Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 135
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The air that morning, 12 June 2008, seemed like limpid water, and Camera Jeff’s lens a muzzle from which a bullet curled – was it the brutal, Powerade-fuelled congress in the cabana at the Roosevelt that made me feel as I had on those wet Tuesdays, when, emerging from the coruscation of the Californian highway into the familiar artificial twilight of a London night, I discovered that it wasn’t familiar any more, but strangely exciting – charged?
Surely it was this feeling, rather than the movies themselves, that so entranced career film critics? Because, let’s face it, there are only so many times any sane person can expose themselves to such hokum before they begin soundlessly lip-synching to the giant mouths on the screen, or running a chipped nail over the dead skin of the lips transfixed in the seat beside them. Bad rhyming quitting the Classic, leaving the Everyman, hitting the gilded boulevard, accompanied by some torpid fiddling about on the G string of a cello that suggests a troubled sexual repletion … The alternative – that critics retained the childlike ability to identify so closely with the sassily imperturbable Fox (Jolie) that they left their own foetuses reposing in red plush, to float up the tractor beam then dive through the screen and penetrate her drum-tight belly – was too awful for me to contemplate. It implied a relationship between critic and star analogous to that of Thetans and those genetic entities they had entered, millions of years in the past, long before they crawled from the primordial slime and became critics in their own right.
Either way, they were all wankers – an English term of general disapprobation drawn from the masturbatory that, to my way of thinking, has far greater resonance than the American ‘jerk-offs’. Sexual wankers, cultural wankers and – an Australian coinage this – time wankers, beating off their lives in the darkness while without the world goes on, a two-reeler, hand-cranked at an unrealistic speed, so that whole societies arise, then vanish forever, leaving behind only the dust of their own prematurely ejaculated geist. The money shot – again.
Wankers, and far more voyeuristic than honest subscribers to pornography, whose pay-perpreciation of the warped trajectory of a penis entering a vagina or an anus takes on the rarefied aestheticism of a Ruskin when set beside such gross satisfaction: piggy little eyes screwed up against the light, envaginating the madonnas on the hu-uge iconostasis over and over and over again. Is there any limit to the capacity of cineastes to be absorbed into these folds and curves of photons? They write their reviews, they expand these into essays, monographs and eventually entire books anatomizing their goddesses and gods. A chapter on their cheekbones, another on their clavicles, lengthy footnotes on the spaces in between their toes, because of the mind of the goddess – her ideas, her thoughts and feelings – there is precisely nothing to be said.
As I trudged on, my own warped trajectory brought me to the border between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The limpid water grew thinner and bluer as the sunlight gained in intensity. The grass along the verges was dense enough for any colt to crop. At the junction with Doheny Drive I spared a thought for Bret: was he up there in his ritzy apartment hosing off the crusts of last night’s fun? Was he wearily contemplating another day in the word mine, chipping away at the computer to expose veins of terse couplets?
Ray: Well, yeah, uh, I guess.
Phil: Later on, OK?
Or perhaps plotting a silken road through cyberspace to the pharmaceutical kampongs of the Far East, where brilliantly hued mounds of OxyContin, Halcion and Paxil sprawled on the ratscuttle floors, their silica slopes illuminated by the rays of light that shot through the perforations in the corrugatediron roofs high overhead?
I well remembered the last time I had visited the pharmacy on the South Lambeth Road to fill my prescriptions for Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin, the feijoada complexion of the Portuguese assistant, in the fatty mass of which swam morsels of acne. She had looked at me – quite reasonably – as if I were mad. Busner had prescribed the Seroxat for depression and the Dutonin because of my volatile reaction to what itself was intended as a dopamine governor. Then there was the Carbamazepin, a further tranquilizer necessitated by my restless spirit. I understood why, because left to my own devices I had a way of cabbing into the West End, scoring on the street, overdosing in the alley off D’Arblay Street, then beating off the paramedics who were reviving me, only to be found hours later wandering over Vauxhall Bridge, with the crotch of my jeans torn out and my jaw half dislocated, as if in the intervening period I had been practising enthusiastic soixante-neuf with a werewolf. American, natch, who, after his lectures at Richmond College – where his folks have paid for a summer semester – cruises the Soho bars sporting a charmingly recherché sleeveless anorak. Or gilet.
