Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘Let me get this straight.’ I stepped into Camera Jeff’s banally furnished personal space. ‘Are we splitting up over artistic differences?’

Someone, I thought, ought to be filming this: I needed a reverse shot, so I could see my wispy moustache bristle. I needed Dolby surround sound so I could hear myself shouting: ‘I don’t need this shit! I hired you fuckers and I can fire you too! You’re off this goddamn picture — off it, d’you hear?! Pick up your gear, bubba, and walk !’

But it was me who did the walking, after I’d torn off the mike, then ripped the power pack from my belt and slapped it into Sound Jeff’s pudgy hand. They stood there bemused while I strode around the bougainvillea beds and away down Beverly Drive. I considered shouting back at them: ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’, but the line can be overused, don’t you think?

Carlos and Simon had made their mark on one of the birches lining Beverly Drive. Other Okies had taken time out to play noughts and crosses or score prick ’n’ balls pictograms. Soon enough my angry exhilaration subsided into the tangerine dream of première classe suburbia, where Latinos made with the flagstones and nobody’s escutcheon leant against a portico — and the sky, the sky was no longer limpid water, only a steadily dilating Playboy bunny’s hole lined with shelves upon which were stacked iPod Nanos and player-piano rolls, Box Brownies and HD video cameras, search engines and difference engines. Tipping back my head, I could see that this warm void was aching for Sergey Brin’s re-entry, as he splashed back down into Marina del Rey after his midweek break at the International Space Station. What — what would he find to google at, now that whole generations and societies had passed for ever: only a savage sitting on the dock of the bay scratching a prick ’n’ balls pictogram into its concrete. Under this the legend: DO NO EVIL.

I had my own small digital camera, and if I sensed the Hals clustering, or a wildcat crew creeping up on me, I could always whip it out and start filming myself, much as a boy wizard wields an invisibility cloak. The only problem I faced was the one of any ham alone in the age of technological reproducibility: who was looking at the me looking at me? Even Sergey hurtling earthwards in his steam-punk Soyuz capsule still had a back-projection of blue chiffon sky framed by the triangular porthole — this, a technique essentially unaltered since Sunset Boulevard , when the cops in the pursuit car stared intensely out at us, while behind them a second film of the unspooling roadway did for the trompe l’œil .

This then is the whole equation

projector → audience (screen) → cops driving (rear window) → Sunset Boulevard receding = reality

that, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stand-in asserted, ‘Not half a dozen men have been able to keep… in their heads.’ It was nothing to do with the residuals for Dharma & Greg , and, believe me, I felt brittle just containing it in my nut, and wondered as I footed down Carmelita Drive whether it might make sense to hole up in the Spadena House. No one would look for me in this symbolic assemblage of witchy elements: burnt-toast eaves, spangly windowpanes, roughed-up plaster and a toad spawn chimney stack. The little homestead of horror had originally been built as a novelty office for the Culver City Movie Company, and only latterly rolled up into Beverly Hills on a truck. I could lie low — the house would recede on a low-loader. Like Donald Crowhurst when he abandoned the 1968/9 round-the-world solo yacht race, I would fake a diary of my own circumambulation, while in a parallel notebook I frantically operated on the equation, multiplying its terms until the warped rooms were cluttered with screens and retrospectives.

There was no smoking in Beverly Hills Park. Kitted out as a bum, the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott sat slumped in an abandoned office chair in the empty pergola — there was a beer bottle, queerly limp, drooping from his hand to his inner thigh. I crossed the road and holed up in the Coffee Café for a sandwich, observing the anthropophagi that patrolled the sidewalk in their Palomino-skin cowboy boots, the bands of jewelled denim between their hips taut as bowstrings.

For a less doughty voyager, departing the island of affluence lying between Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire and Rexford might have been dispiriting — yet I felt carefree, reknotting my shoelaces, reefing the strap of my backpack and stepping out with the wind behind me. It’s only those who have no experience of round-the-conurbation walking who imagine suburbia as an unvarying ocean of roof peaks and garden troughs; no, here is the great individualism Americans justly pride themselves on, with each property distinguished from its neighbour: Spanish Mission instead of Neogothic, japonica in place of bougainvillea, TruGuard rather than Mercian security.

From the ridge at Pico I could see the whole dish full of smog spread out beneath me, from which popped the up-plummeting bodies of trampolining children and the inverted mop-tops of truffula trees. For a moment I hesitated — might it be an idea to set a course through the Hillcrest Country Club? I could join a lost tribe of rich Jews and wander that landscaped Sinai for… years. But no, I had a rendezvous with Tamisa the crossing guard, who sat in regal splendour at the junction of Beverwil and Cashio on her throne of puddled fat. ‘You’ve gotta get offa your backside,’ she told me without a smidgeon of irony. Then reassume it, I thought, part time at twelve bucks an hour.

Quite suddenly I was standing in a grocery store at Hughes Avenue buying a can of Kobe energy drink and chatting to the sales assistant, who was from Bhutan. He was unimpressed by my voyage: ‘I run a trekking business in my own country,’ he told me. ‘Also, I am a mountaineer.’

Outside I looked up at the frozen wang of the Santa Monica Freeway and thought better of it — so poured the drink away on to the asphalt. It wouldn’t do to arrive all fired up. I spat my tasteless cud of nicotine gum into my palm and was appalled to see that my jaws had expertly worried it into a perfect little voodoo doll of Orson Welles, complete with cloak and wide-brimmed hat. I shuddered, remembering the micro-manipulation of Hagop Sandaldjian, and, last fall, Sherman flung naked across the high bed — then Willy Town Mouse scuttled into the cheesy wedge of the Culver Hotel.

Which wasn’t so bad — there was a high staff turnover and no one remembered me. I was given a room on the third floor with a dinky four-poster garrotted by swathes of muslin. The shower’s low pressure felt historically accurate, then I sat drying off in a wing armchair looking out through breeze-buffeted net curtains at the balding Baldwin Hills, with their oil pumps rising and falling like failing hair implants. I had come almost full circle, and might reasonably have gone on to LAX and flown home to London. After all, no one else had turned up dead — yet.

Instead I phoned and in the gap between ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ heard the low moan of eight lost hours and the dumb percussion of falling marbles. I wanted to ask about the crime scene tape — was it still there? But she hardly ever left the house — except by Packard; while the children — who would’ve known — were out at casting calls. So we said our goodbyes and hung up, and in the seconds after the marriage of the plastic I felt as if, far from having communicated, we had only defined the vast compass of the incommunicable.

Guffin was waiting for me at a table outside Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled ‘American gastro-pub’ on Culver Boulevard, whose ‘executive chef’ was none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. I nodded to Mac and for a while we sat silently in an establishing shot, absorbing the drivel on the menu: Ford’s culinary philosophy was much influenced by the French slow-food movement, which favoured authentic locally sourced ingredients, simple preparation, blah-blah-bleurgh! It wasn’t a philosophy that extended to the establishment’s décor, with its gas station logo implying that esturgeon confit was another type of high-octane fuel.