Brand New Cherry Flavor Read online

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR

  “Brand New Cherry Flavor is pierced, tattooed, mirror-shaded, and as far off its face as the L. A. it depicts is off the planet. It simultaneously combines to be hideously, hilariously believable and dream-logically scary. What’s more, it’s cool, nasty fun… Enjoy!”

  ~Charles Shaar Murray, author, Boogie Man

  “Darkly magical. The pages fly!”

  ~Patricia Briggs, NYT Bestselling Author of the “Casey Thomson” series

  “Brand New Cherry Flavor is, hands down, one of the most spectacular novelistic events of the ‘90’s!”

  ~The Oregonian

  “Cool and funny, visceral and paradoxically detached, Brand New Cherry Flavor seizes its subject matter and does it justice. With a vengeance. Lisa Nova’s the sexiest, most striking new heroine in dark fantasy since Sonja Blue—Or anti-heroine.”

  ~ Locus

  “Avant-garde horror writer Grimson…leaves one thrilled if feeling rather unclean.”

  ~ Kirkus Reviews

  “Witheringly funny in its satire against cinema, stardom and celebrity, Grimson’s novel performs a gleeful demolition job on the mindlessness of American ‘slasher’ movies. Working within the tradition of John Updike’s ‘The Witches of Eastwick,’ the book blends subject matter and a realistic technique to explore what one of its characters calls ‘the metaphysical strangeness of existence’”

  ~The Daily Telegraph, UK

  “A hectic pursuit of narrative force by any means is allied to verbal wit and ingenious games in Brand New Cherry Flavor, Todd Grimson’s spectacular novel of Hollywood and the occult… a foul-mouthed, extravagant novel, combining a strong sense of the demonic with some snappy one-liners. Grimson…has produced a novel of vitality and promise.”

  ~The Times (of London) Literary Supplement

  “A gang of zombie bikers, ancient Aztecs, designer drugs and bucketloads of horror movie glamour take Brand New Cherry Flavor on a hallucinogenic, Hollywood trip. One highly hip, extremely bizarre and darkly humorous read—buy it!”

  ~ Company, UK

  Also by Todd Grimson

  Within Normal Limits (Novel)

  Stainless (Novel)

  Copyright © 1996 and 2011 by Todd Grimson

  First Printing in the United States: November 1996

  First Schaffner Press Edition: October 2011

  Published in the United States

  This book and all Schaffner Press titles are distributed for the trade by Independent Publishers Group (IPG): www.ipgbook.com.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Special thanks to Chuck Denman, L.A. Detective, and Jim McLennan, editor of “Trash City,” London.

  For further information or to obtain permission

  from the publisher, contact: Permissions Dept.

  Schaffner Press, Inc.

  POB 41567

  Tucson, Az 85717

  For Library of Congress Catologuing-in-Publication Data, contact the publisher.

  For B., Lise Raven, and Christopher Schelling

  PART 1

  Morality was a word my parents

  never used. Truth was the word. Truth

  and facing things like an animal.

  NASTASSJA KINSKI

  ONE

  So the whole thing started in a restaurant. Ferns, cut flowers, glass, and mirrors. Lisa had the white-bean rapini salad, olive bread, white wine, while the vice president in charge of development at a major studio, tall, fifty-three, tanned and aerobicized, known in select Hollywood circles for his net play and crosscourt backhand, had marinated lamb with vanilla-bean vinaigrette, Persian taftoon and lavash, halved figs, iced mint tea.

