Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  Slowly, the Kematrol beat the cocaine hydrochloride molecules into submission. I stopped having to patrol the nylon trench in between the twin beds, ceased to be worried that the TV stand would sink further into the tufted orange hotel carpet. A couple of hours later I fiddled open the glassine envelope and tipped the last of the coke on to the toilet seat in a stall at La Guardia, then flubbered it up.

  The flight to Syracuse was uneventful, if, that is, you’re used to the transcendent misery of realizing you have been sent back from the future and at any minute will be killed – a murder that you yourself witnessed as a small child. I was used to this. From the airport I took a cab to the university’s Health Science Center. Dr Thomas Szasz, a dapper septuagenarian in a neat blue suit, was waiting for me in a room full of ventilation ducts and polystyrene fire-retardant tiles that audibly crackled with static electricity.

  I recall my conversation with Dr Szasz perfectly well (or should I say, with his impersonator, for I realized soon enough that he was being played by Donald Pleasence in his last major role), and in particular his goulash-thick Hungarian accent that added the suffix szasz (pronounced zarj) to many of his words, thus: ‘Yesasz, my criticszasz are many, my enemieszasz ubiquitouszasz,’ giving me the uncanny feeling that his speech was a form of prayer, consisting in the incantation of his own – possibly divine – name.

  Not that there was anything self-worshipping about the veteran anti-psychiatrist (as portrayed by the valetudinarian actor). I had a journalistic assignment, but was also interested in speaking with him because he had known Zack Busner well during the early 1960s. At that time Szasz was working on what would become his signature work, The Myth of Mental Illness, while Busner was setting up his ‘concept house’ in Willesden. Both were engaged in a revolt against the dehumanizing character of institutional psychiatry, both fundamentally questioned its view of mental pathologies, but only Busner had ended up on celebrity game shows.

  Peering over his bifocals, Szasz looked at me as if I were a psychic gift sent by his old comrade in arms-thrusting-from-the-walls-of-her-flat. I told him about the Riddle, and how buying up shares in the manufacturer had almost financially bankrupted Busner, just as publicizing the enquire-within tool had done for him professionally. ‘I seeasz, I seeasz,’ Szasz muttered as I spoke; then when I’d concluded he said: ‘It isasz, I think, a caseasz of hubriszasz.’

  ‘Hubris?’

  ‘Exactly, hubriszasz. You seeasz, like me, Zack Busnerasz believed that schizophreniasz was not a pathology at all, only a semantic confusionasz.’

  ‘And it isn’t?’

  ‘No, of courszasz not – researcasz in the last thirty yearszasz haszasz conclusively established the genetic basiszasz of schizophreniasz, if not its actual causzasz.’

  ‘So, you were wrong?’

  ‘We were wrong, which is by no meanszasz to endorszasz the way the therapeutic state treats schizophreniasz, or to admit that any other so-called mental illnessasz – such as depressionasz – are anything of the sort. But in this caszasz, we were wrong. I think perhapszasz that Busner is too proud to admit thiszasz, and so ...’

  His fingers, which had been steepled beneath his chin, now interleaved, then inverted to reveal all the pink little people straitjacketed in his institution. So, as you can see, it was an epochal encounter for me – one that had far-reaching consequences, especially when I became aware that Szasz had cofounded, with the Church of Scientology, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

  For the rest of the interview Dr Szasz treated my questions seriouszly if peremptorily, szwiping them out of the air in such a way as to suggest he was translating from one conceptual language into another. Which made it all the more bizarre when, at the end of our hour together, he turned hospitable – very hospitable – and suggested that while he had no wish to detain me against my wishes, I might like – on a purely voluntary basis, of course – to be his guest in a nearby facility ... indefinitely.

  On the same trip to the States, Charles and I went up the Twin Towers. Given subsequent events, I’d like to be able to tell you that they made a big impression on me, but that would be a lie. Indeed, I can honestly say that I never gave the vast blocks another thought from that day until 11 September 2001, whereas my revulsion from Mike Myers returned again and again over the years, rising unfunnily up my gorge whenever I caught a few seconds of a trailer for one of his movies, saw a poster, or even heard the words ‘Mike’ and ‘Myers’ in completely unrelated contexts.

