Mystery Girl: A Novel (35 page)

trash anyway, and what about all these European exiles who made the old B-movies? That grabbed him more than anything, I think. He liked thinking about Fritz Lang and all those guys, the one who made
Detour.
You and he could have talked about that all night. Still, he claimed he had no idea about horror movies, he’d never seen one, blah blah, so I offered to help him write it, like sit at the computer and type and so forth, and he finally agreed. I think that at first the idea of us working together intrigued him more than the script itself. That I was his muse. So all of a sudden just like that, we were collaborators. Now instead of being an actress, which I’d never really wanted anyway, I was going to be this genius writer. Of course I didn’t stop to think that I’d simply switched from my mother’s fantasy to his. But I liked writing at least. Honestly it didn’t seem so hard to me, like it did to him or to you, all that misery and drama and hating yourself and ripping things up. You never really reminded me of him until that first time I came home and you were lying on the floor with torn paper all around you. I was like, uh-oh, here we go again. Another diva. You two were the real actresses. To me making up a story was fun. I liked the script. I didn’t care if it was a masterpiece. I liked being behind the camera with Zed. I could tell people didn’t really take me seriously of course, this seventeen-year-old girl, but Zed did. He’d make everyone wait while he took me in the corner and asked what I thought. Still, even though it was flattering and showed how highly he thought of me, I realize now that it signaled a shift in him, the first tremors of self-doubt. Looking to me for reassurance, trusting my taste, not his own. In any case, it didn’t end well. Once again the suits fucked us over. The backers were shady and ran out of money. At one point Zed drove to Vegas with his cameraman and tried to raise the cash by playing blackjack. In the end the bank owned the movie. They took it away from Zed, had some hacks recut it, changed the title, and dumped it onto the video market. After that Zed vowed no more commercial Hollywood movies. But it didn’t occur to him that it is hard to live a commercial Hollywood lifestyle
without them. He assured me everything was just fine. What we needed was a new project, one of our own. That was when we started working on the trilogy. Of course the basic subject matter, the texts, the music, were all from Zed. But more and more, he seemed to turn to me, taking my ideas and fantasies and incorporating them into the films. The lines were blurring and he wanted to blur them even more, between art and life, between himself and me. When I woke up in the morning, he’d ask about my dreams and write them down in a notebook. We’d take ecstasy and he’d tape-record us talking. Then Maria joined us, and it got even more complicated. She was a Mexican girl we met at a salsa club and brought home with us, and somehow she just never left. Everyone thought it was Zed’s fantasy, but really it was my idea. I was lonely. I had no friends of my own, I wasn’t in school or working a job, I hung out at that house all day. Maria was my age and we actually looked similar. People used to think we were sisters, which amused us because it made us feel even more perverse. We had a room in the house that we painted all black, sealed the windows with tinfoil and heavy curtains, where she and I went to light black candles and read our black books, play around with spells and potions. It was silly, we were children, but dangerous, demented children, with money and drugs and freedom. We’d have a fantasy or read something in a book and act it out like an amateur theater troupe. Maria and I making love while Zed and his friends watched. Group scenes. Whips and masks and candles. Multiple men and me. I never wanted you to know all that or to think of me that way. I thought it would change the way you saw me, twist it, poison our love. Was I wrong? Could you be happy knowing your wife had been a crazy slut? Or that her first great love wasn’t you? That’s why I lied. I never wanted you to know Mona. I decided to bury that person in Mexico and forget her forever, and just be Lala, your wife. But the dead won’t stay buried, not when they’ve been murdered and hidden away, then they won’t rest in peace. Mona became my ghost. I dreamed as her and caught glimpses of her in mirrors. I’d
