Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (20 page)

Indeed, it isn’t clear to me exactly when the scene did begin. Out from the terminal, under the planking of flyovers, the
headlights of Infinitis and Escalades left glowtrails worming across my retinas, while the globalized skyline of Marriotts, Hiltons, palms and flagpoles seemed that much bigger – what with the streetlights smudged by the
nuages maritimes
.

As instructed, my crew had met me by the departure gate, locked and loaded so they could start shooting right away. I dimly registered a middle-aged cameraman with a comfy belly lying in a hammock of red shirt – then I was past him, and I could only assume that he was hurrying along in my wake until he drew level, walking backwards at speed, the sound recordist guiding him by gripping on to his belt.

So it continued, on past the XXX Sex Shops and across the intersections, the two men passing me, then stopping, panning as I went by to my departing back, then passing me once more. It reminded me of overtaking a truck with a shiny aluminium tank, then pulling in front of it, then dropping back behind, then passing it again – all this in ’94, on the Santa Ana freeway, with Polly Borland in the passenger seat, filming our reflection in the mirrored belIy of the grunting beast with a Super 8 camera. Rodney King was newly tenderized by the truncheons of the LAPD, and this was our anticipation of what became the signature CGI shot of urban destruction: the huge vehicle either laterally twisting, or – as above – turning end-over-end as it caroms along a city canyon. Why? Because, paradoxically, while the shot appears to be about the destruction of technology, it reinforces the notion that planes, trains and automobiles are like boulders tumbling down the hillside of civilization – natural and unstoppable.

I had no idea what the recordist was picking up with his fluffy loofah – wild track, I supposed. I hadn’t particularly wanted sound, but the cameraman had said on the phone
I
always work with Ray
in such a way as to suggest it would arouse suspicion if I didn’t take them on as a unit, together with a third: a fixer-cum-gofer who I now assumed must be the clumpy-thighed girl in a hoodie who, whenever I directed my gaze away from the sidewalk, was standing in a parking lot, or beside a useless hedge footling with her BlackBerry.

I didn’t have a reservation, yet, despite it being the middle of the night for me, rejected Inn after Court after Lodge. Rejected them, although I believe I know better than most that selfconsciousness – and hence the illusion of choice – must only be a function of the time-lag between the determined action and our decision to take it. In our innermost portions, we understand this, and so are impelled to place a face on this milliseconds-long void – revere it, even. So ...

Ever the victim, I take back my twenty and pocket it, cross the oil-stained forecourt, cross another intersection, pity a jet screaming overhead, then swing into the lobby of the Uqbar Inn. The crew tumble in after me, panting. I look round from the receptionist’s bored make-up to mutter a curt ‘Cut!’ at their sweaty faces.

We sat in the lobby area on foam chunks covered in citrine nylon to discuss the following day’s filming. I explained my objective: that they should film my walk from LAX to Hollywood as a single continuous shot, at times static, at others panning, at still others tracking or zooming. The cameraman objected that the interruption of night-time, to say nothing of the gaps between set-ups, would ruin the effect: ‘You’d need a relay of goddamn camera coolies walking backwards the entire way!’ I nodded understandingly, then palmed him off with the offer
of a beer – and pizza, which the trio then ate, their triangular tongues darting out to capture the wedges before tomato purée and mozzarella muck dribbled into their laps.

My map was spread out on a coffee table, and we were hammering down tomorrow’s route and deciding where exactly they should pick me up, when I realized that if all three weren’t exactly
sui generis
, neither were they featured players. I had, of course, forgotten the sound recordist and the gofer’s names the instant they were introduced to me; however I knew the cameraman was Jeff, so decided to term them generically ‘the Jeffs’. Jeff was curious about the project – he was English and had been based in LA for over twenty years. I reiterated the explanation I’d given him on the phone: that it was an experimental film, with Arts Council backing. But this had scarcely sounded plausible when I was sitting in the B&B in Uxbridge, and he hadn’t swallowed it.

