Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

I fly, legs akimbo, from the minibar to the sink in the bathroom. Kiehl’s bath products rattle in the cabinet, then tumble about my shuddering shoulders. I fly from there back to the minibar, which rocks, rolls and spews its tiny Rémy Martins, gives birth to its jars of jelly babies. Then from there — at last! — to the bed. I rise up from my knees as if on an invisible horse going at a vigorous trot. I reverse this posture and joggle on. I sink down on all fours and the cabana resounds with the crack of an invisible palm that sets first one of my buttocks then the other shivering like jellies, while my face crashes into the pillows and my hand grips one of the hemispherical vinyl bolsters.

Then I’m on my back, my labia pulsing, my clitoris vibrating. I groan and squeak — as abandoned as an abandoned chest of drawers being sawn through by a rusty saw. Still, what do I expect? Pornography is the CCTV of the Id, with its fixed camera angles that capture the dullest views of suburban bedchambers and anonymous hotel rooms. But be not censorious, we actors are not malefactors — only ordinary folk going about our fucking business. It’s all perfectly workaday; and since I was never going to soar over the Hollywood Hills, then down into the Valley where the flightless birds fluttered and gobbled, they’d come to me for a turkey shoot instead.

Half the adult population of the world rasps, ‘I wanna come in your mouth!’ and I gasp,

‘Whatever.’

Their semen is as frothy as aerated cream and as toxic-tasting as typewriter correction fluid. ‘Did you get that?’ I ask the gauzy crew as, up on one elbow, I unceremoniously spit it into a tooth glass.

Afterwards we are surprisingly tender with each other. I lie in the crook of his arm while he tousles the mussed hair on my forehead. He sips a Rémy Martin while I reminisce:

‘I used to bunk off school — y’know, play hooky — and go to the Everyman cinema up in Hampstead. I can still remember those rainy Tuesday afternoons — it’s always a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the past, isn’t it?’

‘Sure, David,’ he says, ‘that’s sweet.’

‘I’d be alone in the fusty little cinema, watching the screen, which wavered and distorted, hot as a furnace. I’d be lying on that blistering tarmac, with the heat beating off the cowling…’

‘So the road, that was your thing?’

‘Yeah, Electra Glide in Blue, Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point — I loved those movies.’

‘Me too.’

‘But then when I was at home it was different stuI–Continental stuI the BBC would screen late at night. I’d be crouched over the black-and-white set I had on a chair in my bedroom — it used to be my father’s study and the wonky shelves were still stacked with his books on planning and government. Before that it had been my elder brother’s — and his double bass was propped in the corner. All the rooms I’ve ever had since then have been sort of sets — trying to re-create that room.’

‘I understand,’ he coos.

‘Sitting there late at night, staring at Giulio Brogi sitting on the abandoned station platform, looking down at the weeds struggling up through the ties and realizing — you see it only in his face — that he’s never going anywhere , that he’s doomed to remain in Tara, that he is… he is…’

‘His father.’

‘Right.’ I twist round to look at him. ‘So, you know that one?’

‘Sure I do — and I did the same thing. OK, it was a colour TV and I never had a hand-me-down room, but essentially it was the same in Sherman Oaks.’ His voice rumbles beneath my ear, a soothing voiceover to the smell-o-rama of cigarette smoke, brandy fumes and fast-drying sweat. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ he continues. ‘How even as kids we sought out unerringly those movies that told us not the truth about ourselves as we were, but about what we would become.’

‘Yeah,’ I weep softly. ‘The truth about what we’ve become, which is cheats.’

‘Cheats?’

‘Cheats, we’re lousy cheats — unfaithful to film.’

I must have slept the same dreamless sleep I endured for all the nights I was in Los Angeles. The only visions were Hal’s-eye views of the beds I thrashed about in, flickering stop-action as my grub’s body mutated under the sheet, until, in the grey dawn my white wings shakily unfolded and flew me to the bathroom.

At some point during those hours he had left me, and if the thousands of frames had been scrutinized there might have been five in which he tenderly disengaged my head, sat upright, then stood, the coiled diaphragm of his underwear held in a deliberating hand, the swirl of his shirt, the door half shut.

In the morning I could only deduce the memory of his presence from forensic evidence: empty Rémy Martin miniatures, the salted slug of a used condom on the wooden floor, a pummelled lube tube on top of the minibar, a screwdriver lying on the rug.

At reception I paid my bill and the clerk handed me a stiff manila envelope: ‘Several gentlemen dropped this by for you earlier this morning, Mr Smith.’

‘Several?’

‘Well, OK, there were five of them.’

Walking a few paces away, I slit it open; inside were the forty single-spaced pages of my position paper. In the designer dimness of the Roosevelt the dense type, studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as,‘45° where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’, seemed to belong to an earlier era — was this the evidence of Jesus’s morganatic marriage to Mary Magdalen we had all been seeking?

With the typescript there was a compliments slip printed with the legend ‘From the desk of the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center’, and, handwritten on this, ‘Many thanks for your interesting insights and observations.’ The signature was quite like Justin Timberlake’s.

‘Can I arrange a car for you, Mr Smith?’ called over the clerk.

I laughed towards his face — and was still laughing as I strode through the dingy lobby and hit the gilded boulevard.

*The exception being the framing device — which implies retrospection — not, counter-intuitively, those events that on Thursday, 12 June 2008, still lay in the future and that I flashed forward to by using Dr Mukti’s CBT techniques. The accuracy of these elements of my reverie was confirmed when they eventually came to pass.

*Jerry Maren, who played Little Professor Atom in At the Circus and who was the ‘prop’ for the gag in which Groucho declines to take the third light from a dwarf on the basis that it’s ‘unlucky’, has had the last laugh accorded by longevity. He’s the only surviving Wizard of Oz Munchkin and has outlived entire legions of full-size thespians.

†I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests — in the jargon — inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor golfing range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

†I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests — in the jargon — inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor gol: ng range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.