Read Online Zeroville by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online

from the future. It’s really not a business for broads. Used to be, of course. But it’s not like any of them is going to be the next Garbo—they’re not even going to be the next Ava Gardner. Janet over there,” he points to one, “had a glory-moment ten years ago, some arty movie about some retarded girl in love with some retarded boy—doesn’t that give you a hard-on, vicar? Isn’t that something you just have to see? It won some festival somewhere and she hasn’t done anything since. Margie was in a Gene Wilder movie a year or two ago, and Jenny, the blonde, is up for some dinky part or other in some movie or other because her dad just won a screenplay Oscar after being blacklisted most of the fifties—so the commies are making a comeback, God love ’em. Not all of them want to be actresses—Cass over there,” the large woman in a muumuu, “has nothing to do with the movies, she was in a singing group everyone in the world has heard of except you, probably, and made a fortune in the lifespan of a larva and is already washed up at the age of thirty, living in the next house over with Julia,” the petite woman with short cropped hair in jean shorts, “who doesn’t want to be Garbo or John Ford but the next Jack Warner or Harry Cohn and may just be evil enough to pull it off, now that I think about it. Now that I think about it, Julia’s the one who will show us all up, right before she uses the least of us, whoever that is—there’s about four candidates within a beer bottle’s throw—to pick the rest of us out of her teeth.”
78.
    “As for Soledad,” says Viking Man, “where do you start? It’s one crazy story after another. No one is sure how old she is, anywhere between her early twenties and her early thirties, born in Seville to Andalusian gypsies or some damned thing that sounds just silly enough to be true. Legend has it her father is Buñuel illegitimately—if that’s so, then she’s at least three or four years older than she admits to since Franco ran Buñuel out of Spain in the late forties. She may not know for sure about her father any more than she knows for sure who’s the father of little Isadora—Zazi—there. Story has it Sol was dancing flamenco by the time she was eight. Story has it she was in a nuthouse for a while in Oslo, and story has it she was cast as the woman who vanishes on the island in L’Avventura and then was dropped at the last minute, for mysterious reasons no one ever has understood or explained. She did some soft-core in Italy or France, came to the States, what? six, seven years ago. Hung around the Strip making the circuit between Ciro’s and the Whisky—story has it she’s a witch and that on Venice Beach twenty miles down the sand here,” he points down the beach, “she gave Jim Morrison the blowjob of all time, channeled from the netherworld. She can be medusa or sweet as candy on pretty much a moment’s notice. It’s hard to know exactly what she feels about her daughter. For a while they were part of Zappa’s commune in the canyon, so of course the story’s gotten around that if Morrison isn’t Zazi’s dad, Zappa is, and if Sol knows, she’s not saying, and if she says, she’s only guessing. Neither seems likely. By all accounts Morrison can’t get it up most of the time and, other than just happening to share the same roof along with thirty other people, Zappa himself is actually a fairly straight arrow about such things, as I understand it. ‘Isadora,’ well, that’s a little elegant, hell, that’s practically blue-blood for a guy who names his kids Dweezil.”
79.
    On his last night at the beach house, Vikar is trying to sleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs and has dreams of Soledad Palladin as Siamese twins, naked and joined not at the breasts but sometimes at the hip, sometimes at the shoulder, sometimes at the place between her legs. Beast needs beast, Soledad keeps whispering in a Spanish that Vikar somehow understands.