by Will Self
‘You know that TV show, man, Intervention?’
‘Can’t say I do.’
‘My folks, they set me up for that. One day I was sitting in my condo in West Hollywood doin’ meth, the next I was in the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Beach, Florida. Craziest thing ever happened to me. I’m only telling this you this’ – he glanced back at me earnestly – ‘’cause I’m pretty much recognized wherever I go. See this: I’m only going down to Radio Shack to get them to look at this busted cell phone I got, but I’ll be hollered at least three times. Three times!’
I was grateful to him – but put him down as another fantasist. The town was full up with them, after all, and if the senescent could masquerade as the juvenescent, and starlets could go supernova – why couldn’t a deluded drug addict be the star of a reality show? But then we hit Sunset and right away a car slowed down and the driver leant out the window: ‘Good to see ya, Virgil!’ he roared. ‘You stay away from that shit now, y’hear.’
‘I hear you, man,’ Virgil called back, but his face – a perfect vacuum of nature-abhorring need – belied his words.
I thanked Virgil for guiding me, and was on the verge of asking him back to the hotel for a drink when some cloudy premonition got in the way. The last I saw of him was his jaunty pair of pants fluorescing in the headlights as it floated across an intersection towards the discount electrical goods store.
Back at the Chateau Marmont the desk clerk wouldn’t let go when I grabbed the key fob. We tugged it this way and that for a while; she was trying to get through to me that: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you Mister Self, he’s waiting in the bar.’ But it had been so long since anyone had called me that I thought she must be addressing the man waiting behind me, scuffing his shoe irritably on the carpet. Eventually she gave up, released the key and passed across a stack of phone message slips, all of which bore the same name: Dr Zack Busner, together with a series of times – 8.30 a.m., 9.30 a.m., 10.00 a.m. – that grew progressively closer to one another, until, as the present drew nigh, he had been calling repeatedly: 6.58 p.m., 6.59 p.m., 6.66 p.m.
He was indeed waiting for me in the bar with his red froggy face, and his pale yellow young Orson Welles face, and his dead-black Sandeman Port face. His six eyes were weeping (‘It’s the smog,’ he explained), and his six wings were beating (‘I just flew in’), and there were so many ice buckets ranged round him on stands that it looked as if this great monster were waist deep in the crystalline chips and cubes.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there you are! Don’t you ever answer your phone? I’ve been leaving messages on it all day – calling here as well. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was surprise you.’ He passed a clawed hand over his face and I felt it.
I sat down opposite him, not speaking, just getting the measure of the situation and the degree of danger I was in. A waitress brought a menu and I ordered a bottle of Powerade®. It was quiet in the bar, that blissful early-evening calm when the barman is dusting all the bottles on the shelves so that they shine, and the atmosphere is quivery with the anticipation of what that night’s patrons will do to each other once their blood begins to boil.
When the waitress returned with my energy drink and poured it into a highball glass, I added a couple of ice cubes from one of the buckets and took a long draught. Setting the glass back down, I looked from one pair of eyes to the next, then said levelly, ‘There’s something you really ought to know.’
‘Oh?’
‘I never did see Citizen Kane.’
* A scene that was shot – or so she assured me – in Stevie’s old apartment building; or possibly Ellen DeGeneres’s (which, might be more apt); anyway, one or the other.
* The Sea Org was formed by Hubbard as his Praetorian Guard in the 1970s, when, facing what he viewed as persecution (or taxation, as it’s commonly known), the core group of Scientologists took to the waves in a couple of clunky old merchant vessels. Mostly comprised of pubescent girls clad in itty-bitty miniskirts and sailor tops, the Org members, while not actually physically abused by Hubbard, were manipulated by him into the most fanatical loyalists.
* Interestingly enough the Guy Fawkes kind – saturnine features accentuated by slashes of’ tache and goatee beard – sported by the anarchist revolutionary V in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel. Moore himself had violently objected to the Wachowski Brothers movie adaptation of his book, stating: ‘It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.’ The question was – and is - which V were the children of Xenu hiding behind?
