Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 131
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
All revved up, all four stomachs swollen with bio-fuels, I jetted the lift up to the twenty-third floor, then lay stranded across the bed in my room. It had been quite a day. I thought back to that moment in early afternoon, when, crossing Grand, en route from the Shrine Auditorium to the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, I had my first clear sight of the Hollywood Hills. By rights there should have been contentment; for here was the long view that my feet, scraping away layer after layer of paving, bitumen and concrete, had exposed: the pointed breasts of the slumbering giantess, dreaming of a city of angels, radiant as Klieg lights.
Not this time. It had been the cab ride at Heathrow that had done it – a scant half-mile of rubber rolling through the tunnel to the terminal building had erased entirely what should always be written on the body: the land’s enduring love for those human feet that had strived through the eons so as to be able to walk upon it. And so the Buckinghamshire lanes didn’t debouch into Century Boulevard, and the Grand Union Canal didn’t feed into the Los Angeles River. It bore down on me as I washed my underpants in the sink, then hung them up to dry on the shower rail, that my entire strategy had been devised not simply to repel the filmic, but to tape back together the Pangaea that had been cut up by the movies.
During the night the radio murmured: a 52-year-old woman had been found murdered in her BMW in Alhambra, a single shot to her upper torso. I tried to prop her up, to talk to her – but she wouldn’t take direction and kept sliding down the gory upholstery. Now that film had died, there was no one to enforce the 30-degree rule.
6
Timber Just in Lake
Not a jump cut at all – more properly understood as a graphic match, the same sight gag that Kubrick made when he cut from that first triumphantly flung war bone to the space station waltzing across the starry backcloth accompanied by the liquid strains of ‘The Blue Danube’. Thus: morning discovers first the concrete logs of 4th and 5th streets felled across the trench full of the Harbor Freeway, then dissolves the heavy drapes of Room 237 to seek out my own trunk lying in a pool of sheets.
And so I awoke to the push-button phone on the malachite bedside table, the hefty hardwood armoire, the lamps swivelled in on their brass-effect wall brackets – all of it neon-furred by dream. And so I floated down the elevator shaft, through the glass roof and into the cavernous atrium, noting the jogging track that runs around the building’s core. Clearly the Westin Bonaventure had been en route to Jupiter for decades now, its bulbous mirrored hulls groping through inner space while its crew remained either in suspended animation, or keep fanatically fit.
Then I was turning into Figueroa, centring my bag a little more comfortably in the small of my back while trying – despite the nuages maritimes that had crept back during the night – to preserve a sunny disposition. Next, I was beside the Los Angeles Central District Health Center, its dusty black cladding grafitti-smeared ‘Hollywood Digz’, ‘Reeper’ and ‘Largo Rats’, where I was hailed by a lithe mixed-race young man, the crotch of whose saggy-assed jeans touched the crossbar of his dinky BMX bike: ‘Say, man, d’you know where the two towers are at?’
He raised himself from the saddle and hitched up his saggy-assed jeans. He couldn’t possibly mean Barad-dûr and Orthanc, could he? Nor, I thought, could he be mistakenly referring to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which had given the producers of the movie adaptation of Tolkien’s novel such cause for anxiety they considered changing its name before its eventual release in 2002. Then again, recognizing the young man as an Anglo-Nigerian writer whom I had encountered a week or so before at a garden party in Notting Hill, I wondered whether or not he might – just might – be referencing Tolkien’s real-life inspiration for his fantasia: Perrott’s Folly and the tower of Edgbaston waterworks, both of which had been visible from the future fantasist’s childhood home?
Fatal Flaw – as I thought of him – didn’t appear to have recognized me, or whoever was playing me this morning. True, the last time I’d seen him his nose was dog-damp with cocaine, while he snuffled the explanation for his failure to publish anything in the past ten years: ‘A fatal flaw. I mean, everyone’s got one, yeah? Mine happens to be – you won’t laugh, will you, promise? – OK, girls in boots with guns. Y’know, before the web it wasn’t so bad – I mean, I had to work at it … but now, well …’ He snotted so loudly the other guests at this tony summer party turned to look. ‘Like I say, it’s a fatal flaw.’
