Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 132
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Appalled fingers drop the SGH-G800, the view rears back and widens – but it’s too late! The choreography of the scene is unmistakable: given the proportionality of my sweat-greased carcass and the dirty boulevard, this could be any poolside out in the Valley, with me an oiled stud limbering up for the money shot, but:
Uh? Uh-oh.
No one need be that alarmed; for one, because this is a PG or at most a PG-13. I mean, nobody lays out the budget for this much wantonly artful destruction without a teenage target acquired. Also, there are – as I previously remarked – aspects of my personality that are beyond my control; surely, it stands to reason that a twice-life-sized bogey boy would have an erectile dysfunction? I may pull the rear of the Hummer towards my tow-hook, my ass cheeks tensing, my rictus widening to reveal incisors the size of dentists, but even as the four Crips leap from its front doors, MAC-10s jerking their hands as if they’re demented conductors, it’s clear I am unable to perform.
The comity of African-American gang members and white LAPD officers is definitely the subtext to this playlet. So what? The Crips’ pistols may spit fire, the cops’ handguns may boom – yet only every twentieth round hits me, and then I merely yelp as if this were flung gravel. The copters’ machine-guns spray this humongous gook more accurately – but I only clap a hand to my neck each time I’m bitten by a .50 calibre horsefly.
Nevertheless, like any frustrated rapist, I am doubly enraged, so snatch up more cars and hurl them at my antagonists – but when this fails to stop them I leap high in the air and come down near the summit of Desmond’s department store. Grabbing the chamfered corner, I start to tear one letter after another from the neon sign, sending them skimming down into the street, where they cleaver into buses, or else up into the sky, where a boomeranging e deftly shreds the rotors of a police copter so that it spirals into the citrus blooms of death.
Things are going my way until the untimely arrival of a marine company armed with FIM-82 Stinger ground-to-air missiles. The first three they launch miss me and inflict devastating collateral damage on Melrose. I leap to evade the fourth and land in the La Brea Tar Pits, where I make free with the hot black gloop, disembowel model mastodons and generally amuse myself. Still, it’s clear that the fight’s going out of me as I wade in circles waisthigh in the pit. So much so that emboldened tourists creep up behind me like kids playing grandma’s footsteps, then pop their miserable flashes. The money shot – when it finally comes – is a tarry plash across their lenses.
I came to in the Farmers Market on Fairfax and 3rd, sitting at a Chinese food stall with two or three other toothless old Jews jew-jewing on noodles and kvetching our way through the hot afternoon. ‘Jesus, Willy,’ said one, ‘you’re so goddamn thin you need reverse lipo, man – some fat squirted into you.’
It was true: my pants were so slack they could comfortably house the Incredulous Hulk. ‘Yeah,’ I mumbled, ‘you’d know all about getting fat squirted into you, Al, coz that’s what your Dora does with her lokshen soup.’
‘Heh-heh-heh,’ gum-chuckled the oldsters, then went back to their jew-jewing and slurping.
I was only mildly fazed by my ability to seamlessly Matthauize with their Parkinsonian blur of liver-spotted hands; hadn’t this always been the key juxtaposition of Hollywood: up on the screen the industry of souls, while in the backroom the sunshine boys black up and cry for mama? So I sat, smothered by awnings and homeyness, contemplating the Three Dogs Bakery (‘Bakery for Dogs’), while from the south there emanated the wailing of sirens, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire, and the kerboom! of ground-to-air missiles. This, the latest death rattle of the megalopolis, was something we oldsters were all familiar with, and so we went on with our ho fun, continued the green tea treatment.
I left a ten-spot for my share of the check and wobbled off into the hurdy-gurdy consumerism of the Grove Mall. All those screen gunfights, what were they, if not a brilliantly deployed strategy of Calm and Blasé against the insurgency of the Id? Of course, things could get out of hand – there was mission creep to contend with. It was only nine days since the propane cylinders on the New York set at Universal had exploded sending a King Kong cloud roaring into the sky above Hollywood. While LAFD’s finest had fought the flames sporting the gold foil suits of poorly conceived aliens, 40,000 archived videotapes had burned – together with the sets of Back to the Future.
