by Will Self
‘What’ve you done with Pete Postlethwaite?’
Camera Jeff, Sound Jeff and Gofer Jeff were standing round me in a menacing semicircle on the verge beside the Will Rogers Memorial Park. On the far side of Sunset Boulevard, the Beverly Hills Hotel was flanked by three-storey palms. In there, I imagined, execs were strong-arming deals; out here there was an intervention going on.
‘What’ve you done with him?’ reiterated Camera Jeff, the Fletcher Christian of this mutinous crew.
‘We’re working on this together,’ I said, looking down at my Rockports nuzzling in the clover-dense grass.
‘Lissen, I was prepared to shoot some footage of you when we picked you up on the Strip where we’d arranged to meet Pete, but enough’s enough.’
‘Enough’s enough? What the fuck—’
‘Yeah, enough’s enough. You may think you’re a player in this town, while we’re nobodies, but this is ... this is—’
‘Bullshit!’ Sound Jeff pushed his angry red face forward.
‘Fuckin’ A!’ Gofer Jeff was dancing on the spot.
‘OK, OK, cool it you guys.’ Camera Jeff patted them down. ‘Mr Thewlis, we don’t want to alienate you.’
‘No, right,’ I laughed sarcastically. ‘Because you want to get paid, don’t you.’
A note of pity entered Camera Jeff’s voice, ‘Actually, that’s not an issue here – we were paid in full in advance by Mr Postlethwaite’s agent – a Mr Self?’
‘The name means nothing to me,’ I lied.
‘Anyway, this isn’t about money, it’s about our professional integrity.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Pete said this was going to be an experimental film – a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking round Los Angeles for a week. From the get-go we told him it wouldn’t add up to anything, but he insisted we trail him all the way from LAX Downtown, then from there to Hollywood. I didn’t know what to expect from him – I mean, I’d seen some of his work, but in the flesh he was, well, skittish.’
‘Skittish? You mean like “houynhmnhmnhmn”!’ I bared my yellow teeth and pranced on the verge. Camera Jeff chose to ignore this.
‘That’s right, skittish – ordering us about, then, when we miked him up he began talking this—’
‘Unbelievable bullshit!’ Sound Jeff bellowed. ‘I’ve had to listen to this crap for two days now!’
‘I don’t think that’s exactly nuanced, Jeff,’ said Camera Jeff. ‘I’ve listened to some of the recordings and it sounded to me as if Pete is having some kind of breakdown. Then this morning you turned up instead of him but wearing the same clothes and behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening – I’m gonna ask you one more time: where’s Pete? Is he back at the Roosevelt? We’re worried about him.’
I thought: the traffic, it’s always building up, silica grains flowing into mounds dammed by stop lights. What were roads anyway? Only pipelines of exasperation pressurized by time. Crown Victoria nosed Taurus, Taurus rimmed Corolla, Corolla went down on Tahoe. Between the snout of a Fusion and the butt of an Equinox I saw long-dead dreamer Richard Brautigan sporting a headband and shades, his big pack dragging on his shoulders as he wove towards Hollywood.
‘Let me get this straight.’ I stepped into Camera Jeff’s banally furnished personal space. ‘Are we splitting up over artistic differences?’
Someone, I thought, ought to be filming this: I needed a reverse shot, so I could see my wispy moustache bristle. I needed Dolby surround sound so I could hear myself shouting: ‘I don’t need this shit! I hired you fuckers and I can fire you too! You’re off this goddamn picture – off it, d’you hear?! Pick up your gear, bubba, and walk!’
But it was me who did the walking, after I’d torn off the mike, then ripped the power pack from my belt and slapped it into Sound Jeff’s pudgy hand. They stood there bemused while I strode around the bougainvillea beds and away down Beverly Drive. I considered shouting back at them: ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’, but the line can be overused, don’t you think?