see her in your eyes when we made love. She was always waiting and watching. Looking back now, it would be easy to blame Zed for everything. You’d say, he was older, the grown-up. He was rich, supposedly. He was a man who took advantage of a young girl, two young girls. And you’d be right. But at the same time, I knew just what I was up to. I knew how to work him and get whatever I wanted, how to exploit his fear of failure, his fear that I would leave. I had the killer instincts of a girl who grew up among hustlers and had to fend for herself around needy or predatory adults. I used to say that Maria and I were both raised by wolves, just different packs. No doubt, hers was tougher, harder. Her mom died young. Like me, she had no dad. She’d crossed into the US illegally when she was fifteen, fleeing a little town where there wasn’t much hope for a poor girl born out of wedlock. She adored her grandma, who raised her, and grew up close to her cousins, but she still swore that she’d never go back. She fantasized about having a big house someday and bringing her grandma up to live there. She was wild. She was hungrier than I was, for adventure, men, sex, money, glamour. She wanted to be a star. She dressed like me, wore her hair and makeup the same way, liked to snuggle in bed on one side of me with Zed spooning me on the other. Maybe she was in love with me a little, or with our lives, or maybe just desperate to become somebody else, rich, white, famous, American. Who knows? One thing is for sure, the whole mess was doomed from the start. The whole triangle. Maybe our whole lives. It was right around that time that Buck first showed up. Zed gave him that nickname. He was Bradley Norman, a trust fund kid from somewhere back east supposedly studying film at UCLA but really just getting high and sucking up to us. Zed used to tease him about his All-American kind of aw-shucks vibe and his rich-kid lameness, calling him Boring Normal, Barely Human, and so forth. He didn’t care, he followed Zed around like a dog, laughed at all his jokes, thought every idea was brilliant, supplied the drugs. Then late one night, one of those old black-and-white Buck Rogers shows was on and Zed
thought he was just like the actor, a real Ken doll, started calling him Buck and that was it. He didn’t even look like him, but it was the perfect kind of ultra-American nickname and it stuck. I couldn’t stand him. He gave me the creeps, the way he was always staring at me, at Maria, at Zed. I wasn’t sure who he had the hots for and I doubt he even knew himself, but a scene like that always attracts the freaks and psychos. We found out later that he already had a history—kicked out of his fancy boarding school for trying to burn the dorm down while his roommates were sleeping, then kicked out of the special farm school they sent him to for killing the cat. I think his rich family just paid him to stay away. Zed didn’t really like him either. He just liked having followers, flatterers. What he really wanted was money. He hoped Buck would help support his films. What I think now is, Buck didn’t really want to fuck any of us. He wanted to
be
us. To be Zed. Anyway, it all came to a head when we made those last movies, the trilogy. Maybe we jinxed ourselves messing around with that dark magical shit. I am not religious of course or even superstitious, but I do feel like when we foolishly unleash forces we don’t understand the results can be tragic. Years later I took an anthropology class and this teacher said something that really rang true. Something like, true spirituality is about selflessness, it’s surrender, giving up yourself to something higher, a greater good. But magic is an attempt to manipulate the world for personal gain, to increase your own power and like, swell up the self. Prayer should shrink it. Magic is selfish and selfishness creates pain, even for yourself. We shot the first two parts at our house.
Invitation
and
Consummation.
On the one hand it was a normal film shoot, or at least normal for us, low budget and artsy-fartsy, thrown together with help from friends and various oddballs. But under the surface was something else, a nightmare carnival aspect. Most of the performers and crew people were somehow in the scene, into rituals or kink or drugs. It was all real to them. To us, too. It was our private lives and fantasies being acted out in public for the world to see. After the second film, the
one with all that sex in it, Maria had a freak out and locked herself in the bathroom for hours until Zed, who was worried she might kill herself, axed down the door. Even then somebody filmed it. I suggested canceling or postponing the last shoot after all that, but Zed wouldn’t hear of it. The money was in place. He was convinced that the trilogy would finally get him established as an important artist. Meanwhile, unknown to me, the gambling debts had mounted, interest on the interest, way beyond anything we could pay. That suddenly burst into the open too, Zed’s dirty secret, like an affair or a secret drinking problem would have been for regular people. In our home drugs and random sex were normal, but not the bank calling about past-due mortgage payments and all the money he’d borrowed against the house. There were letters that said Final Warning across the envelope in red. There were lawsuits over the whole fiasco of
Succubi!