Standing beside the rack of plug adaptors, zip-up neoprene pouches and personal grooming tools, under the watchful eyes of a plaster Alsatian on a top shelf, I could feel the sine waves plotting the metabolic half-lives of these drugs tangle in my cortex, and in that moment I decided that a life in which happiness was mixed up like a mental cocktail was no kind of life at all. So I paid the assistant, took the plastic bag of meds home, tied a knot in the handle and chucked it up on to the top shelf in my study, where it lay for years, beside the yellowing typescript of my grandfather’s doctoral thesis ‘The Divine Indwelling’. This was his attempt to reconcile the then (1960) modish Existentialism with Eastern religion, Christianity and science. My father, who viewed his own failure to find a publisher for this weird synthesis as a betrayal of his patrimony, once asked me shortly before he himself died what I thought of ‘The Indwelling’. I confessed that after attempting a few pages I had come to the conclusion that Grandad – a notorious autodidact who studied for seven ordinary degrees while commuting to London each day on the Brighton Belle – ‘had suffered for his learning – and now it’s our turn’.
‘What’ve you done with Pete Postlethwaite?’
Camera Jeff, Sound Jeff and Gofer Jeff were standing round me in a menacing semicircle on the verge beside the Will Rogers Memorial Park. On the far side of Sunset Boulevard, the Beverly Hills Hotel was flanked by three-storey palms. In there, I imagined, execs were strong-arming deals; out here there was an intervention going on.
‘What’ve you done with him?’ reiterated Camera Jeff, the Fletcher Christian of this mutinous crew.
‘We’re working on this together,’ I said, looking down at my Rockports nuzzling in the clover-dense grass.
‘Lissen, I was prepared to shoot some footage of you when we picked you up on the Strip where we’d arranged to meet Pete, but enough’s enough.’
‘Enough’s enough? What the fuck—’
‘Yeah, enough’s enough. You may think you’re a player in this town, while we’re nobodies, but this is … this is—’
‘Bullshit!’ Sound Jeff pushed his angry red face forward.
‘Fuckin’ A!’ Gofer Jeff was dancing on the spot.
‘OK, OK, cool it you guys.’ Camera Jeff patted them down. ‘Mr Thewlis, we don’t want to alienate you.’
‘No, right,’ I laughed sarcastically. ‘Because you want to get paid, don’t you.’
A note of pity entered Camera Jeff’s voice, ‘Actually, that’s not an issue here – we were paid in full in advance by Mr Postlethwaite’s agent – a Mr Self?’
‘The name means nothing to me,’ I lied.
‘Anyway, this isn’t about money, it’s about our professional integrity.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Pete said this was going to be an experimental film – a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking round Los Angeles for a week. From the get-go we told him it wouldn’t add up to anything, but he insisted we trail him all the way from LAX Downtown, then from there to Hollywood. I didn’t know what to expect from him – I mean, I’d seen some of his work, but in the flesh he was, well, skittish.’
‘Skittish? You mean like “houynhmnhmnhmn”!’ I bared my yellow teeth and pranced on the verge. Camera Jeff chose to ignore this.
‘That’s right, skittish – ordering us about, then, when we miked him up he began talking this—’
‘Unbelievable bullshit!’ Sound Jeff bellowed. ‘I’ve had to listen to this crap for two days now!’
‘I don’t think that’s exactly nuanced, Jeff,’ said Camera Jeff. ‘I’ve listened to some of the recordings and it sounded to me as if Pete is having some kind of breakdown. Then this morning you turned up instead of him but wearing the same clothes and behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening – I’m gonna ask you one more time: where’s Pete? Is he back at the Roosevelt? We’re worried about him.’