Again with the hitch and a small blue cotton cloud puffed from his waistband; invisible wires of humming tautness connected Fatal Flaw’s saggy-assed jeans to those of hundreds – thousands perhaps – of other young men throughout Los Angeles, Pasadena and even into the Valley. Seeing my perplexity, he explained: ‘It’s the courts, man, the fuckin’ courts.’ Of course, the County Criminal Courts Buildings, colloquially known as the two towers, and buried in the acropolis of the nearby Civic Center.
We chatted for a while, and Fatal Flaw mugged that he didn’t like the bus and so had cycled in from Melrose for his appearance that morning. His espadrilles were worn through – filthy toes fingered a bike pedal. He offered me his pouch of Bugler, but there were only a few pinches of tobacco dust. The last I saw of him was when I looked back from the junction of Figueroa and Sunset: he was deep in conversation with a bag lady pushing a shopping cart who bore a distinct resemblance to the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.
Years before I had queued for tickets at Cologne railway station. It was an innocently racist era in Germany, and the poster of a wanted Libyan terrorist stuck up by the Bundespolizei had been captioned below the usual Roswell photofit ‘Michael Jackson phenotype’. To transmogrify from an abused child star to an abusive adult has-been – this was a far scarier metamorphosis than the jaw-stretching and fur-sprouting Jackson underwent in John Landis’s fourteen-minute music video for Thriller.
The Jeffs were waiting on the set for this extravaganza: the Carpenter-Romantic woodhenge of Angelino Heights, a lumber yard of open-truss porches, high gabled roofs and exposed rafter ends – all of it ill with shingles. Peeking out from upper windows, banners whispered ‘Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home’. Home to where Woody Woodpecker perches, ‘H’h’h’h’-ha-ha! H’h’h’h’-ha-ha!’, drilling his geist into the boards with no lubrication of beak or hole.
There it is, take it – and it goes without saying (except by a legion of postdoctoral students) that there’s little more fucked up than a fairytale. Besides, between Angelino Heights and Alvarado there runs a fatal flaw in the earth’s crust, one that links the Echo Park boating lake via William Mulholland’s aqueduct to Benedict Canyon. Hollis Mulwray sculls along it, with his daughter’s incestuously begot daughter sat prettily in the stern, while that unhappy detective Jake Giddes (when he turns up people get dead) spies on them from the parking lot. Or is that the thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer, logy on ludes and champagne, being ferried to her rendezvous at Jack Nicholson’s house near Mulholland Drive? Ah yes, a photo shoot with the diminutive director-cum-actor whose credit should read not ‘Man with Knife’ but ‘Man Who Will Put his Dick in a Child’s vagina mouth anus (delete where appropriate)’.
1969, Manson waits back at the ranch while Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles ‘Tex’ Watson head for music producer Terry Melcher’s house in Benedict Canyon. 1973, the boating lake in Echo Park is a location for Polanski’s Chinatown. 1977, the very little director does the big bad thing. The steady 4/4 rhythm of the oars, the silver nitrate surface of time flows along the fatal flaw, until, thirty-seven years later, Atkins, in the terminal stages of cancer, applies for parole. So what if she were sprung, she’d still be a lousy walking companion – what with one leg already amputated. The only people I envy in this thing are the dead.
The nuages maritimes had finally dispersed as I made my way along the path beside the boating lake; conservation volunteers were picking up trash, while a couple of fountains simmered offshore. At Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple on Logan Street a gang of middle-aged bikers were doubling as extras in a TV shoot, their hogs lined up along the kerb: slices of chromed bacon. McPherson had been a devotee of shuyu, her Sunday sermons preached in front of a mock-up of the LA skyline, complete with two miniature aeroplanes, one piloted by Beelzebub, the other by the Good Lord.
As I scaled the hump of Montrose Street, then continued down Alvarado, the Wilshire corridor was spread out below me, frothing with greenery, wispy with smog. Shortly before I turned to the west along Beverly – in order to avoid MacArthur Park – I passed a grotty little dealership. Alvarado Auto Sales were pushing rusty pickups riddled with rust, decadent compacts and my own VW Variant Fastback, a car I’d last seen in a breaker’s yard in Battersea twenty-two years previously. The chances of this were minute – yet when I stopped to peer through the wound-down driver’s window and caressed the pimply vinyl hump of the dash, there could be no mistaking it: this was the very same car, the one I’d bought from a social worker on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, shortly after the riot of October 1985 in which PC Blakelock was hacked to death by Mob with Axe.
