by Will Self
As I scaled the hump of Montrose Street, then continued down Alvarado, the Wilshire corridor was spread out below me, frothing with greenery, wispy with smog. Shortly before I turned to the west along Beverly – in order to avoid MacArthur Park – I passed a grotty little dealership. Alvarado Auto Sales were pushing rusty pickups riddled with rust, decadent compacts and my own VW Variant Fastback, a car I’d last seen in a breaker’s yard in Battersea twenty-two years previously. The chances of this were minute – yet when I stopped to peer through the wound-down driver’s window and caressed the pimply vinyl hump of the dash, there could be no mistaking it: this was the very same car, the one I’d bought from a social worker on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, shortly after the riot of October 1985 in which PC Blakelock was hacked to death by Mob with Axe.
I’d crashed the VW a year and a half later on Chelsea Bridge – and although I knew it wasn’t a write-off, I’d still been in shock when the man at the breaker’s menaced me with a tyre-iron and said, ‘Take a tenner for it – or just fuck right off.’ I found the reappearance of my old car strangely heartening: the three-car shunt that had seemingly killed it must have been a stunt, the directors of which had arranged for it to be transported here and restored. I crouched to pray, a devout machinist, and called unto the Great Car Spirit to enter me, pump the gas, slip the clutch and drive me west towards Hollywood.
When I straightened up I noticed overhead a billboard advertising The Incredible Hulk, the release of which was now: 11.6.08. The Chrysler Building peeked over the bugaboo boffin’s green-skinned shoulder; surely, I thought, it must get tired of this shtick? Then I hitched up my short pants – which seemed ridiculously baggy – and besides, why did I find it so difficult to remember?
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Considered as a Precursor of Express Checkout
Somewhere between the Town House – an English manor held down in the shrubbery and force-fed pituitary gland – and the Bullocks Wilshire, I stopped at a grocery store for an energy drink with a dumb name like Relentless. Big mistake. From its terracotta base to its oxidized copper finial, the old department store was streamlined: an autobuilding speeding from the roaring twenties to the choking noughties. In seconds I was 500 yards up the road and only six days and forty years late to meet the bullets from Sihran Sihran’s .22.
Bobby Kennedy, hustled through the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel by his security detail, had just delivered his victory speech following the 1968 Californian presidential primary. That speech! Its homage to his assassinated brother, its guileless paean to the Great Society, what ... what were these? Ticked boxes on a card, the drinks swigged and peanuts snaffled from the minibar of democracy. Bobby is gone – unceremoniously dumped in the trunk of Monroe Stahr’s 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan, which shoots out from the portecochère, the chrome angel lying across its hood absorbing the up-thrust of the road through his fanned wingtips. Kathleen’s in the passenger seat, her beautiful composite of a face framed by one half of the split windshield. As for Stahr, his olive complexion cannot hide the tide of death rising up from his white silk shirt collar.
As the Chrysler turns left on to Wilshire the sound of Bobby’s drumming fists is clearly audible, yet neither Monroe nor Kathleen registers any emotion. Why should they give a shit about Kennedy? He’s way in the future, but in their immediate past are all the greats whooping it up at the Coconut Grove – Swanson and Shearer, Valentino and Flynn, Mayer and Chaplin. They’re too early, accelerating west, fuelled by the lust that will propel them all the way to Stahr’s half-built house in Santa Monica, where the nuages maritimes will creep through the chinks in its fuselage as they fuck on his raincoat on the floor.
They are too early – and I was too late: the Ambassador had been through the crusher and all that remained were chunks of dusty-white rubble baking behind a chain-link fence. When Scorsese pitched up to shoot The Aviator in the Coconut Grove, he had to back it up 500 yards to the Bullocks Wilshire, and it was there that Leo DiCaprio sipped milk and schemed to swat biplanes out of the sky – an actor playing an inchoate pathology, which would one day grow into a giant corporate gorilla.
We stopped for coffee – another big mistake: there was only so much anyone could take in when it came to Camera Jeff’s career lows. A missing poster tacked to a tree beside where we sat offered $1,000 for Scooby’s safe return. I thought back to the last time I’d seen him, disappearing behind the koi sign outside Iver, and, tearing off one of the paper slips, I resolved to make the call that night, a facecloth over the receiver to disguise my voice.
