Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  ‘I used to bunk off school – y’know, play hooky – and go to the Everyman cinema up in Hampstead. I can still remember those rainy Tuesday afternoons – it’s always a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the past, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure, David,’ he says, ‘that’s sweet.’

  ‘I’d be alone in the fusty little cinema, watching the screen, which wavered and distorted, hot as a furnace. I’d be lying on that blistering tarmac, with the heat beating off the cowling ...’

  ‘So the road, that was your thing?’

  ‘Yeah, Electra Glide in Blue, Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point – I loved those movies.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘But then when I was at home it was different stuI – Continental stuI the BBC would screen late at night. I’d be crouched over the black-and-white set I had on a chair in my bedroom – it used to be my father’s study and the wonky shelves were still stacked with his books on planning and government. Before that it had been my elder brother’s – and his double bass was propped in the corner. All the rooms I’ve ever had since then have been sort of sets – trying to re-create that room.’

  ‘I understand,’ he coos.

  ‘Sitting there late at night, staring at Giulio Brogi sitting on the abandoned station platform, looking down at the weeds struggling up through the ties and realizing – you see it only in his face – that he’s never going anywhere, that he’s doomed to remain in Tara, that he is ... he is ...’

  ‘His father.’

  ‘Right.’ I twist round to look at him. ‘So, you know that one?’

  ‘Sure I do – and I did the same thing. OK, it was a colour TV and I never had a hand-me-down room, but essentially it was the same in Sherman Oaks.’ His voice rumbles beneath my ear, a soothing voiceover to the smell-o-rama of cigarette smoke, brandy fumes and fast-drying sweat. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ he continues. ‘How even as kids we sought out unerringly those movies that told us not the truth about ourselves as we were, but about what we would become.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I weep softly. ‘The truth about what we’ve become, which is cheats.’

  ‘Cheats?’

  ‘Cheats, we’re lousy cheats – unfaithful to film.’

  I must have slept the same dreamless sleep I endured for all the nights I was in Los Angeles. The only visions were Hal’s-eye views of the beds I thrashed about in, flickering stop-action as my grub’s body mutated under the sheet, until, in the grey dawn my white wings shakily unfolded and flew me to the bathroom.

  At some point during those hours he had left me, and if the thousands of frames had been scrutinized there might have been five in which he tenderly disengaged my head, sat upright, then stood, the coiled diaphragm of his underwear held in a deliberating hand, the swirl of his shirt, the door half shut.

  In the morning I could only deduce the memory of his presence from forensic evidence: empty Rémy Martin miniatures, the salted slug of a used condom on the wooden floor, a pummelled lube tube on top of the minibar, a screwdriver lying on the rug.

  At reception I paid my bill and the clerk handed me a stiff manila envelope: ‘Several gentlemen dropped this by for you earlier this morning, Mr Smith.’

  ‘Several?’

  ‘Well, OK, there were five of them.’

  Walking a few paces away, I slit it open; inside were the forty single-spaced pages of my position paper. In the designer dimness of the Roosevelt the dense type, studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as,‘45° where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’, seemed to belong to an earlier era – was this the evidence of Jesus’s morganatic marriage to Mary Magdalen we had all been seeking?

  With the typescript there was a compliments slip printed with the legend ‘From the desk of the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center’, and, handwritten on this, ‘Many thanks for your interesting insights and observations.’ The signature was quite like Justin Timberlake’s.

  ‘Can I arrange a car for you, Mr Smith?’ called over the clerk.

  I laughed towards his face – and was still laughing as I strode through the dingy lobby and hit the gilded boulevard.

  *The exception being the framing device – which implies retrospection – not, counter-intuitively, those events that on Thursday, 12 June 2008, still lay in the future and that I flashed forward to by using Dr Mukti’s CBT techniques. The accuracy of these elements of my reverie was confirmed when they eventually came to pass.

