Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  Felipe, seeing how loose my ends were becoming, malevolently suggested I might like to visit a carniceria out in East LA, so I walked over Bunker Hill to Broadway and waited among the baggage, the denim and the rolled gold for the 31 bus. It ground across the bridge over the Inca runnel of the Los Angeles River, then along 1st Street, while I watched in-bus American Latino TV: adobe men in white hoodies yapping like Disney characters for a public health campaign.

  It was mid-morning and the carniceria sat beside the dusty road, a nondescript three-storey building. Inside, the narrow aisles lined with chiller cabinets smelt of blood and there was sawdust on the floor. Signs read FOOD STAMPS ACEPTAMOS, the lighting was yellow and blue, pigs’ trotters lay in a stepped pyramid climbed by lost flies. There was no one about – I reached across to where a cleaver lay on a wooden chopping board scored with never-to-be-erased blows. I hefted the cleaver – it felt right, perfectly weighted. I only let it fall, applying no force – only let the inertia carry it through its short arc, the same way my late father-in-law had told me to play a golf stroke: letting the weight of the club head follow through the ball, which in this case was a chunk of my thigh, and a neat slice of my jeans. The fabric absorbed the blood from the meat – a few drops fell across the sawdust.

  I had a handkerchief with me and I tied it round my leg, thinking I looked acceptably Peckinpah. Or at least I must have done this, because when I was myself again I was standing on the parched grass of the Evergreen Cemetery, looking at the effaced tombstones of Civil War dead, and there was the tourniquet and the ferrous red on my spasmodic hands.

  Sherman called that evening and when he realized the state I was in he had Baltie drive him back into town from Palm Springs. ‘You are fucked up, man,’ he said, finding me lying in my slough at the top of the yellow tower in the Westin. I’d stolen Felipe’s big pencil and scrawled stuff on the walls: ‘Very little application, very little hope, very little probity, very little ...’

  ‘Sherm,’ I croaked, ‘there’re things we need to talk about – stuff to do with the past.’

  ‘I don’t wanna hear about it,’ he snapped, then: ‘Yup, no, Vargas has the necessary financial instruments.’ He turned his back on me and toddled to the window, continuing the call – which seemed to be something to do with piling up five dressed-stone body forms at Machu Picchu. It was left to Baltie to haul over the business directory and find a doctor who’d do a house call.

  The next day Baltie drove us south through the flatlands to Anaheim. It was an interminable journey, strip after mall after strip. I suppose I must have been a little feverish, and despite – or perhaps because of – the OxyContin the doctor had prescribed, I kept slipping sideways from consciousness, only to slice back in as we pulled up at another stoplight and there was Sherman’s blocky head spewing words and cigar smoke: ‘There’s no sense to that, if the base plate is being fabricated in Manaus it will have to be taken down the Amazon ...’

  At Disneyland, Sherman explained: ‘I think you’re in need of a little reparenting, you’ve lost your way.’ He reached up and took my hand with surprising tenderness. ‘I want you to think of me as your mother—’ Then, exactly like my long-dead mother, his attention was snagged by an incoming call, and he let go of my hand to field it.

  We wandered along the ersatz Main Street USA, and queued for Autopia in Tomorrowland. Sherman’s grace was well to the fore: no matter how many kids pointed or called out to him, he responded with a cheery wave. ‘Don’t you love it here?’ he asked after we’d driven the dinky karts round the circuit for a while and were heading for the Small World ride, the three of us licking outsized ice cream cones.

  ‘Um, well, love may be a bit too strong, but Sherman, I have to—’ Once again I was frustrated, this time by the ride being shut. The Disney people wouldn’t admit what had happened, but later we learnt that one of boats had blocked the flume.

  ‘They were built for smaller people!’ Sherman crowed. ‘And now these fatties cram themselves in it’s definitely a smaller world.’

  The day after that it was the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City and Sherman and I were riveted for hours by Hagop Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs poised in the eye of a needle.

  The Armenian had been an extremely calm man, and there was the assumption that acts of such controlled creation necessarily implied taboos on acts of procreation.

