Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Horrified, I realize I’m in the van of a flying wedge charging straight towards a horde going in the opposite direction. Their impact flips me head over heels, and as the two columns grind against each other I’m twirled again and again, as a spar is battered by a weir. ‘JussstinJussstinJussstinJussstin!’ The pressure increases — if I’m sucked into an eddy I’ll be trampled to death beneath the clones’ feet, which, despite their binary DNA, are rigid and hard. My ribs are cracking, my shoulders and hips disjointing… I fight it, kicking out to keep my feet on the ground. Another moaning rush, ‘JusssJusssJusss!’, and I find myself in a calm spot where the pressure slackens — although now I feel a terrible stabbing pain in my lower back. It’s strange, given that the forms that surround me have no more angles or projections than mass-produced souvenir Oscar statuettes… I can’t turn but manage to twist my head: a very skinny kid wearing a Lakers cap has his sharp shoulder digging into my kidneys. Shocked by this reindividuation, I pan about and see that, yes, others of the homologues are becoming distinguishable, with here a shock of brown hair, there a scattering of freckles, over there a beaded dreadlock.

It must be that whoever animated the scene anticipated action here requiring a close-up. I crane to see under the peak of the boy’s cap — he’s as vague as a ghost, so, having laboriously freed my arm, I swing on him, a clumsy haymaker that comes down on top of his head and with a yelp he goes under. There’s a further wild surge that washes me into another calm pool; this time I’m facing a young woman who sobs hysterically. Her cotton print dress has been ripped from the neckline to her waist — her brassière as well. Her breasts would be beautiful, were it not that one of them is missing a nipple. I push back to give her some room, but every time I move she moves with me, insinuating her leg between my thighs. I’m becoming aroused — until the girl spasms violently and her blonde bob lifts to reveal that she has no ears. ‘Stop it! Fuckin’ quit!’ she yells — but it isn’t me that’s bothering her, it’s the clone behind her, whose blank screen morphs into a goatish leer… then I see that he has his hand up her dress, while he dribbles on her bare neck.

My arm is still aloft, so I grab his ear — another action that’s obviously been anticipated, for it’s as well formed as an anatomical drawing. I squeeze it as hard I can and twist, but it isn’t long before skin melds with cartilage and the ear disappears back into a slick egghead that’s borne away from me. At least the young woman has escaped, although when I try to pick out her blonde bob in the crowd it too has been subsumed by the pixels… Another spasm passes through them; I find myself within an arm’s length of a signpost, a second spasm and I grab it, am swung up and round into the air…

A final view of Hollywood Boulevard crashing with waves of sound: ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ The pagodas of Grauman’s soar thousands of feet into the sky, as do the other, less ornate buildings, all of which have been subjected to the same crude multiplier. In the deep trough between them the crowd ripples, and there’s a last sensation of buoyancy as I float on this lake of doppelgängers before a providential swirl carries me into the gloomy inlet of the Roosevelt’s lobby.

I stared at my idol face in the tarnished pool of an old mirror for a long time, yet there seemed no evidence of the ordeal I had just survived: my clothes were intact; my baseball cap was clamped firmly on my head. True, my expression was a little wary, but even as I looked a familiar superciliousness crept back in from the edges. I sniffed deeply, sucking up the ineradicable odour of old hotel — dust and static electricity — then padded back towards the stairs that led down to the reception desk. *

Between square pillars I could see that the tables were already laid in the restaurant, glassware and cutlery gleaming on dark wood. I checked my watch: 7 .16 already — I had better get ready fast, or I’d be late for my dinner with Bret.

*After I had levied my Mastercard and signed the form, here, here and there, the receptionist clicked his fingers for the bellhop. I tried to say that I didn’t require any assistance but the words crumbled on my tongue, and for what seemed like several hours I was suspended in a reverie during which I surveyed an entire alternative history for the North American landmass. One in which the second wave of colonization was from the west, in the tenth century ce, and by Arab traders who then converted the Native Americans to Islam, occupied the entire continent, established a caliphate, rapidly industrialized and then in the seventeenth century mounted a war of conquest against the sleepy European backwater where the Reformation — not to mention the Enlightenment — had yet to occur.

‘Is the asparagus fresh?’

‘Well, it’s in a soup, so it’s been, like, puréed.’

‘But was it fresh when it was puréed?’

‘I guess.’

‘What about the halibut?’

‘I can assure you: that’s definitely fresh.’

‘Definitely?’

‘Definitely.’

Fresh the halibut may have been, although this was still the type of restaurant where dead fish were laid out for boning on squared-off mounds of clapshot or polenta. Over Bret’s shoulder the dun dining room of the Roosevelt seamlessly merged with the deeper and wider murk of the Spanish Revival lobby, where an enormous crystal chandelier dripped wanly, scarcely illuminating the exposed ceiling beams, let alone the mezzanine level cornice with its pattern of desert blooms.

There had been some manoeuvring before we were installed by our own square pillar, which, like all the others in the restaurant, had been boxed off at head height by interior designer Dodd Mitchell — although probably not personally.

‘I don’t want to sit next to anyone in this town,’ Bret had explained to the maître d’ after rejecting the first two tables offered. He was wearing a cool-looking cream linen suit and a positively chilly blue silk shirt. Ray-Bans poked from his display pocket, and when he canted sideways on the banquette suede loafers poked out from beneath the table. He was being played by mid-period Orson Welles — neither the obese, sherry-swilling old roué who had taken on Busner’s role, nor the young Welles who had impersonated the writer back in the mid-1980s, at the summit of his notoriety.

I didn’t know who’d taken me on this evening — and Bret was giving nothing away. I thought it unlikely that Postlethwaite had been racketing around Manhattan in the nineties, which was when I’d got to know the author of American Psycho , but it was possible Thewlis had been there for raucous dinners at Elaine’s, big drinks in the small hours at Mary Lou’s in the Village, then dawn upchucking from the East River, glimpsed nauseously by vampires doing lines of cremains off somebody’s butcher block in someone else’s apartment.

In those days Bret had struck me as high, wide, handsome and more than a little bumptious — this was forgivable, given that he was scarcely thirty and already with the masterpiece of Citizen Kane to his credit. Now he seemed leaner — the Welles glimpsed only briefly on camera during the shooting of his Rockefellerfunded South American travelogue, a fiasco that had ended up way over budget. Perhaps it was this that had winnowed him out?

He finished ordering with a run through the white wines available by the glass, before settling reluctantly on a Zinfandel.

‘And for you, sir?’

‘Me?’ I was flustered, and as my Adam’s apple scraped in my dry throat I flashed back to the $1,000-per-night poolside cabana where I had checked myself out obsessively in the mirror before this rendezvous. What madness! How could I have forgotten the thinning hair, the pocked cheeks, knobbly knees and hairless ankles? I was Postlethwaite, of course, and no matter how many Kiehl’s bath products I lavished on myself there was no possibility of my seducing Bret, I mean, I was hardly his type . ‘Uh, I’ll have… the same as him.’