Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

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.

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 Benedict 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.