Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

It was then that I noticed that the once-threshing crowd had been landed — the purse seine was empty except for me, Ellen, the leg and the legman. ‘Will you join us?’ I asked Mac, but he only handed me a manila envelope.

‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Everything I could find out; read it later and then call me.’ He snagged Atkins’s leg, which was hopping past, and tucked it under his arm like an umbrella. ‘The sick shit that goes down in this town,’ he muttered as he duck walked in front of us along the chicken run, but I knew his comments weren’t addressed to anyone in particular, just as I also knew that he was as happy as a pig in it.

The evening began to end in the hotel restaurant. We were eating paella made with giant insects, and although the antennae caught in my teeth they didn’t taste too bad. I was sandwiched between a movie lawyer and the teenage wife of a mogul who was fully gravid — it seemed she might give birth at any moment, a baby doll torn bloody from beneath the hem of her baby doll dress. The lawyer was telling me he represented Rutger Hauer — although what that had to do with anything (even Hauer himself) was entirely obscure. Then he said, ‘I live out at the Palisades in a one-storey house. Y’know people aren’t killed by earthquakes at all — they’re killed by houses.’

The evening was killed off by my bungalow. Coming along the path from the pool, I saw that the moon had risen above the billboard advertising The Love Guru , and I cursed myself for my earlier trope: the Mare Ibrium was nothing like a fake beard — Myers’s or anyone else’s.

I sat smoking a Joya de Nicaragua and got out Mac’s report — which turned out to be a photocopy of my own. I leafed through the forty-odd pages, smiling grimly at the smiley faces and scattering cigar ash on the elaborate diagrams. Mac had scrawled a few words across the final page: ‘Copies of this are being widely circulated — if you can’t join ‘em, beat ’em.’

*It was anomalous that no one seemed to be played by anyone else at this gathering, although when I came to reflect on it later there was one exception — Ellen DeGeneres as Stevie Rosenbloom. I cannot account for the veridical nature of the events recounted below, except to suggest that I was thrown by the contrast with the last Hollywood party I’d been to, almost a decade before, at Carrie Fisher’s house. That was a true ‘night of a thousand stars’ — or at least, I think it was. At one point I found myself in the line-up for the chicken gumbo with Rod Stewart, Geena Davis and the entire featured cast of Blake Edwards’s The Party (excluding, of course, Peter Sellers); then later on I asked the crown of Jack Nicholson’s head if: ‘You get out much?’

Being in one space — albeit the sort of hypertrophied living room-cumterrace mandatory for second-generation movie royalty — with that much notoriety could’ve been the beginning of the Syndrome, because, while these faces were as familiar to me as my own (and, in many cases, having examined the play of their features for many hours, far more so), I had the disagreeable sensation that they were not who the world claimed them to be, but rather a bunch of saddo impersonators, scooped up off the sidewalk outside Grauman’s and taken on by Fisher as a job lot to amuse persons unknown who were sitting hidden behind two-way mirrors, snorting cocaine and laughing hysterically.

It must have been a hell of night, because when I awoke — tucked as savagely into my bed as I had been by the disapproving nurse at Heath Hospital thirty years before — I found I’d had breast implants done. And not just any breast implants Laura Harring’s. At least, I fantasized that they might be Laura Harring’s breast implants, because when I examined them in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door they had a combination of inelasticity and prominence that reminded me of the improbability of her chest — relative to the slimness of her back — when Harring and Naomi Watts took off their tops to fake love in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive *(2001).

I wondered whether implying that anyone might have had breast implants was libellous — but the alternative — that these were Laura Harring’s actual breasts — was too awful to contemplate. I mean, there was I, idly caressing them, while Harring might well be lying somewhere dreadfully hacked about. In an interview I had read with the actress she said: ‘Life is a beautiful journey. Every episode of my life is like a dream and I am at peace and happy with what life has given me.’ But there was no way she could factor a sadistic double-mastectomy into such a beneficent dream — this was a thieving nightmare. Or had Harring been murdered, her beautiful face beaten to a pulp with a brass statuette of a monkey? If so I was off the hook for libel — but without an alibi for the caesura of the past twelve hours.

Clearly, it was time to force the pace of events: if they were messing with me to this extent I’d better take the fight to them. I leafed through the Yellow Pages , found the number, called it and discovered there was a meeting in Hollywood that very morning. Good, I’d have some breakfast, then stroll over.

Slumping in the kitchenette, teapot on the table, and beside it the newly polished brass statuette of a monkey, I poked one long lean thigh languorously out from the folds of the hotel bathrobe. Ignoring the multiple sections of the LA Times strewn all around, I felt as iconic as a Terry O’Neill photo which was just as well, because even in a town renowned for sick shit it was going to take some guts to hit the streets with my purloined tits.

I needn’t have worried, by the time I’d shaved and dressed, the breasts — or implants — had begun to subside, becoming first perfectly normal middle-aged bubs and then the budding nubbins of a teenage girl. Locking the door to the bungalow, I slid a hand up under my T-shirt and was relieved to discover coarse hair. The whole tit-thing must have been the after-effect of a particularly polymorphous erotic dream, and although I felt a little cheated it had to be better than murder.

I found the meeting up on Hawthorn in some kind of community centre. There was a Formica table covered with leaflets and a forty-year-old woman with braces and a tongue stud serving coffee through a hatch. Savouring the ghostly aroma of last week’s cheap meals, I took one, figuring it was only Nescafé, and thinking also of how it was I walked among them, these seraphic folk, able to suspend disbelief in films, in TV adverts, in pop songs, in microwaved food — and even in age itself. Maybe — just maybe — this could work for me too.

All the rest of the cast was assembled — exactly the players you’d expect for a self-help production almost anywhere in the maldeveloped world: following men and trailing ladies, character-defect actors, bit failures and spare extras. I slotted right into this stereotypy and no one paid me the least attention as I threw myself down on a canvas bottomed chair, muttering and slurping and giving off that supersonic whine that’s unfailingly associated with mental distress.

I watched and listened as the children of Xenu were called onstage to testify to their treatment at the hands of the cult. This frail girl, all elbows and ears, the ends of her hair as fractured as her psyche, explained how she had been recruited into the Sea Org *at the age of twelve and spent eight years being bullied and abused — four of them as a suppressive person, forced to wear an orange jumpsuit and wield a mop for fourteen hours a day. She wept.