The little bastard. He’ll be the first to go, I thought.

  16

  Hitting Off

  Some of them were shooting at the hawks. Paddy and Colette and June and a girl named Irma, who went a little crazy, imitating the birds in their wide-winged evil circling, in a dance she made up as she danced on the flagstone “landing terrace.” Melva was very jealous of her. Vlad J. following us all over with his hand-held camera, one of Melva’s boys climbing down through the rubble to the beach, slipping and cutting his bare leg on a rock, blood swarming out. I laughed and climbed down to rescue him —this was the second day and I was still powerful—and tested out his blood myself, dipping a forefinger in it just for wild laughter, and the kid went white.

  At night you could hear rattlesnakes. You could hear slithering and cold evil crawling. The inside of the place was so jumbled, so smelling of wet people and their things, that I went back out to sleep in the car. I like to sleep alone. Out there my head was filled with the pounding of water, pounding pounding pulsing of great waves, water breaking against the beach against the boulders. The boulders were big as houses. I cast my mind back over the partying and the filming and wondered: Was Gotteson like that foam down there, churning out of the Pacific Ocean only to be sucked back into nothing…?

  Vlad J. said he couldn’t see except through his camera. Couldn’t see things in three-dimensional focus. His eyes fastened on mine, through the camera lens. He said, Bobbie you have the most fascinating face, Bobbie, your face is… your face is fascinating.…Your body is fascinating.…You climbed up here, didn’t you, climbed up from the beach or out of a hole in the ground, with little bits of dirt clinging to you, clinging to the hairs on your body, your fingers itching to get at us…?

  I did the Machete Dance for him. Irma ran out to join me, eyes closed and stomach bared. Do it, do it! she begged. The others took up the chant. But though I was high from hitting off the blood a sweat broke over me and I went cold. Irma screamed: Do it to me, Bobbie! Floating in the pool and cast in a heap at the end of the pool were the mannequins from yesterday. Irma was like foam being churned up and flung at me, her mouth twisted, saliva running from one corner of her mouth down her chin, the others were gathered around chanting and stamping their feet, sweet Bobbie and sweet Irma, why not…?

  Why not?

  Somebody said that the scavenger birds could see death, could see life about to click! into death. That was why they circled El Portal all the time. Their shrewd lidless eyes were like mine. Could pierce surfaces that are a riddle to ordinary vision. There, there—there the fizzing-out of life, and there Bobbie swoops down to his target! Irma rushed at me. There were black smears around her eyes, her eyeballs were watering, itching, reddened. She was going to die anyway in a few weeks. The sea and sky and these chanting hoarse people were too much for her…she was someone’s ex-daughter or ex-wife…she was “under contract” at V. Studios and hadn’t had a job for six years, assigned to wait, she had wept into my ear the night before of how she had been a Queen somewhere—Davenport?— Davenport High School?—a Queen—and her beautiful face and beautiful black mane of hair had won her so many prizes and loves and this contract under Mr. V. but now she was a very old woman, ready to die, she was twenty-two years old and please, Bobbie, would I kill her so that she could break back into tiny particles of moisture…? She threw her arms around my neck but I swung the Machete clear of her with a trick I had, so that people gasped, and if I had not been so steady in my center of gravity she would have knocked us both into the pool.

  At this moment the sun broke clear. Vlad J. ran up to us.

  “Oh, the sun! The sun!”

  We rubbed our eyes and put on dark glasses.

  Everyone denies these accusations, Bobbie. You are telling lies.

  He came down himself. He came to visit. He came to visit. El Portal is in his name, you can check it—

  El Portal is not in his name.

  He came himself to visit, there are pictures of him! They all got out their cameras. Vlad J. filmed the landing of the helicopters. I was there. Someone ran to wake me up, I was lying in the main living room, with my head in the fireplace where the stone was very cold and restful, and I ran outside in spite of how burning the sun was, and there the first helicopter was landing.…I went wild with it, the roaring and whining! I was very excited! Everyone had been arguing—would he show up, or wouldn’t he?— even though it was Melva’s birthday and some anniversary of theirs—but one of Melva’s boys had confided in me that he had forgotten all about Melva, that he was in love with someone else and would never show up at this dump.…But he was supposed to come to meet me. This was to be our meeting.

  You really are a maniac, Bobbie. It’s pathetic, actually. That you, a no-talent two-bit three-time-loser punk from New Jersey, a State-supported little ungrateful bastard with fake gypsy eyes and a voice like coffee grounds—that you of all people should fantasize a meeting with the millionaire-industrialist, millionaire-inventor, millionaire-philanthropist Vanbrugh!

