Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  I push-button into the fray, my wild discharges set the line of innocent acacias ablaze as Mr Me sprints through the traffic across Central; pickups side-swipe saloons that frontend UPS trucks. Smoke staggers, tracers doodle, sirens yowl and the security men take stances to unleash their impotent allusion to automatic fire: fluttery little yellow flashes, ‘Dapocketa-pocketa-pock!’ Mr Me karate-chops one Hal, then the next, gains the door of the plant, forgets what he’s meant to be doing ...

  And wanders away aimlessly, following his crosshairs, lost in a reverie of competence, his fingers pushing his own enigmatic buttons – the yellow, red and green, the square, circle and cross – while the HUD map oscillates wildly. The nuages de jouer condense into 7th Street, then the flower market, where the stalls are hung with piñatas. There are piñatas in the shape of lions, rabbits, snakes and lizards; traditional seven-pointed star piñatas and piñatas fashioned – albeit poorly – to resemble logos: a blocky ‘GM’, a Hummer shield, Dolce and Gabbana’s copulating initials.

  At the next stall to come into existence the woven-straw heads of Cheney and Rumsfeld spin slowly in the breeze on the strings that trepan their hollow heads. Ditto the Weinsteins, Karen Bass and Arnie; Nicole and Angelina kiss with a ‘Tthwock!’ and a riffle of their paper-streamer hair, while Thewlis and Postlethwaite duel with Cyrano noses.

  When the stallholder enlarges in Mr Me’s direction, I’m searching through the available lines for: Why have these relatively minor English actors been fashioned into fiesta toys? But he forestalls this by squawking: ‘Petey Postlethwaite, man, I loved you in that Brit TV show.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Sins, man – that’s why I had the piñata made of your head.’

  I rotate the market 20 degrees. ‘But why Thewlis?’

  ‘Aw, dude.’ The stallholder cups the back of the straw head. ‘Ain’tcha seen Dinotopia – it’s the greatest.’

  Along the kerbs of the fashion district bolts of cloth are extruded into being, ready to be cut and sewn into the piping through which watery bodies will flow. Cars keep slewing to a standstill and offering themselves to me; light aircraft taxi up, their propellers lickety-licking like the tongues of affectionate dogs; at one point I’m even offered a jetpack. But I keep on walking, and by the time I’m following my own avatar along Broadway I’ve long since forgotten that it’s all a game, that somewhere a primum mobile sits, gritty with cookie crumbs, his thumbs numb from twiddling the toggles – my disbelief is suspended, spinning in the green air that solidifies into the ornate façades of the Mayan Theater, the Belasco and the State, while the crowds of stereotypes and replicants thicken: Tyrell Corporation, heading home.

  I gather the crew into a team; standing close to Gofer Jeff I can appreciate the care that’s gone into plotting the downy bell curve of her standard deviation face. ‘It’s a wrap for you guys for the day,’ I tell them, ‘I won’t be needing you here – sure, stuff is shot around Downtown, but it’s mostly TV: suits and skirts crossing Main Street in long shot to City Hall to engage in the highest of all sciences and services, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall – architecture conceived of as a frozen moment of sandwich wrapping. Pah! I have nothing to fear from that!’

  Camera Jeff is eyeing Mr Me quizzically, but before he can be supplied with any dialogue I turn on my zigzag legs, head on along Broadway, then swing into the foody-gloom of the Central Market. A hiatus while the interior loads, then: comforting down lights and exposed piping spring into being, together with a sawdust-strewn floor and fruit stalls piled high with Arnie hands of bananas. Lobsters scuttle in glass tanks, noodles steam in hanks, greenbacks spit from a freestanding ATM and the replicants mill and mutter

  Lawrence G. Paull had it right in his production design for Blade Runner. Downtown LA was shuyu, a borrowed urban background for a formal garden of noirish planting, equally and elegantly stunted love and hate. Mr Me and I are both transfixed by a modular plastic display stand full of sour worms, gummy sour mix, neon sour worms, sour rings and cherry sours.

  And so: the game is paused while I’m left to consider this Möbius strip of celluloid: in 2008 the lobby of the Bradbury Building has been beautifully renovated, yet in the early 1980s, seriously dilapidated, it served as the apartment block of bioengineering genius J. F. Sebastian. Paull and director Ridley Scott drenched Downtown LA in a toxic rain that fell from a sky sullied with the smoke of oily flare-offs,* and made of these seventy-odd city blocks an evaginated Central Market full of jabbering Asiatic proles spearing their neon sour worms with chopsticks. Overhead a dirigible wallows in the smog; its belly nudges the top storeys of the 1920s blocks and is wrapped round with a screen-sash upon which cherry-red lips part to receive more wriggling neon sour worms.