Carlos and Simon had made their mark on one of the birches lining Beverly Drive. Other Okies had taken time out to play noughts and crosses or score prick ’n’ balls pictograms. Soon enough my angry exhilaration subsided into the tangerine dream of première classe suburbia, where Latinos made with the flagstones and nobody’s escutcheon leant against a portico – and the sky, the sky was no longer limpid water, only a steadily dilating Playboy bunny’s hole lined with shelves upon which were stacked iPod Nanos and player-piano rolls, Box Brownies and HD video cameras, search engines and difference engines. Tipping back my head, I could see that this warm void was aching for Sergey Brin’s re-entry, as he splashed back down into Marina del Rey after his midweek break at the International Space Station. What – what would he find to google at, now that whole generations and societies had passed for ever: only a savage sitting on the dock of the bay scratching a prick ’n’ balls pictogram into its concrete. Under this the legend: DO NO EVIL.
I had my own small digital camera, and if I sensed the Hals clustering, or a wildcat crew creeping up on me, I could always whip it out and start filming myself, much as a boy wizard wields an invisibility cloak. The only problem I faced was the one of any ham alone in the age of technological reproducibility: who was looking at the me looking at me? Even Sergey hurtling earthwards in his steam-punk Soyuz capsule still had a back-projection of blue chiffon sky framed by the triangular porthole – this, a technique essentially unaltered since Sunset Boulevard, when the cops in the pursuit car stared intensely out at us, while behind them a second film of the unspooling roadway did for the trompe l’œil.
This then is the whole equation
projector → audience (screen) → cops driving (rear window) → Sunset Boulevard receding = reality
that, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stand-in asserted, ‘Not half a dozen men have been able to keep ... in their heads.’ It was nothing to do with the residuals for Dharma & Greg, and, believe me, I felt brittle just containing it in my nut, and wondered as I footed down Carmelita Drive whether it might make sense to hole up in the Spadena House. No one would look for me in this symbolic assemblage of witchy elements: burnt-toast eaves, spangly windowpanes, roughed-up plaster and a toad spawn chimney stack. The little homestead of horror had originally been built as a novelty office for the Culver City Movie Company, and only latterly rolled up into Beverly Hills on a truck. I could lie low – the house would recede on a low-loader. Like Donald Crowhurst when he abandoned the 1968/9 round-the-world solo yacht race, I would fake a diary of my own circumambulation, while in a parallel notebook I frantically operated on the equation, multiplying its terms until the warped rooms were cluttered with screens and retrospectives.
There was no smoking in Beverly Hills Park. Kitted out as a bum, the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott sat slumped in an abandoned office chair in the empty pergola – there was a beer bottle, queerly limp, drooping from his hand to his inner thigh. I crossed the road and holed up in the Coffee Café for a sandwich, observing the anthropophagi that patrolled the sidewalk in their Palomino-skin cowboy boots, the bands of jewelled denim between their hips taut as bowstrings.
For a less doughty voyager, departing the island of affluence lying between Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire and Rexford might have been dispiriting – yet I felt carefree, reknotting my shoelaces, reefing the strap of my backpack and stepping out with the wind behind me. It’s only those who have no experience of round-the-conurbation walking who imagine suburbia as an unvarying ocean of roof peaks and garden troughs; no, here is the great individualism Americans justly pride themselves on, with each property distinguished from its neighbour: Spanish Mission instead of Neogothic, japonica in place of bougainvillea, TruGuard rather than Mercian security.
From the ridge at Pico I could see the whole dish full of smog spread out beneath me, from which popped the up-plummeting bodies of trampolining children and the inver
ted mop-tops of truffula trees. For a moment I hesitated – might it be an idea to set a course through the Hillcrest Country Club? I could join a lost tribe of rich Jews and wander that landscaped Sinai for ... years. But no, I had a rendezvous with Tamisa the crossing guard, who sat in regal splendour at the junction of Beverwil and Cashio on her throne of puddled fat. ‘You’ve gotta get offa your backside,’ she told me without a smidgeon of irony. Then reassume it, I thought, part time at twelve bucks an hour.
