Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (22 page)

‘That’s right, paint – whether wet or dry; and if I came into contact with it at all – which is, as I’m sure everyone realizes, difficult to avoid, well, I got a painful itching in my eyebrows. Now the condition has cleared up and I feel ... well, like a million dollars!’

There was a scattering of applause, but there were also mutterings of discontent and somebody called out, ‘Tell us what you had for breakfast on October the third 1942!’

I fidgeted with the hem of my twill skirt. ‘That’s easy, a bento box. The sushi and sashimi were fine, and I asked for a refill of miso soup, which I sipped together with mouthfuls of green tea from a china beaker—’

In a chain Japanese diner on Figueroa? I don’t think so – not a china beaker, only a lidded styrofoam cup, the textured dimples
of which squeaked beneath my sweaty fingertips; across the road Felix the Cat pole-sat with a come-hither grin on top of a Cadillac dealership. ‘I’ve scheduled a meeting for you with Michael Lynton at Sony Pictures in Culver City this Friday – the thirteenth,’ said Ellen DeGeneres’s voice in my ear. Frank Tenpenny was sitting with a table of LAPD patrolmen next to mine – a more or less solid block of heavy-duty navy cotton accessorized with forearms, side arms and crew-cut heads on V-shaped plinths of white T-shirt. It was true about the bento box, though – the lacquered tray littered with rice lay on the table beneath my eyes. ‘Kinda unlucky, maybe ...’

‘Maybe.’ I was mightily impressed at my ability to pick up my end of the phone conversation. ‘But then I could always pitch him a nightmare.’

She laughed throatily. ‘Pitch him a nightmare – I like that. Anyway, you’re set to see him at ten that day, and I can get you a five o’clock at the Marmont with Michael Burns – if you think you can get from Culver City to the Marmont by then? ’Course, you’ll need to get back by seven anyway ’cause I’ve arranged a little party in your honour—’

‘A party?! But I don’t know anyone – and no one knows me.’

‘Lissen, don’t worry, it’s a tiny affair – more of gathering, really.’

A useful little heads-up display map had appeared in the corner of my visual field, and using this I could quickly and easily estimate the mileage from Culver City to Hollywood, so said, ‘Actually, it appears eminently possible for me to meet with Burns – but listen, are you
sure
these guys want to see me, I mean, it’s not like I have anything to offer them and I don’t want to go squandering your agent capital.’

‘Puh-lease, David, you’re a respected actor – you’re bankable, guys like that are always gonna want to meet with you.’

I said nothing to her of the black-clad legs stomping the prone form of the studio head until it disintegrated into its encoding. We hung up. I paid the bill and found the Jeffs outside waiting for me. ‘Eat well, WW?’ asked Camera Jeff. I checked out my HUD health bar and saw that I had plenty of lives, so grunted affirmatively.

Jeff had rigged up a new gizmo during his lunch break, a tiny digital camera mounted on an aluminium pole he could hold at ground level, angled up to give a shot of my walking feet. I appreciated the thought he’d put into this amblecam – all the way from LAX I’d been agonizing that without sufficient close-ups of my feet they might be cropped, then grafted on to the legs of an extra in a crowd scene of a thriller featuring a psychopath hell-bent on shooting a politician the name of whom no one will ever remember. Really.

No sooner had I begun walking and Camera Jeff was turning over, than I realized this set-up had a radical effect on my point of view. Listen, I’m not a fool-I’d known for years how detached I was from the normal range of feeling, how solipsistic, how dissociated, so that on occasion I seemed to be observing myself acting out a predetermined role. Busner may have termed my malady ‘ebullient and productive’, yet all too often it felt merely hollow and miserable. What was it he had warned me about? What ...

To the north-east the Downtown towers rained down light-spears that disappeared into the smog bank lying above Broadway and Bunker Hill. I glanced right and left and the fishbowl turned while my arms remained lifelessly projecting ahead. Was I in the world any more? Or was the world in me?
Just before the Shrine Auditorium I had crossed the fault line where the plate of the old pueblo grinds against that of the new city, and now as I navigated east towards south central I realized I had crossed the border that separates LA from Los Santos.

