Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Much later that night I lay in Room 2229 unable to sleep and regretting having freed my mini-slaves. I rose, dressed and laced my boots — appreciating the neat job that had been done on the eyelet. Then I went for a walk around the cavernous hotel counting my charged paces in tens, then hundreds; counting the emergency stairs in tens, then hundreds; stopping beside service carts and riffling the shampoo miniatures — then moving on.

In the morning the driver who drove me to the airport was tight-lipped. I could understand why — the highway was wide and terrifyingly nondescript, the buildings resisted the anthropomorphism of scale, the sky over Lake Ontario was bigger than a nebula. I scanned the verges of the freeway; even though it was midweek I hoped against hope that Reichman had got the walking bug, and I would see him pulling his own suitcase back to Pearson.

The driver took a call on his cell phone and listened intently to the muffled squeaking.

‘Pest control problem?’ I asked when he hung up.

‘You could say that,’ he answered curtly. ‘The festival’s suite at the hotel was broken into last night. Things were done with the LongPen… dreadful things.’

‘Excuse me sir, you have too many things in your pockets.’

We stood on a desert island of carpet tiles somewhere in the placid lagoon of Pearson International Airport. I was a pre-wrecked Crusoe; she was a squat mermaid of South Asian extraction with blue-black hair. She wore a nylon jacket with fluorescent patches that bulged at the hips and the fishtail of her lower body was poured into black slacks. At least it was healthy flesh and not all the necrotic stuff I had wadded into the Barbour, stuff she began to gingerly extract with rubber-gloved hands, laying it all out on the brushed steel.

I waited with the Ohrwurm boring into me: a tiny finger flutter of the keys, the entire orchestra dangling from the pianist’s hangnail…

The security woman unearthed the tiny plastic tomb within which this vast and resonant performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto — by Daniel Barenboim with the London Philharmonic — was interred. She bunched up the skirt of the Barbour, appalled to discover yet another pocket — the poacher’s — and unzipping it removed the small corpse of my rolled-up plastic trousers.

Leaving Tor-Buff-Chester (a mega-region embracing Toronto that stretches all the way from Buffalo to Quebec City, and has an annual $530 billion of economic activity) was proving more difficult than anticipated. ‘The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones,’ contended Uncle Vladimir — meaning ‘bore’ as in ‘induce tedium’. I didn’t feel that way: my ability to build a concert hall in the inches between my ears was the only thing that made all of this — the queuing, the carpet tiling, the pornographic X-raying of my possessions — remotely tolerable.

Then, aloft, as the Northwest flight skipped across the dimpled Great Lakes, I dipped carottes coupées et pellées in trempette ranch , while little Daniel braced himself in the aisle and puuuushed! with his fluttery fingers, so that the entire fuselage of the plane widened and the trolley dollies could dance about one another in Busby Beethoven routines.

There were 216 private jets booked into Miami International Airport for the Miami Basel Art Fair. ‘Fine art is a luxury good, and so there is a natural marketing synergy, a comparable customer profile and a similar trend cycle,’ or so said Jeremy Laing, the Canadian fashion wunderkind. I wondered if Sherman would be there: he was outwardly disdainful of money, contending that if he sought the maximum for his pieces and ruthlessly hired, fired and even circumvented his gallerists, it was only to further the work.

‘I’m just a very little man making very big things,’ he’d said when I last taxed him with posing for the cover of a glossy auction house magazine. ‘And you have to appreciate the costs involved: the planning, the technical drawings, the lobbying — materials and fabrication are only the tip of the iceberg.’

I hadn’t observed that the end result was as egotistic as any other monumentalism, and that really spending his money extravagantly might be of more benefit to others than these iron giants trampling down the hills, or standing forlorn in the Seine. I hadn’t, for the shameful reason… but there was also Sherman’s indisputable generosity: restaurant bills paid without a murmur, plane tickets chucked like paper darts, and opera seats offered offhand.

And yet… and yet… I was never entirely comfortable with his largesse; was it all adding up to a costly obligation? Besides, Sherman devalued his gifts by exhibiting the appetitive disdain I’d noticed in others like him — those who, by their own efforts, had worked their way up from a comfortable childhood to being seriously rich.

Sherman had shirts and suits tailored by the score; and, as he advanced through life, Baltie brought up the rear, picking up the clothes that had been discarded by his boss because they were slightly soiled. Sherman bought bottles of Cristal, drank half a glass, then, gripped by a whim for a pint of lager, climbed down from tables doodled with costly food — dots of Beluga caviar, scrawls of langoustine — and marched away, leaving Baltie to settle the bill. Sherman — having already extracted a Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto from the humidor that went everywhere with them — would wait at the kerb: a fire hydrant spurting smoke. Needless to say, the expensive cigar was stomped to shreds after a few puffs.

‘When I see a guy lighting a cigarette as I turn the corner, I don’t think he’s gonna be taking the bus!’

I could see her point, but I’d been waiting for the service for a while and even in the northern Californian sunshine everything was weighing heavily on me: I needed a smoke. The timing was wrong for a walk into town — besides without a Reichman to goad I didn’t really have the oomph. I thought of the days ahead of me, the paltry rituals of a man alone in a strange city: reading suppers — possibly a concert, an excursion to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Metroline bus blatted along I-29, through the cleft of the buttocky hills, one of which bore the tattoo CITY OF INDUSTRY. I’d never liked San Francisco in all the time I’d been visiting; for me the city always remained tangled in the fallen freeways of the 1989 earthquake, and these, in turn, contained within their distressed steel and clots of concrete the ghost of the 1906 earthquake with its subprime fatalities — 300, 3,000 or 30,000? The tenderloin was a cut of putrefying meat, crawling with tramp-flies and shoved in the face of tourists, and in the Prescott Hotel on Post Street where I had slumped, stifled by swags, pelmets, tassels, throw cushions — all the amniotic padding of an embryonic luxury — I noticed for the first terrifying time that reflected in the mirror the label of the mineral water bottle read NAIVE.

I couldn’t believe that San Francisco had been hiding these big things from me — but there they were, floodlit: a concert hall, a city hall, some kind of library or museum, all stacked along avenues wide enough to gladden Albert Speer. No doubt in Sacramento there would be a state capitol that was a copy — near enough — of the one in Washington; it was the same throughout the States: prêt-à-porter legislatures and courts, bought from the Great Framers up in heaven.

I had booked the best seat in the house, the plush throne of B1 in the balcony. High above the stage dangled enormous transparent sound-bafflers, and as the soloist mounted the keys with his fingers, climbing up and up to the tremolo peak of the allegro, I wondered how great a compass of emotion might be contained between one note and another, dreadfully pinched by the minims. The Ohrwurm bored on into my cheesy brain, proof — if any were needed — that I was already dead.