Quite suddenly I was standing in a grocery store at Hughes Avenue buying a can of Kobe energy drink and chatting to the sales assistant, who was from Bhutan. He was unimpressed by my voyage: ‘I run a trekking business in my own country,’ he told me. ‘Also, I am a mountaineer.’
Outside I looked up at the frozen wang of the Santa Monica Freeway and thought better of it – so poured the drink away on to the asphalt. It wouldn’t do to arrive all fired up. I spat my tasteless cud of nicotine gum into my palm and was appalled to see that my jaws had expertly worried it into a perfect little voodoo doll of Orson Welles, complete with cloak and wide-brimmed hat. I shuddered, remembering the micro-manipulation of Hagop Sandaldjian, and, last fall, Sherman flung naked across the high bed – then Willy Town Mouse scuttled into the cheesy wedge of the Culver Hotel.
Which wasn’t so bad – there was a high staff turnover and no one remembered me. I was given a room on the third floor with a dinky four-poster garrotted by swathes of muslin. The shower’s low pressure felt historically accurate, then I sat drying off in a wing armchair looking out through breeze-buffeted net curtains at the balding Baldwin Hills, with their oil pumps rising and falling like failing hair implants. I had come almost full circle, and might reasonably have gone on to LAX and flown home to London. After all, no one else had turned up dead – yet.
Instead I phoned and in the gap between ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ heard the low moan of eight lost hours and the dumb percussion of falling marbles. I wanted to ask about the crime scene tape – was it still there? But she hardly ever left the house – except by Packard; while the children – who would’ve known – were out at casting calls. So we said our goodbyes and hung up, and in the seconds after the marriage of the plastic I felt as if, far from having communicated, we had only defined the vast compass of the incommunicable.
Guffin was waiting for me at a table outside Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled ‘American gastro-pub’ on Culver Boulevard, whose ‘executive chef’ was none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. I nodded to Mac and for a while we sat silently in an establishing shot, absorbing the drivel on the menu: Ford’s culinary philosophy was much influenced by the French slow-food movement, which favoured authentic locally sourced ingredients, simple preparation, blah-blah-bleurgh! It wasn’t a philosophy that extended to the establishment’s décor, with its gas station logo implying that esturgeon confit was another type of high-octane fuel.
The happy detective was being played by himself – he’d even grown his own trademark brown moustache for the role. It was a relief, of course, because I never knew before I actually saw someone who would be impersonating them, and even then if it was a good method actor it could still take a while to identify which one. As for me, Mac didn’t seem to care who had the part, only remarking, ‘You look well, man,’ before moving straight to business: ‘So, you’ve got a case for me?’
I filled him in on the conflagration at Pinewood and my escape with the quadrumanous cartoon dog. Then there was the episode on Century, and my discovery of the adulteration taking place at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant. I alluded to the car fight at the La Brea Tar Pits, but didn’t go into too much detail, then went over the horrific riot outside Grauman’s so exhaustively that by the time I’d finished we were both staring down at matching tartes tatin. Of anything to do with Thetans I said nothing – this was a litigious town, and then there were the Scientologists.
I suppose we must have had Ipswich clam rolls and polenta cakes but saving Mr Ford’s finer feelings it was all plaster casts to me – prop food that had me gulping down glass after glass of water, then calling the waiter to get more. The unemployed actor could barely conceal his annoyance, and every time he plonked down the flask he grunted like a woman tennis pro serving an ace.
Mac sucked his moustache and tousled his own hair. ‘You’re racking up enemies with your behaviour, man,’ he said, as weary as a walrus. ‘You got any protection?’
I explained about the Jeffs.
‘You’re screwing up big time, aren’tcha.’
‘I’m sorry?’.
‘Well, if you’re right and the movies were murdered – not just accidentally killed – then you’re a real slow-moving target. Personally, I think your initial strategy was the right one – be filmed or get drilled. Now how’re you gonna keep safe?’
‘Tomorrow morning I’m going right into the heart of the machine.’ I stabbed a finger towards the Sony lot. ‘It’s the last place anyone will think of shooting me.’
‘And then?’
