Shooting Elvis Read online

  The maid woke me at noon, knocked on the door, reminded me check-out time was up, was I planning to stay another night? I splashed cold water on my face, dried off, fumbled around for my new lipstick, a very dark purple, almost black. After that, a touch of eyeliner, mascara the same color. On the dresser was a bag of thriftshop clothes. I emptied it on the bed, stepped into my new look. Faded black jeans, plain black t-shirt, crushed velvet gold vest, Converse canvas high-tops, a black baseball cap embroidered in gold and studded with tiny round mirrors.

  I examined myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. It always seemed to me Los Angeles was about being somebody you weren’t to begin with but maybe could be with a little work and a lucky break or two. People drifted here from all over the world to change who they were. I was no different. I searched the reflection for old signs of myself. Only my eyes looked the same, centered in a new face. I didn’t know who I was anymore. The clues were somewhere in the mirror image of the strange woman staring back at me.

  6

  It was a long shot the police would get to the Motel 6, but the clerk saw me go in one hair color, out another, might put something together better left apart. Hollywood was sleazy, mostly about cheap fun with drugs and sex, the more I looked at it, the more I realized it wasn’t my scene at all. If I was going to be smart, I needed to put some distance between my old and new identities. I figured I’d drive out to the beach, watch the waves and think about what to do next. Assumed if I got on a big enough street it would take me to a freeway and the freeway to the beach, but the streets took me to this urban industrial wasteland on the fringe of downtown L.A. I got hungrier and hungrier while I drove, passed a dozen restaurants made my stomach turn just to look at. Somewhere in a maze of side streets I passed a restaurant called Gorky’s. It looked all right on the outside, better than Denny’s anyway. I could get something to eat, ask directions. I parked my car where I could keep an eye on it, went inside.

  Gorky’s wasn’t a normal restaurant, I could tell the moment I walked in. The people in it looked kind of scraggly. Every other guy in the joint had a goatee, the guys who didn’t have a goatee had a tattoo showing, and some had both. The women wore hippie clothes, combat boots, didn’t comb their hair. They had about as many tattoos as the guys. I almost turned around and walked out, the people were so weird looking, until I remembered I was weird looking too.

  There was a bulletin board for people to post stuff just inside the door. In among the various advertisements of things for sale was a hand-scrawled note somebody wanted a roommate. That was interesting because the room was cheap and I needed a cheap room. I went to the phones around back, gave the number a call, but all I got was an answering machine didn’t give any names or anything, just played a few bars of scratchy jazz and beeped. There wasn’t any way I could leave a dependable message about how to get in touch with me, so I just said I was calling about the room, I’d be the one in the baseball cap hanging out at Gorky’s.

  I grabbed a green salad at the buffet, a bowl of borscht, meatloaf, a slice of peach pie and black coffee, paid for it at the cash register, was lucky enough to nab a table by the front window just as a party of four was getting up. After I stuffed every last bite down my throat, I stared out the window, felt lost, wondered if I should get back in the car, try to find the ocean. It was only half a million square miles big and blue in color, I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding it. But the food was sitting heavy in my stomach, I didn’t want to go driving again just yet. I left my baseball cap to save the table, walked out to get my portfolio and camera bag.

  First thing I noticed walking up to the Honda was my right taillight was broken. Not just broken, shot out, a big hole in the metal plate behind the shattered plastic. Bastards could have killed me. There were two shots, I remembered, found the second hole in the space between the back bumper and the hatch.

  When I got back inside Gorky’s, there was a bizarre-looking woman sitting at my table. She drank from a cup of coffee, smoked a Kool cigarette, flicked the ashes into the saucer under her cup. Her eyes were the bulging kind, looked like they were about to pop out of her head. Her hair was stringy and greasy. She didn’t wear any shoes, her feet were black with dirt. She curled one foot up under her butt, and the other went sole down on the front edge of her chair. I couldn’t help notice she didn’t wear panties, a fact plainly visible by the way she sat and the shortness of her lime green dress. But she didn’t sit there conscious of what she was doing. She didn’t care so much, she didn’t know. My first impression, this was either a lunatic or a dirty saint.