  Harrison Ford hunts replicants in 2019 (1982). The replicants track down J. F. Sebastian to the Bradbury Building (1893, but built according to principles of urban architecture advanced by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887). To recap: in 1982 a Dutch movie star pretends to be an android in an 1893 building intended by its architect to be futuristic, but now impressed on an imagined future to leave the shape of the past ... in the past.

  Shortly before I left London I had watched a DVD* of Blade Runner with Sean Young, who, for the duration of the movie, played the role of my wife – or at least some of it, because I kept being interrupted by SMS text messages sent by Busner to my cell phone, a technology the ubiquity of which in 2019 wasn’t anticipated in 1982. Although, to be strictly fair, we could propose an alternative timeline, BR1, in which cell phones are everywhere in 2008, then entirely gone less than two decades later, to be replaced by older devices that are prized for their ability to both mediate and disjoint communication: answer phones.

  Deckard, the blade runner, has an answer phone. I didn’t need to dwell on the cheesynthetic Vangelis soundtrack, or the dyed and shocked hairstyles of the women drinking blue neon cocktails in the bar where Daryl Hannah shakes her bootie, in order to find the movie dated; the answer phone’s flex was already lashed round my neck and it dragged me down through successive time currents, each one full of such anachro-snags, to where I type this on my dead mother’s Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, perfectly aware that you – perhaps in 2019 – are entirely at a loss to understand what so exercises me.

  For as long as I’d been visiting Los Angeles the funicular alongside the Angel’s Flight had been out of order. Anyway, I didn’t want to take that route up Bunker Hill: boring through bank lobbies and shopping concourses, climbing flights of concrete stairs rising from parking lots to become the crenulated underside of freeways, the cobblestoned embankments of which are strewn with the discarded mattresses of the homeless. No, I had no desire to extract a core sample of this power-midden, with its bottom layer of grandiose clapboard, which, by the 1930s, had festered into the boarding houses where John Fante’s young men typed and diddled; I had no wish to expose the Otis Chandler stratum, or the unholy alliance of Westside movie Democrats and Downtown propertocrats that sat on top of it.

  Instead, I schlepped up 5th Street in the malodorous twilight. I had panned 360 degrees since the October evening when I mooted the death of film with the gay comedienne at the Café Pinot, and no matter how ceaselessly the city retro-fitted itself with its own futurity, there was nothing it could do with the 35-storey-high mirrored gas tanks of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, a structure I had last gazed upon in its guise as the Atrium in Los Santos. Having been soundly thrashed by my son, CJ, in a game of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I lay on the sidewalk and watched him disappear into its lobby accompanied by a bevy of bitches in skin-tight micro-skirts. Still, what can you expect from an entire world a mere 13.7 miles square? One in which the omniscient deity of narrative has been abandoned, pumped full of pixels in a back alley, leaving everyone to run amok, minumental masters of their own fate?

  Once I’d checked in, I stopped to chat with Felipe at the concierge desk – he was still wielding his pe
ncil, still embroidering the gold thread of fantasy on to the uniform straitjacket of a less than congenial reality. There had, he said, been an amusing incident the week before, when one of the delegates to the Integrated Systems Convention tripped while fetching yet another muffin from the coffee stand and fell into the fountain, triggering a geyser that surged up, racing the glass elevator, until he was suspended, screaming, high above the lobby. When after twenty minutes the manager charged with choking off the jet nervily jerked the stopcock, the systems delegate was dead on arrival at Level 1, floating face down in the carbonated pool, while his moribund internal monologue fizzled out altogether.

  That evening, I was the only diner in a Japanese restaurant on Level 6. I ate beef teriyaki in a woody nook, peering between paper screens at a carved and ornamented bar that gaped like a mouth full of gold crowns. I’d had indigestion before I started eating, and with each mouthful I considered: would that this – which Frederic Jameson has defined as ‘the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism’ – didn’t taste so fucking bad. Farting like a cannibalistic cow in a clover field, I shifted the heavy, plush-seated chair so that it pounced on my own feet with its claw ones.

  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.

  * This has become known, by ecologists, as the ‘Blade Runner outcome’.

  * Digital Video Disc, an optical disc storage media format developed in the early 1990s.

  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 saggyassed 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 fourteenminute 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 Benedic
t 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.