I thought: the traffic, it’s always building up, silica grains flowing into mounds dammed by stop lights. What were roads anyway? Only pipelines of exasperation pressurized by time. Crown Victoria nosed Taurus, Taurus rimmed Corolla, Corolla went down on Tahoe. Between the snout of a Fusion and the butt of an Equinox I saw long-dead dreamer Richard Brautigan sporting a headband and shades, his big pack dragging on his shoulders as he wove towards Hollywood.
‘Let me get this straight.’ I stepped into Camera Jeff’s banally furnished personal space. ‘Are we splitting up over artistic differences?’
Someone, I thought, ought to be filming this: I needed a reverse shot, so I could see my wispy moustache bristle. I needed Dolby surround sound so I could hear myself shouting: ‘I don’t need this shit! I hired you fuckers and I can fire you too! You’re off this goddamn picture – off it, d’you hear?! Pick up your gear, bubba, and walk! ’
But it was me who did the walking, after I’d torn off the mike, then ripped the power pack from my belt and slapped it into Sound Jeff’s pudgy hand. They stood there bemused while I strode around the bougainvillea beds and away down Beverly Drive. I considered shouting back at them: ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’, but the line can be overused, don’t you think?
Carlos and Simon had made their mark on one of the birches lining Beverly Drive. Other Okies had taken time out to play noughts and crosses or score prick ’n’ balls pictograms. Soon enough my angry exhilaration subsided into the tangerine dream of première classe suburbia, where Latinos made with the flagstones and nobody’s escutcheon leant against a portico – and the sky, the sky was no longer limpid water, only a steadily dilating Playboy bunny’s hole lined with shelves upon which were stacked iPod Nanos and player-piano rolls, Box Brownies and HD video cameras, search engines and difference engines. Tipping back my head, I could see that this warm void was aching for Sergey Brin’s re-entry, as he splashed back down into Marina del Rey after his midweek break at the International Space Station. What – what would he find to google at, now that whole generations and societies had passed for ever: only a savage sitting on the dock of the bay scratching a prick ’n’ balls pictogram into its concrete. Under this the legend: DO NO EVIL.
I had my own small digital camera, and if I sensed the Hals clustering, or a wildcat crew creeping up on me, I could always whip it out and start filming myself, much as a boy wizard wields an invisibility cloak. The only problem I faced was the one of any ham alone in the age of technological reproducibility: who was looking at the me looking at me? Even Sergey hurtling earthwards in his steam-punk Soyuz capsule still had a back-projection of blue chiffon sky framed by the triangular porthole – this, a technique essentially unaltered since Sunset Boulevard, when the cops in the pursuit car stared intensely out at us, while behind them a second film of the unspooling roadway did for the trompe l’œil.
This then is the whole equation
projector → audience (screen) → cops driving (rear window) → Sunset Boulevard receding = reality
that, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s standin asserted, ‘Not half a dozen men have been able to keep … in their heads.’ It was nothing to do with the residuals for Dharma & Greg, and, believe me, I felt brittle just containing it in my nut, and wondered as I footed down Carmelita Drive whether it might make sense to hole up in the Spadena House. No one would look for me in this symbolic assemblage of witchy elements: burnt-toast eaves, spangly windowpanes, roughed-up plaster and a toad spawn chimney stack. The little homestead of horror had originally been built as a novelty office for the Culver City Movie Company, and only latterly rolled up into Beverly Hills on a truck. I could lie low – the house would recede on a low-loader. Like Donald Crowhurst when he abandoned the 1968/9 round-the-world solo yacht race, I would fake a diary of my own circumambulation, while in a parallel notebook I frantically operated on the equation, multiplying its terms until the warped rooms were cluttered with screens and retrospectives.
There was no smoking in Beverly Hills Park. Kitted out as a bum, the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott sat slumped in an abandoned office chair in the empty pergola – there was a beer bottle, queerly limp, drooping from his hand to his inner thigh. I crossed the road and holed up in the Coffee Café for a sandwich, observing the anthropophagi that patrolled the sidewalk in their Palomino-skin cowboy boots, the bands of jewelled denim between their hips taut as bowstrings.
