The desert night air was probably full of car fumes from the rushing traffic, but it smelled somehow pure, like the stuff they pump into the casinos. Allegedly.
I'd dirown my earphones on to the counter and walked out. Larry hadn't tried to stop me.
Now, though, I realized diat I'd just created three major problems.
First, I was going to have to explain to Tyler that I'd blown the whole Las Vegas deal—money and votes— because I'd refused to do five seconds of overtime. And without Las Vegas's vote, I might have thrown away my chances of winning the competition.
Second, I'd probably dropped Candy in it. They'd be bawling her out for not seducing me into emptying my gun. But she looked like a survivor. And she was beautiful enough to get a job anywhere in this town.
Third, and most immediately, I didn't know how to get back to my hotel without Larry's help. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood where there were bus stops. And I couldn't go back in the gun shop and ask for the number of a taxi service.
It was only when I was sitting next to the pizza guy, getting myself delivered to the hotel along with a couple of Quattro Stagiones, that I remembered the last thing Larry had said to me as I walked out of the shop. I couldn't recall the exact words, but they were something along the lines of it being wise for me to leave the hotel before he got there. If I wasn't mistaken, his last words had been, "Ya got till midnight ya fucken fuck."
I offered the delivery guy an extra ten dollars if we reached the hotel before the pizzas got cold.
5
I found Jake in the casino. He was smoking a thin cigar and was engrossed in a game of three-card poker.
"If he throws you or your baggages in the pool, just come here. We will play poker."
"Very helpful, Jake, but I'm off to L.A. right away," I told him. "You want to come with me?"
"No, I will gain some money, change my name, and then return to New Orleans."
He groaned—he'd just lost a hand.
I told him that the small pile of chips on the table was probably enough to get him there by Greyhound, and that it might be better to cash them in rather than risk losing the lot.
"No, man," he said. "You know, everything in America is genetic, yeah? You are obese, it is genetic. You're a criminal, it is the fault of your ancestors. Well, I have the poker gene. I am writing a poem about my genes. You want to hear it?"
"I haven't got time right now." Neither did I have the necessary genes to withstand Jake's poetry. "How much do you need?" I asked him.
"Oh, enough to get to New Orleans. I must maybe buy an old car. Not much. I will gain it from this or I can borrow it from my mom." He coughed smokily, and leaned away from the table to tell me a secret. "Her, uh, work, you know? It is just until she has the cash to pay her nail salon. And she never kooshes with the men." He was using the French coucher, meaning "sleep." "She only does some SM things and, you know, la branlette." Fortunately he didn't mime the handjob he was talking about.
"She told you all that?"
"Yeah."
"I believe her," I told him, and we said a manly goodbye with one of those American sex-free hugs.
Juliana was in the resort's business center. It was open 24/7, just like the casino. She was looking at apartments for rent and checking out cheerleader-equipment sites. Now that she'd got where she wanted geographically, she was trying to do the same professionally. She was certainly no time-waster.
"You're planning on staying here, then? Not going to New Orleans with Jake?" I asked her.
She laughed. "He's a nice guy, and I think he's only just realizing what potential he has. But he's got too many nationalities left on his list. And I got stuff to do with my life." She nodded toward the computer screen.
I apologized for screwing up her free-suite deal and told her I'd left my credit card number with reception so she could get another room.
She wished me luck with the voting ceremony, and gave me a chaste peck on the lips.
"I know Alexa thinks we did, but I'm glad we never—you know," she said. And somehow it didn't sound at all like an insult.
The one person I couldn't track down was Alexa. Neither Juliana nor Jake knew where she was. Apparently she'd taken her bags and disappeared. And now her phone was on voice mail. She clearly hadn't thought much of my suggestion that we needed to carry on talking before we made any decisions about San Francisco.
I left her a message starting with "It's me."
I added "Paul," just so she'd be sure.
Los Angeles
Mini Ha-ha
1
THE LAPD SEEMED to take traffic offenses very seriously.
