by Will Self
He saluted me lazily, ‘Word up, man,’ then double-took. ‘Oh, you’re that guy – Brit actor, ain’tcha? Saw you in that kids’ movie – wha’ wuzz it, now?’
‘It was Harry Potter, man,’ said another, still taller NWPhd coming up beside him. The two of them stood towering over me, mild curiosity on their handsome faces.
I flannelled: ‘Um, yeah, I did do those films but it was only for the—’ I pulled myself up short: how could admitting to mercenary motives be an excuse? I tried another tack: ‘Y’know, I was in Malick’s The New World, a biggish role – I’m not primarily a Hollywood casting.’
‘True dat.’ This came from the third NWPhd, who was wearing a purple silk Chanel tie. ‘You daybooed in that kerazee movie that starts wi’ you raping some sorry bitch in a goddamn alley. I guess you’d know all about slavish lust.’
‘It’s ambiguous.’
‘What you say?’
‘It’s not certain that I’m raping her – I mean, that the character I was playing was raping her.’
He shook his head gloomily, ‘Motherfucker, if that’s your idea of consensual sex I hate to think what you rapin’ would look like, sheee!’ He blew hard then collected himself: ‘No disrespect, man – what’s your name, anyway?’
I ignored this and said, ‘Y’know your English translation doesn’t exactly match up – there’s nothing about wires and nerves in the Latin.’
‘Oh, really?’ Purple Tie called to the last of the NWPhds, who was coiling a microphone flex on the stage: ‘Howie, get over here will’ya?’
As Howie approached I saw that he wore studded leather wristlets, and that, although he was dressed like his fellow band members, the crotch of his suit pants hung low – almost between his knees.
‘Yeah?’ He looked at me belligerently, eyes bloodshot in ochreous skin, wispy hairs threaded his lower lip to his chin.
‘Man’s questioning the translation, Howie,’ Purple Tie said, then to me: ‘May I introduce you to Professor Howard Turner; he holds the chair in classics and comparative literature here at USC, so, if you-gonna-be-questioning’ – he poked me in the chest to emphasize each word – ‘you-gonna-be-answering to Howie, you fill me?’
All four NWPhds had ranged themselves menacingly around me. ‘You dig Aurelius, man?’ Howie growled.
‘Well, we’d all do well,’ I wittered, backing towards the sunlight, ‘to maintain a stoical attitude in the face of ... y’know – stuff.’ Outside I could see the Jeffs sharing a bottle of Powerade Aqua; they and it both looked appealing.
‘Don’t come down this way again,’ said the leader of the NWPhds, who had the passionate beauty of the young Marvin Gaye. ‘Unless you be confident you can parse a Latin sentence purr-fic’-lee.’
‘An’ declaim some,’ said the second giving me a light shove.
‘An’ display appropriate rhetorical style,’ Purple Tie added with a fist flourish that knocked me into the realization that he was being played by Jamie Foxx.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you won’t believe this, but the day before yesterday, back in Britain, I took a long walk with Morgan Freeman.’
‘What the fuck’re you talking about?’ Foxx had backed me right to the door. I made another bid to connect:
‘I don’t want to be intrusive, but did you learn anything about Cruise when you worked with him on Michael Mann’s Collateral, for example, the sigmoidal flexure of his ... ah, penis?’
Foxx looked almost pitying: ‘I don’t wanna know nothin’ ‘bout that, my friend,’ he said. ‘This here is a litigious town – and then there’s the Scientologists.’
We were in the open air; SUVs full of coeds farted past. Waving a plastic bottle at me, Gofer Jeff called out, ‘I’ll getcha a Powerade, Pete.’
‘Pete?’ Foxx looked at me speculatively.
‘I’ve gotta get going,’ I said. ‘I’m due over at the Shrine Auditorium, but one thing: you were awesome back there, you guys gigging anywhere soon?’
Foxx laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Anything is possible, my friend.’ The transition in a few seconds from anger to incredulity to sympathy would’ve been bewildering if he weren’t such an accomplished actor. ‘You take care out there.’
5
The Atrium
A statue of a Shriner stood in the parking lot – like me, he was slightly bigger than lifesize. Unlike me, he wore a bum-freezer and a fez and was holding a child of around five in the crook of his arm. But, there again, like me, both figures had faces the colour of pipe clay and eyes like pee holes in the snow.
