Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

The thoughts of this gross a body cannot help but be visible, so, notwithstanding the drivers — who either run screaming, or grab guns from the glove compartments of their stalled and crashed cars — I pause to consider my prospects… my sexual prospects. I mean, c’mon, I’m, like, fourteen feet high , with a build that makes the most avid steroid-guzzler look mimsy — surely my cock ’n’ balls are to scale ? Anger and lust — never more that a synapse apart — fuse behind the baroque half-dome of my forehead with its convex mouldings and entablature of worry lines. True, these vile creatures may be my sworn enemies, but I’d still like to. . fuck one .

Say… that one, over there, the gridlocked black Hummer, with its tinted windows wobbling a come-on, as its speakers pump out the hypnotic bass line of a rap song that’s familiar despite my hydrocephalus. ‘ Serviat! Raptetur! Serviat! Raptetur! ’ Wires and nerves threaded through my unreasonable lusts and unsociable motions pull them tight and I kick out, sending an auto spinning on its longitudinal axis, scattering trim, fenders, fragments of window glass, then its doors, hood, wheel trim and alloys. The anti-roll bar neatly skewers a woman drinking a frappuccino outside Starbucks to a poster advertising frappuccino — violence of such jocular savagery it can be accepted uncritically as wholesome entertainment.

As can the kicked car, which goes on spinning until all that’s left is a body shell — the engine having long since plunged through the awning of the El Camino tapas bar — inside which the skull of its late driver is rattling like a pea in a whistle. Not that anyone pays any attention: the arty-slackers who were goofing beneath the awning have scattered already, whipping out their camera phones, so it’s with the low definition (yet enhanced newsworthiness) afforded by the tiny screen of a Samsung SGH-G800 that we witness my next trick: a Pontiac G5 coupe grabbed in one hand , my huge fingers fitting so neatly into the window holes that it’s impossible not to think: why hasn’t anyone done this before? And an old clunker of a Dodge Intrepid grabbed in the other — then the two autos beaten like cymbals as I roar and roar and roooooarrrr!

Suddenly squad cars are barricading off the four blocks of Wilshire between Detroit Street and Burnside Avenue, while the fat blue-and-white LAPD choppers bumble down over the rooftops, the perforated stings of.50 calibre machine-guns poking from their open hatches. Like I should care? I’m gonna hump a Hummer, so hurl the crumpled-tissue cars away, then lifting the off-road vehicle — perhaps for the first time in its life off the road — I tear a gash in its rear end the approximate size necessary. With disturbing tenderness I shift my grip so that I’m holding the car by its rear wheels and pull it towards my tumescent crotch.

Appalled fingers drop the SGH-G800, the view rears back and widens — but it’s too late! The choreography of the scene is unmistakable: given the proportionality of my sweat-greased carcass and the dirty boulevard, this could be any poolside out in the Valley, with me an oiled stud limbering up for the money shot, but:

Uh? Uh-oh.

No one need be that alarmed; for one, because this is a PG or at most a PG-13. I mean, nobody lays out the budget for this much wantonly artful destruction without a teenage target acquired. Also, there are — as I previously remarked — aspects of my personality that are beyond my control; surely, it stands to reason that a twice-life-sized bogey boy would have an erectile dysfunction? I may pull the rear of the Hummer towards my tow-hook, my ass cheeks tensing, my rictus widening to reveal incisors the size of dentists, but even as the four Crips leap from its front doors, MAC-10s jerking their hands as if they’re demented conductors, it’s clear I am unable to perform.

The comity of African-American gang members and white LAPD officers is definitely the subtext to this playlet. So what? The Crips’ pistols may spit fire, the cops’ handguns may boom — yet only every twentieth round hits me, and then I merely yelp as if this were flung gravel. The copters’ machine-guns spray this humongous gook more accurately — but I only clap a hand to my neck each time I’m bitten by a.50 calibre horsefly.

Nevertheless, like any frustrated rapist, I am doubly enraged, so snatch up more cars and hurl them at my antagonists but when this fails to stop them I leap high in the air and come down near the summit of Desmond’s department store. Grabbing the chamfered corner, I start to tear one letter after another from the neon sign, sending them skimming down into the street, where they cleaver into buses, or else up into the sky, where a boomeranging e deftly shreds the rotors of a police copter so that it spirals into the citrus blooms of death.

Things are going my way until the untimely arrival of a marine company armed with FIM-82 Stinger ground-to-air missiles. The first three they launch miss me and inflict devastating collateral damage on Melrose. I leap to evade the fourth and land in the La Brea Tar Pits, where I make free with the hot black gloop, disembowel model mastodons and generally amuse myself. Still, it’s clear that the fight’s going out of me as I wade in circles waisthigh in the pit. So much so that emboldened tourists creep up behind me like kids playing grandma’s footsteps, then pop their miserable flashes. The money shot — when it finally comes — is a tarry plash across their lenses.

I came to in the Farmers Market on Fairfax and 3rd, sitting at a Chinese food stall with two or three other toothless old Jews jew-jewing on noodles and kvetching our way through the hot afternoon. ‘Jesus, Willy,’ said one, ‘you’re so goddamn thin you need reverse lipo, man — some fat squirted into you.’

It was true: my pants were so slack they could comfortably house the Incredulous Hulk. ‘Yeah,’ I mumbled, ‘you’d know all about getting fat squirted into you, Al, coz that’s what your Dora does with her lokshen soup.’

‘Heh-heh-heh,’ gum-chuckled the oldsters, then went back to their jew-jewing and slurping.

I was only mildly fazed by my ability to seamlessly Matthauize with their Parkinsonian blur of liver-spotted hands; hadn’t this always been the key juxtaposition of Hollywood: up on the screen the industry of souls, while in the backroom the sunshine boys black up and cry for mama? So I sat, smothered by awnings and homeyness, contemplating the Three Dogs Bakery (‘Bakery for Dogs’), while from the south there emanated the wailing of sirens, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire, and the kerboom! of ground-to-air missiles. This, the latest death rattle of the megalopolis, was something we oldsters were all familiar with, and so we went on with our ho fun, continued the green tea treatment.

I left a ten-spot for my share of the check and wobbled off into the hurdy-gurdy consumerism of the Grove Mall. All those screen gunfights, what were they, if not a brilliantly deployed strategy of Calm and Blasé against the insurgency of the Id? Of course, things could get out of hand — there was mission creep to contend with. It was only nine days since the propane cylinders on the New York set at Universal had exploded sending a King Kong cloud roaring into the sky above Hollywood. While LAFD’s finest had fought the flames sporting the gold foil suits of poorly conceived aliens, 40,000 archived videotapes had burned — together with the sets of Back to the Future.

As I bent to pick up a strip of packing tape twined in the fence of Pan Pacific Park, Gofer Jeff came barrelling along the sidewalk on her denim kegs. ‘Mr Thewlis! Mr Thewlis!’ she puffed. ‘We’re so sorry — we kinda lost you back there.’