"Speed limit enforced by aircraft," the sign said. What happens if you go over 55 miles per hour? I thought. Do you get strafed?
As usual, though, no one was taking any notice of police threats. The speeders, swervers, and inside-lane overtakers were just as carefree as they'd been in New Jersey, Florida, and everywhere.
I was steering Thelma along her seventieth or eightieth mile of L.A. urban highway, and it was impossible to imagine that the continent contained anything other than roads, bridges, service stations, and shopping malls, stretching to the horizon and beyond, covering the whole globe, with lone dusty palm trees like the umbrellas in a giant concrete cocktail. I was doing my best to use the lesson I'd learned on the East Coast—I was ignoring all attempts to sidetrack me and was sticking doggedly to highway 10 as it rolled westward to the Pacific.
The drive had been pretty exhausting. The road atlas predicted that it would take exactly four-and-a-half hours to cross the Mojave Desert and get to the Coast, but they must have done their test drive at two in the morning. I'd been on the road for six hours and still there was no sign of sand, waves, or migrating whales.
At last the highway petered out, and a sign told me I was in Santa Monica.
I called Suraya, and got through to her stand-in, Hemang.
"Hey, I got a cousin in Sanna Monica," he said.
"Is he a Dennis?"
"No, an anesthetist," he replied, not picking up on my tired teasing.
"When will Suraya be in?" I asked. I preferred to explain my Las Vegas problems to her.
"She might not be back for a while. Her pop's threatening to throw her out of the house." He explained that Suraya's dad had found out about her gallant neighbor. There had been a huge row, and when Suraya had summoned the scooter-borne knight in shining armor to rescue her, he had chickened out of a conflict with the older generation. Now Suraya was off work with "nerves."
"You have no idea how deeply I sympathize," I said. He thought I was being sarcastic, but I meant it. I begged for the name of the chain hotel where all the lesser voting-ceremony guests like myself were being put up.
Hemang found it in a matter of seconds, and dictated it over the phone.
"Whoa," he added. "It's, what, six in LA?"
"Yes, about that."
"Check-in's not for another three or four hours. You've got time for some tourism."
I felt more like going to see his cousin and getting a dose of morphine.
The hotel was one street back from the ocean. I was told that I was welcome to leave my luggage in the car, my car with the valet, and come back at around noon when my room would be ready.
All I wanted to do was crash out, but I took a beaker of coffee from the thermos in reception and strolled the last few yards to the Pacific.
If this was the climax of my trip, it was a bit disappointing. Wasn't the Pacific meant to be blue? It was almost coffee brown, the small waves rippling like the topping on a caramel latte. The tropical palms were here—immense trees swaying in the breeze, their oil-drum-thick bases tapering to pencil thin beneath their parasol of leaves. But the trunks were smothered in graffiti. You couldn't see wood for at least the first five feet. And they were set in lawns that had been squatted by homeless men—scruffy, bearded figures who were emerging from improvised shelters or lying stretched out in sleeping
bags, still unaware that another roofless day was just beginning.
I decided to avoid crossing the lawns, and followed a path that led along the seafront. This was even riskier than tiptoeing between sleeping tramps, though, because the dawn rollerbladers and cyclists made no concessions for a drowsy traveler at the end of his transcontinental odyssey.
"Pedestrians on the boardwalk!" a cyclist barked at me. With his floppy T-shirt, bare feet, and premature sunglasses, he looked much too laid-back to get angry, but he was gesticulating furiously at the pictograms on the tarmac that seemed to indicate I was walking in a wheel-only zone.
Los Angeles, I decided, wasn't making me feel too welcome. I made a silent wish for things to improve very soon, culminating of course in a victory at the voting ceremony in around thirty-six hours' time.
I had barely finished uncrossing my fingers when a dark blur materialized from behind a palm tree. It was a homeless man with a black bandana knotted on his head and an insane glint in his eye. He was holding a bike chain. The idea that he might just have stolen it from the guy who yelled at me was no consolation.