  The rich asshole told her that no, sorry, the job of assistant to the director he’d promised her, her dream job, the chance to work with and presumably get tight with Selwyn Popcorn, whose films she had always admired, cult-worshiped way back before film school—now, after two and a half fruitless, generally fucked-up years out here, getting nowhere, ending up going to bed with this guy, whatever the hell his name was, Lou Greenwood, Lou Adolph, Lou Burke, Lisa meanwhile not getting any younger at twenty-six, totally broke at the moment too, just everything—Lou said sometimes things came up, he couldn’t help it, somebody’s daughter had been promised, it was a fait accompli… so would she like to be a second second AD on the project? “I can get the DGA to waive the written,” he said, but Lisa wasn’t having any of that. They were sitting next to each other, and he’d been complacently fondling the inside of her nylon thigh; presumably he already had a replacement girlfriend lined up, he never fucked his wife anymore—mutual consent, he’d said—whatever, who knew? What difference did it make?

  Lisa forced herself, it was terrible but she managed, in a flat voice, to get out, “Listen, I’m fucked up, I’m really broke….”

  “This happens to you, doesn’t it?” he said, consulting his brown leather wallet, and—this was all so humiliating, she could kill him— he counted it, it looked like, coming up with a hundred or so, in that neighborhood; she took it but it was nothing, pocket change, in effect. She hated him for putting her in this position.

  It was like her eyes glazed or something for a moment, and she suddenly stuck the sharp-tined fork in his thigh, hard, stabbed him with it … and it stayed there, stuck in his flesh. After the initial moment he nodded and said, “I understand.” Other than an initial flicker, like a video tracking badly for a nanosecond, he took it well. Did he know she was capable of murder? Did he understand that?

  No, probably not. He didn’t have the capacity to understand. He thought he was handling her violence in an ultracool ultraworldly manner. She should kill him, then he’d know. He wrote a phone number on the back of one of his cards from the studio, a number in medium blue Papermate ink.

  “You want some money, try this.”

  Lisa took the card from him and went outside. As she came out she raised her arm to shield her gaze from the whitish yellow blurry sun. Fucking L.A. She had believed that gradually, diplomatically, without seeming to ask for any favors, she could have manipulated Selwyn Popcorn into really desiring to see some of her work. The black and white art film she’d done in New York, or the Cubism-versus-Godzilla video….

  This would have been the job to have. As first assistant director, for instance, you just yelled, “Hey everybody, places,” all the time. Second unit director, you went around shooting close-ups of doorknobs or planes landing, shit like that. Assistant to the director, you called up Chuck Suede and he took your call. Now all this was lost.

  Damn. She’d left her sunglasses inside, her favorite pair. Foot traffic: two guys who looked like Hong Kong action-movie gangsters, very cool, gazing at Lisa, one saying to the other something hidden by the language difference—out of it emerged “Nastassja Kinski.” Lisa heard it clearly, it wasn’t exactly the first time since she’d been in L.A. that she’d been compared to the actress. The resemblance was noticed, or hyperbolized, as it never had been in New York. It was a compliment out here, whereas in New York it would have been cooler, probably, to look like someone more cultish, say the fifties film noir femme fatale Jane Greer, who had been in only a relatively few movies (most memorably Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, opposite Robert Mitchum).

  Nastassja Kinski, especially in her early films, had huge, hypnotic eyes, full, pouty lips, dark hair … and she eventually ended up nude in almost every film. Later on in her career she had become more ethereal, and blond. Lisa didn’t know what to think or what to say in ret
urn when the resemblance was remarked upon. She had become good-looking only when she was seventeen or so. In fact, she had been chubby as a child. It was weird, therefore, to be told she looked like someone famous, and famously beautiful. She didn’t look that much like her.

  At home, after trying to call her best friend, Christine, and getting her machine, Lisa, petting her Burmese cat, decided to call the number Lou had given her. It was mysterious, and Lisa could never resist mysteries. Curiosity. It would be tacky if Lou was just trying to pass her on to some friend of his. It didn’t seem like that, though.

  OK. What the fuck. She’d screwed someone to advance her career, and now she was behind on the rent. So why not? She felt reckless and despondent, and this was at least action of some kind.

  “Who’s this?” a woman’s voice said.

  Lisa pronounced her name.

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. Are you ready to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “We’ll pick you up around eight. Don’t worry about what to wear.”