‘That’s where you come in. Listen.’ I dropped my voice conspiratorially and, leaning towards him, took a forkful of his tarte.
‘Hey!’ Mac was outraged, and struck out at my fork with his own. We began fencing with the cutlery, until the waiter broke it up. ‘You were saying?’ Mac asked, picking bits of caramelized apple off the lapels of his corduroy sports jacket.
‘I can’t keep track of all the leads – that’s the trouble with a victim that’s a representational medium –’
‘You say that, but everyone knows who murdered portrait painting – the camera, right?’
‘Right, but portraits in oils were slow fucking food, man, one frame, hanging around on walls – they had it coming. The movies are something else – sixteen, twenty-two frames every second; for over a century they sopped up the world like a celluloid sponge, they saw everything – they depicted everyone. Sometimes they mocked up real events; other times those events were staged for them. As for the actors – they played characters based on real people; real people played themselves – or else made-up characters. That’s too many linkages, Mac, too many suspects. Have you seen the titles at the end of an average Hollywood movie nowadays, there’s thousands of the—’
An old homeless man, who had been standing watching us from the far side of the waist-high canvas partition penning off the patrons from the sidewalk, now approached, his hand outstretched. I looked at its dirty and cracked nails – there was an open sore on the leathery palm. ‘Please,’ the poor fellow croaked. ‘Please, gennlemen, I only need a few cents to get a sammich. I’d be obliged.’
He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Indian-born British novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, what with his straggling grey beard and dishevelled pride, so I dropped a few coins into his hand, then said, ‘But tell me one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘How come you’re begging – I would’ve thought that with your sales you’d be set up for life.’
‘Oh, yeah, sales.’ He shrugged philosophically. ‘It’s true, the books sell well enough but that’s chickenfeed; the real money is in movies, and they option stuff and option it again – then they drag me out here for meetings with execs and like a sap I come. Then nuthin’ happens – nuthin’ at all.’
He shuffled away disconsolately, and turning back to Guffin I deftly changed the subject: ‘So, Calista Flockhart, her cunt’s still wedding-fresh, right?’
The happy detective spat a chunk of pastry on to the table, while all around us the baboon diners rose to their bandy legs.
‘Ferchrissakes,’ Mac said, recovering himself, ‘d’you wanna get us lynched, or what?’
‘I was only asking – I’m sure it’s a question that’s on everyone’s lips.’
‘Maybe, but they kinda slurp it back down.’
The baboons were settling back down as well, their muzzles dropped to their arugula. We sat in silence for a while.
‘I dunno,’ he re
sumed eventually. ‘I’m not sure I want to take this one on – we’ve got troubles of our own down at the Times.’
‘Your man Zell?’
‘The word is we’re looking down the barrel of a gun.’
‘And people are going to get fired?’
‘Absolutely – and you wanna know why? It’s the same as your movie case: the readership can’t suspend disbelief in newsprint any more, it’s just dead meaning swatted on the page to them. They want something that lights up, scrolls down, they want inset full-motion videos and pop-up—’
‘Idents.’
‘Right.’
Dusk was fingering along Culver Boulevard, together with the traffic and the No. 11 Nocturne played with a jazz twist. There was a lazy intimacy to the scene – they didn’t call Mac the happy detective for no reason; whatever his own problems – and he had them – he always succeeded in infusing any scene with a comfortable tannin vibe, ironic considering that when:
‘You turn up people get dead – now don’t they?’
He wasn’t taken aback. ‘So that’s how it is, is it, you’ve got a third act problem.’
‘I guess.’
‘So you think: bring in Mac and the body count’ll rise.’
‘Something like that had occurred to me.’ I took out a miniature Effie Perrine and she took out a miniature bag of Bull Durham and fiddled a cigarette into tubular existence. ‘Anyway,’ I resumed, ‘what’s your scruple? You say people’re gonna get dead anyway, leastways in my scenario they get dead in the service of a decent cause – finding out who clipped the most beautifulest narrative medium the goddamn world has ever seen!’
