Set the Controls for the Heart of Sharon Tate by Gary Lippman

Author:Gary Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2019-08-26T20:45:35+00:00

AFTER his mother’s death, Lunt felt too guilty to leave behind his paralyzed father, despite the round-the-clock home nursing care, and so the Sharonophile said goodbye to Los Angeles (temporarily, he vowed), settled into his old home in Sulphurdale, and took a job as a local realtor. Before long, his Sharon books and videocassettes and photographs and mementos spread like kudzu from his bedroom shrine to fill the whole house. This did not displease Mr. Moreland—“You’ve finally blossomed,” he told Lunt with tears in his eyes—but it sometimes taxed the patience of Jah Victor and the rest of the nursing staff, who had to work around the mess.

While living at home, Lunt began to write about Sharon, publishing articles in Sharon-oriented journals, especially that slick bible of Tate-World, Sharing Sharon. He mingled gladly with other Sharonophiles, too, but because these S-philes were distributed across the globe, Lunt’s contact with them was usually at Tate-World Conferences or via phone calls, postcards, letters, and emails. Also, he used the vacation time from his work at the realty agency to visit Sharon-oriented sites around the world.

Lunt’s first international voyage was to Argentina. An elderly film scholar who specialized in 1960s Hollywood had lured Lunt to Buenos Aires with the promise to, as the old man put it, “give you the big surprises about la linda Sharon.” Sadly, Lunt’s journey was star-crossed from the get-go. On arrival, he learned that a case of cholera had claimed the old scholar’s life. And after spending a few days sightseeing in Buenos Aires, which was sweating through a heat wave, Lunt wasn’t feeling so healthy himself.

The onset of some intense stomach ailment left Lunt writhing in his small room in the noisy Hotel Nebraska with all the symptons of, well, cholera. Not that it could actually be cholera, or so Lunt reassured himself: he’d never even gotten to meet with the film scholar. During the next four days in BA, however, Lunt lay naked and self-soiled on his damp, narrow bed, gazing dully at the brown-papered walls, reading the ink off the one book he’d brought along (In Sharon Tate There Is No East or West by Ingrid XZ) and listening to the one cassette tape he’d brought with him (The Doors’ The Soft Parade).

After his tape player broke down, Lunt switched on the radio in the room, just in time to hear about a city-wide cholera alert. Now he really got writhing. To think that he’d flown all the way down here at great expense only to contract a case of cholera! His ailment turned out to be nothing more than a mundane gastric virus, but Lunt didn’t discover this fact until days later, so while he suffered, hugging himself, ravaged by a breakbone-style fever, he prayed to Sharon’s spirit to save him, and what he got was not salvation—not immediate salvation, anyway—but a roommate.

“Konichiwa,” said the portly Japanese man with a prodigiously pimpled forehead who stepped into Lunt’s room, a dented gray suitcase in each hand.

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