I’d crashed the VW a year and a half later on Chelsea Bridge – and although I knew it wasn’t a write-off, I’d still been in shock when the man at the breaker’s menaced me with a tyre-iron and said, ‘Take a tenner for it – or just fuck right off.’ I found the reappearance of my old car strangely heartening: the three-car shunt that had seemingly killed it must have been a stunt, the directors of which had arranged for it to be transported here and restored. I crouched to pray, a devout machinist, and called unto the Great Car Spirit to enter me, pump the gas, slip the clutch and drive me west towards Hollywood.
When I straightened up I noticed overhead a billboard advertising The Incredible Hulk, the release of which was now: 11.6.08. The Chrysler Building peeked over the bugaboo boffin’s green-skinned shoulder; surely, I thought, it must get tired of this shtick? Then I hitched up my short pants – which seemed ridiculously baggy – and besides, why did I find it so difficult to remember?
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Considered as a Precursor of Express Checkout
Somewhere between the Town House – an English manor held down in the shrubbery and force-fed pituitary gland – and the Bullocks Wilshire, I stopped at a grocery store for an energy drink with a dumb name like Relentless. Big mistake. From its terracotta base to its oxidized copper finial, the old department store was streamlined: an autobuilding speeding from the roaring twenties to the choking noughties. In seconds I was 500 yards up the road and only six days and forty years late to meet the bullets from Sihran Sihran’s .22.
Bobby Kennedy, hustled through the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel by his security detail, had just delivered his victory speech following the 1968 Californian presidential primary. That speech! Its homage to his assassinated brother, its guileless paean to the Great Society, what … what were these? Ticked boxes on a card, the drinks swigged and peanuts snaffled from the minibar of democracy. Bobby is gone – unceremoniously dumped in the trunk of Monroe Stahr’s 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan, which shoots out from the porte-cochère, the chrome angel lying across its hood absorbing the up-thrust of the road through his fanned wingtips. Kathleen’s in the passenger seat, her beautiful composite of a face framed by one half of the split windshield. As for Stahr, his olive complexion cannot hide the tide of death rising up from his white silk shirt collar.
As the Chrysler turns left on to Wilshire the sound of Bobby’s drumming fists is clearly audible, yet neither Monroe nor Kathleen registers any emotion. Why should they give a shit about Kennedy? He’s way in the future, but in their immediate past are all the greats whooping it up at the Coconut Grove – Swanson and Shearer, Valentino and Flynn, Mayer and Chaplin. They’re too early, accelerating west, fuelled by the lust that will propel them all the way to Stahr’s half-built house in Santa Monica, where the nuages maritimes will creep through the chinks in its fuselage as they fuck on his raincoat on the floor.
They are too early – and I was too late: the Ambassador had been through the crusher and all that remained were chunks of dusty-white rubble baking behind a chain-link fence. When Scorsese pitched up to shoot The Aviator in the Coconut Grove, he had to back it up 500 yards to the Bullocks Wilshire, and it was there that Leo DiCaprio sipped milk and schemed to swat biplanes out of the sky – an actor playing an inchoate pathology, which would one day grow into a giant corporate gorilla.
We stopped for coffee – another big mistake: there was only so much anyone could take in when it came to Camera Jeff’s career lows. A missing poster tacked to a tree beside where we sat offered $1,000 for Scooby’s safe return. I thought back to the last time I’d seen him, disappearing behind the koi sign outside Iver, and, tearing off one of the paper slips, I resolved to make the call that night, a facecloth over the receiver to disguise my voice.
When we went on, with Jeff jogging along beside me, his eye-on-a-stick staring at my shoes, something had changed. My pulse began to quicken, lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a – it was paranoia on my part, certainly, but then they were sending them against me, these bioengineered anthropomorphic killing machines, human brains yoked to hundreds of horsepower. Waiting for the stop lights so I could cross into Hancock Park, I sympathized with those familiar features as they loomed in the screens, awfully contorted by the effort of braking. I could almost taste the sweet white flesh inside those two-millimetre-thick steel shells that had been artfully folded into Infinitis.