and now the lawyers themselves were suing us for payment. And these were the legit, lawful bullies. There were also the gangsters, Italians from Vegas and Chinese from downtown, stopping by for a chat, always nicely dressed and soft-spoken, but Zed pale and shook up when they left, sleeping now in the guest room with his gun under the pillow while the big bedroom with its king-size bed and mirrors was just for Maria and me. Sex, which was now all about performance and ritual, took place in the living room, where we entertained guests, or the black-walled dungeon room, or outside. But no matter what, the shoot was on. Zed overcame my misgivings, as did Maria, who bounced back from her freak out and was all for it, though now she was high all the time and never seemed to sleep or eat. And I guess I wanted it too. I wanted to believe it would change things, get us out of the corner we were in. Like magic. So we packed up and drove to the desert. It was a tiny crew. Just me, Zed, Maria, Buck as DP, and our friend Tommy, who took sound and had become a constant hanger-on. I liked him though. He was the sweet and lost type, still going to art school although he was almost as old as Zed, happy to come over and help paint scenery or sew costumes or just get high and
watch TV with me. Technically he was gay but really he was just obliging. He had a thing for Zed, like everyone did, he was very magnetic in those days, but Tommy was kindhearted and sort of submissive and not creepy like Buck. We took the lightweight 16mm camera with the built-in mic, so that I could run it during the scenes where all the guys were on-screen. The shoot was a disaster from the get-go. Of course we got a late start and by the time we arrived in the desert the shops were closed. Zed said not to worry, we’d get groceries in the morning, but of course we overslept and the cabin we’d rented was way out in the middle of nowhere and he was frantic to shoot. So there we were, insufficient food and water, but more than sufficient booze and drugs, intense heat and light, hauling equipment up and down and dancing around naked on boulders. Drinking warm beer and whiskey to quench your thirst in hundred-degree heat isn’t wise. Neither is taking acid and getting lost in the desert. By nightfall we were all out of our minds, half crazy, but I guess Buck was all crazy. What I now believe is that he is evil. Just a bad soul. Rotten. And real evil isn’t big and monstrous, it’s small and pathetic and mean and weak but capable of true hate and cruelty. The rest of us are just fucked up, messy people trying our best and screwing up all the time. That’s what I like to think anyway. That’s how I hope you will remember me. As someone who tried her best but fucked up. Someone who loved you but wasn’t sure how to. How do we learn, people like us, except by practicing on each other? The sundown was gorgeous and Zed got some shots. We built a fire and tried to roast hot dogs and burgers but we were too wasted. They were part burned and part raw and we threw them away. Coyotes howled and I thought I saw wolves running, packs in formation in the shadows, but it was dusk and in the desert the dusk will play tricks on you. That’s how I felt when Buck killed Tommy. Like I was seeing things. Like I was dreaming, until I got woken up by someone screaming and realized it was me. Zed tried to revive Tommy but there was no chance. He was gone. Then he attacked Buck and almost strangled him. I think he would
have killed him but Maria and I begged him not to. I said to call the cops, to turn Buck in. Buck didn’t even object. He just looked at me like the whole thing was out of his hands, like he wasn’t even the one who did it, covered in Tommy’s blood. It was Maria who was worried about the cops, who pointed out how much trouble we could all be in, with the drugs and weapons and so forth. Accessories, whatever. The whole night passed and at dawn we had a plan. By now Buck had come down to earth. He was desperate and willing to do anything if it meant he didn’t have to go to prison. He claimed he couldn’t remember what happened, that it was all a blackout from drugs. That was when we saw how this could solve a lot of problems for all of us. Zed and me with our debts. Maria with the INS. I felt sick about it, but nothing was going to bring Tommy back. First, Zed faked the suicide. He loaded his pistol with a real bullet, put the gun in Tommy’s hand and blew his face off, then toppled him over the cliff. The damage from the fall made it hard to see the knife wound and he was unrecognizable anyway. Then Zed hid in the desert while the rest of us went back to town and reported it. We said it was Zed who’d killed himself. We pretended not to know exactly where we’d been so it took a few days to find the body and by then the coyotes were at it. We all gave statements and no one doubted it was Zed. Buck obtained a passport for him and an envelope full of cash for us and one for Maria. Zed held onto the film as insurance. Then Maria and I traded passports, agreeing that she would go to Europe using my name. As long as she left LA, it was easy. Everyone had always mixed us up and called us sisters, and over there, where we were only known by name or from our films, she could pass. People don’t really look. They see what they expect to see. Zed and I got to escape a life in LA that was destroying us and disappear to Mexico like outlaws. Maria got to be the widow of a famous artist and an American. She got to be me and I got to stop being me. Perfect. Buck would use his trust fund to pay for it all, but it didn’t feel like blackmail. More like we were helping a sick friend and being thanked for our trouble. He eagerly agreed.