Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (33 page)

(
For T. E. Grau
)

—Tycho Johansen,
I Was Rod Serling’s Bodyguard

(North Hollywood Books, 1983)

Felix Ramirez’s first thought when he saw it was horrible. Not bad-taste/bad-art horrible. It might have been that. The colors were perhaps a little garish. The graveyard mold a little bit too much on the slate-blue side. The ghoul’s doglike face seemed (to Felix) to be a little too elongated. Felix tried to think of the painter who did that, but Amedeo Modigliani’s name eluded him despite Art History 102 two years ago. But he certainly thought of Goya’s
Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.
The ghoul’s wide-staring eyes, his gore-smeared mouth clamped down on the naked figure’s thigh, seems to have a leering grin. Felix watched Rod and the big dumb Dane look at the painting. Felix thought Rod would love it. Partially because the ghoul’s staring eyes looked more than a little like Richard Nixon’s, and Rod, the “angry young man of Hollywood,” wanted to punish Nixon for the war. Felix wanted to walk over to Rod, wanted to introduce himself, but you didn’t just walk up to studio execs in NBC. Felix was waiting with other cattle for a screen test. But he clearly heard Serling say something about “Pickman’s Model” and express some regret. The great man’s elevator came and Rod and his bodyguard boarded.

It was 1971 and big things were happening. Eighteen-year-olds could now vote as well as die for their country. We went to the moon twice. The World Trade Center was opened a few weeks ago and they’ve started building the Superdome in New Orleans. And Felix Ramirez had a plan. He is ready to be one of the first Chicano actors to make it big. Everything points to go. They’ve got that new show
All in the Family
. They axed
Hee-Haw, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D.,
and
The Beverly Hillbillies. The Lawrence Welk Show
was replaced by
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
What did you not see? Mexicans. Felix knew that at some point Mexicans were going to be interesting. So he had a plan: monsters, then villains, then heroes of his people, then finally the serious actor. He would do it for Momma. Momma had died the same week as Kennedy, so it wasn’t a big deal, not even to the nuns at school. Probably that November he had begun to hate the world.

His cousin Guillermo had called him from Mexico City and told him to try out for
Night Gallery.
He figured it out; nobody will care if a monster eats enchiladas in its off-time. Then it is a clear step to villains, and then when Mexicans become commercial—there he would be.

The trouble for the grand scheme was that Felix was not drawn to the macabre, unlike Guillermo. He tried watching Karloff stumbling along in
Frankenstein.
He tried his best Romanian accent imitating Lugosi
.
He just wasn’t scary. But the painting leaning on the guard’s desk:
that
was scary.

Felix had a “call back”—he was being considered for a ghoul. He would get the paintng as a model. He almost ran to the guard’s desk. A bored African American guard reading a comic book,
The Forever People.
The painting was gone.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Felix.

“Yeah.”

“There was a painting here.”

“Sure was.”

“Do you know what happened to it?”

The guard looked up. Felix saw that one of the superheroes was black; the other ones looked like hippies. It was a sign. We were in a new age.

The guard said, “The artist came and got it. At least she told me she was the artist. Why?”

He sounded a little worried; maybe he realized that he should have asked the “artist” for some ID. But on the other hand, who would want that monstrosity behind their couch?

“I thought it looked really scary. I wanted to study it. For my next role.”

“Oh, you’re an actor. Well, I will agree with you on the scary part. That thing gave me the willies. It had been against my desk for a week. At night I would turn it against the wall.” He gestured. “A lot of people leave stuff here. They think that Serling buys art for his show. The first season we wouldn’t let them leave it. He looks the stuff over now. I think he does that to annoy the network artist. He can be a dick sometimes.”

“He ever buy any of it?”

“He doesn’t even run the show. Laird runs it. Serling got tired of doing everything over at CBS.”

“So what’s he looking for?”

“He does his thing. I do my thing.” The guard began to pick up the comic book.

Felix persisted. “I really want to meet that artist. Maybe she can help me out with makeup tips.”