  Click. Lisa frowned. But then the touch of her cat’s body and smooth fur cheered her up. He knew her hand. The human-animal bond. He purred, closing his eyes. She gazed around at her apartment, slowly, like a stranger to her own life.

  Then she sighed and thought again about that fucking Lou. He wasn’t stupid, wasn’t a philistine or an accountant like so many of the men out here she’d met. He was married, with two kids. He had viewed all her material, said he liked most of it, said what he thought were film school-art school conceits. He knew she needed money; it was getting to the point where she couldn’t afford either to stay in L.A. or to go back to New York.

  Music. She needed to hear some noise. Some of her friends were in a band called the Painkillers, for whom she’d done the Cubism-versus-Ciodzilla video, in which cubism defeats the monster, driving it into the bright blue Japanese sea … but Lisa wanted to listen to something harsher, so she put in a CD of a new local band, Feed My Ego 3.

  Later, as she ate something for dinner, she channel-surfed from a commercial (a woman in a white bikini emerging from the sea, glistening slo-mo droplets on tanned golden skin, just a glance, perfect) to a kung fu movie dubbed into Spanish. The choreography was fun for a few minutes, the sound of the blows exaggerated with electronic snare-drum handclaps, yil ho! hiyah! A girl in a red kimono turns her back to the assailant, executes a forward somersault, then poses, almost Egyptian, freezes, then barely moves, not even glancing behind, so that the guy walks right into what turns out to be a punch.

  Lisa went down at eight. She waited in her battered old black leather jacket, untucked white shirt and faded jeans, sensible shoes, semi-anonymous, smoking a cigarette while she leaned against a palm tree by the street. Defiance expressed by not dressing up. Anguish at feeling betrayed by the world. She did, however, have some makeup on. Dark red vamp lipstick, blush … and she had three little gold earrings decorating each ear.

  A limo pulled up. The driver, in uniform, was wearing sunglasses. In the backseat, a blond crew-cut woman beckoned Lisa inside, giving her a knowing, coolly friendly smile.

  I am in a pornographic situation, thought Lisa Nova, one hour later, in a mansion surrounded by woods and manicured green lawns, somewhere in Bel Air.

  TWO

  Floating slowly, like fish in an aquarium, following almost mechanically precise geometric paths, in a big, big room, bigger than a gymnasium … eyeballs like nude cephalopods, swimming around without their shells, a cloudy white, filmed with red. The eyes seemed unnaturally large, brown irises, blue, and dark electric green, opening to the retina, behind this—or somewhere—the invisible, theoretical rods and cones.

  There were also some robotic insectoid eyes on flexi-metal stalks, moving about to examine her from this angle or that. An impression of protozoan, amoebalike shapes, as Lisa, anesthetized with a synthetic endorphin derivative, well-being and contentment riding through her bloodstream, knew that everything was fine, for instance, in the blue vein under the smooth pale skin there in her foot.

  The ceiling was so high. Some eyes had ascended, evidently studying the solar system painted way up there, orbits described on neutral

  zinc white with dotted lines. The ciliary muscles moved the gazes this way and that, soft creatures whom she was not afraid of at all… though she was not completely without fear. Fear of the general state of things, of the blind spot, of surprise.

  The stark yet intimate transaction: money for flesh. It had been explained to her, and she understood. If she experienced some disquiet behind the medication, that was nothing to shiver about, nothing to depress.

  Voyeurism. Exhibitionism. I’m weak. I have been paid. Painless, she looked too. Pinkness. Wet flesh mirror, or monitor, slowly melting mirror.

  THREE

  “Then you’re a whore,” pronounced her best friend and collaborator, Christine Rien. “Just ‘cause it’s thousands of dollars doesn’t mean it’s not prostitution.”

  “I know that,” Lisa said somewhat crossly. Then, a moment later, after taking a sip of sweet café au lait, “Nobody touched me.”