"That coffee?" he said. His teeth were definitely not those of a rich American.
"Yes. I hope you take sugar." I put the beaker on the ground and got out of there.
2
I conned my way into a room a few hours early and shut the curtains on the rising sun. I squeezed between sheets that, as always, were too tightly tucked in, and instantly lost consciousness.
I was woken by my mobile phone. It seemed to be having a panic attack. It rang, stopped, rang again, stopped, and then had a third go at driving me mad. It was obviously an urgent call.
"Paul? It's Suraya." I hoped for her sake that she hadn't phoned to give me the latest on her scooter saga.
"Hi. You're back at work?"
"Yes. You've got to get to Hollywood. They want you to do a dress rehearsal at the theater. They're in a frightful tizzy."
"A tizzy?" Another of her phrases from 1950s England.
"Yes, there is a problem with the voting system.
Apparently lots of the delegates think that they will have to vote countries out, like on reality TV. The organizers are having to hold briefing sessions to explain tJiat voters must choose the country they want, and not the one they want to eliminate. So they are in a panic and they want to rehearse the bits that they still have under control." "And they have me under control?" "So they think, yes. They have not met you yet."
Thelma drove as if she had never felt more at home since the Mini-fan-club rally in Miami, perhaps because there were lots of her brothers and sisters cruising the city. I doubted that any of the others had a kilted guy at the wheel, though. They were mainly driven by desperate-housewife types in wraparound sunglasses.
Familiar names came and went with every set of traffic lights—Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Melrose Avenue, Sunset Boulevard, and finally Hollywood Boulevard.
Just like my first view of the Pacific, my initial impression was anticlimactic. Was this really where everyone wanted to come and get made into a star, I wondered. This anonymous strip of malls and souvenir shops?
I finally saw evidence that the street was home to more than the everyday business of harvesting tourist dollars. A truck was unloading spotlights, tripods, and other showtime gear on to the sidewalk. I pulled up in front of the truck and was instantly chased off by a small guy with long hair and a headset.
"Not here," he said. "Just drive on." He returned his attention to shooing pedestrians over to the other side of the street.
I didn't move, and took a look at the place where my trip would truly come to a climax the following day—Grauman's Chinese Theater. It was a tall, pagoda-style construction in a semicircular courtyard. Marking the entrance to the theater were two bright-orange columns. The doors to the temple were golden and decorated with saber-toothed-dragon masks. It wouldn't have been out of place in Las Vegas—except that there, the Chinese temple would have been several dozen stories taller and the dragons on the facade would have been spitting real flames.
Technicians were mounting floodlights on tripods and heaving a roll of red carpet into the courtyard.
"Get outta here or we'll have you towed." The human guardian of the temple rapped on my roof.
"I'm here for the dress rehearsal," I told him through my open window.
"Oh." Without apologizing, he asked my name and had a short discussion with his headset. "OK, leave the car here and wait by the entrance. Someone'll come and meet you."
I did as I was told, and wandered over to look at the handprints and autographs that the theater is famous for. Tourists were milling around, taking photos of the legendary names who had left their mark in the courtyard's cement. Marilyn Monroe seemed to be the people's favorite. Her dainty handprints were black, presumably from all the people who'd pressed their palms into hers rather than because she'd forgotten to wash before coming to be immortalized. Groucho Marx, I saw, had left an imprint of something that looked suspiciously like his penis, but I guessed that it was probably his trademark cigar. Meryl Streep seemed to have sunk deeper into the concrete than anyone else. Was it a watery mix that day, I wondered, or an unflattering comment on her weight?
The workers were showing a distinct lack of respect for these famous names. A security guy was crouching down with his butt hanging over Jean Harlow. And the technicians were in the process of obscuring large expanses of the courtyard with their carpet. The guests at the voting ceremony were going to be treading on all those stars.
