Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  They were all there in the limelight: the Jeffs and Bret, Michael Lynton and Ellen DeGeneres, James Crespinel and Judy Brown, Michael Laughlin* – who was explaining the genesis of his self-designed sneakers to a young woman whose name I never did learn – and Mac Guffin, who immediately drew me to one side: ‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘I picked up five fucking tickets minding your back all the way up Cienega.’

  ‘No one asked you to do that,’ I hissed. ‘And if you had to, why didn’t you ditch the wheels?’

  ‘Aw, c’mon fellah, don’t be like that – I’m just trying to look out for you; they’re on your tail – y’know that, don’tcha? They’re sharpening their knives, putting on their leather faces, cranking up their chainsaws, I mean, it’s because you’re paranoid that they’re now coming to get you–’ He broke off to take a highball glass full of fruit from a waitress struggling through the throng.

  ‘Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mac,’ I snarled; ‘why not just piss all over my party.’

  ‘Party?’ He shook his Labrador head, then began slobbering on a pineapple chunk. ‘Isn’t that a little grandiose – it looks more like a—’

  ‘Nice gathering,’ Bret said, cutting in appositely. ‘This is Brad.’ A tall, good-looking young man in blue jeans and a silky-black hoodie, the pink drapes of whose top lip parted to reveal expertly bleached teeth.

  ‘Hi,’ said Brad chirpily.

  ‘Brad is directing a movie called The Shrink.’

  ‘Really?’ I said with maximum disdain. ‘And what of it?’

  ‘He wondered if you might like to drop by the set – they’re shooting on location down at Venice; wouldn’t that be on your way back to LAX?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to sound unconcerned, although I was whining inside: Is he trying to get rid of me?

  ‘Bret says you’re walking clear round LA,’ said Brad.

  ‘That’s the aim.’

  ‘Any special reason?’

  ‘I’m location spotting for a movie about a guy who circumambulates Los Angeles,’ I told him. ‘I originated the script, did the development myself, put together a lot of the finance, then took it to Sony.’ I jabbed a finger towards Lynton. ‘They’ve green-lit the project and I’ll be directing as well.’

  ‘And starring?’

  I really didn’t like this Brad – he was snider than an ill-gotten Madison hidden in a coffee can.

  ‘Well, no, since you ask – obviously not. I may have some profile as an actor but I’m not that bankable. Leo DiCaprio will be playing me – although he’s gonna need a body double for the walking scenes.’

  Brad was smirking and I foresaw that our next exchange would cross the border at Tijuana into outright savagery. Luckily DeGeneres took my elbow and guided me away, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Don’t mind us, guys, there’re some people I’d like David to meet.’

  There was Dervla, who as she spoke took strand after strand of her own chestnut hair in her scissoring fingers – as a hairdresser might – and who wondered if I would be interested in her idea: ‘Based on an original phobia of my own – fear of candlesticks.’ And there was Ogden, who had bitten his nails so badly he had to wear ten finger puppets. ‘What’s the pitch?’ He threw his chucklesqueak into the felt mouth of the Mickey Mouse one. ‘I’ll tellya, it’s about a guy who’s nervous, nervous, noy-vuss – set in Manhattan, natch – or at least, on a set of Manhattan crowded with scrumptious twenty-somethings deafened by canned laughter.’ And then there was Artie, who had spent the last thirty years in a remote cabin in Montana obsessively writing and rewriting a movie script about a reclusive anarcho-Luddite who launches a bombing campaign aimed at derailing the relentless reproducibility of technology: ‘I worked on birch bark,’ Artie confided, ‘using a bone stylus and pigments I had extracted from wildflowers. Then, when I finally returned to civilization, I found out about the Unabomber – man, was I pissed – my whole fuckin’ idea stolen for real.’

  They were all interesting pitches, yet I found it difficult to concentrate and kept grabbing Coke after Coke from the trays swirling through the smallish crowd. So there was my mounting and gaseous turbulence – and also the disconcerting presence of Susan Atkins’s amputated leg (which, so far as I knew, no one had invited), which kept kicking the guests’ butts, a grim travesty of the murders it would undoubtedly have tried to perform if it could’ve got their necks behind its knee.