Lumpa-lumpa-lumpa-lumpa- I had been alone for a long time – not because I wanted to be, but because until I solved my … problem, there would be aspects of my personality I was unable to control. I was compelled to move from town to town, taking odd jobs where I could, staying off the books and below the radar, just an ordinary nerdy Joe with an IQ of 198 able to expand the coefficients of the binomial theorem while flossing my lacquered teeth. I might hide out here, in the eight-car garages attached to Florentine villas or Tudorbethan mansions, but sooner or later I would have to deal with it, did I want to fight them, or was it the dewily protuberant top lip of my only true love I saw shadowed by the sunshades?
Back on the Miracle Mile, the streamlined blocks taunt me with their grande vitesse, while I remain crawling along at ground level, menaced by a dump truck, lumpa-lumpa-lumpalumpluml’l’ – my hands clench in front of my starting eyes, green, alien, engorged, the pastel-painted oblongs of the storefronts ripple with distortion: a fireball has been ignited behind my eyes! The orange-and-white canopy of Busby’s movie theatre radiates visible spectra! A roar of rage, deep and grinding as a malfunctioning camshaft rotating all the way from Hellenistic Greece to Detroit, bursts from my barrelling chest. My T-shirt falls away in shreds, my baseball cap pops off like the plastic cap on a wine bottle. At last! Now it’s clear to me why my short pants have been so saggy-assed all day! Now that I have metamorphosed they’re a perfect fit!
I leap twenty feet in the air and come down hard on all fours, my elephantine hands and feet sending cracks fissuring through the sidewalk. I grab handfuls of hardtop and yank the roadway like a carpet runner, so that it rucks up, sending BMWs and Renegade Jeeps cannoning into one another. Oh! The heady perfume of spilt petrol, the festive tinkle of shattering glass!
I turn this way and that before the empty eyes of polystyrene heads ranged in the window of a wig store, marvelling at my own preposterous physique, abs and pecs wrapped around my ribcage like the coils of a monstrous green-skinned constrictor. Deltas of arteries radiate out from trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles thick as hawsers.
The thoughts of this gross a body cannot help but be visible, so, notwithstanding the drivers – who either run screaming, or grab guns from the glove compartments of their stalled and crashed cars – I pause to consider my prospects … my sexual prospects. I mean, c’mon, I’m, like, fourteen feet high, with a build that makes the most avid steroid-guzzler look mimsy – surely my cock ’n’ balls are to scale? Anger and lust – never more that a synapse apart – fuse behind the baroque half-dome of my forehead with its convex mouldings and entablature of worry lines. True, these vile creatures may be my sworn enemies, but I’d still like to … fuck one.
Say … that one, over there, the gridlocked black Hummer, with its tinted windows wobbling a come-on, as its speakers pump out the hypnotic bass line of a rap song that’s familiar despite my hydrocephalus. ‘Serviat! Raptetur! Serviat! Raptetur! Wires and nerves threaded through my unreasonable lusts and unsociable motions pull them tight and I kick out, sending an auto spinning on its longitudinal axis, scattering trim, fenders, fragments of window glass, then its doors, hood, wheel trim and alloys. The anti-roll bar neatly skewers a woman drinking a frappuccino outside Starbucks to a poster advertising frappuccino – violence of such jocular savagery it can be accepted uncritically as wholesome entertainment.
As can the kicked car, which goes on spinning until all that’s left is a body shell – the engine having long since plunged through the awning of the El Camino tapas bar – inside which the skull of its late driver is rattling like a pea in a whistle. Not that anyone pays any attention: the arty-slackers who were goofing beneath the awning have scattered already, whipping out their camera phones, so it’s with the low definition (yet enhanced newsworthiness) afforded by the tiny screen of a Samsung SGH-G800 that we witness my next trick: a Pontiac G5 coupe grabbed in one hand, my huge fingers fitting so neatly into the window holes that it’s impossible not to think: why hasn’t anyone done this before? And an old clunker of a Dodge Intrepid grabbed in the other – then the two autos beaten like cymbals as I roar and roar and roooooarrrr!
Suddenly squad cars are barricading off the four blocks of Wilshire between Detroit Street and Burnside Avenue, while the fat blue-and-white LAPD choppers bumble down over the rooftops, the perforated stings of .50 calibre machine-guns poking from their open hatches. Like I should care? I’m gonna hump a Hummer, so hurl the crumpled-tissue cars away, then lifting the off-road vehicle – perhaps for the first time in its life off the road – I tear a gash in its rear end the approximate size necessary. With disturbing tenderness I shift my grip so that I’m holding the car by its rear wheels and pull it towards my tumescent crotch.