  I said, “I was sitting here before.”

  She didn’t so much as look at me. I was suddenly unsure what the hip etiquette was in a place like this, asked, “So do you mind if I sit here again?”

  Her eyes fixed on my hat. She said, “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how long ago you were sitting here. Was it a couple of minutes ago, an hour ago, days ago, or maybe you’re one of those reincarnation nuts and you think you sat here in a previous lifetime.”

  I pointed to my hat, said it was just a couple minutes I’d been gone, see, there’s the hat I left.

  She looked at me very critically, said, “I was wondering what kind of person would wear a hat like that.”

  “What’s wrong with the hat?”

  “It’s decorated with little mirrors.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “They look like eyes, staring at me.”

  I took out my camera, because the woman’s weirdness inspired me. People usually think the beautiful is photogenic, but for me, it’s the ugly, strange, violent. The beautiful depict what we want, but the ugly portray who we are. The first shot I took the woman stared off camera, ignored me while she smoked. The second shot she vamped, cigarette smoldering out the corner of her mouth, lips pursed and hand poised on the back of her head, big eyes rolling back in their sockets so only the bloodshot whites showed. The beauty queen pose and lack of attention to beauty in her person was wonderful, grotesque. Her irises slid back to horizontal, stared at me cynical as a clown who long ago lost heart, performs with contempt for herself and the audience. I shot that, too.

  Outside the window, a police car stopped on the street, blocked my Honda. Two policemen got out and walked into Gorky’s. Lots of cops worked downtown, made sense some came in every now and then for coffee and pie. But I didn’t reason it out just then. I was scared as hell. I hid behind my camera. The two policemen approached the manager, hitched up their belts, adjusted their nightsticks. One of them said something. The manager shook his head. I swung my camera over to the woman. She bolted from her chair so fast I lost her out the side of the frame. I picked up her image again outside the window, standing in the middle of the street and looking toward the sky, east and west, as though she searched for something up there.

  The policemen finished talking to the manager, walked back to their car. One of them noticed the woman, followed the direction of her gaze up into the sky, but whatever she was seeing escaped him. He looked at her like there was something wrong with her mind. His mouth moved, said something like, “Hey, get out of the street.” The woman didn’t seem to want to move, but she obeyed orders, stepped onto the sidewalk. Once the police car turned the corner, she ran into the street again, searched the sky another minute before coming back to the table.

  I looked at my hands. They shook. I asked the woman for a cigarette. I didn’t smoke but wanted to start. She pulled one out of her pack, stuck it in the corner of her mouth and lit it, said, “You work for them, don’t you?”

  “The police? No way.”

  “Not the police,” she objected, like I was stupid. “Them.”

  “Which them do you mean?”

  “The FBI, CIA, Mafia, JFK Assassination Conspiracy, Secret World Government, or the Alliance of Intergalactic Evil Nations, otherwise known as ALIEN. They’re all the same.”

  The FBI was a saf
e bet. I said, “I don’t work for them. They’re after me.”

  She didn’t seem surprised, said, “You too? Of course, that’s what they all say when they want to get your confidence.”

  “They tried to shoot me. I got two bullet holes in my car to prove it.”

  “Easily faked.”

  She smoked, watched me. I watched back. She whispered, “Have you seen the miniature radio-controlled flying saucers?”

  I said, “God help me if I start seeing flying saucers.”

  “God help us all. They have them now. It’s how they watch us. Powered by batteries that never go dead, same technology Standard Oil bought up and concealed years ago to keep battery-powered cars off the market.”

  “That what you were looking for outside, flying saucers?”

  She nodded, slow and solemn.

  I asked, “How do you know these things?”

  “I’m a filmmaker. It’s my job to know.”

  “You mean you make movies, like Terminator, True Lies?”

  “I don’t make Hollywood movies,” she said, sneering when she said “Hollywood.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too many people watch them.”