  The scene in The Love Guru that most outraged me was one involving the actor of restricted height, Verne Troyer, who Myers had imported from his earlier Austin Powers movies to play the foul-mouthed manager of the Toronto Maples ice hockey team. I suppose that given my own issues it ill behove me to be quite so censorious, but when I saw Troyer upbraiding the Guru (Myers) and his star player (Timberlake) in a scaled-down office obviously modelled on the dwarfish train carriage set in the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus,* I longed for one of those vodka miniatures that I drained during the 1992 JFK to Heathrow flight to magically reappear in my hand, so that I could smash it against the wall of the cinema, then plunge it into Myers’s chipmunk cheek.†

  It may be the vagaries of memory, but I think the vodka miniatures were glass. I don’t believe either Charles or I behaved at all badly – we didn’t even raise our voices, only unravelled the way even well-knit folk do when drinking to excess on long-haul flights. Nevertheless, about an hour before landing the stewardess approached our scaled-down barroom and told us that she refused to serve us any more liquor, and that if we didn’t moderate our language she would have the pilot radio ahead and we would find the police waiting for us upon touchdown.

  ‘He was wearing crocodile-skin shoes the last time I saw him,’ Bret was saying of a former brat pack writer-buddy. ‘He told me they cost $20,000.’

  I pushed my spoon through the quarter-inch of tarte au chocolat and it clicked with china. The waiter materialized with a vodka tonic for Bret; then, as he turned away, he moved the bottle of Powerade from one point on the adjacent table to another more exactly in my own mid shot. As if this setdressing were the cause, the voices of the other diners were now right in my ear.

  ‘It’ll be huge, see,’ the man was saying. ‘I mean, we’re with this guy all the way – he doesn’t know who he is any more, hell, he doesn’t know who anyone else is either.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I’d misread the situation: this wasn’t a date; the suit was pitching to hay-hair, who had to be a studio exec.

  The suit pressed on: ‘Everyone he runs into is played by an actor – some well known, others not so, and people’ll have a great time trying to identify who’s who – that’s how they identify with his, his—’

  ‘Condition, yeah, I hear you.’

  ‘But there’s more’ – he began waving his hands – ‘our guy has these delusions, he sees things, he hears voices, everything is incredibly significant – everyone is in on the conspiracy –

  ‘He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, right?’ She was bored. ‘Lissen, Griffin, I don’t want to, like, pop your bubble, but I’ve had people coming on to me with these psycho ideas for months now – it’s all over town like a goddamn rash.’

  I could understand why Bret didn’t want to sit next to anyone in LA. I couldn’t tell if he’d overheard the schizopitch; his face bore an expression of frightening ennui. I began babbling: ‘I’ve been reading your Lunar Park, man; it’s great, truly great – maybe your best yet. I love the way you play with your own identity, create a doppelgänger – but isn’t that what the movies can do now, there’s no disbelief so heavy that it can’t be winched up with fleets of computer-generated helicopters? I mean, it’s also like a psychosis, believing in this stuff even for a second – that’s why they’re putting so much into the new 3-D technology. Shazzam! And you’re in the insect mines of Minroad. Shazzam! again, and you’re in some poor fucker’s liver, kayaking down his bile duct ... and, well, t
his is what we fear, isn’t it? The numbers of people with mental illnesses are increasing exponentially – bipolar, hypomania, OCD, dementia, addiction, schizo-fucking-phrenia – it’s a plague, and these Hollywood movies are expressing that fear! What’s so incredible about the Hulk? I’ll tellya: he’s got BDD, body dysmorphic disorder. He’s a perfectly ordinary guy but he thinks he’s got green skin and this, like, obscenely muscled—’

  The waiter was back with a credit card receipt to sign. I scanned it and from the total realized we were going Dutch. Bret was already tucking his Mont Blanc back inside his jacket. I had no idea if he had heard what I’d been saying – or if I’d said it at all.