As I bent to pick up a strip of packing tape twined in the fence of Pan Pacific Park, Gofer Jeff came barrelling along the sidewalk on her denim kegs. ‘Mr Thewlis! Mr Thewlis!’ she puffed. ‘We’re so sorry – we kinda lost you back there.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I snapped. ‘So long as you keep laying down covering fire for these last three miles I’ll be just fine.’
‘Covering fire?’ She looked at me as if I were aha-a-ha-ha-ha a cold-blooded killer.
‘Sorry, I mean, so long as you keep rolling until I get to Hollywood, then …’ I struggled to cinch my elephantine pants with the tape.
‘Then what?’
I knotted the tape. ‘Then it’s a wrap.’
At 6922 Hollywood Boulevard there was a small terrace outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I sat dunking two of Earl Grey’s hot nuts into a styrofoam cup full of boiling water. Opposite me a bum with an uncanny resemblance to the French romanciermaudit Michel Houellebecq was nursing a mug rimmed with old froth. He wore a mauve shirt over a leather jacket and his sock-puppet face was scuffed and scabby. A Discman lay on the metal tabletop between his bloated fingers, the headphones of which clipped a dirty-cream panama to his ginger hair.
I had loathed him at first sight – would that I could’ve been planted opposite the efficient student at the next table, whose thrift-store cheongsam was split high on her chubby thigh. I eyed her well-thumbed Pride and Prejudice and her puppyish tummy with equal covetousness. The Houellebecqalike smelt – he muttered ‘Get it together!’ and other worrying exhortations.
Behind me I could hear the squeaking and baying of a rapidly gathering crowd. As I had taken my seat I’d clocked the security barriers, the bald boys in black suits and the limos pulling up outside Grauman’s – there was obviously a première under way, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my teatime, any more than P. G. Wodehouse had allowed the transportation logistics of Los Angeles to disrupt his habits, when he reported for his first day’s work at MGM in Culver City, having walked the six miles from Beverly Hills.
I sipped my Earl Grey judiciously – the only movie stars left in Hollywood were the supermen’s batmen, the jokers’ tin men, the Elvises and the Marilyn Monroes. Still, at least the impersonators had the virtue of honest subterfuge – not so the out-of-towners treading on the stars’ stars who were being drawn to the red carpet like flies to an Insect-O-Cutor. Once they got between the pavilions, under the mad eaves of the Chinese Theater, they’d get uglier: sunshine and oranges were not enough, not now they were a lowering and bitter crowd.
The traffic continued to rumble and toot, the Houellebecqalike continued to mutter and poot. The first screams were synchronized with the camera flashes reflected in the window of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but soon enough this son et lumière became a dinning zoetrope, then a howling stroboscope – and still I did not turn; didn’t until from out of the hysteria projected a single comprehensible line of dialogue: ‘That guy never gives autographs!’ Then at last I swivelled in my seat to be confronted by a black face gone blubbery with joy. He held out his book so everyone on the terrace could see the page. There was the mark, the stave of the J serving for the T as well, both names lying upon a dais of a flourish and – a few feet beyond the baying hound – there was the marker.
He was wearing a shiny slate bomber jacket with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a $500 T-shirt, and there were sunglasses tipped forward on his charming nose. There he was, Justin Timberlake, his pale trunk tipping forward into the pool of faces, while a forest of limbs reached up to grab him. And there too, floating on the end of a blue-and-white-striped tie, was the clown-face-designed-by-committee of Mike Myers, while beside him bulged the baby puss of Jessica Alba.
‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ the crowd chanted, while the security detail that had ushered these, the stars of the new Myers comedy vehicle, The Love Guru, across the road, were now frantically trying to get them back. It wasn’t the cars that were the problem – their drivers sat, docilely accepting the mêlée – it was the crowd, which, having filled up the forecourt of the theater, came coursing between the stalled vehicles, a human torrent with waves of faces.
Rising unsteadily to my feet, I addressed my fellow patrons: ‘C’mon, people!’ I struggled to make myself heard. ‘This is lunacy. Justin Timberlake! Mike Myers! Jessica-fucking-Alba? These are not big stars even by the standards of our Lilliputian era – seriously, no one’s gonna riot over them.’ I waved my arm wildly and knocked over my cup. Earl Grey leapt into the Houellebecqalike’s lap. He leapt up crying, ‘Roi du cons!’, grabbed me by the throat and began dragging me off the terrace.
