Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 137
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
‘Bye, Pete,’ Lynton called.
‘Goodbye, Mr Postlethwaite,’ his secretary echoed. ‘And, by the way’ – she made the usual moue – ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but I loved you in Dinotopia.’
I walked down Main Street, passing neon signs for bowling alleys, a piano bar, the Continental Hotel. This was no torn children’s book, the fragments dancing in an open fire – nor was it the Sargasso of the imagination where all the dreams ever dreamt are becalmed. No doubt somewhere in the cool, humming interiors of the sound stages, animatronic ducks were dancing in front of a blue screen, but out here there was only a carpenter lifting paint pots from a golf cart, and the open doors to a cavernous prop warehouse.
I paused, rubbing my eyes, hearing them squelch: a Spiderman caught in the web of the present. On three-storey shelves sat the things, the great material substratum of the enacted, its TVs and washing machines, magazine racks and rugs, bottles of Powerade and bathroom mats, telephones and coat trees, brass statuettes and Barcaloungers, pool toys and vibrators, the neurofibrillary tangles and Bronze Age funerary gifts of a culture crazed by its own capacity for replication. Even a cursory examination was enough to tell me that this hangar possessed its own stratigraphy; that the stuff of Now reposed on the highest shelves, up near the roof, while at ground level I was staring at the fox-fur stoles, Victrolas and aspidistra pots of the era when the movies had only just begun. As I looked on, a forklift truck pulled into the stores and shovelled up a henge of ancient beige plastic computing equipment. No doubt soon enough it would be shot; and then, chained to their seats in the caves of illusion, the prisoners would watch the shadows of these things cast upon the wall. So that when they arose they might go back to the plaster and plywood of their own lives, bite down on the sawdust.
Beyond the main gates Los Angeles was waiting, her hot legs spread – and I entered them, devoutly. In the Hayden Tract, a phantasmagoria of Sci-Arc buildings with broken bone girders, staircases to nowhere and oriel windows bursting like buboes, I found a café where I could sit outside. I smoked, drank tea and finished Bret’s Lunar Park. There was room in the novel for Harrison Ford to have a walk-on part – he, who had himself once been a set carpenter, hammering away on the hulks becalmed in the Sargasso of the imagination. I left the book lying on the table – what did narrative have going for it anyway – only smelting kryptonite out of coincidence so as to trap us superheroes in the mundane.
Out here, by rights, I should have feared the zephyrs uncoiling from the brows of the Baldwin Hills – but instead I hitched up my pants and made for La Cienega; it – not they – would carry me the six miles north, back to Hollywood.
‘Surfer frat boys – that’s all I can think about.’
‘And you’re telling me he didn’t have a place to live?’
‘Yeah, but he was sooo cute, but crazy – when I first started dating him he admitted it.’
‘It?’
‘That he’d set the fire himself – the one he received the, uh, commendation for.’
I couldn’t prevent myself from eavesdropping: did she really say ‘surfer frat boys’? Or from looking from the sheepskin seams of her lambbag to her charm bracelet to her anorexic bangs. Her companion was just a hair head – to me.
I’d regained consciousness in a booth in a McDonald’s, and, judging by my small pot of soda and skimpy burger, I’d only popped in to use the restroom. It wasn’t until I was back out in the street, striding through the tinted air, that it occurred to me to offer her this factoid: her lover was not alone. It’s been estimated that 20 per cent of all fires are set by the LAFD itself – acts of daring professional closure that could only make psychiatrists gasp in admiration as they drove their patients insane with neuropharmacology.
It wasn’t until I was back out on Cienega that I realized where I was: around the junction with Olympic. And this … this too needed to be noted: that every time Marlowe or Archer got sapped, then came to with a line of inconsequential dialogue in his ears surfer frat boys … it was a metaphor for Los Angeles’s sprawl, as its long lean boulevards stretched out from the rumpled bed. Too much trouble to describe all those Hummers with their wobble-board doors bass vibrating, too much effort to block in those body shops and dental technicians, the stench of a gas station and the street persons, who, skin like bacon rind, were frying today as the smog blew away. Keep on walking… Johnnie Walker, dapper in top hat and frock coat, his boots shined, his monocle screwed into his eye, strode out towards Hollywood, yet never arrived, pinned as he was like a butterfly to the billboard.