When we went on, with Jeff jogging along beside me, his eye-on-a-stick staring at my shoes, something had changed. My pulse began to quicken, lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lumpa-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a – it was paranoia on my part, certainly, but then they were sending them against me, these bioengineered anthropomorphic killing machines, human brains yoked to hundreds of horsepower. Waiting for the stop lights so I could cross into Hancock Park, I sympathized with those familiar features as they loomed in the screens, awfully contorted by the effort of braking. I could almost taste the sweet white flesh inside those two-millimetre-thick steel shells that had been artfully folded into Infinitis.
Lumpa-lumpa-lumpa-lumpa- I had been alone for a long time – not because I wanted to be, but because until I solved my. . . problem, there would be aspects of my personality I was unable to control. I was compelled to move from town to town, taking odd jobs where I could, staying off the books and below the radar, just an ordinary nerdy Joe with an IQ of 198 able to expand the coefficients of the binomial theorem while fiossing my lacquered teeth. I might hide out here, in the eight-car garages attached to Florentine villas or Tudorbethan mansions, but sooner or later I would have to deal with it, did I want to fight them, or was it the dewily protuberant top lip of my only true love I saw shadowed by the sunshades?
Back on the Miracle Mile, the streamlined blocks taunt me with their grande vitesse, while I remain crawling along at ground level, menaced by a dump truck, lumpa-lumpalumpalumpluml’l’ – my hands clench in front of my starting eyes, green, alien, engorged, the pastel-painted oblongs of the storefronts ripple with distortion: a fireball has been ignited behind my eyes! The orange-and-white canopy of Busby’s movie theatre radiates visible spectra! A roar of rage, deep and grinding as a malfunctioning camshaft rotating all the way from Hellenistic Greece to Detroit, bursts from my barrelling chest. My T-shirt falls away in shreds, my baseball cap pops off like the plastic cap on a wine bottle. At last! Now it’s clear to me why my short pants have been so saggy-assed all day! Now that I have metamorphosed they’re a perfect fit!
I leap twenty feet in the air and come down hard on all fours, my elephantine hands and feet sending cracks fissuring through the sidewalk. I grab handfuls of hardtop and yank the roadway like a carpet runner, so that it rucks up, sending BMWs and Renegade Jeeps cannoning into one another. Oh! The heady perfume of spilt petrol, the festive tinkle of shattering glass!
I turn this way and that before the empty eyes of polystyrene heads ranged in the window of a wig store, marvelling at my own preposterous physique, abs and pecs wrapped around my ribcage like the coils of a monstrous green-skinned constrictor. Deltas of arteries radiate out from trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles thick as hawsers.
The thoughts of this gross a body cannot help but be visible, so, notwithstanding the drivers – who either run screaming, or grab guns from the glove compartments of their stalled and crashed cars – I pause to consider my prospects ... my sexual prospects. I mean, c’mon, I’m, like, fourteen feet high, with a build that makes the most avid steroid-guzzler look mimsy – surely my cock ’n’ balls are to scale? Anger and lust – never more that a synapse apart – fuse behind the baroque half-dome of my forehead with its convex mouldings and entablature of worry lines. True, these vile creatures may be my sworn enemies, but I’d still like to. . . fuck one.
Say ... that one, over there, the gridlocked black
Hummer, with its tinted windows wobbling a come-on, as its speakers pump out the hypnotic bass line of a rap song that’s familiar despite my hydrocephalus. ‘Serviat! Raptetur! Serviat! Raptetur!’ Wires and nerves threaded through my unreasonable lusts and unsociable motions pull them tight and I kick out, sending an auto spinning on its longitudinal axis, scattering trim, fenders, fragments of window glass, then its doors, hood, wheel trim and alloys. The anti-roll bar neatly skewers a woman drinking a frappuccino outside Starbucks to a poster advertising frappuccino – violence of such jocular savagery it can be accepted uncritically as wholesome entertainment.
As can the kicked car, which goes on spinning until all that’s left is a body shell – the engine having long since plunged through the awning of the El Camino tapas bar – inside which the skull of its late driver is rattling like a pea in a whistle. Not that anyone pays any attention: the arty-slackers who were goofing beneath the awning have scattered already, whipping out their camera phones, so it’s with the low definition (yet enhanced newsworthiness) afforded by the tiny screen of a Samsung SGH-G800 that we witness my next trick: a Pontiac G5 coupe grabbed in one hand, my huge fingers fitting so neatly into the window holes that it’s impossible not to think: why hasn’t anyone done this before? And an old clunker of a Dodge Intrepid grabbed in the other – then the two autos beaten like cymbals as I roar and roar and roooooarrrr!
