Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Keep walking — early morning on Sundays is the time allotted for pedestrianism in LA. For an hour or so those of us on foot had the city to ourselves. There was a mackerel sky over the Santa Monica Freeway and a steady stream of joggers coming between the mirrored donjons of Century City. Then there were the street persons, old hags bent double under sacks who turned their backs on the haunting flares of sunlight. ‘You have really pretty eyes,’ said a scuffed-up ladyboy who pulled me up outside a deli somewhere around Glen Boulevard. ‘Can I have a light?’ I took in the shaving rash, the baseball cap, the hip-hugging cut-offs and the just-picked-up butt of filter tip stuck in a face that was dustily lacking in registration.

I gave him one, although he too had a disconcerting air of being pre-known, as did the petals lying around a storm drain and the WARNING. THIS AREA CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER, BIRTH DEFECTS AND OTHER REPRODUCTIVE HARM, as did the Elysian Fields of the Los Angeles Country Club.

A linguini of LAFD hoses had been vomited across the sidewalk from the engines parked by the kerb, and there, sitting at the metal tables in front of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, were the fire starters themselves, companionably planning their day’s arson. I stopped for a smoke and a coffee — decaf, of course. But, even so, this was a big mistake, because as I kept walking my bladder swelled and mutated until I was but a hollow man who could barely put one leg full of urine in front of the other.

What to do? Gas station after gas station taunted me with its signs: RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMER USE ONLY. Until I got it into my thick head and became a customer myself — but what to buy, not a candy bar, or a spare cap for my gas tank. No need for a newspaper or a rubber mat either… Aha! Quick Energy Drink ®— small, portable, inoffensive. I paid and knocked it back. Then the Cha’ an meditation illness began, in front of the urinal, it was of course state law that employees wash their hands, but as for the rest of us we were free to walk the streets with our hands dripping blood and excreta. The incontinent recall of Buddhist texts, which is the symptom of this overstraining of the pupil’s psyche, can be rectified only by the master hitting him hard on the head with a stick. Otherwise the texts range themselves, left to right, across the pupil’s visual field, not interrupting his view of a homeless man foetal on the sidewalk — but augmenting it. More disturbingly, the texts are no mere phenomenological wallpaper — the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by the pupil, even as he stares through them at the sign for historic Route 66.

And still the texts proliferate — at first only ones the pupil is familiar with, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of. Yet these too are comprehended in their entirety, at once, even though he can see straight through them to a plate-glass window, and beyond that a store full of running machines. The pupil’s mind becomes bloated with a consciousness that inexorably ramifies, his ego, free-will, intentionality — whatever — it is trapped like a swarming water drop pinioned in a microscope slide. There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits — these are texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilizations, texts doodled on the Etch A Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid –

The Quick Energy Drink ®had to have been a mistake, because this was the mosh-pit of soma I was chucked into as I continued west to Santa Monica — with one key distinction: I saw not texts but video clips. Clips of me walking out from the arrivals terminal at LAX and on to Century Boulevard, clips of me freaking out in a gas station, clips of me checking in to the Uqbar Inn, clips of me passing by donutmorphic drive-ins, clips of me surging through nuages maritimes in the Baldwin Hills, clips of me beating on piñatas east of Broadway — in short, video clips of me at every stage of my circumambulation, and not just the ones I knew had been taken by the perfidious Jeffs, but all the clips from the security cameras I’d long stopped trying to avoid.

I was pondering this — in as much as anyone could ponder such an extravagant onslaught of visual imagery, tens — hundreds even — of thousands of full-motion shots of himself walking, streamed straight to his visual cortex — when I realized that one of the clips was in real time and that it coincided, more or less, with my own POV. I was passing by the John Wayne Cancer Institute; it was a pretty big cancer institute — but then he had been a pretty big guy. I had reached Santa Monica and regained some sort of equilibrium, standing on the sidewalk like any other rube and reading the following text:

‘Here are described the humble beginnings of the once swamp dweller whose fortune was lost many generations before his own birth due to the unfortunate and unexplainable misplacement of his great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s will and the deed to 21,138 acres of land which once encompassed the greater part of what is now San Francisco. Legend also tells that the soul of SCUSSUXYKOR III, an ancient Egyptian pharoah murdered by his very own soothsayer priest, sometimes dwells within his flesh. The astrological sign of the squid from the zodiac of the planet Jamzübati-Remoti on the outer Stewart Skippy Socrates solar system centered on the SUZIIR23 galaxy exemplifies the Amazing Chain Man.’

Which was written in marker pen on a piece of cardboard stuck on top of shopping cart, beside which sat a street person I thought I recognized. He was rattling hanks of chain between his hands. His bald head was surmounted by a twist of bandana, and above his beard was the benign expression of someone who believes that the everyday slights of this world can be fully explained by pan-galactic conspiracy theories.

‘Hey, Chain Man,’ I said.

‘Hey,’ he replied.

‘That’s a fine piece of writing.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Not to be picky, but it’s p-h-a-r-a-o-h.’

‘A-o-h what?’

‘Pharaoh — you’ve reversed the o and a .’

‘Right, whatever, dude.’ He let the chain hank fall to his lap. ‘But I’m a writer — not a fuckin’ speller.’

I make no excuses, I was weary and anyway facetiousness comes naturally to me: ‘Oh, OK,’ I chuckled, ‘so what do you write?’

The Amazing Chain Man got out a bit of a Marlboro and lit it before continuing, ‘Before the strike I had a pretty good gig churning out scripts for Stargate SG-I , did some stuff for Atlantis and Universe too — that was my eating money anyways.’

‘Oh — you mean you’re a real writer.’

‘Like, d’oh, we’re all real writers.’ He waved the tip of his cigarette to encompass the tramps, winos and bums who had congregated on these benches at the intersection of 7th and Santa Monica. ‘Whaddya think, that the WGA had a generous strike fund? There was too much fuckin’ product anyway, now they’ve gone head to head over the new media residuals for Dharma & Greg , well, most of us will never work again. Some of these guys, though, they’re, like, idealists.’

‘Like idealists — you mean they’re transcendental idealists?’

‘No, dummy, they’re novelists, short story writers — even biographers. They’ve come from all over to back the strike. They can read the writing on the wall: if it that’s all she wrote, that’s all they’ll be wroting too.’

I let this solecism slide and confined myself to the matter near to hand:

‘So this’ — I pointed at the cardboard — ‘is what exactly?’