Return to the Sunlit City : part one

 

They say all America looks for that sunlit city on the hill…

(Dear Miss Landau)

 I remember standing there, looking up at the hill, waiting for her.

I’d misquoted Ronald Reagan’s speech about the shining city on the hill. “The American vision of creating a new nation of free people, a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill.”

I remember looking upon that hill, and I don’t mind saying Juliet was the shining light.

That was many years ago, but I still come to praise my Caesar, not bury a tarnished rose.

Perhaps Julia Drusilla, sister of Caligula, might have said the same. Or perhaps another Drusilla did so in her stead, standing at sunset on a faraway hill high above the streets of Avalon.

It would be simple to pen a scandalous diatribe. To talk only of narcissism, secrecy, an unfinished documentary, a dreadful film, a stolen name and a bankrupt makeup line.

So very simple.

But I said I’d never do that.

Enough. On with the impossible tale from times past, spilling over into today...

September 2024, and Point Lobos looked no different than it had before. Fourteen years earlier, I’d been a late blooming autistic fledgling of forty-five, fresh from the adrenalin-fuelled flames of L.A. The memory of that first meeting with Miss Landau burned like fire into the forge of my subconscious, still sculpting the chessboard and tapestry upon which Dear Miss Landau and the Dru Quartet would calmly stand and foresee Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s future path.

It seemed so easy then.

Crossing America like Jody's grandfather in John Steinbeck's The Red Pony in the wake of Drusilla’s Roses, the sudden continuation of that forgotten vampire’s story. She and I calling to each other across the world like surreal linesmen from Wichita. Stealing the Enterprise for my Helen of Troy that spring day, seeking that strange and violent city on the edge of forever. All other reasons and motives falling quietly away ‘til there was only she and I and that long road.

That’s what it was really like. This sick society of today slashes at the old and courtly values it will not understand like an ignorant ugly child, and I sometimes hate those who can only smirk and sneer from the sidelines.

There is an innocuous sentence in Dear Miss Landau:

“…and once I cleared customs and departures, seeing the lines of the ship for the first time. The sky might be my sea but the ship was mine again…”

My great-grandfather had been a ship’s captain. Martin Landau the only Hollywood actor I’d ever followed and it seemed, like Robert E. Howard and Conan, that I’d got his daughter’s Dru for a tulpa.

I’d been at a comic-con once where Clare Kramer said the only way Buffy could successfully continue would be if it came from a new and wholly unexpected angle.

And it seemed like all the elements necessary to do so were mystically assembling themselves. I was back in the centre seat and the fairytale was coming true.

So I crossed America and met her one sweet Sunday in March on a boulevard west of sunset.

Nothing can ever touch that day, but I recorded it on the spot and know which song I thought of while I waited, standing by a streetlight that Sunday, quite frantic with fear. Every generation has its gods and, like a plebian citizen in Rome’s forum, I waited for my Hollywood princess.

The moment I first saw her was like nothing you’ll ever know.

I spent several days in Hollywood then went north to Point Lobos and Steinbeck country, for he as well as Dru had motivated me. Dru had started the long journey to regain her soul on the shores of the Point. A lost little beach by the name of Gibson, changed privately by me to Drusilla’s beach.

I spent some time in Monterey, visited the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, thinking for the first time that maybe a book could come out of this. I came back to Cannery Row to find a fortuitous email from the National Autistic Society suggesting I wrote the story of this trek in order to inspire those with autism.

And it all came together like magic. Dear Miss Landau’s manuscript and myself were discovered just days after I finished it, the Dru Quartet virtually wrote itself and I incorporated Buffy’s lost story arc into the latter two tales with ease. As if the story had only been waiting for the right time and place to be resurrected.

Everything came together.

And then, nothing.

For the magic fully to work it needed both of us, and Juliet stayed quiet as a nun at nocturns.

I was published and happy. I was also happy with my film star, but nothing happened.

Then, in November 2013, I heard about A Place Among the Undead, a vampire documentary she was planning.

It didn’t feel like the right road to take, but I kept quiet about it until November 2015. Juliet hinted she'd like me to join the ranks of Undead supporters. I agonised all night about how to reply, and finally admitted I had doubts.

I never heard from her again.

But Dear Miss Landau, the Dru Quartet and some related commercial possibilities were still there, though lying fallow.

I moved from Scotland to Shropshire in 2019. I wasn’t trying to put everything behind me but it did serve as a clean break.

Or so I thought.

No sooner had I arrived in Shifnal than I heard Juliet was booked to appear at a comic-con in Telford. Three miles away, as the crow flies.

I often wonder if fate or destiny was trying to guide both our lives, and that was certainly one of those times.