  ‘Look.’ He was staring at my retreating figure in the rear-view mirror of his mind. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – this script, the rewrites, it’s been grinding me down, besides I gotta drive.’ Bret got up to leave, and when he turned his back I snagged the Powerade from the next table, cracked the lid and drained it in a single heady draft, then I followed his shrinking back.

  While we waited under the porte-cochère for Bret’s car, I tried to revive the conversation. Where was he living? Did he get out much – socialize? The more fatuous my questions, the more his face folded in on itself, an origami of mouth tucked under ear, ear poked behind eye. Eventually I resorted to blandishment: ‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me Friday evening at the Bar Marmont.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘It’s a very little party – more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up that would be ... nice.’

  The parking valet leapt from behind the wheel of a big black Beamerish wagon and held the door open for Bret. I was reminded of the scene in Swann in Love, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu, in which Odette de Crécy (played by Ornella Mutti) is dressed by her maid with a sensuousness all the more compelling for being an expression of the way nineteenth-century labour relations made of one woman’s body a workhorse, and another’s a commodity to be sponged clean, then boxed in its clothes.

  The valet clothed Bret in his black BMW, tucking him between its steely folds and binding his breasts with a nylon band. The final touch was to lift his limp legs and insert them into the leatherette hole formed by the seat and the dash before shutting the car door with the sumptuous delicacy of someone smoothing rumpled silk. The window moaned down and I was confronted by two anxious Postlethwaites leering from the lenses of Bret’s Ray-Bans.

  ‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘you’re not fooling anyone with this, this imposture – least of all me.’ He squirmed and the car juddered into drive. ‘I don’t know the guy well enough to know whether you’re doing a good job, but let me tell you, if you’re a professional actor – and come to think of it I do vaguely recognize you – if people get wind of this you’ll never work in this town again.’

  The car purred forward, then moved to the right. I stared at Bret’s face, which remained turned towards me, as, instead of taking the exit, he came back round the circuit to where I stood. The 180-degree revolution of the writer’s head was disturbing enough, but when Bret drew level he said casually, ‘See you tomorrow,’ then accelerated away in a cloud of nitrogen, water vapour, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter and un-burnt fuel.

  Naturally, I understood what Welles had been doing: referencing the revolutionary opening shot of Touch of Evil, a single continuous take over three minutes long that sent the camera tracking down the main street of a dusty border town, then plunging clear through a building in order to follow the progress of a bomb planted in the trunk of a car. If Welles-as-Bret had been the camera, it must have been me who’d swallowed the dynamite.

  It certainly felt that way as I ambled poolside: the halibut had reanimated and was threshing about in my belly full of stale asparagus soup. Nothing was helped by the movie star impersonators who were sitting at the circular tables in the Tropicana bar. The pool had been decorated by David Hockney, his clever embellishment consisting of the signature blue curlicues painted on the bottom, which on his own canvases gave the impression of clear water with a rippled surface, but here suggested the blue-varnished toenail clippings of giant starlets.

  I assumed the impersonators were there to re-create the first Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Roosevelt in 1929, but there were far too many Charlie Chaplins, Clara Bows, Gloria Swansons and especially Errol Flynns among the guests to make the scene remotely credible. Besides, the twenties were roaring with contemporary chatter as they downed their cocktails: Atkins’s parole hearing, the election campaign, the writers’ strike, Bratton and Baca’s set-to over racial violence, where to buy the longest-lasting garden flares. . .

  I turned my back on the haunting – I couldn’t stand to look them in their other people’s faces. I walked along the musty dogleg of the cabana corridor and slid my key card into its slot. I hit the lights and a filament squirmed in a goldfish bowl. Christ, what a dump! Hemispherical vinyl bolsters were tacked up the wall above the bed – which was a squared-off mound of clapshot. I sat down on it and put Postlethwaite’s face in my hands. The Powerade was coming up on me, the 1929 Awards were getting louder and louder – sleep would be out of the question, and worse still it was so dark I couldn’t see to read.

  There’s a knock on the door and when I open it a solid man-shape stinking of sweat and body paint pushes straight past me.

