Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

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.

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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.

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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.

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Top of the World, Ma

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

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La Jetée

I hurt him and there was only this way.

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Left Behind

Some rolled-up plastic trousers.

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The Earth Summit

And a mobile…

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Global Reach

… phone.

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?

Were these people, I wondered, my new gang? The psychic insurgents I had fantasized joining as, fractured by acid, I riffled through the pages of R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self? I didn’t want to join now I was in the recruitment office — yet feared I already had. A few months previously I’d been an in-patient at Heath Hospital on a surgical ward. I’d had my tonsils taken out — a painful operation at that age. Ostensibly, this was because of all the sinus attacks I kept getting, which felt like thumbscrews being tightened — on my brain; but the real reason I kept getting sick in my nose was all the powder I shoved up it, the bathtub amphetamine, the cocaine cut with baby laxative, the scouring smack — and worse.