As Humphrey Bogart once said, “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Well, the Covid pandemic put paid to that booking and she mucked up the ticketing on the second attempt, but all that served always to keep her on my mind. Comic-con appearances in London or Paris I could ignore, but turning up right on my doorstep in Shifnal?

In the meantime, A Place Among the Undead lurched ever onwards, suddenly morphed into A Place Among the Dead and came out to decidedly mixed reviews. Juliet also came out, accusing her parents of being narcissists and dramatizing this in Dead.

Buffy the TV show hadn’t done so well either. An early film script concept by Whit Anderson foundered, the first Buffy reboot was paused (Hollywood-speak for being sent to hell and damnation), Joss Whedon fell suddenly and savagely from grace, the Covid pandemic knocked everyone for six, Hollywood suffered through the writers and actors strikes and the audio drama Slayers (featuring Dru) also came out to decidedly mixed reviews and was promptly stomped on by Disney, now owners of Buffy’s licence.

Meanwhile, I was in the odd position of possibly knowing how to continue Buffy. I talked to other cast members at comic-cons (Amy Acker seemed especially interested), pitched where I could, wrote about it when possible.

Nobody paid any attention.

2024.

I wanted to go back to the West Highland town of Glenfinnan, the pivotal setting for my other novel, The Legend of John Macnab, and a spiritual retreat of mine. Juliet and I hadn’t even seen each other in six years. I’d also noticed James Marsters and Juliet would be appearing at a comic-con in Aberdeen, not far from where the Book of Deer (focus of Macnab) was created in the tenth century.

I checked with two counsellors I knew whether I should even go. They OK’d it and my main aim was to try to explain about the lost story arc to James.

But for a’ that, it would be nice to see Juliet.

So I crossed over from Lochaber to Moray, and drove down to Aberdeen.

I tried to explain to James about the story arc. I don’t think he quite got it but we shook hands on it and it was good to see him again.

That was the main aim. The general idea was to let Juliet get a glimpse of me as I was leaving. No more than that.

But Juliet saw me sooner than expected, shot to her feet as if a small tactical nuclear device had gone off right beneath her butt and ran behind the curtain.

I was escorted out by security, which was ghastly. It was nearly as dark as Dead’s ending, where she was trapped in a dark joyless room, waiting to be killed by a supposed vampire.

Who was I, Darcel?

I spent the next few months putting myself together again and, insane as this may sound, it felt like Somebody Up There liked me.

While the Buffy makeup line Juliet was fronting went bankrupt, her podcast caused a fan scandal and an astute blogger finally asked what had become of Undead and the $175,216 crowdfunded for it, I visited Cambridge and managed to see the Book of Deer. I also found out that I was the only person in history commercially to have written about it. It’s a small plaudit but it means something to me; and it was the final act of a thirty-year literary odyssey.

Not two weeks later, I went back to Point Lobos, Salinas and Monterey. I saw Drusilla’s beach once again, revisited the Steinbeck Center and found out Dear Miss Landau was the first book in decades to feature The Red Pony.

Juliet is a Steinbeck fan, but I’d introduced her to the novel. She should have been there that day.

In both cases – Cambridge and California – if both journeys had been TV movies, I could see the end credits coming down.

I’d walked back up to the bottom end of Carmel from the Point and when the Number 5 bus hove once again into view, waved it down with my old straw hat. I must have looked like the most unlikely paisano imaginable, but I had Steinbeck in my soul and Dear Miss Landau’s genesis had begun when I first saw Rocinante from Travels With Charley.

The Chevron station was still there, the old Carmel Mission stood behind me, and I was home again. My soul’s home, anyway.

Steinbeck believed that you can’t go home again, that “the Monterey where they used to put a wild bull and a grizzly bear in the ring together, a place of sweet and sentimental violence,” was no more. It was true, and I lived in a far future world he never lived to see, yet still I walked in Steinbeck’s footsteps through Old Monterey.

“Where are Jim and Carol?” I asked myself, echoing his words in Johnny Garcia’s. “Cousin Keith and Rena Lou? What of the girl from Fremont Street I met, passing through? Maria in Vegas and Natalya on the night train? What happened to the hostel on Schrader, demolished far away in L.A., and oh Lord, what became of Dru?

“What became of Julie, too?”

I was in Steinbeck’s “bucket of ghosts”, that was true. Part of the past just passing through. But it did seem like the years faded away, and once again it was yesterday.

It also seemed I’d been richly compensated for Juliet’s antics, but she and I were still far from the sunlit city on the hill.

With acknowledgment to the works, words and phrases of John Steinbeck, specifically in Travels with Charley; and to Julius and Philip G. Epstein, screenwriters, Casablanca.