Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I snapped. ‘So long as you keep laying down covering fire for these last three miles I’ll be just fine.’

‘Covering fire?’ She looked at me as if I were aha-a-ha-ha-ha a cold-blooded killer.

‘Sorry, I mean, so long as you keep rolling until I get to Hollywood, then…’ I struggled to cinch my elephantine pants with the tape.

‘Then what?’

I knotted the tape. ‘Then it’s a wrap.’

At 6922 Hollywood Boulevard there was a small terrace outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I sat dunking two of Earl Grey’s hot nuts into a styrofoam cup full of boiling water. Opposite me a bum with an uncanny resemblance to the French romanciermaudit Michel Houellebecq was nursing a mug rimmed with old froth. He wore a mauve shirt over a leather jacket and his sock-puppet face was scuffed and scabby. A Discman lay on the metal tabletop between his bloated fingers, the headphones of which clipped a dirty-cream panama to his ginger hair.

I had loathed him at first sight — would that I could’ve been planted opposite the efficient student at the next table, whose thrift-store cheongsam was split high on her chubby thigh. I eyed her well-thumbed Pride and Prejudice and her puppyish tummy with equal covetousness. The Houellebecqalike smelt — he muttered ‘Get it together!’ and other worrying exhortations.

Behind me I could hear the squeaking and baying of a rapidly gathering crowd. As I had taken my seat I’d clocked the security barriers, the bald boys in black suits and the limos pulling up outside Grauman’s — there was obviously a première under way, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my teatime, any more than P. G. Wodehouse had allowed the transportation logistics of Los Angeles to disrupt his habits, when he reported for his first day’s work at MGM in Culver City, having walked the six miles from Beverly Hills.

I sipped my Earl Grey judiciously — the only movie stars left in Hollywood were the supermen’s batmen, the jokers’ tin men, the Elvises and the Marilyn Monroes. Still, at least the impersonators had the virtue of honest subterfuge — not so the out-of-towners treading on the stars’ stars who were being drawn to the red carpet like flies to an Insect-O-Cutor. Once they got between the pavilions, under the mad eaves of the Chinese Theater, they’d get uglier: sunshine and oranges were not enough, not now they were a lowering and bitter crowd.

The traffic continued to rumble and toot, the Houellebecqalike continued to mutter and poot. The first screams were synchronized with the camera flashes reflected in the window of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but soon enough this son et lumière became a dinning zoetrope, then a howling stroboscope — and still I did not turn; didn’t until from out of the hysteria projected a single comprehensible line of dialogue: ‘That guy never gives autographs!’ Then at last I swivelled in my seat to be confronted by a black face gone blubbery with joy. He held out his book so everyone on the terrace could see the page. There was the mark, the stave of the J serving for the T as well, both names lying upon a dais of a flourish and — a few feet beyond the baying hound — there was the marker.

He was wearing a shiny slate bomber jacket with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a $500 T-shirt, and there were sunglasses tipped forward on his charming nose. There he was, Justin Timberlake, his pale trunk tipping forward into the pool of faces, while a forest of limbs reached up to grab him. And there too, floating on the end of a blue-and-whitestriped tie, was the clown-face-designed-by-committee of Mike Myers, while beside him bulged the baby puss of Jessica Alba.

‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ the crowd chanted, while the security detail that had ushered these, the stars of the new Myers comedy vehicle, The Love Guru , across the road, were now frantically trying to get them back. It wasn’t the cars that were the problem — their drivers sat, docilely accepting the mêlée — it was the crowd, which, having filled up the forecourt of the theater, came coursing between the stalled vehicles, a human torrent with waves of faces.

Rising unsteadily to my feet, I addressed my fellow patrons: ‘C’mon, people!’ I struggled to make myself heard. ‘This is lunacy. Justin Timberlake! Mike Myers! Jessica-fucking-Alba? These are not big stars even by the standards of our Lilliputian era — seriously, no one’s gonna riot over them .’ I waved my arm wildly and knocked over my cup. Earl Grey leapt into the Houellebecqalike’s lap. He leapt up crying, ‘ Roi du cons! ’, grabbed me by the throat and began dragging me off the terrace.

Before I toppled into the millrace of sentiment, I was gifted with a moment of clarity: I saw that the bald boys had succeeded in corralling the money back on the far side of the boulevard, while the crowd that whirled around Grauman’s had swollen mightily, its turbulence of bodies enveloping the stalled vehicles and washing up against the fronts of the buildings to twice head height. I saw that the people closest to me were highly individuated — I had only to look upon them to know all about them .

Valerie Schultz, a dental hygienist from Portland, Oregon, a tad overweight, a jet-bead bracelet buried in her wurst folds, a cold sore on her full lower lip, had been date-raped in 1984 and became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption, but two years ago he tracked her down. He was angry, almost illiterate — he’d run away from foster parents in Cedar Rapids to join a biker gang. Valerie got him on a methadone programme, but he still drank — and when he drank he beat her, hence the yellowy-blue stippling of a bruise on the flap of belly exposed as, bobbing in the mob, her T-shirt rides up.

Bob, Duane and Kerry-Anne — I can smell their separate savours as they sibilate ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ But, just as anonymity shades in notoriety, so the further my eye roves the more stereotypical the faces of the crowd become. Then I’m being tossed and buffeted, bouncing off a belly over here, receiving a clout from a stray fist over there. As I am pitched up on to their heads and shoulders, the cacophony of moans, catcalls, shrieks, chants and applause becomes overwhelming. From up here I can make out small islets of the recognizable — a Tin Man with an oil-funnel hat, Elvis mouthing, ‘Everybody let’s rock!’ — but these are surrounded by visages, the eyes, noses and mouths of which are no more differentiated than the funiculae, mandibles and compound eyes of a locust corvée.

To begin with I assume that it’s my own proximity that can imbue these anthropoids with individuality — but I’m soon disabused, for as the agitated waves sweep me away from the terrace of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the crowd becomes more cloned. By the time I’m two blocks further and being scraped along the stone rendering of the L. Ron Hubbard Gallery, I’m surrounded by a swarm whose faces are smooth convexities of flesh, gashed with slots from which issue a monotonous drone.

My clothes are ripped to shreds, blood flows from cuts on my chest and thighs — unless I can gain a place of safety soon I’ll be torn to shreds by the computer-generated mob. Think — think! The clones may be frenzied but they move only where preordained by their creators; if I can read the currents and cross-currents perhaps I can go with the flow? I note the alignment of the Orange Grove sign with a palm tree: that bearing should take me towards the Roosevelt Hotel. I twist and slip sideways into the tide coursing back towards Grauman’s; then, as it draws level with the tree, I push hard at a head with both feet and reach for the trunk… only to be swept backwards by a rush heading the other way.