I came to again in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, getting ready for the party being given in my honour. (Well, not so much a party – that implies an importance I wouldn’t wish for a second to arrogate to myself; more of a gathering, really.) I was still thinking about the burning of Los Angeles and waiting for Faye to get back – it was that kind of bungalow. Naked, fresh from the shower, I wandered from the small bedroom, icy with state-of-tech TV and music system, to the kitchen, which, with its humming rhombus of an icebox, its foursquare sink – suitable for tanning hides – its chintzy muslin curtains and linoleum pong, suggested a happier era of making do belied by the dishonourable tray loaded with potato chips, cookies, cashews and liquor bottles.
I dressed and went outside to where evening had sidled between the palm leaves, and cheery lanterns lit up the mini-homesteads of this dinky banana republic. From the direction of the pool I could hear a little pre-supper goosing going on: a splash, a cry, the wet thwack of a bikini strap. Behind my bungalow Mike Myers’s moon face rose up, cratered by the Mare Imbrium of his fake beard. His karma is huge…
I walked towards the thwack, let myself out through the metal gate, skirted the porte-cochère, walked down the lane, then along Sunset, and, passing between two sharp-featured young women snapped into black Lycra, entered the Bar Marmont. My key fob bulged in the pocket of my short pants as I walked up some stairs, along a narrowing corridor, through a barroom the width of a train carriage and into a second, narrow as a toilet stall, then into a third no wider than a chicken run, at the end of which I climbed through a trapdoor into a hutch cluttered with armchairs and oil paintings and people – most of whom were thrashing about in a purse seine smoking area, accessed via french windows the size of marmalade jars.
They were all there in the limelight: the Jeffs and Bret, Michael Lynton and Ellen DeGeneres, James Crespinel and Judy Brown, Michael Laughlin16 – who was explaining the genesis of his self-designed sneakers to a young woman whose name I never did learn – and Mac Guffin, who immediately drew me to one side: ‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘I picked up five fucking tickets minding your back all the way up Cienega.’
‘No one asked you to do that,’ I hissed. ‘And if you had to, why didn’t you ditch the wheels?’
‘Aw, c’mon fellah, don’t be like that – I’m just trying to look out for you; they’re on your tail – y’know that, don’tcha? They’re sharpening their knives, putting on their leather faces, cranking up their chainsaws, I mean, it’s because you’re paranoid that they’re now coming to get you–’ He broke off to take a highball glass full of fruit from a waitress struggling through the throng.
‘Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mac,’ I snarled; ‘why not just piss all over my party.’
‘Party?’ He shook his Labrador head, then began slobbering on a pineapple chunk. ‘Isn’t that a little grandiose – it looks more like a–’
‘Nice gathering,’ Bret said, cutting in appositely. ‘This is Brad.’ A tall, good-looking young man in blue jeans and a silky-black hoodie, the pink drapes of whose top lip parted to reveal expertly bleached teeth.
‘Hi,’ said Brad chirpily.
‘Brad is directing a movie called The Shrink.’
‘Really?’ I said with maximum disdain. ‘And what of it?’
‘He wondered if you might like to drop by the set – they’re shooting on location down at Venice; wouldn’t that be on your way back to LAX?’
‘Uh, yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to sound unconcerned, although I was whining inside: Is he trying to get rid of me?
‘Bret says you’re walking clear round LA,’ said Brad.
‘That’s the aim.’
‘Any special reason?’
‘I’m location spotting for a movie about a guy who circumambulates Los Angeles,’ I told him. ‘I originated the script, did the development myself, put together a lot of the finance, then took it to Sony.’ I jabbed a finger towards Lynton. ‘They’ve green-lit the project and I’ll be directing as well.’
‘And starring?’
I really didn’t like this Brad – he was snider than an illgotten Madison hidden in a coffee can.
‘Well, no, since you ask – obviously not. I may have some profile as an actor but I’m not that bankable. Leo DiCaprio will be playing me – although he’s gonna need a body double for the walking scenes.’