  The first helicopter landed on the terrace. Some men climbed out and circled the terrace. I was a little off my head from the roaring because I hate machines. I’m no mechanical modern man! They were dressed in suits and ties and knew their way around, Melva invited them inside for a drink, but they said no, they didn’t have time, but had to clean things up a little for Mr. V. who would be landing in an hour, and everyone looked at everyone else—scruffy and red-eyed and wild-haired from the night before—and Irma started to cry and staggered back to the house. I smoothed my hair down with my hands. They got the Mexican servants to clean up and one of Mr. V.’s aides and myself dragged junk out of the swimming pool, he was very polite to me, and appreciated it when I said I’d wade in, to get some bottles and parts of dummies’ arms and legs that were floating around, so he wouldn’t have to get his shirt-cuff wet. Then they sprayed. They explained that Mr. V. was very cautious about scorpions. I followed them around and helped move chairs and tables and beach-umbrellas. I said that I had a magic way with poisonous things, that I could pick up a scorpion and talk it out of stinging. It was a matter of inner rhythms. It was a matter of slowing your brain-rhythms to such an extent that the scorpion swayed with you, hypnotized. They were very polite to me and—

  Bobbie, all this is a lie. You know that you never met any of these people. They deny it. Most of them deny it. And if you weren’t under indictment for first-degree murder, for having hacked to death one Cynthia Pryce of Pasadena, California, you can be certain that the Vanbrugh Corporation would sue you for all you possess—

  I did meet him. I met all of them. It’s on film but I can’t get hold of the film and I can’t get royalties from it. The girl from Pasadena has nothing to do with it. I don’t know her. I met her in a bar. She followed me out. She was a stewardess for Transcontinental Airlines and in my head I got it mixed up with his airlines—I hate machines and can’t remember their names—something lurched up in me, like a log lurching up to the surface of some fast-moving wild stream, and I thought, Hey why not, hey, why not go home with this little doll and love her a little, and maybe, maybe she is a little girl of his to put in another good word for you, Bobbie?…because by then I was broke and desperate and everyone had slammed the door shut in Bobbie’s face. Because I was sinking and bruised. I didn’t know her name and in the bungalow, in the front room where she showed me all her girl friends’ record albums, and we were fooling around, a mist came over my brain the way it floated over the railing from the sea. I got sick. Very sick. Throwing-up-sick. And so certain powers failed me and no soul-programming worked, and the girl started to throw herself around like she was crazy, and I was throwing myself around like there were many more of me, inside of me, crammed-up inside of me…like a woman stuffed with babies, baby rats or baby gophers or moles or…or things burrowing to get out, you know, and ready to use their teeth if they can’t get out. When I came to the lights in the front room were smashed and the hi-fi was blaring, drums and rockets coming from two sides of the room, and I crawled over the broken records and the cushions with their stuffing hacked out and I saw this dressmaker’s dummy with one shoe on and one shoe off and a lot of blood, and a weird red glow from the hi-fi where there was this little pink-scarlet knob, you know, made of plastic, that lit up to tell you that there was still electric current going there.…My mind opened up a crack and alerted me to rise on one elbow, to look around for the camera. Was maybe somebody lurking in the kitchen, in the dark?…eh?…was it little owl-eyed Vlad J. who loved me so, and all but thrust Irma into my nest in the fireplace? …or someone from the studio itself, The Studio, getting a few hundred yards more of film for them to scrutinize? But I didn’t have my guitar any longer! I did have the Machete with me, which I usually carried wound in many yards of coarse woven cloth some girl gave me, brought back from Taos, to go with my primitive good looks, but where was the Machete…?