I had walked to the Shrine Auditorium for obvious reasons: if, as I believed, buildings were corporeal things, briefly animated by mind or minds, then this was one of the corpora delicti that would prove not just that film was dead – but that it had been murdered. From the 1940s through to the 1990s the Shrine had hosted Oscar ceremonies; even standing in the open air, looking through the barred doors, I could still smell the reeks of stale narcissism, avarice and hunger. I banged on the doors until a security guard played by Ken Sansom came stumbling through the gloom, then palmed him a couple of hundred bucks to let me in. I strode through the darkened halls and passages, before stepping out into the cavernous auditorium itself.
Vast plaster swags bellied from the roof a hundred feet overhead; above the stage dangled a chandelier the size of a flying saucer. The polyhedral niches and recessed colonnettes to either side of the proscenium, the latticed screens that rose behind the forty-seat boxes, the ogee arches standing proud of the curving walls – it all post-hypnotically suggested an alternative history for the Americas: Los Angeles settled from the west in the fifth century after Muhammad by Arab dhows that had rounded the Capes of Good Hope and Horn, their lanteen sails dipping like rocs’ wings into the long swell of the Pacific. The indigenous tribes of the Californian littoral had all joyously submitted to Islam, green flags fluttered along the spine of the Sierra, and two centuries later the Shrine was raised as the physical embodiment of the evolving Al Malaikah consciousness, its dome swimming in the bilious smog of a million Al Forsan autos ... But I remained unaware of this until the following evening, when the desk clerk at the Roosevelt snapped his fingers.
I walked out on to the stage followed by Sansom, who was morphing – his hair reddening and curling, his face growing shinier and more venal – until he was not just an acceptable stand-in but a dead-ringer for the founding charlatan of Scientology. Hubbard approached and, raising a hand to my forehead, tipped me straight back into the mind-bath of Dianetic reverie, where I lay feeling the warm current of time course along my flanks and sweep between my parted thighs. Then Hubbard gave me a gentle push and I found myself carried swiftly upstream, my arms and legs mutating into flippers, then fins, then polyps – until there I was, beached in the Upper Palaeozoic, with Hubbard rapidly opening and closing his fleshy hand to simulate my shell, and so sending waves of anxiety through the audience of pre-clears unable to cope with their own molluscan memories.
As one genetic entity to others, I sympathized, yet at the same time I could feel that every single sleight, cramp, twinge and sniffle I had experienced in all my multitudes of animal lives had been accepted, digitized and rewritten in the binary encoding of my analytic brain, a smoothly functioning computational device with the power of a thousand networked super-computers – although this analogy is woefully impoverished, implying a clackety-plastic clunkiness to what’s beyond the grasp of any pre-clear, especially you.
I, the Thetan, lifted off from the stage, my silky-brown hair haloing my superfine 35,000-year-old features, and so L. Ron and I danced a pas de deux as, to the amazement of the crowd, we orbited the chandelier before touching down together, hand in hand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Elron boomed, ‘I give you the first clear, Sonya Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. In addition to her many other accomplishments, Miss Bianca has full and perfect recall of every moment in her life. But first, if you will my dear, please tell us how Dianetics has he
lped you.’
‘Well.’ To begin with my voice was tremulous and my pulse raced, but as I spoke I grew in confidence: ‘I had a strange and, um, embarrassing allergy to ... well, paint.’
‘Paint?’
‘That’s right, paint – whether wet or dry; and if I came into contact with it at all – which is, as I’m sure everyone realizes, difficult to avoid, well, I got a painful itching in my eyebrows. Now the condition has cleared up and I feel ... well, like a million dollars!’
There was a scattering of applause, but there were also mutterings of discontent and somebody called out, ‘Tell us what you had for breakfast on October the third 1942!’
