Will Self: Walking to Hollywood

At three minutes past noon on 8 October 2007, I found myself standing listening to Sherman Oaks beside a dew pond on the crest of the South Downs in Sussex. A single cramped ash was reflected in the gunmetal disc of water, a disc that was ringed with pocked earth and cupped in a fold of cropped turf. Had an eavesdropper crept up on the pair of us, they might have thought Sherman’s magniloquence prompted by the very finitude of this watering hole, that the way he lectured not only me but the thrushes flitting overhead was an attempt to break free of this claustrophobic scene: the sky closely sealed by a lid of cloud, cut-outs of hedge and woodland stuck on the receding crests of the downs.

I knew this not to be the case.

Sherman had always been a big talker. I remember him aged seven or eight, rolling around in the boot of my mother’s car when it was her turn to do the school run, spouting a stream of wisecracks and making razor-sharp observations on the foibles of the world. A precocious anarchist, at thirteen Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski’s, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this — in a thick, mittel -European accent: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

It’s barely worth remarking that the impact of this stunt would be hugely enhanced by the perpetrator’s stature: at eight Sherman had been less than three feet tall, at thirteen he was perhaps three-foot-two, thirty-five years later he had gained, at most, an inch.

Assuming Sherman did do it — and I have no reason to doubt him — his dwarfism was the reason he got away with it, for in the North London of the 1970s the uneasy ridicule that disability once provoked had mutated into a tolerance that already verged on de facto acceptance of collective responsibility: we were all to blame for Sherman Oaks’s restricted height. Not that our peers felt exclusively this way; after all, children are always in a state of nature — always nasty, brutish… and short. Sherman may not have been overtly persecuted, but he undoubtedly felt excluded — forever eddying while the life stream flowed forward all around him.

In my early teens I felt that way too. It wasn’t commonplace spottiness — my face was mailed in acne. Then there was Dick Holmes, who could’ve used a D-cup bra. Together we formed a mismatched trio: the Small, the Fat and the Spotty lanky one. I daresay there are plenty of outcasts who sink into introspective angst, but with Sherman to goad us on there was no chance of that: he made me march into the chemist’s, where I bought the useless salves for my hurting face and confronted the pharmacist, claiming that it was the product that had done it to me. He got Dick Holmes to dress up in his mother’s frock and buy us booze, and he himself led us into the reference section of High Hill Bookshop, where he sat insouciantly on a table reading the Britannica aloud. When confronted, he said he was a five-year-old genius.

Still, as the lugubrious narrator of La Jetée would have it: ‘Nothing tells such memories from ordinary memories; only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.’ Sherman, having none to spare, never gave an inch. I was in awe of his chutzpah — he was our own home-grown Vamana: Vishnu incarnated as a dwarfish trickster. As for me, I had already imperfectly grasped an awareness that would harden within me even as my acne scabbed then flaked away: whatever the emotional scars I might bear my life would remain coddled and my instincts conformist — only a striving such as Sherman’s against his crushing disability could be accounted an exercise of will at all.

On his sixteenth birthday Sherman threw a party at his parents’ house on Norrice Lea. The studious entrepreneurialism of Mr Oaks — he manufactured cash registers in a 1950s block near Hangar Lane that looked like a cash register — had kerchinged the family this Lutyens villa, complete with redbrick loggias and a sunken garden. Twice-my-height privet hedges hid the mullioned windows, behind which lay an enormous open-plan kitchen — the first I had ever seen. Beneath track lighting (again, the first I had ever seen) gleamed two of every white good, for although Sherman bought ham at the deli then wolfed it straight from the wrapper, Mrs Oaks kept strict kosher.

The child of a ruptured family from the wrong side of the North Circular, I was awed by the opulence of the Oakses’ home. Our kitchen window still had several broken panes patched with cardboard and Sellotape — the result of my parents’ penultimate row. Our goods weren’t white at all, but yellowed with sadness and neglect. There was less than one of everything and the family dog had had a nervous breakdown, while my older brother — having absorbed the force of Christopher Logue’s clerihew ‘When all else fails, try Wales’ — had decamped. To Swansea.

I was awed by the Oakses’ home — and captivated by the Oaks sisters. There were three of them, ranged around Sherman in age and each seemingly more lovely and gracile than the preceding one. The youngest, Tertia, was an outright stunner. My mother, whose own neuroses and phobias made her a lightning conductor for any distress sparking across the suburb, speculated on what quirk of heredity had produced Sherman. But, while it was tempting to think in terms of throwback, or kick sideways, or even adoption, he shared with his sisters the same white-blond hair, fierce blue eyes and highly wrought features; it was the parents who failed to jibe — their doughy pans were both dashed with liverish freckles, and their bottoms were as broad as the seats of the Mercedes in which they purred the 500 yards to Greenspan’s in the Market Place, where they bought schmaltz herring and smoked salmon. While not discounting Mr Oaks’s ability to drive a hard bargain, the notion that they had got the kids in a job-lot was preposterous.

Anyway, on this summer evening the old Oaks had been got rid of so that the teens could get drunk, dance and feel each other up shamelessly — either on the G-plan leather sofas in the living room, or at the top of the house, in a rumpus conversion fully equipped with snooker table, one-armed bandits and a 1950s jukebox loaded with 1970s rock ’n’ roll revival singles. Showaddywaddy anyone? Unlike my own house, where cobwebs smeared the ceilings, here the only spiders were from Mars and locked up in the polished beech cabinets of a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, from where they screamed to us of slinking through the city, smarming in and out of sexes, before bawling teen abandonment to the rooftops.’

In the previous year the religious anointment of hydrogen peroxide had sloughed off my beastly mask. It had hurt, and no one — least of all me — believed that any great beauty lay beneath, so how to explain Tertia, who after two hours and twice that many Bacardi-laced Cokes, waltzed me backwards across the hall and into the oddly antiseptic gloom of her father’s study, where, her neat denim behind aligned on the desk blotter, she grabbed hold of my crotch while exhorting me to ‘Do it!’