Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (35 page)

I tried switching from one side of the boulevard to the other as it wound down through the canyon, so as to provide the beasts coming from either direction with the greatest possible visibility – but this was no good, for darkness was upon us all now, and as I pelted like a picaro (or do I mean a picador?) beneath the points of their chrome horns I couldn’t prevent myself from witnessing the abominations inside these Escalades and Infinitis and Tahoes. I may have been a cryogenically
preserved Disney head bowled chuckling down this lane of death, I may have been a silica grain impelled by time, but at least I wasn’t like these ... these ...
sinners
.

No wonder they couldn’t slow down, when this lustful man’s penis was so engorged, so turgid, that I could see it thrusting up towards the windshield. No wonder they couldn’t see me, when this gluttonous family’s minivan was so stuffed with their own fat and discarded food that even as they screamed by I noted the high tide of gnawed drumsticks, frayed corncobs and crescent burgers pressed by paps and thighs against the greasy windows. No wonder they had no care for the future, when, like this derivatives trader, they urged their Crown Victorias forward, while their heads were
reversed
.

This last beast, sightless, sunless, ravenous, clipped my shoulder and sent me flailing into a drive. I wasn’t injured at least the skin wasn’t broken, and only swirled into an oily multicoloured whorl when I pressed it with my thumb – but I was finished. I slumped down on the concrete, my throat combusting with nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, particulate matter and, of course, hydrocarbons. It was the nadir – and then he came, and I was lifted up.

He came, tripping down the side of the boulevard, his silky three-quarter-length pants shimmying as his highly toned calves took the stresses of descent in their stride. He came, strips shaven into his scalp beneath the arms of his shades, a tattoo of a torpedo on his stringy neck, a tuft of hair on his decisive chin. He came – and when he saw me there, washed up on the shore by the metallic storm, he stepped aside and pulled away the headphones that cosseted his noble ears.

Despite the whoosh of the boulevard, I registered familiar close harmonies, staccato yet melodious cheeping from the tinny-tiny speakers: ‘Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, so do ... (Aff-ect! Pro-ject!) And so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life ... out of it, out of it ... (Pro-ject! Dee-part!) And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the so-ci-ety of men—’

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened to the Latin?’

‘Excuse me?’ He hadn’t noticed me before I spoke.

‘That’s NWPhd, isn’t it? I saw those guys rehearsing down at USC a couple of days ago.’

‘Aw,’ he said, shaking his head dismissively, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that, this is my roommate’s MP3. I just grabbed it as I took off – this ain’t my kind of shit at all.’

‘You don’t dig Aurelius?’

‘Or who?’

‘Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher – it’s his
Meditations
those guys are rapping, I just wondered what’d happened to the Latin, they usually do the Latin as well as the English.’

‘Oh, OK, I getcha – my roomie, he did say this was some kinduva remix, so maybe they, like, dropped the Latin to make it more commercial, or some kinda shit like that.’

It had been a long and substantive speech – which I was grateful for, but I needed more; he, however, seemed intent on leaving, pulling the headphones back on and turning to resume his goatish descent. ‘Hey, wait!’ I cried.

‘Say what?’ He turned back.

‘You aren’t going to walk all the way down Laurel Canyon, are you?’

‘Fool, I live up there a-ways, so I do the walk down to Sunset twice daily – I’ve a little problem with my licence, you dig. The only time I
don’t
walk down is when I skateboard.’

‘Skateboard?’

‘You heard it. I got me one of those big three-foot boards with the meaty wheels. I start back up a-ways by the park. Man, I tellya that thing
goes
– I guess I must be hitting thirty by the time I get to here, and when I drop back an’ brake, the sparks
fly
.’

‘But what about the sinners?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean the traffic – the cars.’

‘Ain’t no traffic late at night to speak of, and when I’m walking I go right directly t’wards ’em. Then they see you – so long as they see you they won’t hit you. And if they do hit you, well.’ He started to rap: ‘It-is-no-grievous-thing to-leave-the-so-ci-ety of men.’

I was impressed by his nerve – and told him so, then asked, ‘Would you mind if I followed along behind you? The traffic terrifies me.’

He grinned. ‘Sure, man, whatever you need.’

It took us around half an hour to cover the two miles back down to Sunset. He loped on ahead, his life story trailing over his shoulder like the silk scarf of a valiant fighter pilot. Which in a way he was now – strafing the enemy with his gaze as they came swooping up towards us.

‘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?

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, although 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.