Santa Monica and Vine

For a few months in 2014 I had a job at a camera rental house two blocks from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, cleaning cables and batteries for $14 an hour. The building was haunted. Not because of the cemetery but because of an acting coach who died just inside the front door in 1977. Occasionally he appeared in our lobby wearing bell bottom jeans and a floral print shirt, an unobtrusive ghost asking quietly for help. Or you might see him in the 7-Eleven parking lot across the street, where he stood in the slumped, stricken posture of a small child preparing to vomit. 

In the 70s, he ran an acting studio out of the same building our camera rental house now occupied. The story of his death began when producers of a PBS documentary about the Manson Family murders asked him for an interview—he knew some of the implicated figures. He must have told the unvarnished truth in that interview because a week after it aired, someone in the parking lot of his studio (which is now a camera house) shot him two times in the back. He managed to stumble through the doors of his studio, where he collapsed among a stunned group of his students. Help, he said. But their brains had been so badly destroyed by years of trying to become actors, they assumed he was providing a prompt, creating a scenario. They thought the blood was fake. They improvised some pointless dramatic scenario around their instructor while the most consequential thing that can happen to a person happened to him there on the floor.

I didn’t quit because of his ghost, although I did see him a few times in the sleepy late-afternoon hours, or because of the other ghost either, which supposedly belonged to an aspiring actress who had hung herself from the rafters a year later, in 1978. The disturbing phone calls from nobody in the evenings, the metallic clangs coming from the windowless battery room, that’s not what scared me. It was a coworker of mine, a tall guy named Henry, who I felt sure was the author of a series of threatening and mostly incoherent notes I found on the windshield of my car in the parking lot. I saw the way you looked at me yesterday, I’ve got mirrors and cameras EVERYWHERE, that kind of thing. You’ve got such a red belly. Each note contained commentary on the redness of my skin, particularly my belly and the area of my torso. Your skin disturbs me. Your skin is turning red. My manager said he couldn’t show me the security camera footage.

Why?

To be honest, no footage exists. The camera broke. Years ago, probably. Nobody knows. What did you say earlier, someone’s screwing with your car? That piece of excrement car of yours?

They’re leaving notes on the windshield, I said.

He shrugged. Anything bad in those notes?

I asked around discreetly; nobody had seen anything. But I had a feeling about Henry. The way he looked at me. The edge in his voice when he asked what movies I’d been watching recently. I hate movies, I said. Me too, he said. They’ve ruined my life.

I secured another job surprisingly quickly, at the first company I interviewed with. The position was at a film processing lab doing all the same things I’d done for free at an identical sort of company three years prior. Mainly I processed dailies from movies. I had to watch every clip sent in from start to finish to ensure the file wasn’t corrupt. Then I backed it up on a separate hard drive and added a touch of basic color correction to the duplicate version. 

Working there wasn’t like watching movies at all because production crews shoot everything out of sequence in order to accommodate the complications of actors’ schedules, the availability of certain important shooting locations, et cetera. The first clips we got might depict a man driving his car into a large, sturdy tree. His wife, asleep in the passenger seat. The car explodes. They both die. The tree looms. Two weeks later, I’d get clips of the two of them sunbathing, drinking beer, arguing with each other, fucking, demonstrating a complete lack of fear regarding automobiles and trees. Having already passed once through death, they became radiant and free.

During my first week of the job, I developed a rash, two red stripes winding across my belly and up the side of my torso. Shingles. Immediately, I thought of the notes on my windshield. The obsession with my red belly. It now seemed clear to me that I hadn’t understood the first thing about those notes. Instead of escaping them, I’d made their words manifest, and who knew what was coming next.

Then something extremely unlikely happened, which is what I think this story is supposed to be about. Clips from a new project came in, and I recognized one of the actresses as Henry’s girlfriend, whom I’d met once at the annual company barbecue. We’d barely talked, but she had a look you remember and a thoughtful way of listening. Even on the moderately-sized monitors we used for processing dailies, she looked huge, and I mean that in the best way, like the camera wanted as much of her as possible. Basically, she dominated the picture. It was just a short film; I don’t know how they had the budget for a film lab. In the clips I saw, she was either on a Greyhound bus or in a bath. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about the bath from the bus or the bus from the bath. Maybe neither. Or maybe both somehow if the film was more sophisticated than it first seemed. Maybe she didn’t know if she was in the bath thinking about the bus or vice versa, in the bus thinking about the bath, and the film revolved around this truly insoluble problem, which in a way might be an attempt to explain the phenomenon of haunting, or at least I thought so at the time. 

I called the producer of the short film from my office phone. He gave me mailing addresses for all the principal actors—he didn’t even ask why. I scratched the rash on my ribcage. I think it was a pretty bad case of shingles. I kept processing the dailies. Then I clocked out for lunch and drove to her address without thinking about it. I parked at the end of the block. It was a pretty big house in Mid-City. I walked down the street and back twice. My heart should be racing, I thought, but it isn’t. That must mean I have nothing to live for. Which should be an advantage. Somehow, this brought aliens to mind, UFOs, and the people who try to describe their alien encounters, and how nobody cares about the particulars of what they have to say. Then I was ringing her doorbell.

She cracked open the door.

Can I help you?

Is Henry there? I said.

No, he’s out of town.

Out of town, I repeated.

Family business, she said. Who are you?

An old coworker, I said. I left something at the office and I was hoping Henry could get it for me.

Does he owe you money? she said.

Well, no.

Come in, she said, have a seat.

She led me to a dining room table in the next room. They were either moving in or moving out. The place didn’t look inhabited. I sat down across from her and she started explaining that Henry had a problem, a serious problem with gambling, and she was working on finding him help. Henry’s mom was helping too. But right now, he was actually out of town because his father had died suddenly in some sort of landscaping accident. He was grieving, that was the truth, not a front to cover his debts. Please, she asked me, have some compassion. He’s an addict, something’s wrong with his brain. And now he’s grieving.

A year later, I saw her again in the dailies at work, this time on a feature film. She made it, I thought, she’s a star. In the first clip, she shaved her head. Then her hair came back. She dug a shallow grave in the woods for a naked man. She buried him. Then she put on her nicest blouse and hired an expensive lawyer. The lawyer appeared to be the same man she had buried in the woods. He promised he would fix everything.