Steve Erickson: Zeroville

34.

Five minutes later Vikar is still on the floor and the police are trying to get him to stop crying. “O.K.,” the chief says. “O.K., God damn it.”

“Oh mother, oh mother …”

“Stop it.” The chief hands the photos back to the black detective who gave them to him. Vikar begins to calm down. “You O.K.?”

Vikar says nothing.

“You O.K.?”

Vikar shakes his head. The chief studies him, disappointed.

The woman and the other men now leave the room, one by one. Vikar is still. “So,” the chief finally says, nodding at Vikar’s head, “what’s with the James Dean and Natalie Wood?”

35.

They leave him in the interrogation room—

— but through the open door he can hear a couple of voices. “… couldn’t even look at the photos,” one of the voices sounds like the chief’s, “how could he have done that to those people?”

“He’s a freak,” the other voice says.

“That’s awfully astute, Barnes. But the city is full of freaks and by itself it doesn’t put him on Cielo Drive with five butchered bodies.”

“I think I like them better when their hair’s down to their asses. Never thought I’d say that …” The voice lowers. “Chief, I can’t say this when Peters is around, but I’m telling you it’s the coloreds on this one.”

“Don’t say that when Peters is around,” sternly.

A pause. “Odd about the name thing. That he would lie about that, of all things — that business about ‘Ike’ not being short for …”

“It doesn’t,” the chief interrupts, “put him up there in the canyon hacking up five people including a pregnant woman.”

“Fucking Hollywood degenerates. Live freaky, die freaky.”

“For God’s sakes, don’t go around saying that either.” Another pause. “You know when we located his father, he wouldn’t admit having a son.”

“Well, chief, would you? What’s with the fucking head, that’s what I want to know. I like all the hair better, never thought I’d say it. The hair down to their asses. Live freaky, die freaky, I’m telling you.”

36.

Forty-five minutes later, a patrol car deposits Vikar at Hill and Third in downtown Los Angeles. “I’d stay out of those canyons if I were you,” one of the cops tells him. “There’s something going on up there.”

“Tell the chief my father was right,” Vikar answers. “He doesn’t have a son.”

37.

That night Vikar slips into the Chinese Theatre through a back door and sleeps on the stage behind the screen. All night, images from the movie fly over him, as though he’s lying at the end of a runway, below an endless stream of jetliners landing.

For four months after arriving in Los Angeles, he works as a handyman at the Roosevelt, riding the elevator with the ghost of D. W. Griffith, who died there twenty years earlier. On his days off, he walks the two miles down Vine to the edge of Hancock Park and the old Ravenswood apartments and the baroque El Royale where Mae West lives, and the orphanage where Norma Jean Baker once could see from her window, a half mile east on Melrose, Paramount Studios and its arched wrought-iron gates just beyond the fountain at Bronson Avenue. When he gets a job at the studio building sets, he rents a $120 second-story apartment on Pauline Boulevard, a secret street in the Hollywood Hills entered only on foot by a long flight of stone steps.

38.

Vikar sees an Italian movie in which a father’s bicycle, on which his job depends, is stolen. The father and his small son search the city for the stolen bicycle. When they don’t find it, in desperation the father steals another bicycle and is caught, threatened and humiliated by an angry mob. The father loves his son so much he’s willing to defy God’s laws for him. But for this transgression he’s punished and abased, and the boy learns that it’s a sin for fathers to love their sons too much.

39.

Vikar still had his hair when he was a twenty-year-old studying architecture at Mather Divinity and saw his first movie. Actually, having finally summoned the courage to defy his father, he saw his first two movies on the same day, back to back.

One, about a London photographer who discovers a murder in a photo of what otherwise appears to be a serene park, made sense to Vikar like nothing else had. The second movie was about a family of sirens living in snowy mountains, pursued by police and leaving a trail of malevolent music. Some months after arriving in Los Angeles and after his own experience with the police, Vikar thinks of this movie when another singing family is arrested for the murders of five people, including a woman eight months pregnant, that took place in the canyons on Vikar’s first night in the city. Gazing at the ravines from the window of his apartment on the secret Pauline Boulevard, Vikar can’t shake, no matter how hard he tries, the movie’s refrain, going around in his head. The hills are alive , he shudders, with the sound of music .

40.

When Montgomery Clift was living at the Roosevelt Hotel in room 928, Ike Jerome was seven years old in eastern Pennsylvania. One night he heard come into his room his Calvinist father who allowed in the house no books except the Bible, no magazines, newspapers, radio or the then new invention of television. The little boy pretended to be asleep as his father knelt next to him in the dark.

“Our God the Father,” the father whispered in the boy’s ear, “had one hour of weakness for which He has spent eternity paying, and that was the moment He stopped Abraham from proving to Him his true faith and devotion. Children are the manifestation of the sin that soiled the world with pleasure’s seed, and the Bible teaches us that sanctification lies in the deliverance of children from this life and from the sin of their birth and existence. Our God the Father learned His lesson. When He punished the Pharaoh for his pride and disobedience, did He smite the Pharaoh? No, shrewdly and without further weakness He smote the Pharaoh’s child, as He smote all the Egyptian children. Down through all the Book of Books He has smote the children until in the end he smote His own child, and had He not stopped Abraham in a moment of heedless mercy then perhaps our God the Father would not have had to kill His own child later. Remember that you are bound to transcend the sin of your childhood by finally setting aside the things of childhood for the things of manhood so that you might live down all your days of sin before delivering your soul to Him, unless by some fantastic glory the God our Father should decide to deliver you from this life now, while still in your wretched state of childishness, you … you …” breathing heavily, “you manifestation you, of all men’s sins.”

“Wallace?” The voice of his mother in the doorway. Ike continued to feign sleep. There was a trembling in his mother’s voice he had never heard.

“Go to bed,” his father said to her without turning from the boy.

“Wallace.” Her voice more firm. This was a moment, though Ike didn’t realize it for years, when anything might have happened.

“As all sons are marked by the destiny of righteous sacrifice,” the father hissed, “so all righteous fathers would be Abraham again, to guide our God the Father’s hand in His hour of weakness.”

“ Wallace ,” his mother again, insistent in a way the boy hadn’t heard before, and wouldn’t again.

41.

At Paramount, Vikar works for a while on the set of a Vincente Minnelli musical about reincarnation. Then he works on an Otto Preminger movie about a burned woman who happens to be played by Vincente Minnelli’s daughter. He can’t believe his luck to be working on movies by Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger. But no one else seems impressed.