  We were staying at the Culver City Hotel and I couldn’t get Sherman on the house phone, so I took the stairs up to his floor. When I knocked on the door it swung open and there he was, naked, sprawled across the high four-poster bed. It would’ve been a cliché to describe him as ‘lost’ in the billowing breasts of the brunette who was sharing the bed with him. A cliché – and straightforwardly wrong, because in the split-second before he bawled at me to ‘Fuck right off!’ I saw that Sherman was quite at home.

  5.125

  Burke Shops at Wal-Mart

  Standing in the Chevalier Woods, my boots buried in damp leaf mould, I stared into the white face of a deer. Overhead a jet’s headlights carved a tunnel out of the autumn dusk. There had been no way of walking out of the O’Hare terminal, which was surrounded by runways, so I took the subway to Rosemont, then picked my way between office blocks to the banks of a cold and polluted river.

  The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor – I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements – massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.

  The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across one doorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.

  That sophism was taken for fate in disguise ... I didn’t like her tone, although I knew it was nothing personal. Anyway, my tics had returned and what time I could grapple from the repetitive operations messing up my head was assigned to the flesh-coloured foam rubber between the brace and her bent wrist. Fantastic materials, glass terrycloth, plastic ...

  Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning: ‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem that cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop window read ‘N–Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were taquerías, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.

  My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone – stylized as a minuet – and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.

  ‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.

  ‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.

  ‘Deep-vein thrombosis – they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’


  ‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’

  ‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’

  5.0625

  Rat Poison

  Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading The Tatler.

  ‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And he’ – a significant lash of a drip – ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you ...’

  He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her gallery and she said she’d tell the family. It was drizzling and I was grateful for the Barbour.

  ‘Did you speak to Herve?’ Sherman quacked as soon as I returned.

  ‘We-ell, I think it was him – my French is, um, rather inadequate. But Sherm, don’t you think you should try to rest?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t – I’m fucking flat out here as it is.’

  ‘What do the doctors say?’

  ‘They say hooray, we’re coining it, then they send in a nurse with another bag of rat poison.’

  ‘Is that what that stuff is?’

  ‘Yes, yes, nothing quite like it for thinning the blood.’

  Baltie had been sent out to buy petits fours, which was what Sherman most wanted besides his phone back. I sat on the bed – there was plenty of room. My friend’s head moulded the pillows, and for the first time I wondered about the process involved in casting his body forms. I reached out to take his hand but he jerked it away:

  ‘What the fuck’re you crying for?’ he said.

  5.03125

  Light Aircraft

  It was the smallest check-in desk either of us had ever seen – more like a lectern, with the Loganair logo plastered across the front. ‘Loganair!’ Sherman guffawed. ‘Should be loganberry.’ He stumped over to a drinks dispenser and began punching buttons distractedly. I wondered if he was already withdrawing from his phone habit.

  Sherman’s doctor had said ambulation was the key to long-term recovery from DVT. ‘He means walking,’ the artist explained to me, ‘so if you’re still game for this northern jaunt let’s go.’

  It had been a grim winter in London – I scratched my wrists so much one of them went septic. It was all right now, though, and as the twin-engined plane motored towards the thousand-foot sea cliffs of Foula I felt the unfamiliar turbulence of optimism. Sherman was in the co-pilot’s seat telling the pilot what to do.

  5.015625

  Paying Guests

  An off-white cloud hung above the hills behind Mrs Field’s bungalow; tractor tyres weighted down the roof. She didn’t seem that pleased to see me again – although Sherman soon charmed her.

  ‘I’ve another chap staying,’ she explained, ‘and to be honest I don’t like the extra work.’

  It was the man from the boutique hotel in Brighton, he was amazed by the coincidence – I couldn’t remember his name. Mrs Field grilled mini chicken Kievs for tea.

  5.0078125

  The Confession

  ‘Why would I want to hear about—’ His words were snatched away by the wind screeching up over the cliff edge. A giant skua hung above a perfectly round pool in the sward.

  5.00390625

  Top of the World, Ma

  ‘You know nothing of what I feel, believe me – you never have.’

  5.001953125

  La Jetée

  I hurt him and there was only this way.

  5.0009765625

  Left Behind

  Some rolled-up plastic trousers.

  5.00048828125

  The Earth Summit

  And a mobile ...

