Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

It wasn’t until I was back out on Cienega that I realized where I was: around the junction with Olympic. And this… this too needed to be noted: that every time Marlowe or Archer got sapped, then came to with a line of inconsequential dialogue in his ears surfer frat boys … it was a metaphor for Los Angeles’s sprawl, as its long lean boulevards stretched out from the rumpled bed. Too much trouble to describe all those Hummers with their wobble-board doors bass vibrating, too much effort to block in those body shops and dental technicians, the stench of a gas station and the street persons, who, skin like bacon rind, were frying today as the smog blew away. Keep on walking … Johnnie Walker, dapper in top hat and frock coat, his boots shined, his monocle screwed into his eye, strode out towards Hollywood, yet never arrived, pinned as he was like a butterfly to the billboard.

I came to again in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, getting ready for the party being given in my honour. (Well, not so much a party — that implies an importance I wouldn’t wish for a second to arrogate to myself; more of a gathering, really.) I was still thinking about the burning of Los Angeles and waiting for Faye to get back — it was that kind of bungalow. Naked, fresh from the shower, I wandered from the small bedroom, icy with state-of-tech TV and music system, to the kitchen, which, with its humming rhombus of an icebox, its foursquare sink — suitable for tanning hides — its chintzy muslin curtains and linoleum pong, suggested a happier era of making do belied by the dishonourable tray loaded with potato chips, cookies, cashews and liquor bottles.

I dressed and went outside to where evening had sidled between the palm leaves, and cheery lanterns lit up the mini-homesteads of this dinky banana republic. From the direction of the pool I could hear a little pre-supper goosing going on: a splash, a cry, the wet thwack of a bikini strap. Behind my bungalow Mike Myers’s moon face rose up, cratered by the Mare Imbrium of his fake beard. His karma is huge …

I walked towards the thwack, let myself out through the metal gate, skirted the porte-cochère, walked down the lane, then along Sunset, and, passing between two sharp-featured young women snapped into black Lycra, entered the Bar Marmont. My key fob bulged in the pocket of my short pants as I walked up some stairs, along a narrowing corridor, through a barroom the width of a train carriage and into a second, narrow as a toilet stall, then into a third no wider than a chicken run, at the end of which I climbed through a trapdoor into a hutch cluttered with armchairs and oil paintings and people — most of whom were thrashing about in a purse seine smoking area, accessed via french windows the size of marmalade jars.

They were all there in the limelight: the Jeffs and Bret, Michael Lynton and Ellen DeGeneres, James Crespinel and Judy Brown, Michael Laughlin *— who was explaining the genesis of his self-designed sneakers to a young woman whose name I never did learn — and Mac Guffin, who immediately drew me to one side: ‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘I picked up five fucking tickets minding your back all the way up Cienega.’

‘No one asked you to do that,’ I hissed. ‘And if you had to, why didn’t you ditch the wheels?’

‘Aw, c’mon fellah, don’t be like that — I’m just trying to look out for you; they’re on your tail — y’know that, don’tcha? They’re sharpening their knives, putting on their leather faces, cranking up their chainsaws, I mean, it’s because you’re paranoid that they’re now coming to get you—’ He broke off to take a highball glass full of fruit from a waitress struggling through the throng.

‘Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mac,’ I snarled; ‘why not just piss all over my party.’

‘Party?’ He shook his Labrador head, then began slobbering on a pineapple chunk. ‘Isn’t that a little grandiose — it looks more like a—’

‘Nice gathering,’ Bret said, cutting in appositely. ‘This is Brad.’ A tall, good-looking young man in blue jeans and a silky-black hoodie, the pink drapes of whose top lip parted to reveal expertly bleached teeth.

‘Hi,’ said Brad chirpily.

‘Brad is directing a movie called The Shrink .’

‘Really?’ I said with maximum disdain. ‘And what of it?’

‘He wondered if you might like to drop by the set — they’re shooting on location down at Venice; wouldn’t that be on your way back to LAX?’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to sound unconcerned, although I was whining inside: Is he trying to get rid of me ?

‘Bret says you’re walking clear round LA,’ said Brad.

‘That’s the aim.’

‘Any special reason?’

‘I’m location spotting for a movie about a guy who circumambulates Los Angeles,’ I told him. ‘I originated the script, did the development myself, put together a lot of the finance, then took it to Sony.’ I jabbed a finger towards Lynton. ‘They’ve green-lit the project and I’ll be directing as well.’

‘And starring?’

I really didn’t like this Brad — he was snider than an ill-gotten Madison hidden in a coffee can.

‘Well, no, since you ask — obviously not. I may have some profile as an actor but I’m not that bankable. Leo DiCaprio will be playing me — although he’s gonna need a body double for the walking scenes.’

Brad was smirking and I foresaw that our next exchange would cross the border at Tijuana into outright savagery. Luckily DeGeneres took my elbow and guided me away, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Don’t mind us, guys, there’re some people I’d like David to meet.’

There was Dervla, who as she spoke took strand after strand of her own chestnut hair in her scissoring fingers — as a hairdresser might — and who wondered if I would be interested in her idea: ‘Based on an original phobia of my own — fear of candlesticks.’ And there was Ogden, who had bitten his nails so badly he had to wear ten finger puppets. ‘What’s the pitch?’ He threw his chucklesqueak into the felt mouth of the Mickey Mouse one. ‘I’ll tellya, it’s about a guy who’s nervous, nervous, noy-vuss — set in Manhattan, natch — or at least, on a set of Manhattan crowded with scrumptious twenty-somethings deafened by canned laughter.’ And then there was Artie, who had spent the last thirty years in a remote cabin in Montana obsessively writing and rewriting a movie script about a reclusive anarcho-Luddite who launches a bombing campaign aimed at derailing the relentless reproducibility of technology: ‘I worked on birch bark,’ Artie confided, ‘using a bone stylus and pigments I had extracted from wildflowers. Then, when I finally returned to civilization, I found out about the Unabomber — man, was I pissed — my whole fuckin’ idea stolen for real.’

They were all interesting pitches, yet I found it difficult to concentrate and kept grabbing Coke after Coke from the trays swirling through the smallish crowd. So there was my mounting and gaseous turbulence — and also the disconcerting presence of Susan Atkins’s amputated leg (which, so far as I knew, no one had invited), which kept kicking the guests’ butts, a grim travesty of the murders it would undoubtedly have tried to perform if it could’ve got their necks behind its knee.

‘What’s with the severed leg?’ I asked Ellen. ‘I mean, is it some kind of ironic comment on my walk?’

‘Lighten up, David,’ she said. ‘Think of Atkins’s leg as just another Mac Guffin — like the hands of Orlac.’

‘You’re not gonna graft that thing on to me, lady. I mean, I’ve got enough homicidal tendencies of my own.’

She looked at me with an odd expression, but only said: ‘Shall we go on and have some dinner at the hotel? The others are already there.’