  *Jerry Maren, who played Little Professor Atom in At the Circus and who was the ‘prop’ for the gag in which Groucho declines to take the third light from a dwarf on the basis that it’s ‘unlucky’, has had the last laugh accorded by longevity. He’s the only surviving Wizard of Oz Munchkin and has outlived entire legions of full-size thespians.

  † I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests – in the jargon – inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor golfing range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

  †I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests – in the jargon – inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor gol: ng range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

  8

  The Happy Detective

  A man walks these streets alone; or, more usually, he drives. He’s not an especially good man – nor is he an evil one. He understands, in the immortal words of multimillionaire Harlan Potter, that ‘A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’ You – you know that a headline in the LA Times announcing that a US airstrike has killed eleven Pakistani infantrymen is bound to make you scrabble for change, lift the rubbery lid, smell the refried human beings.

  A man walks these streets alone – why, hasn’t he got a car? Has he, like the failing screenwriter played by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, had it repossessed? ‘You’re cutting my legs off!’ Yes, I remembered now: that was what Holden-as-Gillis howled despairingly as the tow truck jounced away. No, our man walks out of choice, and walks because only on foot can he engage in the sciamachy essential to his trade: fencing with the shadows of hat brims, gun muzzles and arms flung across brickwork by the beams of the Kliegs.

  A man walks these streets alone: attuned to the tyre slap and engine howl, he is content in his solitude. If a Predator drone were to come dallying overhead, dipping into the canyons, then rising up to skim the apartment blocks, he would not flinch – for he is the happy detective. The happy detective knows no angst, for he has made peace with this moment and for all eternity; he remains sublimely unaffected by the thinness of his characterization while more rounded characters bemoan their stereotypy.

  The happy detective accepts that when he turns up, so do the corpses: sluttish young women, their faces beaten to bloody pulp with brass statuettes; venal old men, the third eye just below their hairlines weeping blood; an Infiniti full of gang members riddled with bullet holes.* If you ask him – and believe me, I have – whether it might be better for everyone if he stayed at home, played with his kid, bickered with his wife, he’ll look at you with his doggedly honest brown eyes, suck doggily on his brown moustache, hem a little, haw a tad, before replying in accents as flat as his Midwestern home state, ‘No, I don’t think that. I guess ... I guess I figure it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, it could be that I’m, like, the catalyst for some of these serial killings, but with an
isolated homicide there’s no way I could be causing them before arriving on the scene. Lissen, what I believe is that if people are gonna get killed they’re gonna get killed.’

  In a lesser man such an attitude would seem sociopathic; in a greater one foudroyant; but the happy detective is of the middling sort, the sort who come to LA either because they’ve made some money and want to spend it, or because they want to exhaust some spiritual capital with breatharians, sucking up prana or checking out chakra. Not that Mac Guffin is a slacker; he works full time on the LA Times editing the culture section, and whatever time he has left over he dedicates to his detection. He doesn’t do divorce, obviously, but he’ll handle missing persons, straying dogs, industrial espionage – the cases that require legwork. And if he gets tangled up in loops of wire with razor-sharp barbs, then so much the better.

  ‘I’m at peace with myself,’ he says. ‘I’ve found my niche. When I was a young man I wasn’t exactly searching so much as yearning for something I couldn’t even identify. Nowadays it’s different: I’ll be crunching over broken glass down a back alley out in Alhambra, I’ll see the body slumped over the wheel of a BMW, and I’ll breathe deeply of the cordite and the blood and the urine, and I’ll think to myself—’

  ‘It’s a wonderful world?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of.’

