Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

And now that I came to think back over the episode, as at first I made my way along the verge of Mulholland, then dived down a winding side road into the dark heart of affluent suburbia, it dawned on me that not once during that strange interlude had the voice referred to me by name. Who was playing me, then? As I walked I ran my hands over my face repeatedly — but one angular middle-aged male face feels pretty much the same as the next, and it wasn’t until I crept under a carport and crouched to frame my features in the wing mirror of an Infiniti that my hunch was confirmed: this was not homely Pete Postlethwaite’s face, or Thewlis’s haughty mien. But as to whose lumpy nose, rag-rolled cheeks and equine teeth were described on this face mask — well, I was at a loss, so I squeezed a blackhead.

And soon lost interest, plodding on along the road towards Mount Olympus. Somewhere up here Huxley’s house had burnt down, a domesticated fireball of mystic books — what was it his friend Gerald Heard had said? ‘Man is the general name applied to successions of inconsistent conduct having their source within a two-legged and featherless body.’ Poor Aldous, his visual field so savagely foreshortened by myopia and his attention span — sooo long, a stretch limmo of awareness, capacious enough to seat the entire casts of all the movies ever shot in Hollywood, in Culver City, in Burbank, in the Valley. Will Hay and the Fat Boy sat up with the driver, and in the back compartment Manuel P. Zlotnik carousing with Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough… and all the rest.

That was Aldous’s misfortune: spaced out in Schwab’s, he had seen Los Angeles’s hair was burning, that her hills were filled with fire, and with that he broke through from the monochrome world of the 1950s to the other Technicolor side. Poor Aldous: if all the movies ever made had been spliced together, wound on to a reel the size of a Ferris wheel and projected on to a screen two inches in front of him, it still wouldn’t have been long enough to divert him, it still would’ve seemed over in a blink of his mescaline eyes. For he had seen the future: the after-image of the movies, flickering on the inside of his lids.

I had noted the flyers for Location Services stuck in the mailboxes along Willow Drive, and now I reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard only to discover that in my flat-footed abstraction I had lost the straight way and that the sun had dipped behind the shoulder of the mountain. The canyon was a deep place and with Saturday fast fading the snorting beasts were rampaging back from the beaches, their headlights piercing the gathering shadows. The hardtop snaked between steep bluffs terraced with real estate and there was no sidewalk. I got out the map crumpled into my pocket, but once I’d unfolded it saw that the available routes back to Sunset were all equally wiggling — they wormed across the rumpled paper, the apotheosis of the grid, as if the plotting pens of an EEG had simultaneously registered the nightmares of the city’s entire populace.

I tried walking on the left-hand side of the road, but each time I rounded a bend I was horribly aware I was invisible to the beasts that came at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour, panting hydrocarbons, their fenders-for-jaws snagging the pandanus along the verge. I sprinted across to the right — but here my terror was still greater, for each time a beast came charging up the hill, its headlights ignited visions in my eyes — while they, I knew mos’ def’, could see nothing at all.

I tried switching from one side of the boulevard to the other as it wound down through the canyon, so as to provide the beasts coming from either direction with the greatest possible visibility — but this was no good, for darkness was upon us all now, and as I pelted like a picaro (or do I mean a picador?) beneath the points of their chrome horns I couldn’t prevent myself from witnessing the abominations inside these Escalades and Infinitis and Tahoes. I may have been a cryogenically preserved Disney head bowled chuckling down this lane of death, I may have been a silica grain impelled by time, but at least I wasn’t like these… these… sinners .

No wonder they couldn’t slow down, when this lustful man’s penis was so engorged, so turgid, that I could see it thrusting up towards the windshield. No wonder they couldn’t see me, when this gluttonous family’s minivan was so stuffed with their own fat and discarded food that even as they screamed by I noted the high tide of gnawed drumsticks, frayed corncobs and crescent burgers pressed by paps and thighs against the greasy windows. No wonder they had no care for the future, when, like this derivatives trader, they urged their Crown Victorias forward, while their heads were reversed .

This last beast, sightless, sunless, ravenous, clipped my shoulder and sent me flailing into a drive. I wasn’t injured at least the skin wasn’t broken, and only swirled into an oily multicoloured whorl when I pressed it with my thumb — but I was finished. I slumped down on the concrete, my throat combusting with nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, particulate matter and, of course, hydrocarbons. It was the nadir — and then he came, and I was lifted up.

He came, tripping down the side of the boulevard, his silky three-quarter-length pants shimmying as his highly toned calves took the stresses of descent in their stride. He came, strips shaven into his scalp beneath the arms of his shades, a tattoo of a torpedo on his stringy neck, a tuft of hair on his decisive chin. He came — and when he saw me there, washed up on the shore by the metallic storm, he stepped aside and pulled away the headphones that cosseted his noble ears.

Despite the whoosh of the boulevard, I registered familiar close harmonies, staccato yet melodious cheeping from the tinny-tiny speakers: ‘Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, so do… (Aff-ect! Pro-ject!) And so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life… out of it, out of it… (Pro-ject! Dee-part!) And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the so-ci-ety of men—’

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened to the Latin?’

‘Excuse me?’ He hadn’t noticed me before I spoke.

‘That’s NWPhd, isn’t it? I saw those guys rehearsing down at USC a couple of days ago.’

‘Aw,’ he said, shaking his head dismissively, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that, this is my roommate’s MP3. I just grabbed it as I took off — this ain’t my kind of shit at all.’

‘You don’t dig Aurelius?’

‘Or who?’

‘Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher — it’s his Meditations those guys are rapping, I just wondered what’d happened to the Latin, they usually do the Latin as well as the English.’

‘Oh, OK, I getcha — my roomie, he did say this was some kinduva remix, so maybe they, like, dropped the Latin to make it more commercial, or some kinda shit like that.’

It had been a long and substantive speech — which I was grateful for, but I needed more; he, however, seemed intent on leaving, pulling the headphones back on and turning to resume his goatish descent. ‘Hey, wait!’ I cried.

‘Say what?’ He turned back.

‘You aren’t going to walk all the way down Laurel Canyon, are you?’

‘Fool, I live up there a-ways, so I do the walk down to Sunset twice daily — I’ve a little problem with my licence, you dig. The only time I don’t walk down is when I skateboard.’

‘Skateboard?’

‘You heard it. I got me one of those big three-foot boards with the meaty wheels. I start back up a-ways by the park. Man, I tellya that thing goes — I guess I must be hitting thirty by the time I get to here, and when I drop back an’ brake, the sparks fly .’