The 45-degree downwardly angled shot was reminiscent of the bistro in the Place Wilson, but my POV remained hovering while the figure in the green T-shirt and green short pants advanced, long legs eating up the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure about the Mr T. Mohawk, but I liked the way I’d acquired a muscular build; nor could I see the point of the cross hairs, that, whichever way I turned, remained aligned – for I wasn’t armed. Indeed, although I was headed straight into the gang territories of East Los Santos, where the Ballas and the Vagos ruthlessly battle for supremacy, I felt not the slightest anxiety.

Neither anxiety – nor remorse, when I thought of the killing at the
carniceria
in East LA the preceding fall, the choking dust clouds when the digger went to work among the Civil War dead in the Evergreen Cemetery, me stuffing the bloodstained handkerchief into my pocket, then furtively adjusting its engorgement as I rode the bus back along 1st Street into town. These memories could have no purchase here, where a sweatshop full of wetbacks plying sewing machines swam out of the
nuages maritimes
. No! The sea mists had dispersed in the Baldwin Hills; this was some other phenomenon. If Mr Me went towards the sweatshop it increased in definition, until I could read the very headline of the sun-yellowed copy of
La Opinión
that lay in the gutter in front of it: ‘
Adiós Triunfal
!’ Next to a photo of La Senadora Hillary Clinton, arm upraised as she gracefully bowed out of the contest.

Then, when I toggled away to the blank space, alien evergreens materialized, their upper limbs customized with the needle-shaggy bafflers of a cell site. Yes! I grasped it at last: I was an aboriginal spirit in the city of unbecoming, who had only to walk towards the void for some new thing to be swiped into existence with Ed Ruscha strokes of oily pixels. Superhero, pah! I was a god now – with a god’s penchant for vengefulness and real-time moral experimentation.

I summon up Marisco’s seafood, a beige stucco box that’s
abierto
. José stands in the doorway, his singlet grimy, the Madonna tattooed on his right arm, Mary Magdalen being sodomized by the Devil on his left. His hair’s gathered in a do-rag, his automatic is stuffed down his pants. As Mr Me comes right up to him, he sprouts bling, shifts on his Keds and rolls his shoulders while spouting pre-recorded dialogue into his cell phone: ‘It’s that
gringo loco
WW again, we told him not to come back here, this time something gotta be done.’

When Mr Me snatches the phone, drops it to the sidewalk and grinds it out like a cigarette butt, José plunges his hand into his pants, but before he can withdraw his piece my long black legs are upside his head, scissoring his thick neck. ‘Ooooh, noooo!’ he moans, then he’s on the ground and I’m break-dancing on his chest.

A low-rider pulls up beside us. The hood pops, the trunk pops, it bounces on its tyres, the doors burst open and disgorge a quartet of Uzi-toting heavies and the ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of a rap backing track; Mr Me despatches the first with the heel of my hand, the second with the scythe of my foot, the third gets me in the shoulder with a round, yet when I consult my target health indicator I see that I’m still well ahead of the game. The fourth is encouraged to kneel in
the open door of the gun wagon, then it’s shut, hard, again and again.

Pumped up with success, Mr Me disdains the jalopy – its door a bloodied mouth beseeching him to enter and drive. Instead, I check the HUD map, then thumb-swagger him east towards Central. The ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of the backing track is joined by NWPhd: ‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again. One wind – one life, one life – one wind, one wind – one life, one life – one wind ...’ The dreamy-creamy superstructure of the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant rises smoothly into my crosshairs above what should be the messy contingencies of power lines, signage and stop lights – should be, but even this far in I’ve spotted the patterning and concluded that this parodic LA has most probably been woven from machine code in a nerdish workroom half a world away.

Still, when a pneumatic ho pours her jugs from the backroom of a tyre shop echoing with the ‘Whirrrrschunk!’ of wheel nuts being drawn like monstrous teeth and coos, ‘Hey, Double-U Double-U, why not step inside for a latte?’ I respect the clarity of the prompt and reply with one of the 4,200 lines of scripted dialogue at my disposal, ‘So long as it ain’t skinny, bitch.’

‘It ain’t skinny at all, homie, it’ll make you
froth
.’