  Christine sighed and shook her head. She had silky golden blond hair, darker at the roots. She looked very Gallic. She’d written articles on cinema for Artforum, the history of the femme fatale for Auteur, women in melodrama, all of that. “I can’t believe you’d do something like this.”

  Lisa shrugged. “It’s just skin.”

  “You let him turn you into a bimbo. It excites you, doesn’t it, in some perverse way.”

  They were at Christine’s sister’s house, in Manhattan Beach. Nobody else was home. Lisa yawned. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Almost a year ago, when she had first come out here, she had had a part in a horror movie, The L.A. Ripper, a small role in which she had played a victim and appeared nude. She had been offered the part because of a series of personal connections, and it had appealed to her as an exercise in intentional bad taste. She appreciated that Christine did not now bring this up.

  “You don’t understand,” Lisa said quietly. “I’m going to get revenge. He lied to me, fucked me over, and he’s gonna pay for it. You’ll see.”

  Christine looked at her, trying to gauge her level of conviction. Lisa was too impressionable, she thought, always too open, too liable to change her mind. Sometimes this led her to do dumb things. She was impulsive and unpredictable.

  “I’m serious,” Lisa said. “I don’t know what exactly I can do, but I’ll get him somehow.” She spoke implacably: passion cooled into will. A good part of her motivation here was to prove something to Christine, though she would not have wanted her friend to realize the power she possessed. She needed some form of payback. It was all so plain to her now. Her conscience would be clear.

  “How many others might have seen you?” asked Christine dispassionately.

  “I don’t know. At one point, I thought I saw Roy Hardway.”

  “Really?”

  “Just a glimpse.”

  Hardway was the thinking man’s action star. His films included Slammer, Dieability, and the remake of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat Lately he’d been in a couple of bombs, but he was still huge.

  “I thought about brain transplants,” Lisa said. “I was imagining a brain hooked up to wires, lying in fluid, like in those movies from the fifties, where the brain starts controlling guys, hypnotizing them, killing people with death thoughts … if there was a transplant, no way they’d get everything hooked up right. All those nerve endings and things would goof, you’d try to open your mouth and your leg would kick out straight…”

  “Was there music playing?”

  “There might have been. It wasn’t a big item.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  Lisa thought about it, then said, “I did something to myself.”

  “Did you make any noise?”

  “I might have, yeah. I don’t know.”

  “But you got paid?”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   The film they’d cowritten, Girl, 10, Murders Boys, still played sometimes in New York. Christine had produced it, and she’d helped with everything from production design to lighting. The subject, one very close to Lisa’s heart, was the true (well, semifictionalized) story of a ten-year-old girl named Mary Bell, from a bad slum in Manchester, England, who had murdered, a month apart, first a three-year-old boy and then a four-year-old, strangling them with her small hands. The film had been shot in sort of a Tarkovsky-influenced visual palette, toned down, timed for a blood red cast … and Lisa and Christine had used Godardian tactics, flashing back and flashing forward, showing questions in white block letters on a momentarily black screen, like DO PARENTS OWN THEIR CHILDREN? or IS MOTHER-CHILD LOVE AUTOMATIC? WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT’S NOT? or, when Mary experimentally half-strangled one of her playmates, laughing after she’d been pulled off, DO OTHERS FEEL THE SAME THINGS WE DO?

  “What if you’re on a video?” Christine said, breaking the silence, changing her position, looking concerned.

  “Tasteful Nudity II: the sequel to Tasteful Nudity?” Lisa rejoined, but she was shaken. I’d have to kill him, she decided. Mary Bell would.

  “What exactly did you do?” Christine asked again.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Lisa replied in a lower, less accessible voice, like a sulking child who’s done something wrong and already confessed.

  After a while, not looking directly at her, Christine said, “Freud presented the fetishist image of a woman, vulva displayed, punished and humiliated, often by another woman plus penis, or dildo, penis substitute, or whip. The pornographic gaze.”

  Lisa looked at her with a look that said, Shut up. Now. I’m not kidding.