Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

ONE

In March of 1962 Jerry Brahms had bought a small two-bedroom apartment a block or two within the gates of Hollywoodland, a neighborhood created in the twenties which encompassed a large parcel of land in the vicinity of the Hollywood sign. The house had cost him nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars, a relatively modest sum for a place so pleasantly situated. Back then, he'd still indulged the fantasy that one day he'd meet a soul-mate with whom he would share the house, but somehow his romantic entanglements had always ended poorly, and despite three attempts to bring someone in, the chemistry had failed miserably, and each time he'd sent the man-to-be on his way, and he'd ended up alone. He no longer hoped for an end to his solitude: even the most optimistic of the cancer doctors who'd seen him gave him at best a year. The tumor in his prostate was now inoperable, and spreading.

For all his love of the dreamy far-off days of Hollywood, Jerry was a practical man, and—at least when it came to himself—remarkably unsentimental. The prospect of dying did not move him particularly one way or another: he was not afraid of it, nor did he welcome the eventuality. It would simply happen—sooner rather than later. Sometimes, when he got melancholy, he contemplated suicide, and in preparation for such a moment had amassed a considerable number of sleeping pills, sufficient, he felt sure, to do the job. But though he had very bad days now, when the pain (and, for a man as fastidious as himself, the practical problems of advanced bowel disorders) was so nearly overwhelming that he thought hard about tying up all the loose ends of his life and simply knocking back the pills with a strong Bloody Mary, somehow he could never bring himself to do it.

He had a sense of unfinished business, though he could not quite work out what the business might be. His parents were long since dead, his only sibling, a sister, also passed away, tragically young. Of his few friends there weren't many that he cared to say anything of great profundity to. If he slipped away, there'd be little by way of tears: just some fighting over his collection of movie memorabilia—which he'd never had evaluated, but was probably worth half a million dollars at auction—and a few tear-sodden, bitchy remarks at Mickey's (his favorite bar) when he was gone. Lord knows, he'd made enough of those kinds of remarks in his life: he'd been the kind of queen with a feline answer to just about anything in his heyday. But there was no joy in that kind of thing anymore. His style of queendom was long out of fashion. He was a dinosaur with prostate cancer; soon to be extinct.

Lately he'd found that his condition made him vulnerable to every little sadness that touched his world. The passing of Todd's dog, Dempsey, had left him in tears all day, though he barely knew the animal. And then the death of Marco Caputo: such a senseless waste of life. He hadn't ever been close friends with Caputo, but on those few occasions when he'd met the man, Caputo had always been polite and professional, rare enough in these days of mediocrity.

The funeral had not done justice to the man, in Jerry's opinion. It had been small (there were a couple of family members in from Chicago, but they looked as though they were more interested in what his will would say than in mourning their brother). Todd, of course, was not on hand, though Maxine was there as his representative. Jerry took the opportunity to ask her how much longer she thought the stalker business would be going on for. Were the police trying to catch this woman, and prosecute her, or was poor Todd just going to have to sit it out? Maxine said she didn't know. She wouldn't be dealing with Todd's affairs for very much longer, she told him: it was a waste of time and energy.

The conversation, the tiny, disinterested congregation, the coffin and the thought of its unviewable contents, all sent Jerry back home to his apartment in a blacker mood than usual. But even so, even on a day when it seemed that all decency and all hope had gone from the world, he found it impossible to take his stash of pills and finish the business.

Why, for God's sake? Something nagged at him; that was all he knew. Something told him: wait, just a little longer.

"It's not over," the opera-queens of his acquaintance used to say, " till the fat lady sings."

Well, somewhere deep in his soul, he knew that the fat lady still had an aria up her sleeve.

So he kept on living, which was often a wearisome business, all the while waiting for whatever was nagging at him to make itself apparent.

Finally, on the night of March 31st, it did.

The circumstances were peculiar: he had a dream so powerful that it woke him. This in itself was odd, because he usually went to bed with a couple of scotches to wash down his sleeping pills, and as a consequence seldom woke.

But he woke tonight, and the dream he'd dreamed was crystal clear.