The guard reached into a trashcan. “I had just filed her phone number.”

He handed Felix half of a torn envelope.

She was Mexican. She was a maid. And one of her weirdo clients had the biggest collection of science fiction and horror shit in all the world. His home was in the fashionable Los Feliz section of Hollywood. Her name was Carlotta Rotos, and the first time Felix met her was on a driveway with a sign that said, “Horrorwood, Karloffornia.” Carlotta spoke to Felix rapidly in Spanish. She had invited him here because she didn’t want to meet him first at her tiny home. Her boss had encouraged her to try and get the painting on the show. He was a little weird.

She was dark and very pretty and in an actual maid’s outfit.

A super-energetic man introduced himself as Forrest J Ackerman. He asked Felix what he was interested in, and Carlotta said, “Lovecraft.” Felix had no idea who Lovecraft was. Ackerman was ushering him into the house, the “Ackermansion.” At the doorway he pointed further up Los Feliz There appeared be to be a Mayan temple. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Maya House’—it was the exterior for
House on Haunted Hill.
That starred Vincent Price; some people think I look like him. Lovecraft, eh? I’ve got a postcard from him.”

Ackerman ran to an overstuffed desk. He couldn’t find it. Then he handed Felix a copy of
Dracula
. “Signed first. But that’s not so rare; there are five of those. Look at the next page.”

It was covered with signatures from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee. Everyone who had been the Count.

For the next two hours there were props from TV and movies and books, books, books. And magazines. And more magazines. At one point Ackerman had shown him a copy of
Weird Tales.
“This was my first magazine. I kept buying them. My mother actually told me that if I was not careful, by the time I was an adult I would have a hundred of them.” The crazy laugh that followed would have done any mad scientist proud. The Unique Magazine showed an Egyptian scene; a brown man and boy were coming over an outcropping toward a crude sphinx with pyramids in the background. “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” by HOUDINI. Thrills! Mystery! Adventure!

Felix was a little dizzy when he walked out into the Los Feliz twilight. Ackerman hadn’t been able to find the postcard. “Things walk out of here all the time.” He had explained to Felix that “Pickman’s Model” was a short story by Lovecraft. When he had heard that NBC was filming it, he suggested Carlotta try and submit the painting. “I’ve got a few items that Lovecraft used to own.” Carlotta looked very guilty when he said that. He showed off Lovecraft’s annotated copy of
The King in Yellow
. Felix could tell that he was supposed to be impressed, so he acted impressed. He was, after all, an actor. At the end of the tour, Ackerman pointed to the Maya House again. “That little number is pretty Frank Belknap Long itself. Bad angles. Bring bad things. Frank Lloyd Wright had been putting the finishing touches on it when his houseboy went berserk at Taliesin and killed seven people. It was said the house was cursed. He built it for a shoe magnate, and the man lost everything in the Depression. The next owner’s wife jumped off the parapet. Tindalos hounds, Chihuahua style if you ask me. I’ve got a book on that too somewhere. The Mexicans knew. Six owners in forty-four years.”

Carlotta looked as if she were going to cry. When she walked him to his car, she gave him her East LA address.

It was brown stucco, had four floors, and was on a different planet than the Ackermansion. But it was the planet that Felix had grown up on. Planet Barrio. There was a cop car parked in front of the liquor store on the corner. It was Tuesday, the smog index was high, and it was hot. He buzzed her box, she buzzed him in. Her room was on the third floor. It had horrible and fantastic studies of ghouls hung on its tiny walls. Some were scenes from Egypt or Rome, others were modern—on the easel was a mainly finished study of a human male being initiated into ghoul society at Forest Lawn. Two ghouls were painting his naked body with a blue-green liquid. A female ghoul with rows of small breasts like a dog reclined on a tombstone holding a broken human skull. Gore ran down her lips and she stared lewdly at the human. Her face was Carlotta’s.

“I am not sick, Mr. Felix,” she said. “I used to paint normal things.”

She pointed to two small canvases up in the corner of the room. One was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers.
The other was a somewhat insipid seascape.