Before I toppled into the millrace of sentiment, I was gifted with a moment of clarity: I saw that the bald boys had succeeded in corralling the money back on the far side of the boulevard, while the crowd that whirled around Grauman’s had swollen mightily, its turbulence of bodies enveloping the stalled vehicles and washing up against the fronts of the buildings to twice head height. I saw that the people closest to me were highly individuated – I had only to look upon them to know all about them.
Valerie Schultz, a dental hygienist from Portland, Oregon, a tad overweight, a jet-bead bracelet buried in her wurst folds, a cold sore on her full lower lip, had been date-raped in 1984 and became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption, but two years ago he tracked her down. He was angry, almost illiterate – he’d run away from foster parents in Cedar Rapids to join a biker gang. Valerie got him on a methadone programme, but he still drank – and when he drank he beat her, hence the yellowy-blue stippling of a bruise on the flap of belly exposed as, bobbing in the mob, her T-shirt rides up.
Bob, Duane and Kerry-Anne – I can smell their separate savours as they sibilate ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ But, just as anonymity shades in notoriety, so the further my eye roves the more stereotypical the faces of the crowd become. Then I’m being tossed and buffeted, bouncing off a belly over here, receiving a clout from a stray fist over there. As I am pitched up on to their heads and shoulders, the cacophony of moans, catcalls, shrieks, chants and applause becomes overwhelming. From up here I can make out small islets of the recognizable – a Tin Man with an oil-funnel hat, Elvis mouthing, ‘Everybody let’s rock!’ – but these are surrounded by visages, the eyes, noses and mouths of which are no more differentiated than the funiculae, mandibles and compound eyes of a locust corvée.
To begin with I assume that it’s my own proximity that can imbue these anthropoids with individuality – but I’m soon disabused, for as the agitated waves sweep me away from the terrace of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the crowd becomes more cloned. By the time I’m two blocks further and being scraped along the stone rendering of the L. Ron Hubbard Gallery, I’m surrounded by a swarm whose faces are smooth convexities of flesh, gashed with slots from which issue a monotonous drone.
My clothes are ripped to shreds, blood flows from cuts on my chest and thighs – unless I can gain a place of safety soon I’ll be torn to shreds by the computer-generated mob. Think – think! The clones may be frenzied but they move only where preordained by their creators; if I can read the currents and cross-currents perhaps I can go with the flow? I note the alignment of the Orange Grove sign with a palm tree: that bearing should take me towards the Roosevelt Hotel. I twist and slip sideways into the tide coursing back towards Grauman’s; then, as it draws level with the tree, I push hard at a head with both feet and reach for the trunk … only to be swept backwards by a rush heading the other way.
Horrified, I realize I’m in the van of a flying wedge charging straight towards a horde going in the opposite direction. Their impact flips me head over heels, and as the two columns grind against each other I’m twirled again and again, as a spar is battered by a weir. ‘JussstinJussstinJussstinJussstin!’ The pressure increases – if I’m sucked into an eddy I’ll be trampled to death beneath the clones’ feet, which, despite their binary DNA, are rigid and hard. My ribs are cracking, my shoulders and hips disjointing … I fight it, kicking out to keep my feet on the ground. Another moaning rush, ‘JusssJusssJusss!’, and I find myself in a calm spot where the pressure slackens – although now I feel a terrible stabbing pain in my lower back. It’s strange, given that the forms that surround me have no more angles or projections than mass-produced souvenir Oscar statuettes … I can’t turn but manage to twist my head: a very skinny kid wearing a Lakers cap has his sharp shoulder digging into my kidneys. Shocked by this reindividuation, I pan about and see that, yes, others of the homologues are becoming distinguishable, with here a shock of brown hair, there a scattering of freckles, over there a beaded dreadlock.