  The dressmaker’s dummy with all the blood was lying on it. The handle was showing. Weird-red, glowing-red, pink-scarlet-sinister radiance. It glowed in the dark. I crawled over to her and said, “Honey you didn’t tell me your name, even,” and it wasn’t until later that day when I had escaped and was having a tamale-burger at a Strip drive-in, standing near some teenage bastard and his bright yellow Ferrari with the radio blaring, that I heard the news bulletin, but by then…by then the memory of it had all evaporated and I felt only that fuzzy little interest, you know, that you feel when you hear about four or five stewardesses murdered in some bungalow they rented out in Pasadena that the neighbors swore had been raided three times in the last three months for drugs and wild parties and late-night noises so I had only a foggy good citizen’s interest in that, because my real self was with my music but my music was shut off and all those powers that went with it that I lost in the scramble-climb up Vanbrugh’s house while those bastards stood around clapping and cheering and snickering—

  Bobbie, you’re lying. You were never at Vanbrugh’s house: that house outside Lucia is not owned by him. Not according to the county’s records. You didn’t meet Vanbrugh, not Vanbrugh in person. You met an aide of his. It was a joke. It was a costume-party. It was a Mardi Gras party. It was a joke set up by Dewey L. of The Studio to punish Melva for her loudmouth talk about him having to sell his house and move into a four-bedroom Colonial in the Junior Estates sub-division off Mulholland Drive, because he was being blackmailed through some convoluted contacts culminating in a dead drug-pusher’s close friend up at Berkeley who possesses certain embarrassing photos involving the dead boy and Mr. L.’s daughter.…So it was all a trick, Bobbie, to fool everyone at El Portal, just some actors dressed up as Mr. V’s flying squad and that degenerate decrepit character-actor of the Forties, Edwin E. playing Vanbrugh himself. What a joke! What a complicated maze!

  I looked him in the eyes. Eye-to-eye with him. I saw him. I saw. They had to help him down the ladder, he must have been unwell. He walked tilted a little to one side…his right shoulder was higher than his left shoulder.…He wore a gauze mask that hid all of his face except the eyes. One of the aides helped him…and he walked over to a table they’d set up for him, the Mexicans all dressed now in white, the blood- and gut-smeared outfits of yesterday gone and clean starched white outfits on, white-gloved, and even the slow-cruising buzzards seemed to stare down at him. I felt my center of gravity tilt.…I felt a strange tugging in my brain, where so much had been hoarded up, so much sanity and the need to run to someone and seize his ankle and howl like a wolf, to surrender oh sweet Jesus at last…after so many years…to surrender instead of having them all surrender to me, turning themselves inside-out to me and their shallow little dark crevices wet-aching for me, for me, the way a few weeks later all their moist little pores would be crying out for me to open them, but when he came to me, when the second helicopter landed and the hurricane-whirling subsided and his nicest politest young aide in a blue suit and a dark blue necktie and a white shirt led him over to the table, even though he was an older man as I could see, and walked unsteadily, and his gray-black hair was thinning so that an oval of his scalp showed through, so very ordinary that the terrace and the helicopters and the broken-up towers of fog coming to us from the ocean were changed into something else, the cries of the birds changed, everything shrill and breathless and burning with sun, and where oh God was my guitar?— where had I left it?—when this happened I knew I would never be the same again. I stood there hypnotized. He sat down, he looked at us. One of the servants uncorked a bottle of water and another servant uncorked a bottle of California wine and, while he watched carefully and indicated with a deft movement of his forefinger—he wore dark gloves—how high they should pour the mixture in a goblet, I seemed to hear the thought-message shooting around into all of us: Stay where you are until you’re released!

  17

  Gotteson’s Pilot-Film

  They came into motion again.

  It began to pulse with time and waves again, and little tentative giggles from the girls. And sound began again. And he motioned Melva over and for forty-five minutes she crouched beside him, not daring to sit, and the two of them talked together in whispers and I saw her face change and age and wither and turn greenish-metallic and brighten again and turn into the face of a twenty-five-year-old girl smiling glowing up into the gauzed-over face of a gentleman who had descended to her from the sky and would soon ascend again but in the meantime was almost touching her, almost touching her tear-sparkling cheeks, while the aides moved among us and said cheerfully, Don’t just stand around looking so scared!—let’s have some nice music piped out here or maybe some of you could entertain—he doesn’t like anything fussy or fancy, just tap-dancing or even ballroom dancing if there’s enough room—his tastes are very simple! We were all shy until Paddy cleared his throat and said, Hey Jesus, this sure takes me back, and he sucked in air for two-three-four laborious seconds and licked his lips and fastened his blood-cobwebbed gaze on a point just a few inches to the left of Mr. V.’s table and began a little dance-routine that I had never seen before in anyone. He lost his balance and started over. Someone said, You’ve still got it, Paddy! And someone else, a middle-aged tear-brimming blonde who had nibbled my toes the night before, snatched off her shoes and began to match Paddy in his dance, spreading out her arms and fixing a sweet glassy smile on the distance, and the two of them danced carefully, grinning, at first pretending not to be aware of each other and then coming together face-to-face with a foot or more between them, while Colette hummed very loudly and broke into a song that the others joined—

  A one, a two, a dippety-dippety-do—

  And where was my guitar?