  ‘What’s with the severed leg?’ I asked Ellen. ‘I mean, is it some kind of ironic comment on my walk?’

  ‘Lighten up, David,’ she said. ‘Think of Atkins’s leg as just another Mac Guffin – like the hands of Orlac.’

  ‘You’re not gonna graft that thing on to me, lady. I mean, I’ve got enough homicidal tendencies of my own.’

  She looked at me with an odd expression, but only said: ‘Shall we go on and have some dinner at the hotel? The others are already there.’

  It was then that I noticed that the once-threshing crowd had been landed – the purse seine was empty except for me, Ellen, the leg and the legman. ‘Will you join us?’ I asked Mac, but he only handed me a manila envelope.

  ‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Everything I could find out; read it later and then call me.’ He snagged Atkins’s leg, which was hopping past, and tucked it under his arm like an umbrella. ‘The sick shit that goes down in this town,’ he muttered as he duck walked in front of us along the chicken run, but I knew his comments weren’t addressed to anyone in particular, just as I also knew that he was as happy as a pig in it.

  The evening began to end in the hotel restaurant. We were eating paella made with giant insects, and although the antennae caught in my teeth they didn’t taste too bad. I was sandwiched between a movie lawyer and the teenage wife of a mogul who was fully gravid – it seemed she might give birth at any moment, a baby doll torn bloody from beneath the hem of her baby doll dress. The lawyer was telling me he represented Rutger Hauer – although what that had to do with anything (even Hauer himself) was entirely obscure. Then he said, ‘I live out at the Palisades in a one-storey house. Y’know people aren’t killed by earthquakes at all – they’re killed by houses.’

  The evening was killed off by my bungalow. Coming along the path from the pool, I saw that the moon had risen above the billboard advertising The Love Guru, and I cursed myself for my earlier trope: the Mare Ibrium was nothing like a fake beard – Myers’s or anyone else’s.

  I sat smoking a Joya de Nicaragua and got out Mac’s report – which turned out to be a photocopy of my own. I leafed through the forty-odd pages, smiling grimly at the smiley faces and scattering cigar ash on the elaborate diagrams. Mac had scrawled a few words across the final page: ‘Copies of this are being widely circulated – if you can’t join ‘em, beat ’em.’

  * It was anomalous that no one seemed to be played by anyone else at this gathering, although when I came to reflect on it later there was one exception – Ellen DeGeneres as Stevie Rosenbloom. I cannot account for the veridical nature of the events recounted below, except to suggest that I was thrown by the contrast with the last Hollywood party I’d been to, almost a decade before, at Carrie Fisher’s house. That was a true ‘night of a thousand stars’ – or at least, I think it was. At one point I found myself in the line-up for the chicken gumbo with Rod Stewart, Geena Davis and the entire featured cast of Blake Edwards’s The Party (excluding, of course, Peter Sellers); then later on I asked the crown of Jack Nicholson’s head if: ‘You get out much?’

  Being in one space – albeit the sort of hypertrophied living room-cumterrace mandatory for second-generation movie royalty – with that much notoriety could’ve been the beginning of the Syndrome, because, while these faces were as familiar to me as my own (and, in many cases, having examined the play of their features for many hours, far more so), I had the disagreeable sensation that they were not who the world claimed them to be, but rather a bunch of saddo impersonators, scooped up off the sidewalk outside Grauman’s and taken
on by Fisher as a job lot to amuse persons unknown who were sitting hidden behind two-way mirrors, snorting cocaine and laughing hysterically.

  10

  The Virgil of Laurel Canyon

  It must have been a hell of night, because when I awoke – tucked as savagely into my bed as I had been by the disapproving nurse at Heath Hospital thirty years before – I found I’d had breast implants done. And not just any breast implants Laura Harring’s. At least, I fantasized that they might be Laura Harring’s breast implants, because when I examined them in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door they had a combination of inelasticity and prominence that reminded me of the improbability of her chest – relative to the slimness of her back – when Harring and Naomi Watts took off their tops to fake love in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive* (2001).