He had dreamed that he was sitting on the toilet, of all places, in a state of agonizing constipation (which was in his waking life a consequence of the painkillers his doctor prescribed). As he sat there he realized that there were wooden boards on the floor of his toilet, not tiles as there were in life, and the cracks between the boards were so wide that he could see right down into the apartment below. Except that it wasn't another apartment, it was—in the strange logic of this dream—another house. Nor was it just any house. It was Katya's dream palace that was spread below him. And as he realized this, the gaps between the boards grew wider, so that he dropped down between them, slowly, as though he were feather-light.

And there he was, in Katya's house, in Coldheart Canyon. He pulled up his pants and looked around.

The dream palace was in a state of considerable disrepair. The windows were broken, and birds flew in and out, shitting on the fancy furniture. A coyote skulked around in the kitchen, looking for scraps. And outside in the tree there were dozens of little red-and-black-striped monkeys, chattering and screeching. This was not so fanciful a detail as it might have seemed to someone who'd not known the house, as he had, in its heyday. There had been monkeys there—escapees from Katya's private menagerie; and for a while it seemed the climate suited them and they would proliferate, but after a year or two some virus had decimated them.

Something about the place in its present condition made him want to leave. He knew, however, that he couldn't. Not without paying his respects to the lady of the house. So rather than wait for her to show herself, he went to look for her, figuring that the sooner he found her the sooner he'd be released from this dream. He started up the stairs. There were flies crawling on the ground beneath his feet, so densely assembled and so sluggish that they refused to move as he ascended, obliging him to crush them under his bare feet as he climbed.

The door to the master bedroom was open. He stepped inside, somewhat tentatively. He had only been in the room once before. He remembered it as being large; but here in his dream it was immense. The drapes were partially drawn, and the sunlight that streamed between them was a curious color, almost lilac.

There was an enormous, but extremely plain, bed in the room. And sitting on the bed was the only woman, besides his mother, whom Jerry had loved: Katya. She was naked; or—more correctly stated—unclothed. Ninety percent of her body's surface was covered with large snails, the common tortoiseshell variety that every gardener curses. They were moving all over her skin. They were on her face, on her breasts and belly, on her thighs and shins. Her hair was matted with their silvery trails, and thirty or forty of them were arranged on her head like a grotesque crown. Her legs were open, and they were also investigating the crevice between her thighs. As is so often the case in dreams, he saw all this with horrid particularity. Saw the way their boneless gray-green bodies extended from their shells as they moved over Katya's skin; their horns reaching out tentatively as they advanced, then retracting as they encountered an obstacle—a nipple, an ear, the knuckle of her thumb—only to stretch out again when they were certain there was no danger in the encounter.

Without speaking, Katya looked down and very delicately plucked one of the creatures off her breast. Then she spread her legs a little wider, so that Jerry had an even more intimate view of her private parts. He was no connoisseur, but even he could see that there was a certain prettiness to the configuration of her labia; she had the pussy of a young girl. Putting her hands down between her legs she spread her lips and delicately applied the snail she'd taken from her breast to the flesh there.

Jerry watched with a kind of appalled fascination as it responded to its new perch, expanding its horns and investigating her.

Katya sighed. Her eyes fluttered closed. Then, suddenly, they opened again. When they did they were fixed on him, with startling fierceness.

"There you are, Jerry," she said, her voice full of the music he remembered from his childhood: the kind of bitter-sweet music by which he had judged the voice of every woman he'd met since.

Later he'd learned that silent-movie stars had been notorious for having voices that precluded them from careers in the sound cinema: but Katya had been one of the exceptions to that rule. She had the slightest foreign inflection (nothing recognizable; just enough to add a certain poignancy to her sentences); otherwise she spoke with a beguiling elegance.

"I need help," she said to him. "Jerry, will you come to the house? Please. I am alone here. Utterly alone."

"What happened to Todd?" he said to her.

"He walked out on me."

"I can't believe that."

"Well it's true. He did. Are you going to choose between him and me?"

"No, of course not."

"He was just another empty shell, Jerry. There was no substance to him. And now I'm alone, and it's worse than death."