  ‘Hey!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Guest services – mind if I come in?’ A coarse voice sounds from head height in the drear.

  ‘You are in,’ I snarl; ‘what the fuck d’you want?’

  ‘Man on the desk says you gotta problem with the lights, can’t see to, uh, read. The dimmer switches in these cabanas are set real low, I can fix that for you.’

  ‘Why, thank you.’

  Is my tone coquettish? I hope not. There’s a clanking as of a toolbox being opened and then the chink and scratch of a screwdriver applied to a switch panel. The light wells up in the cabana and I see the screwdriver twirling in midair. The voice says, ‘Say, you’ve got quite a build on you, you work out, do weights?’

  ‘We-ell, not exactly.’ Under the warm scrutiny of this void I feel the grotesquely magnified self-consciousness of an adolescent – and with it the lust. ‘But I do a lot of, um, walking.’

  ‘Walking, huh, you mean walking like this—’ The screwdriver clatters to the rug and it’s upon me, invisible hands pushing up the breathable fabric of my T-shirt, invisible thumbs circling the aureoles of my nipples, invisible fingers flicking the rapidly erecting teats. I moan, and slump back against the door to the patio, my pulse begins doubling its beat as an invisible tongue snails back and forth across my belly.

  It should smell of chemical sweat percolating through a dermis abraded and abraded again, by hand, with a pumice stone, in a walk-up hotel room in West Hollywood – yet doesn’t. It should feel like a violation: the fat tongue shape urging into my mouth, the grappling hook caught in my hair – yet doesn’t. I sense myself levitating, I mewl and struggle – not to escape but so as to arrange for my T-shirt to twirl over my head, my belt to whip away, my pants and underwear to slide along my legs, then flip over the TV set.

  The vortex sets me down on top of the minibar, where I teeter on my fundament. What would the reverse shot show in this now glaring cubicle? No perfect buns, rock hard – the hollow in each gluteus maximus so pronounced that were it horizontal it could serve as a bird bath – but my own splayed thighs, my own puckered-brown anus growing pinker as it lengthens into a gaping vagina. Men as far off as Cancún or Coventry are watching this – but they can’t see this piece of beefcake, its wipeable hide, its brows knit and its jaw set with the effort of whaling into me. They can see my thighs gape still further to allow an unobstructed view, but for them there’s no glistening penis writhing with veins – so why should there be one for me?

  I fly, legs akimbo, from the minibar to the sink in the bathroom. Kiehl’s bath products rattle in the cab
inet, then tumble about my shuddering shoulders. I fly from there back to the minibar, which rocks, rolls and spews its tiny Rémy Martins, gives birth to its jars of jelly babies. Then from there – at last! – to the bed. I rise up from my knees as if on an invisible horse going at a vigorous trot. I reverse this posture and joggle on. I sink down on all fours and the cabana resounds with the crack of an invisible palm that sets first one of my buttocks then the other shivering like jellies, while my face crashes into the pillows and my hand grips one of the hemispherical vinyl bolsters.

  Then I’m on my back, my labia pulsing, my clitoris vibrating. I groan and squeak – as abandoned as an abandoned chest of drawers being sawn through by a rusty saw. Still, what do I expect? Pornography is the CCTV of the Id, with its fixed camera angles that capture the dullest views of suburban bedchambers and anonymous hotel rooms. But be not censorious, we actors are not malefactors – only ordinary folk going about our fucking business. It’s all perfectly workaday; and since I was never going to soar over the Hollywood Hills, then down into the Valley where the flightless birds fluttered and gobbled, they’d come to me for a turkey shoot instead.

  Half the adult population of the world rasps, ‘I wanna come in your mouth!’ and I gasp,

  ‘Whatever.’

  Their semen is as frothy as aerated cream and as toxic-tasting as typewriter correction fluid. ‘Did you get that?’ I ask the gauzy crew as, up on one elbow, I unceremoniously spit it into a tooth glass.

  Afterwards we are surprisingly tender with each other. I lie in the crook of his arm while he tousles the mussed hair on my forehead. He sips a Rémy Martin while I reminisce: