Steve Erickson
Zeroville
I believe that cinema was here
from the beginning of the world.
Zeroville
1.
On Vikar’s shaved head is tattooed the right and left lobes of his brain. One lobe is occupied by an extreme close-up of Elizabeth Taylor and the other by Montgomery Clift, their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other’s arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.
2.
This is the summer of 1969, two days after Vikar’s twenty-fourth birthday, when everyone’s hair is long and no one shaves his head unless he’s a Buddhist monk, and no one has tattoos unless he’s a biker or in a circus.
He’s been in Los Angeles an hour. He’s just gotten off a six-day bus trip from Philadelphia, riding day and night, and eating a French dip sandwich at Philippe’s a few blocks up from Olvera Street, the oldest road in the city.
3.
There in Philippe’s, a hippie nods at Vikar’s head and says, “Dig it, man. My favorite movie.”
Vikar nods. “I believe it’s a very good movie.”
“Love that scene at the end, man. There at the Planetarium.”
Vikar stands and in one motion brings the food tray flying up, roast beef and au jus spraying the restaurant—
— and brings the tray crashing down on the blasphemer across the table from him. He manages to catch the napkin floating down like a parachute, in time to wipe his mouth.
Oh, mother, he thinks. “A Place in the Sun, George Stevens,” he says to the fallen man, pointing at his own head, “NOT Rebel Without a Cause,” and strides out.
4.
Tattooed under Vikar’s left eye is a red teardrop.
5.
Is it possible he’s traveled three thousand miles to the Movie Capital of the World only to find people who don’t know the difference between Montgomery Clift and James Dean, who don’t know the difference between Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood? A few blocks north of Philippe’s, the city starts to run out and Vikar turns back. He asks a girl with straight blond hair in a diaphanous granny dress where Hollywood is. Soon he notices that all the girls in Los Angeles have straight blond hair and diaphanous granny dresses.
6.
She gives him a ride, staring at his head. She seems odd to him; he wants her to watch the road. I believe perhaps she’s been taking illicit narcotics, he thinks to himself.
“Uh,” she finally starts to say, and he can see it right there in her eyes: James Dean, Natalie Wood … What will he do? She’s driving and, besides, she’s a girl. You can’t smash a girl over the head with a food tray.
“Montgomery Clift,” he heads off her blunder, “Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Elizabeth Taylor,” she nods. “I’ve heard of her …” pondering it a moment. “Far out.”
He realizes she has no idea who Montgomery Clift is. “You can let me off here,” he says, and she drops him where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards fork, at a small theater—
7.
— where he goes to the movies.
A silent European film from the late twenties, it’s the worst print Vikar has seen — less a movie than a patchwork of celluloid — but he’s spellbound. In the late Middle Ages a young woman, identified in the credits only as “Mlle Falconetti,” is interrogated and hounded by a room of monks. The woman doesn’t give a performance, as such; Vikar has never seen acting that seemed less to be acting. It’s more an inhabitation. The movie is shot completely in close-ups, including the unbearable ending, when the young woman is burned at the stake.
8.
Afterward, he makes his way farther west along Sunset before cutting up to Hollywood Boulevard. Where once was the Moulin Rouge nightclub at the corner of Vine is now a psychedelic club called the Kaleidoscope. Vikar really has no idea what a psychedelic club is. Along Hollywood Boulevard are shabby old jewelry shops, used bookstores, souvenir stands, porn theaters. He’s startled there are no movie stars walking down the street. Still hungry from having sacrificed his French dip sandwich at Philippe’s, he orders a chicken pot pie at Musso & Frank, where Billy Wilder used to lunch with Raymond Chandler while they were writing Double Indemnity, both drinking heavily because they couldn’t stand each other.
9.
He spends a few minutes looking at the footprints outside the Chinese Theatre. He can find neither Elizabeth Taylor nor Montgomery Clift. At the box office he buys a ticket and goes inside to watch the movie.
As Vikar traveled on what seemed an endless bus to Hollywood, the Traveler hurtles through space toward infinity. Dimensions fall away from the Traveler faster and faster until, by the end of the movie, he’s an old man in a white room where a black monolith appears to him at the moment of death. He becomes an embryonic, perhaps divine Starchild. Vikar has come to Los Angeles as a kind of starchild as well, a product of no parentage he acknowledges, vestiges of an earlier childhood falling away from him like dimensions. Vikar tells himself, I’ve found a place where God does not kill children but is a Child Himself.
He’s now seen two movies, one of the Middle Ages and one of the future, in his first seven hours in Los Angeles. Vikar crosses Hollywood Boulevard to the Roosevelt Hotel, built by Louis B. Mayer, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in the year the movies discovered sound.
10.
Vikar walks through the Roosevelt lobby, which has a statue of Charlie Chaplin. With its stone arches and palm fronds, it’s slightly seedy; the first Academy Awards were held here forty years before. At the front desk, he asks for room 928.
The young clerk behind the front desk says, “That room’s not available.” His long hair is tucked into his collar beneath his coat and tie.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Seventeen years ago,” Vikar says, “Montgomery Clift lived in that room.”
“Who?”
Vikar restrains the urge to pick up the small bell from the desk and lodge it in the philistine’s forehead. For a moment he considers the image of the clerk having a bell for a third eye, like a cyclops. People could walk up and ring it, and every time they did, this infidel would remember Montgomery Clift. “Montgomery Clift,” Vikar says, “lived here after making A Place in the Sun, when he was filming From Here to Eternity.”
11.
The clerk says, “Hey, man, have you seen Easy Rider? I usually don’t go to movies. I’m into the Music.”
“What?”
“The Music.” The clerk turns up the radio. There’s a song playing about a train to Marrakesh: “All aboard the train,” the singer sings. It’s horrible; they’ve forgotten A Place in the Sun for this? Vikar also suspects there’s something narcotics-related about the song.
“Montgomery Clift’s ghost lives in this hotel,” Vikar says.
“No,” the clerk answers, “that’s that D. W. guy.”
“D. W.?”
“It’s in the brochure. He died here or something, busted.” He adds, “I don’t mean busted like by the cops — I mean broke. His ghost rides up and down the elevators trying to figure out where to go.”
“D. W. Griffith?”
“I think that’s him,” the clerk nods, impressed, “yeah, D. W. Griffin.” He looks at the register. “Room 939 is available, that’s in the other corner at the other end of the hall, so it’s like Room 928 except backward.”