11
A Touch of Evil
Going home always feels like the real getaway to me. To depart on a journey is to simplify your identity: you must present a serviceable persona to strangers shorn of ambiguities – be just x, or y, or possibly j. But when you scoop the strange coins from the unfamiliar bedside table and funnel them into your pocket, when you flex your passport and put it away in the zip-lock bag inside the zippered compartment, when you look at your face in the mirror above the sink – and queasily catch sight of the back of your spacey head in the mirror on the bathroom door – you begin to feel the first stirrings of adventurousness: who will I be when I get back? Will I have changed? Will they have changed? The world is all used up — only tourists or salesmen set off on journeys; the real explorers strike out for the known.
These were some of my more spacious thoughts as I got ready to quit my bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on the morning of 15 June 2008. Making some coffee in the kitchenette, packing my small bag, drinking the coffee and eating a cinnamon donut while I scanned the map – these were actions: easy enough to suspend disbelief in, having as they did the robotic character of the pre-credits sequence for a movie that’s gone straight to video before it’s even in the can.
Touch, taste – smell! Don’t make me laugh – all these are barnyard senses, grossly overrated, only pigs would want points. That my thoughts had a quality of being somehow pre-cogitated – at once a little glib and overworked – I didn’t let bother me. Nor did I make too much of the way that I was conscious of these thoughts not merely as subjective intimations but as actual declamations that resounded in space. It was inevitable that I’d be feeling a little spaced out – it had been quite a trip, although I couldn’t remember much about it. Still, I had a long day’s walk ahead of me if I wanted to make my flight, so: ‘I’d better not linger.’
At 8.12 a.m. I was standing at the junction of Sunset and La Cienega, looking down the long gentle slope into the nuages automoteurs that blanketed the Los Angeles Basin, out of which came the occasional set of headlights, dragging behind them a car. A billboard rose above the intersection, on it the sad black face of a giant captioned in the art director’s conception of the giant’s own handwriting ‘I lost me too meth.’ ‘Me too, brother,’ I muttered as I loped past. ‘Me too.’ Then I was working my way down, block by block, to Santa Monica Boulevard, egged on by Johnnie Walker, who seemed to be striding out from every billboard that didn’t feature a gargantuan speed freak. ‘Keep Walking!’ Johnnie’s copywriter exhorted – although he himself remained pinioned. ‘Keep Walking!’ I admonished myself, then noticed a strange phenomenon: my own shadow, legs parted, cast on to the smogbank by the rays of the rising sun.
Keep walking – early morning on Sundays is the time allotted for pedestrianism in LA. For an hour or so those of us on foot had the city to ourselves. There was a mackerel sky over the Santa Monica Freeway and a steady stream of joggers coming between the mirrored donjons of Century City. Then there were the street persons, old hags bent double under sacks who turned their backs on the haunting flares of sunlight. ‘You have really pretty eyes,’ said a scuffed-up ladyboy who pulled me up outside a deli somewhere around Glen Boulevard. ‘Can I have a light?’ I took in the shaving rash, the baseball cap, the hip-hugging cut-offs and the just-picked-up butt of filter tip stuck in a face that was dustily lacking in registration.
I gave him one, alt
hough he too had a disconcerting air of being pre-known, as did the petals lying around a storm drain and the WARNING. THIS AREA CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER, BIRTH DEFECTS AND OTHER REPRODUCTIVE HARM, as did the Elysian Fields of the Los Angeles Country Club.
A linguini of LAFD hoses had been vomited across the sidewalk from the engines parked by the kerb, and there, sitting at the metal tables in front of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, were the fire starters themselves, companionably planning their day’s arson. I stopped for a smoke and a coffee – decaf, of course. But, even so, this was a big mistake, because as I kept walking my bladder swelled and mutated until I was but a hollow man who could barely put one leg full of urine in front of the other.