I fidgeted with the hem of my twill skirt. ‘That’s easy, a bento box. The sushi and sashimi were fine, and I asked for a refill of miso soup, which I sipped together with mouthfuls of green tea from a china beaker—’
In a chain Japanese diner on Figueroa? I don’t think so – not a china beaker, only a lidded styrofoam cup, the textured dimples of which squeaked beneath my sweaty fingertips; across the road Felix the Cat pole-sat with a come-hither grin on top of a Cadillac dealership. ‘I’ve scheduled a meeting for you with Michael Lynton at Sony Pictures in Culver City this Friday – the thirteenth,’ said Ellen DeGeneres’s voice in my ear. Frank Tenpenny was sitting with a table of LAPD patrolmen next to mine – a more or less solid block of heavy-duty navy cotton accessorized with forearms, side arms and crew-cut heads on V-shaped plinths of white T-shirt. It was true about the bento box, though – the lacquered tray littered with rice lay on the table beneath my eyes. ‘Kinda unlucky, maybe ...’
‘Maybe.’ I was mightily impressed at my ability to pick up my end of the phone conversation. ‘But then I could always pitch him a nightmare.’
She laughed throatily. ‘Pitch him a nightmare – I like that. Anyway, you’re set to see him at ten that day, and I can get you a five o’clock at the Marmont with Michael Burns – if you think you can get from Culver City to the Marmont by then? ’Course, you’ll need to get back by seven anyway ’cause I’ve arranged a little party in your honour—’
‘A party?! But I don’t know anyone – and no one knows me.’
‘Lissen, don’t worry, it’s a tiny affair – more of gathering, really.’
A useful little heads-up display map had appeared in the corner of my visual field, and using this I could quickly and easily estimate the mileage from Culver City to Hollywood, so said, ‘Actually, it appears eminently possible for me to meet with Burns – but listen, are you sure these guys want to see me, I mean, it’s not like I have anything to offer them and I don’t want to go squandering your agent capital.’
‘Puh-lease, David, you’re a respected actor – you’re bankable, guys like that are always gonna want to meet with you.’
I said nothing to her of the black-clad legs stomping the prone form of the studio head until it disintegrated into its encoding. We hung up. I paid the bill and found the Jeffs outside waiting for me. ‘Eat well, WW?’ asked Camera Jeff. I checked out my HUD health bar and saw that I had plenty of lives, so grunted affirmatively.
Jeff had rigged up a new gizmo during his lunch break, a tiny digital camera mounted on an aluminium pole he could hold at ground level, angled up to give a shot of my walking feet. I appreciated the thought he’d put into this amblecam – all the way from LAX I’d been agonizing that without sufficient close-ups of my feet they might be cropped, then grafted on to the legs of an extra in a crowd scene of a thriller featuring a psychopath hell-bent on shooting a politician the name of whom no one will ever remember. Really.
No sooner had I begun walking and Camera Jeff was turning over, than I realized this set-up had a radical effect on my point of view. Listen, I’m not a fool-I’d known for years how detached I was from the normal range of feeling, how solipsistic, how dissociated, so that on occasion I seemed to be observing myself acting out a predetermined role. Busner may have termed my malady ‘ebullient and productive’, yet all too often it felt merely hollow and miserable. What was it he had warned me about? What ...
To the north-east the Downtown towers rained down light-spears that disappeared into the smog bank lying above Broadway and Bunker Hill. I glanced right and left and the fishbowl turned while my arms remained lifelessly projecting ahead. Was I in the world any more? Or was the world in me? Just before the Shrine Auditorium I had crossed the fault line where the plate of the old pueblo grinds against that of the new city, and now as I navigated east towards south central I realized I had crossed the border that separates LA from Los Santos.
The 45-degree downwardly angled shot was reminiscent of the bistro in the Place Wilson, but my POV remained hovering while the figure in the green T-shirt and green short pants advanced, long legs eating up the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure about the Mr T. Mohawk, but I liked the way I’d acquired a muscular build; nor could I see the point of the cross hairs, that, whichever way I turned, remained aligned – for I wasn’t armed. Indeed, although I was headed straight into the gang territories of East Los Santos, where the Ballas and the Vagos ruthlessly battle for supremacy, I felt not the slightest anxiety.