  I left the table to get a refill of coffee. She gave me her cup, said if I didn’t mind. When I got back with both cups, she had opened my portfolio, was flipping through it. She asked, “These pictures yours?”

  It embarrassed me to have her look, didn’t show my photographs to anybody. Didn’t think anybody saw the same way I did. The portfolio was half full, mostly pictures of my family I shot over the past year. Granny Faye. Pop drinking beer, fixing his pickup. Mom cleaning house. Ray watching Mom, sitting next to Pop. I shot black-and-white with my family, deliberately underexposing the film and pushing it in the lab to enhance the patterns of grain. Technically, the photographs were rough, like if you took sandpaper to the image. My family complained about it, said I made them look ugly. It was just the way I saw them, imperfectly focused, dark here and washed out there, fused together by shards of grain.

  I reached for the portfolio, said, “I don’t want to show these to anybody yet.”

  She wouldn’t let me take it back, pulled out a shot of my grandmother, turned it around a couple of times, asked, “What’s this?”

  It was a photograph of Granny Faye lying in bed. I took it one morning after a difficult night at the rest home, where she’d lived the last couple years. I’d stayed since the afternoon before, fell asleep in the chair at the foot of her bed. When I woke, she had a look on her face not exactly peaceful but somehow beyond pain. I photographed her face blending with the white pillow, the morning sun lighting up the window behind her. It was the best way I had of understanding what happened.

  “It’s a picture of my grandmother.”

  The woman said, “She looks dead.”

  “I guess she was.”

  “That’s cold. Really cold. I’ve never heard anything so heartless in my life. Your own grandmother. Did you call the doctor?”

  “Well, she was already dead.”

  “That’s so cold it’s brilliant.”

  I looked at her like, “What?”

  “Can’t be sentimental. Truth is brutal.” The woman stuffed the photographs under the rear flap, pushed the portfolio across the table, asked, “How much can you pay?”

  “You want me to pay you for looking at my photographs?”

  “I was talking about rent money.”

  “How did you know I was looking for a place to rent?”

  The woman pointed to my hat, said, “You called. Base-ball-style hat, right?”

  We walked to the woman’s place from Gorky’s. The neighborhood was all abandoned factories, warehouses, street-stripped cars. Nobody on the streets much, except the homeless. The woman said her name was Cass, she was sharing studio space with a painter named Billy b in an old ball-bearing factory just south of downtown. Cass was the one wanted a roommate, because she was having problems making the rent. I was going to live in her half of the studio, in the room where she edited her films before the rental company came and repossessed the editing machine. My share was $200 a month, which I didn’t have to worry about not having because it wasn’t due until the first of the month.

  Cass led me up a flight of steps, through a door with a picture of Elvis painted on it, into a painter’s studio, a huge space with rough wood floors, brick walls, plaster-board partitions, ladders, open beam ceilings. A young guy sat cross-legged at the far side. Cass told me that was Billy b, the guy she shared the loft with. A cigar smoldered from his thumb and forefinger. He stared at a twelve-foot-tall painting of an eye, cheekbone and eyebrow. Some blank spots showed through here and there, where he hadn’t finished painting, but even so, the eye was unmistakably Elvis. Paintings of celebrities were stacked all along the walls, up against the workbench, just about everywhere. The paintings were huge, most bigger than any wall in any place I’d ever lived. Some were complete portraits, some just famous body parts. Donald and Ivana and Maria Trump, Kim Basinger, Guns n’ Roses, Madonna, Roseanne, Oprah, and Elvis, everywhere Elvis. The portraits were bright, hard like porcelain.

  Billy b didn’t move. Just sat and stared at this painting. Paint smeared his jeans and t-shirt, his baseball cap was so thickly caked I couldn’t tell the original color of the cloth. Even his simple round glasses were flecked with paint. I thought he was cute, surfer boy good looks, long blond hair tied back in a pony tail.

