Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘Where’s Philbin?’ Brad asked a nearby AD, ‘I need Philbin here right now — and tell him to bring the sides.’

‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ The name echoed away through the house and in a short while a fussed-looking writerly type — small, glasses, needlessly sensitive face — came hustling up clutching a handful of A5-sized yellow pages.

‘OK, Philbin.’ Brad took the sides from him and shuffled through them rapidly to find the right scene. Maybe seven or fifteen men and women in business suits materialized out of nowhere, and the entire group adjourned sideways through sliding doors on to a roof terrace, where they formed a promenade of couples, passing the yellow pages back and forth between them.

Eventually some sort of consensus was reached, because Brad and the blackleg writer came back with the relevant side and they bent over it together. Brad said, ‘Uh, yuh, uh, so… here, and here — I don’t like that — that doesn’t seem to me the kinda way he’d say that at all.’

‘It’s too, uh, teen?’ Philbin ventured tentatively.

‘Yeah!’ Brad was delighted. ‘You got it, Philbin, it’s too goddamn teen , now put some words in his mouth that have got more… more… ’

‘Gravitas?’

‘I’ll grab your fuckin’ ass if you don’t hustle, Philbin,’ Brad laughed, and the writer withdrew to a corner with the script editor and the script editor’s four assistants. Spacey was now doing neck rolls.

After a few minutes Philbin was back with the new sides and Brad okayed them and Spacey and Postlethwaite scanned them fast like the pros they were, and the makeup and wardrobe people stampeded out of shot and the clapperboard was waved in front of the camera again: ‘l07 #2. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:

BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?

CLIENT: OK, I guess.

BUSNER [ provocatively ]: He’s a cool guy, Shiva, but sorta dull.

CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking — then played them back to me.

BUSNER: Did it help?

CLIENT [ giggling ]: Help… well, I guess with the movies — and a little bit with reality

There was no denying: it was an improvement — far more plausible. But I knew there’d be at least twenty or fifty more takes before they nailed the scene down and I had six or seven miles still to go. I didn’t want to disturb Brad while he was shooting, so I asked one of the gofers to tell him goodbye from me. She said she’d make sure Brad’s PA got the message: ‘He should know you’ve gone by early next week — midweek at the latest.’

I set off along Dell pursued by the sinister intimations I’d had when Spacey was sorting through the watches. Watches! Such a cliché — whether on wrists, mantelpieces, or melting in the corner of Dalí canvasses, timepieces were always just that. Still, what did I have to fear? I’d survived it all, and here were the cheery apartment blocks surrounding Marina del Rey, their balconies like the open draws of filing cabinets, their sunbathing tenants brown-papery in the afternoon sun.

I’d survived it all, and here were out-of-work hoofers break-dancing with placards advertising real estate brokers at the intersection of Washington and Lincoln boulevards — tossing them up in the air, then catching them behind their backs. There was a metaphor there, but I was too weary and footsore to reach for it; I only wanted to keep on going across the Ballona wetlands, where Leonardo DiCaprio had flown his Spruce Goose, and the Native American juju had repelled the developers and the toxic effluent from Hughes Aircraft had been pumped away and the egrets and the herons waded… I only wanted to keep going, but there was this awful tinnitus plaguing me — bass notes and bum notes, a sax riff that pierced me from ear to ear.

The sidewalk gave out and I went on, the fenders of SUVs shaving my cheek. I wanted to keep going — but out here in the middle of the marsh, where freshwater floods met saltwater tides and the wrack was Infinitis and Escalades and trucks and town cars, all mired in solid oil, I spied a figure tailing me from the front. How long had he been there? Had he been keeping tabs on me all the way from the Chateau Marmont, or from still further back along my circuit? He was in shirtsleeves, a jacket slung over his shoulder, and although I thought I recognized the set of his shoulders and the shuffle of his gait, every time I tried to catch up (the bass doubling time, the sax beginning to rock), he accelerated as well. I slowed down and he slowed down, I hopped and he hopped, I skipped and he skipped.

Tiring of this, I stopped — and he stopped. The tinnitus faded to a distant plink-honk. We stood twenty yards apart for a minute or so. I turned back to face Marina del Rey, then whipped back round — I’d caught him out: it was Mac Guffin. ‘So it’s you,’ I called. ‘Should I be afraid? I mean, when you turn up people generally get dead — even your clients.’

‘Especially my clients,’ he called back. ‘My clients have a near 100 per cent fatality rate.’

‘But you don’t let it get to you, do you, Mac?’

‘I try to maintain a regular disposition.’ He held his hands palm up, the laughter lines creased around his trustworthy brown eyes.

‘What’re you trying to tell me, Mac — that the worst has already happened?’

‘I figure someone had to, Will: you’re a dead man walking. You’ve been dead since Laurel Canyon.’

‘Was it the implants?’ I asked, kneading my breasts through the damp fabric of my T-shirt. ‘I mean, I know suicide rates are way higher for the women — the people who’ve had them.’

‘No.’ He shook his head pityingly. ‘It wasn’t the implants; it was that dumb-ass report you wrote. You didn’t think you could get away with saying those things about the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis without getting clipped, didya?’

‘Well, I dunno…’ I hung my head in the sweet breeze coming in off the wetlands.

‘Y’know what it was, Will, it was attention-seeking.’ Mac shook his head; he didn’t seem so happy today.

‘I… I just wanted to belong.’

‘Well, now you do belong: to the departed. And, while we’re at it, it’s 10.2 and 67 degrees.’

‘I had no idea it was that… big.’

‘No’ — again the weary shake — ‘you had no idea.’ And he turned his back on me and trudged on along the scrappy verge. Having no alternative, I followed my Charon, the swish-swash of the traffic fading imperceptibly into the moody horns and sucrose strings of a pickup orchestra fucking over The Isle of the Dead in Westwood.

Which faded out on the rise, where Mac halted and I turned back, hoping for a sweeping panorama of the coastline, but saw only a sign for La Vista Motel and the highway in its mid-ground of embankment and plantation, up above the blue screen and a few dabbles of cirrus. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve gotta leave you here, man; there’s a hiking trail along the bluff to the playa — kinda neat walk.’

‘Neat walk!’ I spat. ‘What is this crap?’

‘Y’know,’ Mac said, observing me with impatience and pity, ‘some people walk for fun, Will, for leisure — to have a good time.’

‘I… I don’t know what to say…’

‘You mean there’s no illusion of a core self that’s giving you direction?’

‘Ye-es, I s’pose so.

‘Well, what can I tell you,’ he said, sucking his moustache; ‘this is an amazingly complex piece of software — there’re bound to be some glitches. I mean to say, this has to be the first time anyone’s tried it.’

‘Tried what exactly?’

‘Kidnapping someone, forcing them to undergo systematic motion-capture filming and standard-deviation face tracking, then replacing them with a 3-D image of themselves.’