Neither anxiety – nor remorse, when I thought of the killing at the carniceria in East LA the preceding fall, the choking dust clouds when the digger went to work among the Civil War dead in the Evergreen Cemetery, me stuffing the bloodstained handkerchief into my pocket, then furtively adjusting its engorgement as I rode the bus back along 1st Street into town. These memories could have no purchase here, where a sweatshop full of wetbacks plying sewing machines swam out of the nuages maritimes. No! The sea mists had dispersed in the Baldwin Hills; this was some other phenomenon. If Mr Me went towards the sweatshop it increased in definition, until I could read the very headline of the sun-yellowed copy of La Opinión that lay in the gutter in front of it: ‘Adiós Triunfal!’ Next to a photo of La Senadora Hillary Clinton, arm upraised as she gracefully bowed out of the contest.
Then, when I toggled away to the blank space, alien evergreens materialized, their upper limbs customized with the needle-shaggy bafflers of a cell site. Yes! I grasped it at last: I was an aboriginal spirit in the city of unbecoming, who had only to walk towards the void for some new thing to be swiped into existence with Ed Ruscha strokes of oily pixels. Superhero, pah! I was a god now – with a god’s penchant for vengefulness and real-time moral experimentation.
I summon up Marisco’s seafood, a beige stucco box that’s abierto. José stands in the doorway, his singlet grimy, the Madonna tattooed on his right arm, Mary Magdalen being sodomized by the Devil on his left. His hair’s gathered in a do-rag, his automatic is stuffed down his pants. As Mr Me comes right up to him, he sprouts bling, shifts on his Keds and rolls his shoulders while spouting pre-recorded dialogue into his cell phone: ‘It’s that gringo loco WW again, we told him not to come back here, this time something gotta be done.’
When Mr Me snatches the phone, drops it to the sidewalk and grinds it out like a cigarette butt, José plunges his hand into his pants, but before he can withdraw his piece my long black legs are upside his head, scissoring his thick neck. ‘Ooooh, noooo!’ he moans, then he’s on the ground and I’m break-dancing on his chest.
A low-rider pulls up beside us. The hood pops, the trunk pops, it bounces on its tyres, the doors burst open and disgorge a quartet of Uzi-toting heavies and the ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of a rap backing track; Mr Me despatches the first with the heel of my hand, the second with the scythe of my foot, the third gets me in the shoulder with a round, yet when I consult my target health indicator I see that I’m still well ahead of the game. The fourth is encouraged to kneel in the open door of the gun wagon, then it’s shut, hard, again and again.
Pumped up with success, Mr Me disdains the jalopy – its door a bloodied mouth beseeching him to enter and drive. Instead, I check the HUD map, then thumb-swagger him east towards Central. The ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of the backing track is joined by NW
Phd: ‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again. One wind – one life, one life – one wind, one wind – one life, one life – one wind ...’ The dreamy-creamy superstructure of the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant rises smoothly into my crosshairs above what should be the messy contingencies of power lines, signage and stop lights – should be, but even this far in I’ve spotted the patterning and concluded that this parodic LA has most probably been woven from machine code in a nerdish workroom half a world away.
Still, when a pneumatic ho pours her jugs from the backroom of a tyre shop echoing with the ‘Whirrrrschunk!’ of wheel nuts being drawn like monstrous teeth and coos, ‘Hey, Double-U Double-U, why not step inside for a latte?’ I respect the clarity of the prompt and reply with one of the 4,200 lines of scripted dialogue at my disposal, ‘So long as it ain’t skinny, bitch.’
‘It ain’t skinny at all, homie, it’ll make you froth.’
No more stereotypical than any seductive banter – I hope you’ll agree. And what of the sex act itself? From behind, natch, her cartoon face sinks into a yielding wall, her coffee haunches seesaw, the PlayStation squeaks ... Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being manipulated as much as the next puppet, but there’s work to be done: since their arrival in the late 1930s, inside the Coca-Cola plant German Expressionist émigrés have forged an indissoluble association in the collective unconscious between tooth rot and eye candy, so that no movie is complete without a waxed-paper demijohn of sugared water and caffeine pumped full of CO2 ...
‘I’m gonna take these muthafuckahs down,’ Mr Me says to the Jeffs, who’ve come up beside me. Sound Jeff pushes his cans up on his head, panda style.
‘Man, WW, that’s some crazy stuff,’ he sighs.
‘The more you know,’ Mr Me says, pumping the shotgun that magically appears in my hands, ‘the better. Now cover me!’