  5.000244140625

  Global Reach

  ... phone.

  Walking to Hollywood

  I’ve been around the world several times and now it’s only banality that interests me - I track it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.

  –Chris Marker, Sans soleil

  1

  The Consultation

  In early May of 2008, my treatment with Dr Shiva Mukti having reached a conclusion, with, I think, the feeling on both sides that there had been a measure of success, I decided to take a walking tour of Los Angeles.

  Mukti showed me the last of the series of films he had made of me on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the same basement room at St Mungo’s where he had conducted our cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. In addition to using all the standard techniques, Mukti also videoed psychotics during their flamboyant episodes, then showed the films to them when lucid, in order to persuade these patients of the necessity of taking their medication.

  ‘In your case,’ he told me during our first meeting, ‘the situation is a bit different. Your reality testing seems wholly adequate; rather, your obsessive-compulsive thought patterns appear to have become, um, engrafted in the external world. It’s as if by continuously viewing the world through the anthropomorphic lens of distorted scale, you have projected on to it a form of body dysmorphic syndrome. This would account for the fugues you experienced while travelling in the States, the loss of the medium sized, your perception of the world as wholly comprised by the awesome and the very—’

  ‘Little.’

  ‘Quite so, the very little.’

  The near-obsolete VDU monitor, with its mushroom plastic casing, sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table. Was this a fungal growth, nurtured overnight under strip-lighting? On the screen, which lacked vertical hold, images of me flickered and kinked. In answer to questions from someone off-screen, I contended that I could sign my name on a dust mote and play billiards with Higgs bosons while simultaneously apprehending the sixty-mile span of the Middlesex tertiary escarpment.

  My dottiness was obvious, yet what struck me more forcibly was the concentration of all this effort, expertise and resources into these mean and institutional images of the very mean and institutional room we were currently sitting in: I sat on the plastic stacking chair watching myself writhe on the same plastic stacking chair, and, although I felt removed from the on-screen antics, it was a disjunction of perspective alone – the man in the room watching himself in the same room insistently demanded another recursion of this POV, another plastic stacking chair, another me.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mukti said as we watched the last film: ‘you’d like some Powerade.’ And he companionably passed me the pink bottle.

  I had been referred to Dr Mukti by Zack Busner, the consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital, who for over a quarter of a century had played a major role in my life - part therapist, part mentor, part friend, part inspiration, part hierophant, part demiurge ... wholly suspect. If I summon Busner up now it is as I first saw him. I was a troubled adolescent with a piebald horse face and wasted legs in drainpipe jeans; he was a plump, frog-faced man, his nondescript hair not so much thinning as giving the impression it hadn’t grown since birth. He leant back in the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk, his legs outstretched, and as he spoke, with great dexterity – as a card sharp in a Western runs a silver dollar over and under his fingers – rolled and unrolled the furry tongue of his mohair tie.

  ‘I have a patient,’ Busner said on that first meeting. ‘Who’s a very well-known jazz musician – a highly talented chap. He tells me that he takes cocaine, he takes heroin – for him it isn’t a problem. Tell me, why’s it a problem for you?’

  I forbore from making the obvious point: if it wasn’t a problem for this jazzer, why the fuck was he seeing a shrink? Forbore for several reasons. First, aged nineteen, I was intimidated
by Busner and his environs. His office was at the end of a corridor, which in turn was at the far end of the hospital’s general psychiatric ward. This wasn’t the locked ward where sectioned patients were confined, but nevertheless there was plenty of flamboyant mental distress on display.

  As I had sat in the miserable little outpatients’ waiting area – a couple of uneasy chairs, a pained pot plant, a racked magazine rack – an anorexic had danced with her drip by the window, toying with the plastic chains that shackled the vertical louvres. Then she came over and sat beside me, breathing in my face caustic acid down a cracked commode leaking sewage. I studied Chat magazine’s great new recipe for banana bread, until a civil enough young schizophrenic came by and offered to sell me the alien implant he had instead of a leg. The anorexic had been replaced at the window looking out over Hampstead Heath by an old man – a catatonic I supposed – who rocked not back and forth on his heels, but from side to side like a metronome, while emitting a buzzing noise, Did he have a horsefly trapped in his mouth?