

“A fucking hit, so that shows what I know.”

“Yes.”

“Too bad about separating the twins before the story starts. Really wanted to see Margie Ruth joined at the tits.”

“Film history will have to survive.”

“Ha! God love you, vicar, you’re getting wry. O.K., I’m off to Spain. If I tell you I’ll send a postcard, I’m probably lying, so I won’t. Hang in there on the editing gig, O.K.?”

“All right.”

“Keep an eye on Dot.”

126.

All the Los Angeles movies are the same movie, Vikar thinks riding the bus at night into the city of the wrong turn, where there’s no love just obsession, which lovers would choose over love even if they had a choice. A hitchhiker gets to L.A. and finds himself at the end of a leash, coiled around the hand of an actress named Ann Savage (… lose my heart on the burning sand / Now I want to be your dog ); blond and bland, not a line of character in his baby face, the actor playing the drifter will spend the end of his life in jail for murdering his wife. A private eye who makes a living pursuing L.A.’s infidelities finds himself at the center of its most forbidden secret, when the woman he’s sleeping with is her own father’s lover, from whom she’s desperately trying to protect the daughter she had by him. Later, the actor playing the private eye will learn his mother is his grandmother and his sister is his mother. God has seeped into Los Angeles after all, and found His instruments there by which to sacrifice the city’s children.

In another movie, the most famous and romantic of L.A. private eyes finds himself at the beach, amid the lazy decadence of the seventies. Vikar almost can recognize the beach house where he was seduced by Margie Ruth. When the gangster’s girlfriend is smashed in the face with a Coke bottle and people in the theater cry out, Vikar is only surprised that she’s not Soledad Palladin; Vikar finally recognizes Soledad among the naked nymphs dancing along the ramparts of Hollywood faux-castles. “It’s all right with me,” the private eye shrugs, not seeming to care about anything until it becomes clear he’s the only one who does care. Three years later Marlowe will move to New York, change his name to Bickle and drive cabs for a living.

127.

Variety , September 24, 1974: “LOS ANGELES — Dorothy Langer, veteran motion-picture editor who worked on the Academy Award-winning A Place in the Sun and the Oscar-nominated Giant under chief editor William Hornbeck — as well as The Heiress, The Barefoot Contessa, Suddenly Last Summer, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Americanization of Emily and The Greatest Story Ever Told —has been named by Paramount Pictures vice president of cultural affairs effective immediately, it was announced today.

“In a joint statement Gulf + Western CEO Charles G. Bludhorn, Paramount chairman Barry Diller and head of studio production Robert Evans said: ‘Dotty Langer is a legend in the business with a deep understanding of both a proud tradition that dates back to Cecil B. De Mille’s The Squaw Man in 1914—the first Hollywood feature — and the recent winds of change that have produced such modern Paramount classics as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Paper Moon, Serpico, Lady Sings the Blues, Murder on the Orient Express , and Love Story , on which she worked as editor. Paramount Pictures is excited by Ms. Langer’s new position and the possibilities it presents for both her and the company, and expects in the coming years to continue a fruitful relationship that already has lasted more than two decades.’”

128.

Vikar stands in Dot’s new office. It’s less grand than he expected. “She’s vice president,” he tells the blank-looking receptionist at the front desk, but when he’s shown into the office Dotty gently explains, “Vikar, there are about three thousand vice presidents at this studio.”

“Three thousand?”

“Maybe not three thousand,” she says, “but it’s like ‘associate producer.’ In this town, if you don’t have a job or you’re not the least bit important, you’re an associate producer. At a studio, you’re a vice president.”

The office is filled with unpacked boxes and Dotty’s desk is in disarray, with no sign of the Jack Daniels bottle, although Vikar feels certain he detects bourbon. The office is small and Dotty appears smaller in a big black chair behind a big black desk. “Well,” Vikar says, “congratulations.”