For a less doughty voyager, departing the island of affluence lying between Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire and Rexford might have been dispiriting – yet I felt carefree, reknotting my shoelaces, reefing the strap of my backpack and stepping out with the wind behind me. It’s only those who have no experience of round-the-conurbation walking who imagine suburbia as an unvarying ocean of roof peaks and garden troughs; no, here is the great individualism Americans justly pride themselves on, with each property distinguished from its neighbour: Spanish Mission instead of Neogothic, japonica in place of bougainvillea, TruGuard rather than Mercian security.
From the ridge at Pico I could see the whole dish full of smog spread out beneath me, from which popped the upplummeting bodies of trampolining children and the inverted mop-tops of truffula trees. For a moment I hesitated – might it be an idea to set a course through the Hillcrest Country Club? I could join a lost tribe of rich Jews and wander that landscaped Sinai for … years. But no, I had a rendezvous with Tamisa the crossing guard, who sat in regal splendour at the junction of Beverwil and Cashio on her throne of puddled fat. ‘You’ve gotta get offa your backside,’ she told me without a smidgeon of irony. Then reassume it, I thought, part time at twelve bucks an hour.
Quite suddenly I was standing in a grocery store at Hughes Avenue buying a can of Kobe energy drink and chatting to the sales assistant, who was from Bhutan. He was unimpressed by my voyage: ‘I run a trekking business in my own country,’ he told me. ‘Also, I am a mountaineer.’
Outside I looked up at the frozen wang of the Santa Monica Freeway and thought better of it – so poured the drink away on to the asphalt. It wouldn’t do to arrive all fired up. I spat my tasteless cud of nicotine gum into my palm and was appalled to see that my jaws had expertly worried it into a perfect little voodoo doll of Orson Welles, complete with cloak and wide-brimmed hat. I shuddered, remembering the micro-manipulation of Hagop Sandaldjian, and, last fall, Sherman flung naked across the high bed – then Willy Town Mouse scuttled into the cheesy wedge of the Culver Hotel.
Which wasn’t so bad – there was a high staff turnover and no one remembered me. I was given a room on the third floor with a dinky four-poster garrotted by swathes of muslin. The shower’s low pressure felt historically accurate, then I sat drying off in a wing armchair looking out through breeze-buffeted net curtains at the balding Baldwin Hills, with their oil pumps rising and falling like failing hair implants. I had come almost full circle, and might reasonably have gone on to LAX and flown home to London. After all, no one else had turned up dead – yet.
Instead I phoned and in the gap between ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ heard the low moan of eight lost hours and the dumb percussion of falling marbles. I wanted to ask about the crime scene tape – was it still there? But she hardly ever left the house – except by Packard; while the children – who would’ve known – were out at casting calls. So we said our goodbyes and hung up, and in the seconds after the marriage of the plastic I felt as if, far from having communicated, we had only defined the vast compass of the incommunicable.
Guffin was waiting for me at a table outside Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled ‘American gastro-pub’ on Culver Boulevard, whose ‘executive chef’ was none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. I nodded to Mac and for a while we sat silently in an establishing shot, absorbing the drivel on the menu: Ford’s culinary philosophy was much influenced by the French slow-food movement, which favoured authentic locally sourced ingredients, simple preparation, blah-blah-bleurgh! It wasn’t a philosophy that extended to the establishment’s décor, with its gas station logo implying that esturgeon confit was another type of high-octane fuel.
The happy detective was being played by himself – he’d even grown his own trademark brown moustache for the role. It was a relief, of course, because I never knew before I actually saw someone who would be impersonating them, and even then if it was a good method actor it could still take a while to identify which one. As for me, Mac didn’t seem to care who had the part, only remarking, ‘You look well, man,’ before moving straight to business: ‘So, you’ve got a case for me?’
I filled him in on the conflagration at Pinewood and my escape with the quadrumanous cartoon dog. Then there was the episode on Century, and my discovery of the adulteration taking place at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant. I alluded to the car fight at the La Brea Tar Pits, but didn’t go into too much detail, then went over the horrific riot outside Grauman’s so exhaustively that by the time I’d finished we were both staring down at matching tartes tatin. Of anything to do with Thetans I said nothing – this was a litigious town, and then there were the Scientologists.
