Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.’

(‘One wind — one life, one life — one wind…’)

Not much, although even a moderately competent Latinist would have been able to detect the incorporation into the English translation of later interpolations.

‘ Tertia igitur pars est animi principatus; ad hunc igitur animum intende: senex es; noli pati, ut ille amplius serviat, aut amplius impetu insociabili raptetur aut amplius fatum vel praesens inique ferat vel futurum horreat .’

(‘ Serviat! Raptetur! ’)

‘The third, is thy ruling part; and here consider; thou art an old man; suffer not that excellent part to be brought in subjection, and to become slavish: suffer it not to be drawn up and down with unreasonable and unsociable lusts and motions, as it were with wires and nerves; suffer it not any more, either to repine at anything now present, or to fear and fly anything to come, which the destiny hath appointed thee.’

‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’

As each of the doctoral rappers completed his line, he took up this chant, until all four were hammering it out: ‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’ Building to panting crescendo: ‘Sla-vish luuuuuust!’

By way of applause there was a scatter of ironic finger-clicking from the stoner kids; NWPhd didn’t seem to mind. Exactly like any professional combo, they slid straight into bickering about the performance: Howie had been a beat out on Quin etiam , but — Howie rejoined — it shouldn’t be con-tern-nee but con-tem-nay .

The college kids filed out into the noonday sun. I found myself unable to leave yet too shy to approach the group. Eventually, one of them dropped off the stage and shuffled across to me, his leather soles squeaking on the woodblock floor.

He saluted me lazily, ‘Word up, man,’ then double-took. ‘Oh, you’re that guy — Brit actor, ain’tcha? Saw you in that kids’ movie — wha’ wuzz it, now?’

‘It was Harry Potter, man,’ said another, still taller NWPhd coming up beside him. The two of them stood towering over me, mild curiosity on their handsome faces.

I flannelled: ‘Um, yeah, I did do those films but it was only for the—’ I pulled myself up short: how could admitting to mercenary motives be an excuse? I tried another tack: ‘Y’know, I was in Malick’s The New World , a biggish role — I’m not primarily a Hollywood casting.’

‘True dat.’ This came from the third NWPhd, who was wearing a purple silk Chanel tie. ‘You daybooed in that kerazee movie that starts wi’ you raping some sorry bitch in a goddamn alley. I guess you’d know all about slavish lust.’

‘It’s ambiguous.’

‘What you say?’

‘It’s not certain that I’m raping her — I mean, that the character I was playing was raping her.’

He shook his head gloomily, ‘Motherfucker, if that’s your idea of consensual sex I hate to think what you rapin’ would look like, sheee!’ He blew hard then collected himself: ‘No disrespect, man — what’s your name, anyway?’

I ignored this and said, ‘Y’know your English translation doesn’t exactly match up — there’s nothing about wires and nerves in the Latin.’

‘Oh, really?’ Purple Tie called to the last of the NWPhds, who was coiling a microphone flex on the stage: ‘Howie, get over here will’ya?’

As Howie approached I saw that he wore studded leather wristlets, and that, although he was dressed like his fellow band members, the crotch of his suit pants hung low — almost between his knees.

‘Yeah?’ He looked at me belligerently, eyes bloodshot in ochreous skin, wispy hairs threaded his lower lip to his chin.

‘Man’s questioning the translation, Howie,’ Purple Tie said, then to me: ‘May I introduce you to Professor Howard Turner; he holds the chair in classics and comparative literature here at USC, so, if you-gonna-be-questioning’ — he poked me in the chest to emphasize each word — ‘you-gonna-be-answering to Howie, you fill me?’

All four NWPhds had ranged themselves menacingly around me. ‘You dig Aurelius, man?’ Howie growled.

‘Well, we’d all do well,’ I wittered, backing towards the sunlight, ‘to maintain a stoical attitude in the face of… y’know — stuff .’ Outside I could see the Jeffs sharing a bottle of Powerade Aqua; they and it both looked appealing.

‘Don’t come down this way again,’ said the leader of the NWPhds, who had the passionate beauty of the young Marvin Gaye. ‘Unless you be confident you can parse a Latin sentence purr-fic’-lee.’

‘An’ declaim some,’ said the second giving me a light shove.

‘An’ display appropriate rhetorical style,’ Purple Tie added with a fist flourish that knocked me into the realization that he was being played by Jamie Foxx.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you won’t believe this, but the day before yesterday, back in Britain, I took a long walk with Morgan Freeman.’

‘What the fuck’re you talking about?’ Foxx had backed me right to the door. I made another bid to connect:

‘I don’t want to be intrusive, but did you learn anything about Cruise when you worked with him on Michael Mann’s Collateral , for example, the sigmoidal flexure of his… ah, penis?’

Foxx looked almost pitying: ‘I don’t wanna know nothin ’ ‘bout that, my friend,’ he said. ‘This here is a litigious town — and then there’s the Scientologists.’

We were in the open air; SUVs full of coeds farted past. Waving a plastic bottle at me, Gofer Jeff called out, ‘I’ll getcha a Powerade, Pete.’

‘Pete?’ Foxx looked at me speculatively.

‘I’ve gotta get going,’ I said. ‘I’m due over at the Shrine Auditorium, but one thing: you were awesome back there, you guys gigging anywhere soon?’

Foxx laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Anything is possible, my friend.’ The transition in a few seconds from anger to incredulity to sympathy would’ve been bewildering if he weren’t such an accomplished actor. ‘You take care out there.’

A statue of a Shriner stood in the parking lot — like me, he was slightly bigger than lifesize. Unlike me, he wore a bum-freezer and a fez and was holding a child of around five in the crook of his arm. But, there again, like me, both figures had faces the colour of pipe clay and eyes like pee holes in the snow.

I had walked to the Shrine Auditorium for obvious reasons: if, as I believed, buildings were corporeal things, briefly animated by mind or minds, then this was one of the corpora delicti that would prove not just that film was dead — but that it had been murdered. From the 1940s through to the 1990s the Shrine had hosted Oscar ceremonies; even standing in the open air, looking through the barred doors, I could still smell the reeks of stale narcissism, avarice and hunger. I banged on the doors until a security guard played by Ken Sansom came stumbling through the gloom, then palmed him a couple of hundred bucks to let me in. I strode through the darkened halls and passages, before stepping out into the cavernous auditorium itself.

Vast plaster swags bellied from the roof a hundred feet overhead; above the stage dangled a chandelier the size of a flying saucer. The polyhedral niches and recessed colonnettes to either side of the proscenium, the latticed screens that rose behind the forty-seat boxes, the ogee arches standing proud of the curving walls — it all post-hypnotically suggested an alternative history for the Americas: Los Angeles settled from the west in the fifth century after Muhammad by Arab dhows that had rounded the Capes of Good Hope and Horn, their lanteen sails dipping like rocs’ wings into the long swell of the Pacific. The indigenous tribes of the Californian littoral had all joyously submitted to Islam, green flags fluttered along the spine of the Sierra, and two centuries later the Shrine was raised as the physical embodiment of the evolving Al Malaikah consciousness, its dome swimming in the bilious smog of a million Al Forsan autos… But I remained unaware of this until the following evening, when the desk clerk at the Roosevelt snapped his fingers.