Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

As I scaled the hump of Montrose Street, then continued down Alvarado, the Wilshire corridor was spread out below me, frothing with greenery, wispy with smog. Shortly before I turned to the west along Beverly — in order to avoid MacArthur Park — I passed a grotty little dealership. Alvarado Auto Sales were pushing rusty pickups riddled with rust, decadent compacts and my own VW Variant Fastback, a car I’d last seen in a breaker’s yard in Battersea twenty-two years previously. The chances of this were minute — yet when I stopped to peer through the wound-down driver’s window and caressed the pimply vinyl hump of the dash, there could be no mistaking it: this was the very same car, the one I’d bought from a social worker on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, shortly after the riot of October 1985 in which PC Blakelock was hacked to death by Mob with Axe.

I’d crashed the VW a year and a half later on Chelsea Bridge — and although I knew it wasn’t a write-off, I’d still been in shock when the man at the breaker’s menaced me with a tyre-iron and said, ‘Take a tenner for it — or just fuck right off.’ I found the reappearance of my old car strangely heartening: the three-car shunt that had seemingly killed it must have been a stunt, the directors of which had arranged for it to be transported here and restored. I crouched to pray, a devout machinist, and called unto the Great Car Spirit to enter me, pump the gas, slip the clutch and drive me west towards Hollywood.

When I straightened up I noticed overhead a billboard advertising The Incredible Hulk , the release of which was now: 11.6.08. The Chrysler Building peeked over the bugaboo boffin’s green-skinned shoulder; surely, I thought, it must get tired of this shtick? Then I hitched up my short pants — which seemed ridiculously baggy — and besides, why did I find it so difficult to remember?

The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Considered as a Precursor of Express Checkout

Somewhere between the Town House — an English manor held down in the shrubbery and force-fed pituitary gland — and the Bullocks Wilshire, I stopped at a grocery store for an energy drink with a dumb name like Relentless. Big mistake. From its terracotta base to its oxidized copper finial, the old department store was streamlined: an autobuilding speeding from the roaring twenties to the choking noughties. In seconds I was 500 yards up the road and only six days and forty years late to meet the bullets from Sihran Sihran’s.22.

Bobby Kennedy, hustled through the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel by his security detail, had just delivered his victory speech following the 1968 Californian presidential primary. That speech! Its homage to his assassinated brother, its guileless paean to the Great Society, what… what were these? Ticked boxes on a card, the drinks swigged and peanuts snaffled from the minibar of democracy. Bobby is gone — unceremoniously dumped in the trunk of Monroe Stahr’s 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan, which shoots out from the portecochère, the chrome angel lying across its hood absorbing the up-thrust of the road through his fanned wingtips. Kathleen’s in the passenger seat, her beautiful composite of a face framed by one half of the split windshield. As for Stahr, his olive complexion cannot hide the tide of death rising up from his white silk shirt collar.

As the Chrysler turns left on to Wilshire the sound of Bobby’s drumming fists is clearly audible, yet neither Monroe nor Kathleen registers any emotion. Why should they give a shit about Kennedy? He’s way in the future, but in their immediate past are all the greats whooping it up at the Coconut Grove — Swanson and Shearer, Valentino and Flynn, Mayer and Chaplin. They’re too early, accelerating west, fuelled by the lust that will propel them all the way to Stahr’s half-built house in Santa Monica, where the nuages maritimes will creep through the chinks in its fuselage as they fuck on his raincoat on the floor.

They are too early — and I was too late: the Ambassador had been through the crusher and all that remained were chunks of dusty-white rubble baking behind a chain-link fence. When Scorsese pitched up to shoot The Aviator in the Coconut Grove, he had to back it up 500 yards to the Bullocks Wilshire, and it was there that Leo DiCaprio sipped milk and schemed to swat biplanes out of the sky — an actor playing an inchoate pathology, which would one day grow into a giant corporate gorilla.

We stopped for coffee — another big mistake: there was only so much anyone could take in when it came to Camera Jeff’s career lows. A missing poster tacked to a tree beside where we sat offered $1,000 for Scooby’s safe return. I thought back to the last time I’d seen him, disappearing behind the koi sign outside Iver, and, tearing off one of the paper slips, I resolved to make the call that night, a facecloth over the receiver to disguise my voice.

When we went on, with Jeff jogging along beside me, his eye-on-a-stick staring at my shoes, something had changed. My pulse began to quicken, lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lumpa-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a — it was paranoia on my part, certainly, but then they were sending them against me, these bioengineered anthropomorphic killing machines, human brains yoked to hundreds of horsepower. Waiting for the stop lights so I could cross into Hancock Park, I sympathized with those familiar features as they loomed in the screens, awfully contorted by the effort of braking. I could almost taste the sweet white flesh inside those two-millimetre-thick steel shells that had been artfully folded into Infinitis.

Lumpa-lumpa-lumpa-lumpa- I had been alone for a long time — not because I wanted to be, but because until I solved my. . problem, there would be aspects of my personality I was unable to control. I was compelled to move from town to town, taking odd jobs where I could, staying off the books and below the radar, just an ordinary nerdy Joe with an IQ of 198 able to expand the coefficients of the binomial theorem while fiossing my lacquered teeth. I might hide out here, in the eight-car garages attached to Florentine villas or Tudorbethan mansions, but sooner or later I would have to deal with it , did I want to fight them, or was it the dewily protuberant top lip of my only true love I saw shadowed by the sunshades?

Back on the Miracle Mile, the streamlined blocks taunt me with their grande vitesse , while I remain crawling along at ground level, menaced by a dump truck, lumpa-lumpalumpalumpluml’l’ — my hands clench in front of my starting eyes, green, alien, engorged, the pastel-painted oblongs of the storefronts ripple with distortion: a fireball has been ignited behind my eyes! The orange-and-white canopy of Busby’s movie theatre radiates visible spectra! A roar of rage, deep and grinding as a malfunctioning camshaft rotating all the way from Hellenistic Greece to Detroit, bursts from my barrelling chest. My T-shirt falls away in shreds, my baseball cap pops off like the plastic cap on a wine bottle. At last! Now it’s clear to me why my short pants have been so saggy-assed all day! Now that I have metamorphosed they’re a perfect fit !

I leap twenty feet in the air and come down hard on all fours, my elephantine hands and feet sending cracks fissuring through the sidewalk. I grab handfuls of hardtop and yank the roadway like a carpet runner, so that it rucks up, sending BMWs and Renegade Jeeps cannoning into one another. Oh! The heady perfume of spilt petrol, the festive tinkle of shattering glass!

I turn this way and that before the empty eyes of polystyrene heads ranged in the window of a wig store, marvelling at my own preposterous physique, abs and pecs wrapped around my ribcage like the coils of a monstrous green-skinned constrictor. Deltas of arteries radiate out from trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles thick as hawsers.