Brad was smirking and I foresaw that our next exchange would cross the border at Tijuana into outright savagery. Luckily DeGeneres took my elbow and guided me away, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Don’t mind us, guys, there’re some people I’d like David to meet.’
There was Dervla, who as she spoke took strand after strand of her own chestnut hair in her scissoring fingers – as a hairdresser might – and who wondered if I would be interested in her idea: ‘Based on an original phobia of my own – fear of candlesticks.’ And there was Ogden, who had bitten his nails so badly he had to wear ten finger puppets. ‘What’s the pitch?’ He threw his chucklesqueak into the felt mouth of the Mickey Mouse one. ‘I’ll tellya, it’s about a guy who’s nervous, nervous, noy-vuss – set in Manhattan, natch – or at least, on a set of Manhattan crowded with scrumptious twenty-somethings deafened by canned laughter.’ And then there was Artie, who had spent the last thirty years in a remote cabin in Montana obsessively writing and rewriting a movie script about a reclusive anarcho-Luddite who launches a bombing campaign aimed at derailing the relentless reproducibility of technology: ‘I worked on birch bark,’ Artie confided, ‘using a bone stylus and pigments I had extracted from wildflowers. Then, when I finally returned to civilization, I found out about the Unabomber – man, was I pissed – my whole fuckin’ idea stolen for real.’
They were all interesting pitches, yet I found it difficult to concentrate and kept grabbing Coke after Coke from the trays swirling through the smallish crowd. So there was my mounting and gaseous turbulence – and also the disconcerting presence of Susan Atkins’s amputated leg (which, so far as I knew, no one had invited), which kept kicking the guests’ butts, a grim travesty of the murders it would undoubtedly have tried to perform if it could’ve got their necks behind its knee.
‘What’s with the severed leg?’ I asked Ellen. ‘I mean, is it some kind of ironic comment on my walk?’
‘Lighten up, David,’ she said. ‘Think of Atkins’s leg as just another Mac Guffin – like the hands of Orlac.’
‘You’re not gonna graft that thing on to me, lady. I mean, I’ve got enough homicidal tendencies of my own.’
She looked at me with an odd expression, but only said: ‘Shall we go on and have some dinner at the hotel? The others are already there.’
It was then that I noticed that the once-threshing crowd had been landed – the purse seine was empty except for me, Ellen, the leg and the legman. ‘Will you join us?’ I asked Mac, but he only handed me a manila envelope.
‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Everything I could find out; read it later and then call me.’ He snagged Atkins’s leg, which was hopping past, and tucked it under his arm like an umbrella. ‘The sick shit that goes down in this town,’ he muttered as he duck walked in front of us along the chicken run, but I knew his comments weren’t addressed to anyone in particular, just as I also knew that he was as happy as a pig in it.
The evening began to end in the hotel restaurant. We were eating paella made with giant insects, and although the antennae caught in my teeth they didn’t taste too bad. I was sandwiched between a movie lawyer and the teenage wife of a mogul who was fully gravid – it seemed she might give birth at any moment, a baby doll torn bloody from beneath the hem of her baby doll dress. The lawyer was telling me he represented Rutger Hauer – although what that had to do with anything (even Hauer himself) was entirely obscure. Then he said, ‘I live out at the Palisades in a one-storey house. Y’know people aren’t killed by earthquakes at all – they’re killed by houses.’
The evening was killed off by my bungalow. Coming along the path from the pool, I saw that the moon had risen above the billboard advertising The Love Guru, and I cursed myself for my earlier trope: the Mare Ibrium was nothing like a fake beard – Myers’s or anyone else’s.
I sat smoking a Joya de Nicaragua and got out Mac’s report – which turned out to be a photocopy of my own. I leafed through the forty-odd pages, smiling grimly at the smiley faces and scattering cigar ash on the elaborate diagrams. Mac had scrawled a few words across the final page: ‘Copies of this are being widely circulated – if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em.’