No more stereotypical than any seductive banter – I hope you’ll agree. And what of the sex act itself? From behind, natch, her cartoon face sinks into a yielding wall, her coffee haunches seesaw, the PlayStation squeaks ... Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being manipulated as much as the next puppet, but there’s work to be done: since their arrival in the late 1930s, inside the Coca-Cola plant German Expressionist émigrés have
forged an indissoluble association in the collective unconscious between tooth rot and eye candy, so that no movie is complete without a waxed-paper demijohn of sugared water and caffeine pumped full of CO
₂
...

‘I’m gonna take these muthafuckahs down,’ Mr Me says to the Jeffs, who’ve come up beside me. Sound Jeff pushes his cans up on his head, panda style.

‘Man, WW, that’s some crazy stuff,’ he sighs.

‘The more you know,’ Mr Me says, pumping the shotgun that magically appears in my hands, ‘the better. Now cover me!’

I push-button into the fray, my wild discharges set the line of innocent acacias ablaze as Mr Me sprints through the traffic across Central; pickups side-swipe saloons that frontend UPS trucks. Smoke staggers, tracers doodle, sirens yowl and the security men take stances to unleash their impotent allusion to automatic fire: fluttery little yellow flashes, ‘Dapocketa-pocketa-pock!’ Mr Me karate-chops one Hal, then the next, gains the door of the plant, forgets what he’s meant to be doing ...

And wanders away aimlessly, following his crosshairs, lost in a reverie of competence, his fingers pushing his own enigmatic buttons – the yellow, red and green, the square, circle and cross – while the HUD map oscillates wildly. The
nuages de jouer
condense into 7th Street, then the flower market, where the stalls are hung with
piñatas
. There are
piñatas
in the shape of lions, rabbits, snakes and lizards; traditional seven-pointed star
piñatas
and
piñatas
fashioned – albeit poorly – to resemble logos: a blocky ‘GM’, a Hummer shield, Dolce and Gabbana’s copulating initials.

At the next stall to come into existence the woven-straw heads of Cheney and Rumsfeld spin slowly in the breeze on the strings that trepan their hollow heads. Ditto the Weinsteins, Karen Bass and Arnie; Nicole and Angelina kiss with a ‘Tthwock!’ and a riffle of their paper-streamer hair, while Thewlis and Postlethwaite duel with Cyrano noses.

When the stallholder enlarges in Mr Me’s direction, I’m searching through the available lines for:
Why have these relatively minor English actors been fashioned into fiesta toys?
But he forestalls this by squawking: ‘Petey Postlethwaite, man, I loved you in that Brit TV show.’

‘Which one?’

‘
The Sins
, man – that’s why I had the
piñata
made of your head.’

I rotate the market 20 degrees. ‘But why Thewlis?’

‘Aw, dude.’ The stallholder cups the back of the straw head. ‘Ain’tcha seen
Dinotopia
– it’s the greatest.’

Along the kerbs of the fashion district bolts of cloth are extruded into being, ready to be cut and sewn into the piping through which watery bodies will flow. Cars keep slewing to a standstill and offering themselves to me; light aircraft taxi up, their propellers lickety-licking like the tongues of affectionate dogs; at one point I’m even offered a jetpack. But I keep on walking, and by the time I’m following my own avatar along Broadway I’ve long since forgotten that it’s all a game, that somewhere a
primum mobile
sits, gritty with cookie crumbs, his thumbs numb from twiddling the toggles – my disbelief is suspended, spinning in the green air that solidifies into the ornate façades of the Mayan Theater, the Belasco and the State, while the crowds of stereotypes and replicants thicken: Tyrell Corporation, heading home.

I gather the crew into a team; standing close to Gofer Jeff I can appreciate the care that’s gone into plotting the downy bell curve of her standard deviation face. ‘It’s a wrap for you guys for the day,’ I tell them, ‘I won’t be needing you here – sure, stuff is shot around Downtown, but it’s mostly TV: suits and skirts crossing Main Street in long shot to City Hall to engage in the highest of all sciences and services, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall – architecture conceived of as a frozen moment of sandwich wrapping. Pah! I have nothing to fear from
that
!’