  I wondered whether implying that anyone might have had breast implants was libellous – but the alternative – that these were Laura Harring’s actual breasts – was too awful to contemplate. I mean, there was I, idly caressing them, while Harring might well be lying somewhere dreadfully hacked about. In an interview I had read with the actress she said: ‘Life is a beautiful journey. Every episode of my life is like a dream and I am at peace and happy with what life has given me.’ But there was no way she could factor a sadistic double-mastectomy into such a beneficent dream – this was a thieving nightmare. Or had Harring been murdered, her beautiful face beaten to a pulp with a brass statuette of a monkey? If so I was off the hook for libel – but without an alibi for the caesura of the past twelve hours.

  Clearly, it was time to force the pace of events: if they were messing with me to this extent I’d better take the fight to them. I leafed through the Yellow Pages, found the number, called it and discovered there was a meeting in Hollywood that very morning. Good, I’d have some breakfast, then stroll over.

  Slumping in the kitchenette, teapot on the table, and beside it the newly polished brass statuette of a monkey, I poked one long lean thigh languorously out from the folds of the hotel bathrobe. Ignoring the multiple sections of the LA Times strewn all around, I felt as iconic as a Terry O’Neill photo which was just as well, because even in a town renowned for sick shit it was going to take some guts to hit the streets with my purloined tits.

  I needn’t have worried, by the time I’d shaved and dressed, the breasts – or implants – had begun to subside, becoming first perfectly normal middle-aged bubs and then the budding nubbins of a teenage girl. Locking the door to the bungalow, I slid a hand up under my T-shirt and was relieved to discover coarse hair. The whole tit-thing must have been the after-effect of a particularly polymorphous erotic dream, and although I felt a little cheated it had to be better than murder.

  I found the meeting up on Hawthorn in some kind of community centre. There was a Formica table covered with leaflets and a forty-year-old woman with braces and a tongue stud serving coffee through a hatch. Savouring the ghostly aroma of last week’s cheap meals, I took one, figuring it was only Nescafé, and thinking also of how it was I walked among them, these seraphic folk, able to suspend disbelief in films, in TV adverts, in pop songs, in microwaved food – and even in age itself. Maybe – just maybe – this could work for me too.

  All the rest of the cast was assembled – exactly the players you’d expect for a self-help production almost anywhere in the maldeveloped world: following men and trailing ladies, character-defect actors, bit failures and spare extras. I slotted right into this stereotypy and no one paid me the least attention as I threw myself down on a canvas bottomed chair, muttering and slurping and giving off that supersonic whine that’s unfailingly associated with mental distress.

  I watched and listened as the children of Xenu were called onstage to testify to their treatment at the hands of the cult. This frail girl, all elbows and ears, the ends of her hair as fractured as her psyche, explained how she had been recruited into the Sea Org* at the age of twelve and spent eight years being bullied and abused – four of them as a suppressive person, forced to wear an orange jumpsuit and wield a mop for fourteen hours a day. She wept.

  As did a burly man, who said that while he had managed to make the break, his parents – despite everything that had happened to him – continued to believe that they were Thetans who had been exiled to earth 75 million years ago, and that after arriving at an implant station housed in an extinct volcano, they had clung to genetic entity after genetic entity, piggybacking their way through evolution, until they ended up passing out leaflets on Hollywood Boulevard. He himself had had a breakdown after leaving, and when his parents ‘They still love me ...’ – had the temerity to meet with him, they too had been labelled ‘suppressive persons’.

  ‘You guys know what that’s like,’ he sobbed. ‘Nobody can talk to them, sit with them, hand them a friggin’ cup of coffee – and you know the awfulest thing, I kinda feel that way too. I feel like I’m a suppressive person even out here in the real world – I just can’t connect.’