10
The Virgil of Laurel Canyon
It must have been a hell of night, because when I awoke – tucked as savagely into my bed as I had been by the disapproving nurse at Heath Hospital thirty years before – I found I’d had breast implants done. And not just any breast implants – Laura Harring’s. At least, I fantasized that they might be Laura Harring’s breast implants, because when I examined them in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door they had a combination of inelasticity and prominence that reminded me of the improbability of her chest – relative to the slimness of her back – when Harring and Naomi Watts took off their tops to fake love in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive18 (2001).
I wondered whether implying that anyone might have had breast implants was libellous – but the alternative – that these were Laura Harring’s actual breasts – was too awful to contemplate. I mean, there was I, idly caressing them, while Harring might well be lying somewhere dreadfully hacked about. In an interview I had read with the actress she said: ‘Life is a beautiful journey. Every episode of my life is like a dream and I am at peace and happy with what life has given me.’ But there was no way she could factor a sadistic double-mastectomy into such a beneficent dream – this was a thieving nightmare. Or had Harring been murdered, her beautiful face beaten to a pulp with a brass statuette of a monkey? If so I was off the hook for libel – but without an alibi for the caesura of the past twelve hours.
Clearly, it was time to force the pace of events: if they were messing with me to this extent I’d better take the fight to them. I leafed through the Yellow Pages, found the number, called it and discovered there was a meeting in Hollywood that very morning. Good, I’d have some breakfast, then stroll over.
Slumping in the kitchenette, teapot on the table, and beside it the newly polished brass statuette of a monkey, I poked one long lean thigh languorously out from the folds of the hotel bathrobe. Ignoring the multiple sections of the LA Times strewn all around, I felt as iconic as a Terry O’Neill photo – which was just as well, because even in a town renowned for sick shit it was going to take some guts to hit the streets with my purloined tits.
I needn’t have worried, by the time I’d shaved and dressed, the breasts – or implants – had begun to subside, becoming first perfectly normal middle-aged bubs and then the budding nubbins of a teenage girl. Locking the door to the bungalow, I slid a hand up under my T-shirt and was relieved to discover coarse hair. The whole tit-thing must have been the after-effect of a particularly polymorphous erotic dream, and although I felt a little cheated it had to be better than murder.
I found the meeting up on Hawthorn in some kind of community centre. There was a Formica table covered with leaflets and a forty-year-old woman with braces and a tongue stud serving coffee through a hatch. Savouring the ghostly aroma of last week’s cheap meals, I took one, figuring it was only Nescafé, and thinking also of how it was I walked among them, these seraphic folk, able to suspend disbelief in films, in TV adverts, in pop songs, in microwaved food – and even in age itself. Maybe – just maybe – this could work for me too.
All the rest of the cast was assembled – exactly the players you’d expect for a self-help production almost anywhere in the maldeveloped world: following men and trailing ladies, character-defect actors, bit failures and spare extras. I slotted right into this stereotypy and no one paid me the least attention as I threw myself down on a canvas bottomed chair, muttering and slurping and giving off that supersonic whine that’s unfailingly associated with mental distress.
I watched and listened as the children of Xenu were called onstage to testify to their treatment at the hands of the cult. This frail girl, all elbows and ears, the ends of her hair as fractured as her psyche, explained how she had been recruited into the Sea Org19 at the age of twelve and spent eight years being bullied and abused – four of them as a suppressive person, forced to wear an orange jumpsuit and wield a mop for fourteen hours a day. She wept.
As did a burly man, who said that while he had managed to make the break, his parents – despite everything that had happened to him – continued to believe that they were Thetans who had been exiled to earth 75 million years ago, and that after arriving at an implant station housed in an extinct volcano, they had clung to genetic entity after genetic entity, piggybacking their way through evolution, until they ended up passing out leaflets on Hollywood Boulevard. He himself had had a breakdown after leaving, and when his parents – ‘They still love me …’ – had the temerity to meet with him, they too had been labelled ‘suppressive persons’.
‘You guys know what that’s like,’ he sobbed. ‘Nobody can talk to them, sit with them, hand them a friggin’ cup of coffee – and you know the awfulest thing, I kinda feel that way too. I feel like I’m a suppressive person even out here in the real world – I just can’t connect.’