What to do? Gas station after gas station taunted me with its signs: RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMER USE ONLY. Until I got it into my thick head and became a customer myself – but what to buy, not a candy bar, or a spare cap for my gas tank. No need for a newspaper or a rubber mat either ... Aha! Quick Energy Drink® – small, portable, inoffensive. I paid and knocked it back. Then the Cha’ an meditation illness began, in front of the urinal, it was of course state law that employees wash their hands, but as for the rest of us we were free to walk the streets with our hands dripping blood and excreta. The incontinent recall of Buddhist texts, which is the symptom of this overstraining of the pupil’s psyche, can be rectified only by the master hitting him hard on the head with a stick. Otherwise the texts range themselves, left to right, across the pupil’s visual field, not interrupting his view of a homeless man foetal on the sidewalk – but augmenting it. More disturbingly, the texts are no mere phenomenological wallpaper – the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by the pupil, even as he stares through them at the sign for historic Route 66.
And still the texts proliferate – at first only ones the pupil is familiar with, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of. Yet these too are comprehended in their entirety, at once, even though he can see straight through them to a plate-glass window, and beyond that a store full of running machines. The pupil’s mind becomes bloated with a consciousness that inexorably ramifies, his ego, free-will, intentionality – whatever – it is trapped like a swarming water drop pinioned in a microscope slide. There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – these are texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilizations, texts doodled on the Etch A Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid –
The Quick Energy Drink® had to have been a mistake, because this was the mosh-pit of soma I was chucked into as I continued west to Santa Monica – with one key distinction: I saw not texts but video clips. Clips of me walking out from the arrivals terminal at LAX and on to Century Boulevard, clips of me freaking out in a gas station, clips of me checking in to the Uqbar Inn, clips of me passing by donutmorphic drive-ins, clips of me surging through nuages maritimes in the Baldwin Hills, clips of me beating on piñatas east of Broadway – in short, video clips of me at every stage of my circumambulation, and not just the ones I knew had been taken by the perfidious Jeffs, but all the clips from the security cameras I’d long stopped trying to avoid.
I was pondering this – in as much as anyone could ponder such an extravagant onslaught of visual imagery, tens – hundreds even – of thousands of full-motion shots of himself walking, streamed straight to his visual cortex – when I realized that one of the clips was in real time and that it coincided, more or less, with my own POV. I was passing by the John Wayne Cancer Institute; it was a pretty big cancer institute – but then he had been a pretty big guy. I had reached Santa Monica and regained some sort of equilibrium, standing on the sidewalk like any other rube and reading the following text:
‘Here are described the humble beginnings of the once swamp dweller whose fortune was lost many generations before his own birth due to the unfortunate and unexplainable misplacement of his great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s will and the deed to 21,138 acres of land which once encompassed the greater part of what is now San Francisco. Legend also tells that the soul of SCUSSUXYKOR III, an ancient Egyptian pharoah murdered by his very own soothsayer priest, sometimes dwells within his flesh. The astrological sign of the squid from the zodiac of the planet Jamzübati-Remoti on the outer Stewart Skippy Socrates solar system centered on the SUZIIR23 galaxy exemplifies the Amazing Chain Man.’
Which was written in marker pen on a piece of cardboard stuck on top of shopping cart, beside which sat a street person I thought I recognized. He was rattling hanks of chain between his hands. His bald head was surmounted by a twist of bandana, and above his beard was the benign expression of someone who believes that the everyday slights of this world can be fully explained by pan-galactic conspiracy theories.
‘Hey, Chain Man,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ he replied.
‘That’s a fine piece of writing.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Not to be picky, but it’s p-h-a-r-a-o-h.’
‘A-o-h what?’
‘Pharaoh – you’ve reversed the o and a.’
‘Right, whatever, dude.’ He let the chain hank fall to his lap. ‘But I’m a writer – not a fuckin’ speller.’
I make no excuses, I was weary and anyway facetiousness comes naturally to me: ‘Oh, OK,’ I chuckled, ‘so what do you write?’
The Amazing Chain Man got out a bit of a Marlboro and lit it before continuing, ‘Before the strike I had a pretty good gig churning out scripts for Stargate SG-I, did some stuff for Atlantis and Universe too – that was my eating money anyways.’