His dream-self was about to get clever and ask her how she could possibly know what death felt like, but then he thought better of asking her.

Perhaps she did indeed know. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility. He'd never understood exactly how her life had worked, up there in the house in the Canyon, but he suspected there were terrible secrets in that place.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked her.

"Come back up to the Canyon," she said.

That was the end of the dream, at least as he remembered it when he woke. The image of her body covered with snails disgusted him, of course; especially its sexual details. Had she conjured that, in dispatching this dream, or had he dug it out of the recesses of his own sub-conscious? Whichever it was, it had done its duty: making certain he understood the pitiful state she was in.

All through the following day, as he went about his chores—down to the market, back from the market, cooking himself chicken, eating the chicken, washing the plate from which he'd eaten the chicken, talking with Luis, who lived below, about how the apartments all needed painting, and who was going to talk to the manager because it had to be done soon; and so on, and so forth—through all of this he kept thinking about the dream, and whether it was really trying to tell him something or not. Out of the blue, he said to Luis: "Do you believe in dreams?"

Luis was a plump, amicable man who'd been in Christopher Street the night of the Stonewall riots, in full drag, or so he claimed. "Like how?" he said. "Give me an example."

"Like: you have a dream and it seems like it's telling you something."

"Oh yeah. I've had those."

"And were they?"

"Like I had a dream in which my mother told me to get out of this relationship I was in with a guy. I don't know if you met him. Ronnie?"

"I remember Ronnie."

"Well he was a sonofabitch. He used to beat me up, he'd get drunk on tequila and beat me up."

"What's this got to do with the dream?"

"I told you: my mother said throw him out. In the dream. She said throw him out or he'll kill you."

"What did you do?"

"I threw him out. I mean, I was ready to do it anyhow. The dream just confirmed what I'd been feeling."

"Did he just go?"

"No. He got physical, and we ended up fighting and—" Luis pulled up his sleeve, exposing a six-inch scar, pale against his mocha skin. "It got nasty."

"He did that?"

"We were fighting. And I fell on a glass-topped coffee-table. I needed sixteen stitches. By the time I got back from the hospital, the motherfucker had gone. He'd taken all my shoes. And they weren't even his size."

"So you do believe in dreams?"

"Sure I believe. Why'd you want to know?"

"I'm trying to figure something out."

"Well, you want my opinion? Dreams can be useful doing that sometimes. Then again, sometimes they're full of shit. It depends on the dream. You know how I know? My momma got really sick with pneumonia, and she was in the hospital in New York. And I had this dream, and she was telling me she was fine, there was no need to spend the money and fly out East, because she was going to get better. Next day, she was dead."

Jerry went back to his apartment and thought about his dream some more, and about what Luis had said. Gradually, it crept up on him why he was being so reluctant about the decision. He was afraid that if he went up to Coldheart Canyon (if he sided with Katya, knowing her capacity for cruelty), it would be the end of him. He'd seen so many movies in which the queen ended up dead in the second act, superfluous to the real heart of the story. Wasn't that him? Hadn't he lived his life at the edge of Katya's grand drama; never important enough to be at the heart of things? If events in Coldheart Canyon were indeed coming to an end—as it seemed they were—then what was the likelihood of his surviving to the final reel? Little or none.

And yet, if this was the inescapable truth of his life, then why fight it? Why lock himself away in his little apartment, watching game-shows and eating frozen dinners for one, when the only drama he'd ever really been a part of was playing out to its conclusion twenty minutes' drive away? Wasn't that just throwing more time away: waste on waste?

Damn it, he would go. He'd obey the summons of the dream and go back to Coldheart Canyon.

This course determined, he set about preparing himself for an audience with the Lady Katya. He chose something elegant to wear (she liked an elegant man, he'd heard her once say); his linen suit, his best Italian shoes, a silk tie he'd bought in Barcelona, to add just a touch of color to the otherwise subdued ensemble. With his clothes chosen, he showered and shaved and then—having worked up a bit of a sweat shaving—showered again.

It was late afternoon by the time he started to get dressed. It would soon be cocktail hour up in Coldheart Canyon. Tonight, at least, Katya would not have to drink alone.