A TV monitor in the corner of the lounge area showed the San Diego Beach Patrol moving on a homeless man who had the varnished cedar complexion and puckish features of the English screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureshi; while a voiceover intoned: ‘The drunk’s emotions can become dangerously aroused ...’ I thought nothing much of the coincidence at the time, but rounded on Jeff: ‘You’re no Scorsese, only a dumbass who came to Tinseltown with big ideas, then ended up shooting wedding videos!’ He just sat there, disconsolately looking at his spreading paunch, and it was left to Gofer Jeff to calm me down by raising such pedestrian issues as municipal film unit permissions. This kept us occupied for ... aeons, until finally they went away. That was the trouble with film people, I ruminated as I slumped in the elevator, then limped along to my room: they applied the same basic principle to all
their practices, so ended up shooting far more of the breeze than could ever be reasonably required.

What was it Busner had warned me about? I knew he had warned me about something that I might find in a hotel room, so I carried out a minute examination as soon as I’d dumped my bag, kicked off my shoes, stripped and showered. Damp and naked, I squatted to peer beneath the valance, then stretched up to see under the pelmet – but there was no sign of anything untoward, no hidden Hals or button mikes. Then I snapped on the radio and smoked for a while as I listened to the subscription drive on KPFK. Now I was standing looking at the bulbous prong of the games controller, an alien’s digit crooked over the top edge of the TV. The ergonomics of the controller were at once obvious and obscure, its yellow, red and green buttons; its twin toggles and further buttons marked with square, circular and triangular symbols.

What was it Busner had warned me about, surely not
the drapes
in Room 423 and their similarity to a Jewish prayer shawl? I could only imagine my occasional therapist would approve of the lengthy reverie I then plunged deep into, concerning Extended Mind Theory as it related to video games and the driving of cars – cars, which are the true superheroes of the modern era, powerful demiurges that canter across cities on their rubbery pseudo-pods. Those adverts for Citroën cars that feature innocuous hatchbacks metamorphosing – à la
Transformers
– into huge dancing robots express a fundamental truth: the servant has become our master. When the movie came out (the third in a series based on a
toy
), Anthony Lane devoted 1,000-plus words to it in the
New Yorker
, which, for sheer sledgehammer- ’n’ -nuttiness, were unrivalled – except,
possibly, by an as yet undiscovered Montaigne essay, ‘On
Flipper
’.

I came to at around 5.00 a.m., still staring at the prong of the controller. During the night I had peed and the uric salts were grainy between my chafed thighs, while the pancake-thin carpeting had been soaked through, then clawed into ridges by my bare feet, which must have continued shuffling on the spot. Pre-dawn leeched the colours from the already muted institutional room. The fugue hadn’t been qualitatively different from waking consciousness, so I was still more exhausted than I had been when the fat controller grabbed me. I fell across the bed, but sleep was tantalizingly out of reach: a beautiful rose garden glimpsed through a vanishingly tiny door, and eventually I dressed and went down to breakfast, which I ate listening to three prominent neurosurgeons discuss cell phone wave shields with Larry King. Their radioactive deliberations were interspersed with the traffic report on KNBC – news that had as much purchase on me as updates on the Assyrian occupation of Babylon
c
. 3200
BC
. Possibly less, given that the UN mandate permitting US bases to operate in Iraq would expire by the end of the year.

I fought off the urge to pick up the dinky blueberry muffin I had unthinkingly opted for and hand it to the bleary child at the next table with the words, ‘To scale with you, I believe?’ Fought it off because the child’s mother was played by Kim Basinger. Basinger, whose forehead had bulged so provocatively as Mickey Rourke slam-dunked her pelvis in
9½ Weeks
(1986) – a swelling that suggested he was pumping her so full of semen there was
nowhere else for it to go
. She still looked pretty shiny despite being on a career-slalom on sheet ice.

The KNBC man’s face was as ancient as an Assyrian basrelief – but full face rather than in profile. He spoke of an accident on Freeway 10, his shattered visage looming between the hieroglyph of civilization and the crumpled topography of the Sierra, then dissolved into live footage of a chariot broadsided across two lanes, with CHP officers dismounted from their Harleys and taking notes on wax tablets.