"It's OK, they don't need you after all." It was the guy with the headset.
"They don't?"
"No, they just wanted to make double sure you were here with your car. Someone heard on the news that you'd broken down."
"Wow, they reported that?" I hoped they hadn't spread the malicious rumor that the breakdown was caused by my running out of petrol.
"Yeah. So you just need to be here three fifty-five tomorrow—"
"Three fifty-five? That's got to be at least three hours before the ceremony."
"No, it's an afternoon show. You didn't know that?"
"No," I confessed.
"Yeah, the theater's booked for an evening premiere. That's why timing's essential. So you pull up right in line with the doors—" he pointed toward them with outspread hands, as if he was guiding me in to land on an aircraft carrier "—you get out, go to be photographed on the red carpet, and your car will be valeted away. OK?"
"OK."
"See you tomorrow, three fifty-five prompt. Have a good one. Hey, you people, the temple's closed, move outta here, please." He began herding off the nobodies who were getting in Hollywood's way.
The sun was shining directly along the boulevard now, giving everyone the excuse to put on their sunglasses. I decided to pay an exorbitant parking fee and bum around. Might as well have a look at Hollywood while I had the chance, even if it meant getting stared at for wearing a skirt.
I bought a coffee at a mall that was open at the back, so that you could look up at the fabled white letters on the hillside. Tourists were taking photos to prove that they'd made it to Hollywood.
In the floor of the mall, forming a trail toward the viewing point for the white lettering, there were mosaics telling dream stories along the lines of "I was cleaning sewers in Chicago when Steven Spielberg fell down my manhole and offered me a role as a sewer cleaner in Indiana Jones." It was the American dream laid out for everyone to follow. Call me a cynic, but it felt like walking down Wall Street, hoping you might magically earn a million on the stock exchange.
People come to Hollywood thinking they're close to the action, but they couldn't be further from it. I mean, here was I, in my semifamous costume of kilt and logoed anorak, and no one was offering me movie work. They probably thought I was the sandwich-board guy for a Scottish pub, on a quick coffee break.
I browsed through my texts, giving my phone a clean-out. My inbox was filling up about three
times a day with messages from weirdos making lewd offers or sending me pictures and movies of their own undercarriages. I zapped them all, except one that looked vaguely professional—this I decided to refer to Tyler. It might fit in with his branded-entertainment plan.
There was a cinema in the mall, so I killed a couple of hours watching a slick thriller, a Hollywood product-placement deal for chic cars, watches, laptops, and—yes— Uzis, in which die baddies got killed, die goodies made love widi die sheets covering their private parts, and an incorruptible cop proved diat one solitary American is more powerful and resourceful than the whole of the world's secret services put together.
After this, buoyed up by the idea that the small guy can achieve anything, I called Alexa, hoping to get our dialogue going again. It was our only chance of salvaging something before we hit the rocks once and for all. Predictably enough, I failed to get through. Life just isn't like Hollywood, even when you're in Hollywood.
3
Maybe I'd had too much coffee, or too much daytime sleep, but I just couldn't get any rest that night. What made things worse was the noise. American buildings are so damn loud. Even at night they won't shut up. Entire hotels shudder and whir twenty-four hours a day like ancient washing machines.
I turned off my air-conditioning, which was hissing out warmth from three or four grilles in the walls and ceiling. I jammed the bathroom door shut so that I wouldn't hear the constantly whistling air extractor. I reached inside my fridge and turned its motor to zero. And still there was a rattling mechanical sound coming from somewhere.
I finally tracked it down to an alcove out in the corridor, diagonally opposite the door to my room. Here, below a sign saying ICE, was a silver machine that sounded like a bus idling at traffic lights. It was shaking so much that if it hadn't been too heavy it would have waddled away and tumbled down the stairs. I kind of wished it would.
It was three in the morning, but I phoned reception and asked if someone could come and turn the machine down. Surely, I said, it didn't need to be on full blast all night?
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