  I hit the gilded boulevard moving purposefully. I’d arranged to have dinner with the happy detective in Culver City; it was a short drive from Venice Beach where he lived, but a ten-mile walk for me from Hollywood. I’d have to walk back to Hollywood the following day after my meet with Michael Lynton at Sony in Culver City; still, it was inevitable that on a circumambulation such as mine, which aimed to mix business, pleasure, therapy and the solution of a major cultural murder, there would be certain ... longueurs. It helped to think of myself as a one-man Bennet sisters, clopping through a prelapsarian Hertfordshire – its elms, beeches and lime avenues superimposed on the concrete chicane of Sunset, in the same way that a 120-foot-high Jennifer Aniston was plastered across the façade of the Hyatt – and naturally, if when I arrived at Netherfield Park I had so much as a sniffle I would be compelled to put up there for weeks, wrestling with marriage proposals and the foxed endpapers of my family bible.

  Along the Strip the Jeffs beamed down in front of me looking utilitarian in their baseball caps and denim shirts. Sound Jeff taped the mike to my chest while I looked away to the tattered copra that had been wind-whittled from the palms, a torn Detour candy bar wrapper, a Häagen-Dazs coffee and almond crunch box, a roasted peanut crunch wrapper and the paper napkin that had been used to wipe the eating-disordered mouth before being discarded in the gutter with all the rest. It all spoke to me – and I spoke of it – as evidence of an uncertain narrative trajectory. It was all very well suspending disbelief in the road movie of LA, but sooner or later you had to question where it might be taking you.

  No one had expressed this better than L. Ron, whose Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE) I had passed shortly after leaving the Roosevelt. His sometime friend, colleague and early champion of Dianetics, A. E. Van Vogt, said of Hubbard: ‘(He) wrote about a million words a year ... I have seen typists working at that speed, but never a writer.’ No wonder he could maintain such resolute narrative headway, his plots moving forward like the starship Hound of Heaven, which, crossing the galaxy at the speed of light, exiles its crew by the passage of time, as back on earth whole generations and societies vanish for ever.

  In the introduction to his final and most monumental exercise in ‘pure’ science fiction, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, L. Ron reprised his own career as a genre typist, relating how he had been brought in by the publishers of John Campbell’s Astounding Stories to inject a little humanity into these tales of futuristic hardware, because ‘[I] could write about real people.’

  Well, I could write about real people just as well – real people like my old buddy Morgan Freeman, who, together with smouldering, stick-thin Angelina Jolie (rub up against her and you might catch fire!), was starring in Wanted, a thriller about a secret Illuminati of assassins, the billboard for which stood proud of the Viper Room. On our walk out to Uxbridge, Morgan had told me enough about the movie for me to feel that I’d seen it already: ‘There’s a neat CGI effect,’ he said, ‘that makes the air appear like kinda limpid water – it happens whenever we’re fighting each other, and then if we fire a gun we can warp the trajectory of the bullet.’

  The air that morning, 12 June 2008, seemed like limpid water, and Camera Jeff’s lens a muzzle from which a bullet curled – was it the brutal, Powerade-fuelled congress in the cabana at the Roosevelt that made me feel as I had on those wet Tuesdays, when, emerging from the coruscation of the Californian highway into the familiar artificial twilight of a London night, I discovered that it wasn’t familiar any more, but strangely exciting – charged?

  Surely it was this feeling, rather than the movies themselves, that so entranced career film critics? Because, let’s face it, there are only so many times any sane person can expose themselves to such hokum before they begin soundlessly lip-synching to the giant mouths on the screen, or running a chipped nail over the dead skin of the lips transfixed in the seat beside them. Bad rhyming quitting the Classic, leaving the Everyman, hitting the gilded boulevard, accompanied by some torpid fiddling about on the G string of a cello that suggests a troubled sexual repletion ... The alternative – that critics retained the childlike ability to identify so closely with the sassily imperturbable Fox (Jolie) that they left their own foetuses reposing in red plush, to float up the tractor beam then dive through the screen and penetrate her drum-tight belly – was too awful for me to contemplate. It implied a relationship between critic and star analogous to that of Thetans and those genetic entities they had entered, millions of years in the past, long before they crawled from the primordial slime and became critics in their own right.

