Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 128
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The cab driver who took me the short distance from the Renaissance Hotel through the tunnel and into the terminal was palpably disturbed; his wide red neck radiated waves of psychosis through the glass partition. He twisted his hands on the steering wheel while muttering obscenities that, if I chose to hear them, had a disconcertingly gynaecological specificity. Pubic symphysis… External urinary meatus… Cunt! He wouldn’t look me in the eye when I paid the fare.
And then I was aboard a taxiing Air France jet, grumbling past the old shell of a plane used for fire brigade practice, while the man in the seat beside me yattered on about the air traffic controllers who had been brought over to Pinewood to play the parts of the air traffic controllers in United 93 (2006). I thought of the air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies.
As we banked and turned to the north-west over the Thames Valley, I saw the film studios laid out far below. Had I been hoping for circling helicopters, the sparkle of emergency services’ lights, a tumescent smokestack and all the other set dressing of civil disaster? ‘Are you on your way to Los Angeles to do some filming, Pete?’ asked my neighbour, and while the clouds tore ragged chunks out of England I made it clear that such familiarity was less than welcome.
He wasn’t to be dissuaded, this plump, white haired, Rolex-wrist-watched, beige-linen-trousered, twenty-seven-years-in-senior-management-once-drunkenly-fucked-a-whore-on-the-Reeperbahn-then-went-on-Seroxat-while-he-waited-for-the-AIDS-test-result man. But when the seatbelt light was extinguished I forced him to withdraw the LCD screen from his armrest, manipulate it into his eye line and begin to watch a Harry Potter film, while I filled my mind with Balyk salmon cooked in crème fraiche with chives and watercress salad, the confit de canard enhanced in honey sauce accompanied by sautéed potatoes and French green beans.
Eleven hours later the pilot pointed out to us the nuages maritimes creeping across the darkling plain. The Sierra zigmauved along the horizon, Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust. Not long after that we touched down at LAX.
4
Among the Chocodiles
‘Next victim!’
Can he seriously mean me? This fat and fatiloquent young man, his cheeks dimpled by silver studs, his black dungarees wide as an army tent, his moobs silicone-stiff beneath the Gothic fluting of his Tarp-shirt.
‘I said: next goddamn victim!’
I’m among the Chocodiles and the Donettes, athwart the Sno Balls and the Cherry Slices, all tangled up in the Gummy Worms and the Sour Neon Worms – I’m a paedo cruising the Sour Patch Kids with a Gummi Bear on my arm—
‘I can’t make change for this.’ He snaps my twenty in front of his miserable face like a small green clapperboard, yet here – at the counter, in the gas station a couple of miles along Century Boulevard from the airport – it isn’t the beginning of this scene at all.
‘Oh boy, you’re gonna regret that.’ I deliver my line with edible insouciance, the calm before Kali comes, four arms whirling, double jaws snapping, skull necklace clacking.
‘Excuse me?’ I now have both Rivet-Cheek’s attention and that of his colleague, a blameless Hispanic kid, whose slick hair is teased and trimmed into all manner of points. Before answering I take a bottle of Powerade from a cooler, crack the screw cap, ostentatiously down the entire twenty fluid ounces, then burp:
‘Urrrrp! I say, you’re gonna regret being impolite to me, because now I will be compelled to shove all those Starlight Mints, Candy Corns, Baseballs, Twinkies, Peach Slices, Ding Dongs and especially’ – I turn to point to the bottom of the display rack – ‘Dunkin’ Stix, right up your fuckin’ asshole, before employing your friend’s greasy head as a plunger with which to pump up the resulting sugary muck into an arterybusting froth.’
Reflecting on the incident later, as I lay across my bed in the Uqbar Inn, I realized it was the ‘greasy’ that’d cost me the sympathy of the other customers in the gas station, who, hitherto merely restless nobodies, now asserted themselves as dangerously individualist frontiersmen and women. With five months still to go until polling day, the wind of change was starting to blow away the nuages maritimes of the Bush administration, so that any racial tokenism that may have been lingering in the body politic was also purged. But at the time I responded purely to the filmic grammar – not, I hasten to add, that CGI can possess syntactic clarity, uttering as it does only the same proposition again and again: we cannot, dull clay that we are, ever fully suspend disbelief in the physics of mass, and so, fingers coated in slip, we spin the wheel.
But first, in advance of the ass-stuffing, I run out on to Century Boulevard, straight into the traffic stream, and stand there arm outstretched, palm raised, daring the next vehicle – which happens to be a passenger bus, fully laden with newly landed Japanese tourists – to run me over. It does; or, rather, since I do not move, impales itself on my arm, with the crunch of punched steel and a hiss of escaping radiator steam. There I am, only slightly rocked on my rubber soles (and the juxtaposition, as ever with effective CGI, is between the utterly ordinary and the vanishingly probable), the rosette of peeled metal bunched at my shoulder, making of me what, a blushing debutante at the Crillon Ball? With a tortured groan from the ruptured chassis and the shrill cries of the Japanese – who, having fallen forward on impact, now roll down the aisle to pile, a jerking mass of flesh, leisurewear and baseball caps in the unbroken dish of the windshield – I raise my arm to the vertical, then flip the bus backwards over my head, so that it revolves, end-over-end, along the roadway, flailing into the oncoming traffic, knocking cars and trucks into the air so that they too resemble ninepins. The metaphor, although obvious, is not strained: because there’s no experience of phenomena on such a scale being cogently witnessed in the realm of the real, the animators – like all honest creators – needs must resort to what they know. So, a petrol tanker star-bursts in the Southern Californian night, while a squad car, siren whooping, crashes down on the crown of a palm, and as a milk truck cannonades through the wide revolving door of the airport Crowne Plaza its whacked crates shed cartons that also flip, end-over-end, a teasing visual synecdoche that serves – in the scant seconds the entire sequence lasts – to reintegrate the fantastical disaster with the homely anxiety of spilt milk.
Not that anyone has time to dwell on this – or the fate of the scores of maimed and, presumably, outright dead – because I’m returning to the gas station. I still look exactly the same – gawky in my kidult gear, my long face gaunt and ineffectual – but of course, now we know I possess superhuman powers, so my appearance underscores the pathos of everyman – or woman – compelled to withstand without a murmur the humiliations imposed by boorish sales assistants. It is as a demigod that I loose still more the drawstrings of my bag o’ winds. Naturally, the very visceral mechanics of punishment must be decently veiled: so, there’s a proaction shot of the assistant’s petrified sneer, another of his colleague whimpering exculpatory please-not-mes, then all is submerged in swirls of multicoloured motion-blur that the eye, rightly, reads as the grappling of many cellophane packets, their ripping; the stripping of the assistant’s heavyweight dungarees, the fisting and the stirring. When it’s over – but is it ever truly over? – teetering on top of the counter is an awful centaur, its front legs with denim bunched at the fetlocks, its hind legs clothed; its torso is writhing, its face is pulsing cherry-bomb-red as systole sucks up all that sugar, sugar that also – in variegated droplets and powdery smudges – is to be seen spattered on the disgusted faces of the customers I shoulder my way through, while dusting my hands off with that rapid, semi-automatic motion that suggests – as much to myself as the restive bystanders – job’s a good ’un.
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 flying 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 belly 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?