  Cass showed me around, talked about the loft. I tried to concentrate on what she was telling me, but it was all pretty obvious, kept looking back to Billy b sitting on the floor. I was reeling from what Wrex did to me, so being attracted to another guy was on my top ten list of things not to do. But he had such gravity of concentration I was sucked into watching him. I told myself it was his relationship to the work that attracted me. I never saw anybody so concentrated in my life, the way he looked at the painting in front of him. Just when I thought maybe he wasn’t real, he was a beautiful statue, he brought the cigar to his lips, said, “Doesn’t work.” A second later, so fast and smooth I didn’t register him getting up, he stood in front of the canvas. I didn’t see anything wrong with the painting. Maybe there was something he didn’t like about the surface, maybe the surface was soft when he wanted it hard and cruel. I never got close enough to find out, because he took an X-Acto knife from his work table, slit the canvas top to bottom in one stroke of the blade.

  I walked up and asked why he did it. He cut the painting again, said, “If it doesn’t work, you have to destroy it.”

  Cass set a six-pack of Bohemia on the floor, said I was the new roommate. Billy b reached down to grab a beer, and on his way back up, gave me a long and serious look, asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Nina Zero.”

  Cass said, “She’s a photographer.”

  “I’m a photographer,” I said.

  “You any good?”

  “Not much.”

  Billy b sat on the floor, said, “Don’t be modest.”

  “Billy b doesn’t like modesty,” Cass echoed.

  “Modesty is for losers.”

  “He thinks you gotta brag if you wanna get anywhere.”

  “People only know what you tell them. If you tell them your work is shit, that’s what they know about you. If you say your work is brilliant, that’s what they believe.”

  I listened that night to Cass and Billy b argue about art and living the life of an artist. Half the stuff I didn’t understand, but listened in awe to the amount and ferocity of it. Cass and Billy b fought over aesthetic theories, philosophies, and movements I didn’t know existed, never knew could be the source of such violent feeling. Terms like kitsch, conceptual art and postmodernism were shouted like it was life and death they were talking about. Most of what they said had to do with something they called anti-art, which seemed to be art at the same time it wasn’t. It was art with all the art removed so anybody could make it, except nobody coul
d really understand or like it except the artists who were making it and the critics who wrote about it after. So it was like this joke everybody took real serious at the same time.

  Listening to them argue, I had the same sense of anxiety I used to get in class when I was afraid the teacher was going to call on me to answer a question on something I knew nothing about. But the longer I listened, the more I realized they weren’t interested in what I had to say. They wanted me to listen to what they had to say. So I did. They went on to argue until two in the morning, when they got violent about something called deconstructionism, demanded to know how I stood. By then it was easy. I just repeated a little of what both were talking about. “See, she understands,” Cass said, and Billy b answered, “My point, my point exactly,” and they both went back to arguing like I hadn’t said a word, didn’t even notice when I said I was tired and got up to go to bed.

  Bed was a six-inch-thick sheet of foam, a blanket, a pillow. I shut my eyes, didn’t get anywhere near sleep, every time I opened my eyes I saw the black case standing in the corner. The loft had twenty-foot ceilings, my room was built like an elevator shaft, it wasn’t easy going to sleep with them arguing outside my door. So I stood, paced the room, bumped into the case every other turn. The Pandora urge to open the thing was strong. I walked around it, studied it. There was a lock on the side, three latches. I hunted around for the key, found it under a swatch of black tape stuck to the back. The case weighed over a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds of cocaine had to be worth about a billion dollars. I freed the key, stuck it into the lock, didn’t turn it. Not that I wasn’t curious. I was curious as hell, scared as much as curious.

  I sat back down on the bed, tried to stare the thing down. Personally, I think Pandora got a bum rap. I read about this. She didn’t put all the evils of the world in a box. Zeus did. There weren’t any warning signs on the box, either. Here she was, the first woman ever created, the Greek edition of Eve, who you may notice also got a bum rap, sent by Zeus to marry a guy she’d never met before. How was she to know Zeus wanted to punish the human race because Prometheus stole fire from heaven? She hadn’t even been born when that happened. I mean, of course she opened the box. It was a wedding gift from Zeus. She would have been fried by a lightning bolt if she tried to send it back. The box was a set-up job from start to finish.