Far from lifting over night, the
nuages maritimes
were even denser that morning, yet, despite not having slept since Uxbridge, as I left the Uqbar Inn I had a fresh spring in my step. I resolved to stay there again in the future, so delighted had I been by the pathos of its frosted floral lampshades – assuming, that is, that my incontinence would be held against Postlethwaite or Thewlis rather than me. Yes, there had been Basinger, and Hal hung above the reception desk as I paid my bill, but once I was out the door the mist was so dense that I doubt any camera could’ve registered the blur when I turned to the right – or the left.

Counter-intuitively, a grid-plan city forces more decisions on the walker than the winding folkways of an older more haphazard urbanity. Since diagonal progress can be made equally effectively by any given series of horizontal and perpendicular traverses, at each intersection the choice of two directions remains, maddeningly. No wonder I opted for one huge L, and so plodded on along Century, then turned left up Cienega, which ran beside a God-gouged gutter full of the San Diego Freeway. Within three miles the limp pennants of the medieval car dealerships and the donutmorphic drive-ins were doing my
fucking head in
, man. The Edenic valley of the Colne, with its pylons and
reedy rills, now came before me in all its lush raiment – why had I not remained there, waiting for my Sissy Spacek, then together with her raised a tribe of feral survivalists among the alders and poplars?

The signal phasing was weighted heavily against the pedestrian, while the clearance zone at each intersection was wide enough to swallow tribes of the impious. But there was one of me to tens of thousands of the Transformers. Each wait for the stickman to shine through the
nuages
was a vigil – I was finely balanced between grief and joy, while Hal cloned himself from one pole to the next. Eventually, at Florence, the sidewalk gave out and I was forced into the ur-suburba. As I ascended the Baldwin Hills, it occurred to me that almost all my life had been a topiary hare’s hopeless race along silent sidewalks beside empty homes. The buttery swathes of the lawns, the oh-so-slow lava flows of the crescents and drives, the Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns as hollow as subprime mortgages – it didn’t matter a jot if the inhabitants were white or, as here, black, suburbs were always at once pre- and post-apocalyptic. In the two-car garage the wayward Cal-Tech physicist connects a purloined cyclotron to a Barcalounger – with devastating results.

The stop lady for Highland Elementary hustled some kids – including me – across the road and I arrived at Homebase, where a score or more of Hispanic extras hung out in the parking lot to see if they’d be taken on for a day impersonating gardeners in long shot. I stopped to chat: no, they didn’t mind the stereotyping, but ‘Y’know, my friend, in this part of town ground staff are almost always whites – it’s, like, a status symbol,’ said one with Coppertone skin and a Fu Manchu goatie.

‘Yeah,’ his buddy concurred. ‘For a reactive industry Hollywood is so fuckin’ slow.’

I went on past caged-in basketball courts and reached the scrubby uplands where oil pumps rose and fell like dipping bird toys. The Jeffs were waiting for me and I conspicuously ignored them as they set up for a long shot in a lay-by. Still, I was grateful for their perfect timing: the
nuages maritimes
were lifting, and to the north the Los Angeles basin lay revealed: 300 square miles of eyes and camera lenses. Somewhere out there was a killer or killers and I needed the crew’s prophylaxis badly; unprotected, who knew what I might become prey to – surely only the pathetic self-consciousness of adolescence, which commences with checking for zits in wing mirrors, and culminates – ten years or yards along the road – in a screen test?

Absorbed in the steady rhythm of my paces I forgot about the Jeffs. I was walking through the Ruben Ingold County Parkway – a strip of greenery that ran along the spur above Slauson – when down in the valley, on the far side of the highway, I spotted a bum asleep on a bench. At least, I
thought
that’s what it was – I couldn’t be certain from this distance. There was an uncanny flatness to the static figure – besides, I knew most LA benches were bum-proofed, their seats either canted forward so it was impossible to find repose, or else segmented with hip-spearing ridges.