  The testimonies were getting to me. I’d known in general terms the secret arcana that Scientologists became privy to only when they attained the grade of Level 3 Operating Thetans, but still: to hear how this hokum had corrupted minds and distorted lives was ... salutary. I looked at the slack skin on the backs of my hands. True, it would’ve been a reassurance to be admitted to the religion – neither of the actors playing me was getting any younger, and while I was confident they’d still be having offers for years to come, what kind of parts would they be? I didn’t want to end up in soaps – or sitcoms. Whereas if I were a Thetan, I’d effectively become an actor with a billion-year contract and there’d be no resting at all: as soon as one part (or ‘life’) ended, another would begin—

  ‘Are you going to join us on the demo?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are you coming with – on the demo?’

  I had been romping in my reverie of full and eternal employment, with its personations flowing seamlessly, each into the next, never the dull requirement to just be myself, when suddenly there were the braces and the tongue stud and the petty earnestness of it all.

  ‘Well, uh, where?’

  ‘We’re going to picket the centre up on Hollywood – you don’t have to if you don’t feel comfortable, I mean, we’d understand.’

  ‘Sure we would,’ said the burly man, coming up behind her with an ursine undulation of his sloping shoulders. ‘I mean, you could be recognized by someone – and that can cause problems in this town, you could end up as fair game.’

  I knew what he was talking about: to be branded ‘fair game’ was the Scientological equivalent of being forced to wear a yellow star in Germany after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. Persons designated ‘fair game’ could be ‘deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist’, and this included being ‘tricked, sued, or lied to or destroyed’.

  ‘I gotta tellya,’ said the burly son of Xenu, leaning down to me conspiratorially, ‘I had no idea you had any involvement with the Church.’

  ‘Um, well, not formally,’ I stressed, ‘but I did go to Saint Hill a few times – y’know, in England.’

  ‘Sure, sure, I understand – loved you in Dinotopia by the way. Lissen.’ He held up a swatch of black cloth and a white mask.* ‘You could always wear these if you don’t want to be recognized, and we’d be grateful, we could use the numbers.’

  I stood up and took the robe and mask from him. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’ll come along – I could use a walk.’

  They couldn’t – the children of Xenu piled into a minibus and several cars, leaving me to plod the couple of miles to where the demo was assembling at Hollywood and Vine. They said they’d try to wait – but, as Busner often used to say, ‘Trying is lying.’ I’d been thinking of him on the walk over, and what he’d make of these odd polarities - here was I, joining the anti-Scientology march, while over there, on Sunset, was the office of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, the anti-psychiatric pressure grou
p szupported by Szasz and the Scientologists.

  From the corner I could see the Scientology kids wending their way through the crowds along the boulevard, all of them in their V masks, and carrying placards with slogans such as ‘They Want Your Money and Your Sanity’, ‘Scientology Disconnects Families’ and ‘Tax-Exempt Pyramid Scheme’. This last seemed the most problematic – after all, just about all of late capitalism was founded on a tax-exempt pyramid scheme; or so it seemed to me, on Saturday, 14 June 2008.

  I shrugged on my own black robe, donned my V mask, then hustled through the tourists and the cruisers and the movie star impersonators – but the demo kept on marching, while I was only floundering: walking to Hollywood was one thing; running quite another. In a way, it was relief when a van slewed into the kerb beside me, its side door slammed open, and two Mormonesque heavies leapt out, grabbed me and hustled me inside. ‘C’mon,’ said one of them. ‘You’ve done enough walking for a lifetime – why not take a ride.’

  The last thing I saw before the door was slammed shut was Margaret Atwood slumped by a storefront, a pathetic styrofoam begging cup on the sidewalk in front of her. I’d had no idea dystopic novels were selling that badly. Then, as the van pulled away, through the tinted rear windows, I spotted Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist – another writer who’d had many of his works adapted for screen; but, while to be down and out in Hollywood was one thing, why was he wearing that curious robe, which looked like a couple of camping mats and an election placard strapped round his torso? And what was he wearing on his head? Was it a hat – or a house? And if it was a house – which one? Darlington Hall, as featured in The Remains of the Day, or Netherfield Park?

  But I had no time to reflect any further on these mysteries, for the van’s driver – who was hidden from me in a sealed compartment – must have seen a break in the traffic and accelerated, and I was thrust backwards on to the point of a hypo. I felt the drug ooze into me – then my consciousness, tissue-thin to begin with, was balled up, wadded and thrown away.