  Either way, they were all wankers – an English term of general disapprobation drawn from the masturbatory that, to my way of thinking, has far greater resonance than the American ‘jerk-offs’. Sexual wankers, cultural wankers and – an Australian coinage this – time wankers, beating off their lives in the darkness while without the world goes on, a two-reeler, hand-cranked at an unrealistic speed, so that whole societies arise, then vanish forever, leaving behind only the dust of their own prematurely ejaculated geist. The money shot – again.

  Wankers, and far more voyeuristic than honest subscribers to pornography, whose pay-perpreciation of the warped trajectory of a penis entering a vagina or an anus takes on the rarefied aestheticism of a Ruskin when set beside such gross satisfaction: piggy little eyes screwed up against the light, envaginating the madonnas on the hu-uge iconostasis over and over and over again. Is there any limit to the capacity of cineastes to be absorbed into these folds and curves of photons? They write their reviews, they expand these into essays, monographs and eventually entire books anatomizing their goddesses and gods. A chapter on their cheekbones, another on their clavicles, lengthy footnotes on the spaces in between their toes, because of the mind of the goddess – her ideas, her thoughts and feelings – there is precisely nothing to be said.

  As I trudged on, my own warped trajectory brought me to the border between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The limpid water grew thinner and bluer as the sunlight gained in intensity. The grass along the verges was dense enough for any colt to crop. At the junction with Doheny Drive I spared a thought for Bret: was he up there in his ritzy apartment hosing off the crusts of last night’s fun? Was he wearily contemplating another day in the word mine, chipping away at the computer to expose veins of terse couplets?

  Ray: Well, yeah, uh, I guess.

  Phil: Later on, OK?

  Or perhaps plotting a silken road through cyberspace to the pharmaceutical kampongs of the Far East, where brilliantly hued mounds of OxyContin, Halcion and Paxil sprawled on the ratscuttle floors, their silica slopes illuminated by
the rays of light that shot through the perforations in the corrugated-iron roofs high overhead?

  I well remembered the last time I had visited the pharmacy on the South Lambeth Road to fill my prescriptions for Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin, the feijoada complexion of the Portuguese assistant, in the fatty mass of which swam morsels of acne. She had looked at me – quite reasonably – as if I were mad. Busner had prescribed the Seroxat for depression and the Dutonin because of my volatile reaction to what itself was intended as a dopamine governor. Then there was the Carbamazepin, a further tranquilizer necessitated by my restless spirit. I understood why, because left to my own devices I had a way of cabbing into the West End, scoring on the street, overdosing in the alley off D’Arblay Street, then beating off the paramedics who were reviving me, only to be found hours later wandering over Vauxhall Bridge, with the crotch of my jeans torn out and my jaw half dislocated, as if in the intervening period I had been practising enthusiastic soixante-neuf with a werewolf. American, natch, who, after his lectures at Richmond College – where his folks have paid for a summer semester – cruises the Soho bars sporting a charmingly recherché sleeveless anorak. Or gilet.

  Standing beside the rack of plug adaptors, zip-up neoprene pouches and personal grooming tools, under the watchful eyes of a plaster Alsatian on a top shelf, I could feel the sine waves plotting the metabolic half-lives of these drugs tangle in my cortex, and in that moment I decided that a life in which happiness was mixed up like a mental cocktail was no kind of life at all. So I paid the assistant, took the plastic bag of meds home, tied a knot in the handle and chucked it up on to the top shelf in my study, where it lay for years, beside the yellowing typescript of my grandfather’s doctoral thesis ‘The Divine Indwelling’. This was his attempt to reconcile the then (1960) modish Existentialism with Eastern religion, Christianity and science. My father, who viewed his own failure to find a publisher for this weird synthesis as a betrayal of his patrimony, once asked me shortly before he himself died what I thought of ‘The Indwelling’. I confessed that after attempting a few pages I had come to the conclusion that Grandad – a notorious autodidact who studied for seven ordinary degrees while commuting to London each day on the Brighton Belle – ‘had suffered for his learning – and now it’s our turn’.