Suddenly squad cars are barricading off the four blocks of Wilshire between Detroit Street and Burnside Avenue, while the fat blue-and-white LAPD choppers bumble down over the rooftops, the perforated stings of .50 calibre machine-guns poking from their open hatches. Like I should care? I’m gonna hump a Hummer, so hurl the crumpled-tissue cars away, then lifting the off-road vehicle – perhaps for the first time in its life off the road – I tear a gash in its rear end the approximate size necessary. With disturbing tenderness I shift my grip so that I’m holding the car by its rear wheels and pull it towards my tumescent crotch.
Appalled fingers drop the SGH-G800, the view rears back and widens – but it’s too late! The choreography of the scene is unmistakable: given the proportionality of my sweat-greased carcass and the dirty boulevard, this could be any poolside out in the Valley, with me an oiled stud limbering up for the money shot, but:
Uh? Uh-oh.
No one need be that alarmed; for one, because this is a PG or at most a PG-13. I mean, nobody lays out the budget for this much wantonly artful destruction without a teenage target acquired. Also, there are – as I previously remarked – aspects of my personality that are beyond my control; surely, it stands to reason that a twice-life-sized bogey boy would have an erectile dysfunction? I may pull the rear of the Hummer towards my tow-hook, my ass cheeks tensing, my rictus widening to reveal incisors the size of dentists, but even as the four Crips leap from its front doors, MAC-10s jerking their hands as if they’re demented conductors, it’s clear I am unable to perform.
The comity of African-American gang members and white LAPD officers is definitely the subtext to this playlet. So what? The Crips’ pistols may spit fire, the cops’ handguns may boom – yet only every twentieth round hits me, and then I merely yelp as if this were flung gravel. The copters’ machine-guns spray this humongous gook more accurately – but I only clap a hand to my neck each time I’m bitten by a .50 calibre horsefly.
Nevertheless, like any frustrated rapist, I am doubly enraged, so snatch up more cars and hurl them at my antagonists but when this fails to stop them I leap high in the air and come down near the summit of Desmond’s department store. Grabbing the chamfered corner, I start to tear one letter after another from the neon sign, sending them skimming down into the street, where they cleaver into buses, or else up into the sky, where a boomeranging e deftly shreds the rotors of a police copter so that it spirals into the citrus blooms of death.
Things are going my way until the untimely arrival of a marine company armed with FIM-82 Stinger ground-to-air missiles. The first three they launch miss me and inflict devastating collateral damage on Melrose. I leap to evade the fourth and land in the La Brea Tar Pits, where I make free with the hot black gloop, disembowel model mastodons and generally amuse myself. Still, it’s clear that the fight’s going out of me as I wade in circles waisthigh in the pit. So much so that emboldened tourists creep up behind me like kids playing grandma’s footsteps, then pop their miserable flashes. The money shot – when it finally comes – is a tarry plash across their lenses.
I came to in the Farmers Market on Fairfax and 3rd, sitting at a Chinese food stall with two or three other toothless old Jews jew-jewing on noodles and kvetching our way through the hot afternoon. ‘Jesus, Willy,’ said one, ‘you’re so goddamn thin you need reverse lipo, man – some fat squirted into you.’
It was true: my pants were so slack they could comfortably house the Incredulous Hulk. ‘Yeah,’ I mumbled, ‘you’d know all about getting fat squirted into you, Al, coz that’s what your Dora does with her lokshen soup.’
‘Heh-heh-heh,’ gum-chuckled the oldsters, then went back to their jew-jewing and slurping.
I was only mildly fazed by my ability to seamlessly Matthauize with their Parkinsonian blur of liver-spotted hands; hadn’t this always been the key juxtaposition of Hollywood: up on the screen the industry of souls, while in the backroom the sunshine boys black up and cry for mama? So I sat, smothered by awnings and homeyness, contemplating the Three Dogs Bakery (‘Bakery for Dogs’), while from the south there emanated the wailing of sirens, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire, and the kerboom! of ground-to-air missiles. This, the latest death rattle of the megalopolis, was something we oldsters were all familiar with, and so we went on with our ho fun, continued the green tea treatment.
I left a ten-spot for my share of the check and wobbled off into the hurdy-gurdy consumerism of the Grove Mall. All those screen gunfights, what were they, if not a brilliantly deployed strategy of Calm and Blasé against the insurgency of the Id? Of course, things could get out of hand – there was mission creep to contend with. It was only nine days since the propane cylinders on the New York set at Universal had exploded sending a King Kong cloud roaring into the sky above Hollywood. While LAFD’s finest had fought the flames sporting the gold foil suits of poorly conceived aliens, 40,000 archived videotapes had burned – together with the sets of Back to the Future.
As I bent to pick up a strip of packing tape twined in the fence of Pan Pacific Park, Gofer Jeff came barrelling along the sidewalk on her denim kegs. ‘Mr Thewlis! Mr Thewlis!’ she puffed. ‘We’re so sorry – we kinda lost you back there.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I snapped. ‘So long as you keep laying down covering fire for these last three miles I’ll be just fine.’
‘Covering fire?’ She looked at me as if I were aha-a-ha-ha-ha a cold-blooded killer.
‘Sorry, I mean, so long as you keep rolling until I get to Hollywood, then ...’ I struggled to cinch my elephantine pants with the tape.
‘Then what?’
I knotted the tape. ‘Then it’s a wrap.’
At 6922 Hollywood Boulevard there was a small terrace outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I sat dunking two of Earl Grey’s hot nuts into a styrofoam cup full of boiling water. Opposite me a bum with an uncanny resemblance to the French romanciermaudit Michel Houellebecq was nursing a mug rimmed with old froth. He wore a mauve shirt over a leather jacket and his sock-puppet face was scuffed and scabby. A Discman lay on the metal tabletop between his bloated fingers, the headphones of which clipped a dirty-cream panama to his ginger hair.
I had loathed him at first sight – would that I could’ve been planted opposite the efficient student at the next table, whose thrift-store cheongsam was split high on her chubby thigh. I eyed her well-thumbed Pride and Prejudice and her puppyish tummy with equal covetousness. The Houellebecqalike smelt – he muttered ‘Get it together!’ and other worrying exhortations.
Behind me I could hear the squeaking and baying of a rapidly gatherin
g crowd. As I had taken my seat I’d clocked the security barriers, the bald boys in black suits and the limos pulling up outside Grauman’s – there was obviously a première under way, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my teatime, any more than P. G. Wodehouse had allowed the transportation logistics of Los Angeles to disrupt his habits, when he reported for his first day’s work at MGM in Culver City, having walked the six miles from Beverly Hills.
I sipped my Earl Grey judiciously – the only movie stars left in Hollywood were the supermen’s batmen, the jokers’ tin men, the Elvises and the Marilyn Monroes. Still, at least the impersonators had the virtue of honest subterfuge – not so the out-of-towners treading on the stars’ stars who were being drawn to the red carpet like flies to an Insect-O-Cutor. Once they got between the pavilions, under the mad eaves of the Chinese Theater, they’d get uglier: sunshine and oranges were not enough, not now they were a lowering and bitter crowd.
The traffic continued to rumble and toot, the Houellebecqalike continued to mutter and poot. The first screams were synchronized with the camera flashes reflected in the window of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but soon enough this son et lumière became a dinning zoetrope, then a howling stroboscope – and still I did not turn; didn’t until from out of the hysteria projected a single comprehensible line of dialogue: ‘That guy never gives autographs!’ Then at last I swivelled in my seat to be confronted by a black face gone blubbery with joy. He held out his book so everyone on the terrace could see the page. There was the mark, the stave of the J serving for the T as well, both names lying upon a dais of a flourish and – a few feet beyond the baying hound – there was the marker.
He was wearing a shiny slate bomber jacket with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a $500 T-shirt, and there were sunglasses tipped forward on his charming nose. There he was, Justin Timberlake, his pale trunk tipping forward into the pool of faces, while a forest of limbs reached up to grab him. And there too, floating on the end of a blue-and-whitestriped tie, was the clown-face-designed-by-committee of Mike Myers, while beside him bulged the baby puss of Jessica Alba.