It must be that whoever animated the scene anticipated action here requiring a close-up. I crane to see under the peak of the boy’s cap – he’s as vague as a ghost, so, having laboriously freed my arm, I swing on him, a clumsy haymaker that comes down on top of his head and with a yelp he goes under. There’s a further wild surge that washes me into another calm pool; this time I’m facing a young woman who sobs hysterically. Her cotton print dress has been ripped from the neckline to her waist – her brassière as well. Her breasts would be beautiful, were it not that one of them is missing a nipple. I push back to give her some room, but every time I move she moves with me, insinuating her leg between my thighs. I’m becoming aroused – until the girl spasms violently and her blonde bob lifts to reveal that she has no ears. ‘Stop it! Fuckin’ quit!’ she yells – but it isn’t me that’s bothering her, it’s the clone behind her, whose blank screen morphs into a goatish leer … then I see that he has his hand up her dress, while he dribbles on her bare neck.
My arm is still aloft, so I grab his ear – another action that’s obviously been anticipated, for it’s as well formed as an anatomical drawing. I squeeze it as hard I can and twist, but it isn’t long before skin melds with cartilage and the ear disappears back into a slick egghead that’s borne away from me. At least the young woman has escaped, although when I try to pick out her blonde bob in the crowd it too has been subsumed by the pixels … Another spasm passes through them; I find myself within an arm’s length of a signpost, a second spasm and I grab it, am swung up and round into the air …
A final view of Hollywood Boulevard crashing with waves of sound: ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ The pagodas of Grauman’s soar thousands of feet into the sky, as do the other, less ornate buildings, all of which have been subjected to the same crude multiplier. In the deep trough between them the crowd ripples, and there’s a last sensation of buoyancy as I float on this lake of doppelgängers before a providential swirl carries me into the gloomy inlet of the Roosevelt’s lobby.
I stared at my idol face in the tarnished pool of an old mirror for a long time, yet there seemed no evidence of the ordeal I had just survived: my clothes were intact; my baseball cap was clamped firmly on my head. True, my expression was a little wary, but even as I looked a familiar superciliousness crept back in from the edges. I sniffed deeply, sucking up the ineradicable odour of old hotel – dust and static electricity – then padded back towards the stairs that led down to the reception desk.11
Between square pillars I could see that the tables were already laid in the restaurant, glassware and cutlery gleaming on dark wood. I checked my watch: 7.16 already – I had better get ready fast, or I’d be late for my dinner with Bret.
7
My Dinner with Bret
‘Is the asparagus fresh?’
‘Well, it’s in a soup, so it’s been, like, puréed.’
‘But was it fresh when it was puréed?’
‘I guess.’
‘What about the halibut?’
‘I can assure you: that’s definitely fresh.’
‘Definitely?’
‘Definitely.’
Fresh the halibut may have been, although this was still the type of restaurant where dead fish were laid out for boning on squared-off mounds of clapshot or polenta. Over Bret’s shoulder the dun dining room of the Roosevelt seamlessly merged with the deeper and wider murk of the Spanish Revival lobby, where an enormous crystal chandelier dripped wanly, scarcely illuminating the exposed ceiling beams, let alone the mezzanine level cornice with its pattern of desert blooms.
There had been some manoeuvring before we were installed by our own square pillar, which, like all the others in the restaurant, had been boxed off at head height by interior designer Dodd Mitchell – although probably not personally.
‘I don’t want to sit next to anyone in this town,’ Bret had explained to the maître d’ after rejecting the first two tables offered. He was wearing a cool-looking cream linen suit and a positively chilly blue silk shirt. Ray-Bans poked from his display pocket, and when he canted sideways on the banquette suede loafers poked out from beneath the table. He was being played by mid-period Orson Welles – neither the obese, sherry-swilling old roué who had taken on Busner’s role, nor the young Welles who had impersonated the writer back in the mid-1980s, at the summit of his notoriety.
I didn’t know who’d taken me on this evening – and Bret was giving nothing away. I thought it unlikely that Postlethwaite had been racketing around Manhattan in the nineties, which was when I’d got to know the author of American Psycho, but it was possible Thewlis had been there for raucous dinners at Elaine’s, big drinks in the small hours at Mary Lou’s in the Village, then dawn upchucking from the East River, glimpsed nauseously by vampires doing lines of cremains off somebody’s butcher block in someone else’s apartment.