“It was because of my brother and the book.”

And she told Felix Juan’s story.

Carlotta’s mom was a maid, her father a Zoot-suiter. A pachuco. Mom worked for Hollywood go-getters. Dad was in and out of jail. Sometimes Dad was Juan’s hero, hater of the Anglo culture machine. Sometimes Dad was Carlotta’s villain—drunk, womanizer, shit-disturber. Momma was Thanksgiving; Papa was
Cinco de Mayo.
Papa got a knife in the side, Momma got to dust an Oscar. Momma was the real world, working hard every day. Papa was Juan’s world.

As a teenager he was in gangs. He tried to find common cause with the blacks. Six years ago he had been in the Watts Riots. Then Juan changed. He buckled down. He went to school.

Juan Rotos wanted what every American wants: gold and knowledge. You go to school to learn stuff and get a good job,
comprende?
All good Americans want Faust’s deal. A Peruvian named Carlos Castañeda had found it. Carlos was an Angelino. Just a couple of years ago he had published
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
Don Juan was a “Nagual,” which comes from the Nahuatl word
nahualli,
one who could turn himself into an evil animal-like being for the purposes of evil sorcery. He made a bundle off the books. In Aztec mythology the God Tezcatlipoca was the protector of nagualism, since he governed the distribution of wealth and the powers of black magic. Juan discovered that shortly after the Conquest, a certain “Black Friar,” Thomas de Castro, had written an account of the magic involved.
Dioses Malvados del Laberintho.
The book had litanies for invoking Tezcatlipoca in his forms as Cetl, the Night Axe; Huemac, the Double; Eihort, the Demon of the Labyrinth; Nyarlotothep-Metzli, the Messenger of the Moon. The book then explained how certain drugs could be smeared on the body in cemeteries, how teeth could be pulled, and how certain sex magic rituals could make one into a Nagual or
Brujo Negro.

Juan had decided de Castro’s book could be his meal ticket. Anglos would love the drugs and sex—and dominant cultures always fascinate on the magic systems of the people they conquer. It was making millions for Castañeda and it would make millions for him. Now it seemed that the bad priest’s book had vanished, so Juan was forging one. Then he spotted a little article on the books that inspired a horror writer named H. P. Lovecraft. It mentioned de Castro’s book
Dioses Malvados del Laberintho.
There was a copy in LA in the Ackermansion.

Juan asked Carlotta to steal it. Borrow it at least until Juan made a copy.

Sure, what was the harm? Juan might make his millions. She picked up the book; she could return it after a copy was made. Juan wouldn’t be a jailbird like Papa; he could make good money for Momma’s retirement. Mr. Ackerman wouldn’t even miss it.

Then Juan decided that it was for
real.

The hexes, the spells, the visions, the power. Juan wasn’t going to return the book. Juan was going to become one of Them. The shape-shifters. The flesh-eaters. The ghouls Mr. Lovecraft wrote about. It could be the vanguard of the Revolution. Juan found E. Duran Ayers’s report of the Zoot Suit Riots. The guy that the LAPD had as an expert witness against Papa and the other pachucos. He taped it to his mirror:

Mexican Americans are essentially Indians and therefore Orientals or Asians. Throughout history the Orientals have shown less regard for human life than have the Europeans. Further, Mexican Americans had inherited their ‘naturally violent’ tendencies from the ‘bloodthirsty Aztecs’ of Mexico, who were said to have practiced human sacrifice centuries ago.

Juan got a tattoo over his heart: ¡Yo soy un Azteca sanguinario! I am a bloodthirsty Aztec. He also had a white football-looking sigil added, the sign of Eihort. His momma decided that he was going to hell. She died a few weeks afterward.

Juan began reciting the litanies, buying the herbs. He got a few of his friends to break into a vault at Forest Lawn. Carlotta broke into tears at this point.

“One night he came here, very late. His face was all black. He had pulled his teeth and put black glass. Obsidian chips. He gave me the book. I don’t know if he was crazy, or not really human anymore. I never saw him again. But I have these.”