  Vlad J. slid his arm around my neck and said softly, “Honey, let’s swing right into a proposition we’ve all been meaning to make you, and now is the perfect time, let’s explore the possibilities of a comedy series in which you play the role…a timely role, and I have the go-ahead from a very interested producer at The Studio, unfortunately not with us right now, but a quick telephone call would get him out here fast if he knew…who happened to be here. Anyway it is a most timely role and Melva balked because she has this mania for troubadours, I mean the funky gutsy strong stuff, but I’m going to go over Melva’s head and take the chance and put the proposition to you, man, because I know you don’t have an agent, don’t believe in agents, but look here, honey, the idea some of us cooked up together was: a comedy series with you as the star’s side-kick, the one who gets all the laughs or most of them, the one who sort of steals the scenes, you know, up until the last five minutes when things straighten out and the drama gets prepared for The End, but anyway you’ve got this incredible natural fantastic talent for being so goddam funny…I mean aside from your other talents…but this is going to be a family show, you know, on television. On television. And some of us thought, Jesus, it was almost a spontaneous group-thought, that I should do maybe a pilot-film while we’re all together out here, like a family, pretty well-acquainted by now and not so self-conscious, and now with Mr. Vanbrugh among us, what an ideal opportunity!—I make enough in six weeks to finance me the rest of the year, so I can do the kind of film-making I really want…and the kind that is somehow in my nature…my unique inexplicable nature demanding to be given visual form…And so, honey, my proposition to you is—”

  I pushed him away.

  I turned and ran back toward the house.

  I was already crying, hoarse angry sobs, and behind me they stopped singing and dancing and said, “What…? What’s wrong…? What happened…?”

  I ran through the foyer and slid on the white fur rugs and almost fell, my eyes were blurred with tears, and righted my balance and ran through the big sunken living room and along the hallway past the Spanish tapestries and icons and in my rage I knocked a statue off its pedestal, and ran into one of the back bedrooms and tore at the bedspread, a heavy primitive quilt with cougars and American eagles and fir trees woven into it, and threw the pillows around tearing one of the pillows with my teeth so that fine white fluffy pinfeathers swirled everywhere, and I heard someone calling after me, Oh Bobbie! and my mind blanked out and I tried to crawl under the bed, because I remember lying under there with my eyes shut tight to keep the tears back and dust-balls drawn up to my mouth when I breathed in and pushed a few inches back when I breathed out, and Melva herself was kneeling by the bed and saying, “Oh Bobbie, did he hurt your feelings…? Oh Bobbie! Oh Jesus, I told him to let me talk to you. He’s a Russian, he’s never learned the nuances of our language…don’t pay any attention to him, Bobbie, please come back out…please don’t cry…Mr. Vanbrugh saw you run away and he’s very, very upset, he can’t stand for anyone to be sad in his presence, he’s a wonderful and generous man and so seldom meets interesting people like us, he’s usually surrounded with that squad of Harvard Law bastards that you can’t get through to save your soul.…Bobbie, sweetheart, are you listening? Mr. Vanbrugh himself wants to see you perform. Mr. Vanbrugh himself. He’s asking for you, he’s out there actually requesting that you come back…he was angry with Vlad for upsetting you, and Vlad may just be out of a job if one of Mr. V.’s aides takes a dislike to him, but you could make us all so happy…and yourself so happy!…if you’d just come back out, honey, and show us how funny you are. There’s no story-line cooked up yet, for the comedy series, and they don’t have a male lead but it will be no trouble to find one—some tall blond clean-faced boring kid, maybe a surfer, or a singer with a good voice—and you, Bobbie, would be the scene-stealer! Did Vlad tell you all this? Honey, please come back! Please forgive Vlad, in front of Mr. V., so he won’t get in trouble! We’re all like a big family, even those of us who don’t know one another well, it’s all one party, honey, and please don’t be uppity.…Mr. V. had the idea that you were one of my sons, he seems to think you’re a bit younger than you are.…So come back, honey, let me wipe your face…that’s my good sweet Bobbie, yes…yes, crawl back out here.…You’ve been crying and your face is all dirty. Let me just wipe it clean, honey, so Mr. V. can see how striking a face you have.…Such personality! Such bone-structure!”