‘Oh – you mean you’re a real writer.’
‘Like, d’oh, we’re all real writers.’ He waved the tip of his cigarette to encompass the tramps, winos and bums who had congregated on these benches at the intersection of 7th and Santa Monica. ‘Whaddya think, that the WGA had a generous strike fund? There was too much fuckin’ product anyway, now they’ve gone head to head over the new media residuals for Dharma & Greg, well, most of us will never work again. Some of these guys, though, they’re, like, idealists.’
‘Like idealists – you mean they’re transcendental idealists?’
‘No, dummy, they’re novelists, short story writers – even biographers. They’ve come from all over to back the strike. They can read the writing on the wall: if it that’s all she wrote, that’s all they’ll be wroting too.’
I let this solecism slide and confined myself to the matter near to hand:
‘So this’ – I pointed at the cardboard – ‘is what exactly?’
‘That’s my shill, man, people see that they get to talking, maybe they ask me to write something for them – tell ‘em a story perhaps, y’know oral literature may be the way the whole thing is going, kinda back to the future trip.’
It was lost on me – the shill, the riff – I was already heading on towards the beach. Thomas Mann was calling to me from his exile in the sewer pipe – the Santa Monica Pier was calling to me too. Not all writers were down and out. I ignored the Amazing Chain Man’s cry, which followed me down the block: ‘I do kids parties too!’
There were no surfer frat boys for me down at the beach, no muscle Manns either, only tourists de-evolving into Segways, and kites tethered to the sand, and craft stalls selling serapes made from tin foil, and glass-bead purses, and figures carved out of pine with quartzite pebble eyes and detachable penises. And there was the Freak Show and the boardwalk cafés, and a wino who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a sign that read ‘Why lie, I need a beer’, and quaint little bungalows festooned with flags, and jogging families, and fat teens hunting for weed, and all the carnival of a Sunday afternoon that I had been exiled from by a circumambulation I now realized had been completely traduced, for I was but one of a legion of writers tramping round LA, we were all the same: poorly registered, our very images thieved from us – just another chapter
in the tale of our immiseration. And in final confirmation of this Kazuo Ishiguro danced past, Netherfield Park tied to his head: he’d made it to Venice before me, together with the Bennet sisters.
I left the beach and floundered inland to where, at the intersection of Windward and Pacific avenues, a section of the old arcade was still standing, with its Corinthian columns striding along the sidewalk. I was so disoriented – so dispirited. If I’d had anything to write on I would’ve made a shill of my own, but instead the very ordinary chained man leant against a pillar and felt the whole city – from LAX to South Central, from South Central to Downtown, from Downtown to Hollywood, and from Hollywood to here – revolve about his head, a whirlpool of ’burbs and malls and office blocks and country clubs, through which cars drove and Metro trains clattered with absolute disregard.
Some scenes from Brad’s movie The Shrink were being shot on location nearby, so I headed on over to Dell Avenue with a view to hanging out for a while – the circumambulation might have failed, but not to visit a murder scene when I was in LA to find a killer seemed like a dereliction. This neighbourhood boasted the last-remaining canals, long troughs of stagnant water reflecting the façades of the self-conscious buildings. The vibe was arty, not artful – men who moisturized sat outside upmarket patisseries in the hot June sunlight, sipping cappuccinos with cashmere pullovers tied round their necks.
I spotted where the filming was going on from a long way off: there were maybe twenty or thirty trucks and SUVs parked along the kerb, and around a hundred techies wearing carpenter jeans and T-shirts merchandising Pacific Northwest grunge bands were milling about performing essential tasks. They were all elbows and earrings and had mouthfuls of crocodile clips but no time for me because time was at a $50-per-hour premium. So I pushed on through and discovered maybe fifty or so boys and girls armed with clipboards, and one of them fetched Brad, who swished his lips open in what I supposed was a welcoming smile – either that, or he might’ve been trying to dazzle me with his teeth.
