Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

This party is fun, all are beautiful, except for the old men who are powerful. People are drinking, finally, and the room is full of indiscreet conversation, much of it about where people will go next. Are you following the rappers with the thirty-thousand-dollar grills on their teeth and their newest accessory-a gold statuette in the palm? Or are you following the Frenchmen holding plush toy penguins above their heads? Committed badge collectors follow the whisper of the hope of an invitation up into the Hollywood Hills, in someone else’s car, with no clear idea of how they will get home.

Outside Morton’s, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a favorite of the late John Cassavetes, smoking a cigar and explaining how things are with him. “He chose me, you see?” he says of Cassevetes. “Me. It was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that.” He is full of soul, and his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. “This town’s treated me well. I was never a star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it’s given me a retirement plan. I’m the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine or ten a year.” He smiled joyfully. We stood together on the forecourt with a lot of other people less joyful: losing nominees, yesterday’s news, TV stars, hungry models and people so famous they couldn’t get to their car without causing a riot. Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the one just described.

The next day I woke at eight. In the name of research I watched an hour of fantasy television about the Oscars that in no way described the evening I had just had. I went back to sleep and woke at eleven. I checked out and dragged my hangover and my laptop down to the pool. It was empty. I ordered a quesadilla, but the speedy service that had been in place only yesterday had vanished. It took half an hour to get some Tabasco sauce. And then it began to rain, softly at first and then dramatically. I moved in under the glass roof and thought of nearby San Fernando Valley, where the American porn industry-a fantasy industry even larger and more remunerative than Hollywood-is located. The pool boys packed up the loungers around me. The rain drummed the surface of the pool and forced water over its edge, soaking the feet of the waitresses as they cleared the tables.

I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them complaining: “It’s not supposed to rain! ” The dream persists, even as reality asserts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say: “I’m moving back to L.A.!” I wanted to a share a novelist’s joke with him: what if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret’s been there, done that: his own Glamorama tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone’s pen. It’ll have to be a collective effort; we’ll have to wake from this dream together. It’ll be darling.

This is a picture of my father and me, Christmas 1980 or thereabouts. Across his chest and my bottom there is the faint pink, inverted watermark of postal instructions-something about a card, and then “stamp here.” Hanging from the tree like a decoration more mirror writing, this time from my own pen. Does it say Nothing ? Or maybe Letting ? I’ve ruined this photo. I don’t understand why I can’t take better care of things like this. It’s an original, I have no negative, yet I allowed it to sit for months in a pile of mail on my open windowsill. Finally the photo got soaked, imprinted with the text of phone bills and Post-it notes. I felt sick wedging it inside my OED to stop the curling. But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not done by your hand. Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds-no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.

Anyway, it’s done now. And this is me and my dad one Christmas past. I’m five and he’s too old to have a five-year-old. At the time, the Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war. It was confusing. I didn’t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan’s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles, and I didn’t get the thing about people pouring into the Prince Charles the next day and repeating the procedure. I didn’t get the men who came around collecting for the IRA on Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to give them anything either-once they saw my mum, with her exotic shift dress and her cornrows, they respectfully withdrew, thinking we had nothing to do with their particular argument. In fact, my parents were friends with an Irishman who gave us a homemade fruit bowl this same Christmas and then the following winter betrayed the spirit of Christmas by making a different kind of homemade gift with which he tried to blow up No. 11 Downing Street. We knew nothing about the bomb until years later, but we all knew about the ugly fruit bowl, ceramic and swirly and unable to stand straight on a tabletop. This was filled with nuts and laid on the carpet to limit the wobble. It’s out of the frame in this photo, on the floor by Dad’s feet. My brother Ben, a little fat thing back then, has it between his legs like Buddha with his lotus flower. Ben was always on food detail in the war that is Christmas. I did, or overdid, the decorations (as you will note, the tree is bending to the left under the weight of manga-eyed reindeer, chocolate Santas, swollen baubles, tinsel, three sets of lights and the presents I tastefully nestled in the branches). Dad cooked. Mum marked out television schedules with a pen. Ben ate the food. Just as Joseph tended to the Virgin Mary, we tended to Ben, making his comfort our first priority. He ate what he needed, and whatever was left we ate. I think it’s Carole King’s Tapestry on the record player. But which song? “It’s Too Late” would make thematic sense-my dad’s smile has the let’s-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage. As for the “Natural Woman” Christmas or the “You’ve Got a Friend” Christmas-these predate my consciousness. But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September baby and me October. Those were the sexy Noels, delivering babies like presents nine months later. By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in July and is still unborn in this photo. I’ve always assumed he was the result of awe-haven’t-had-sex-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad’s birthday is in late September), and by the time he turned up, Blood on the Tracks had replaced Tapestry as the family Christmas soundtrack. Maybe you wonder about the black man in the pink hat. I wonder about him, too. I think he’s an uncle of mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain). My mother claims an uncertain number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them-in the Jamaican parlance-“outdoor children,” meaning same father, different mother. Denzil must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother is five foot five and shrinking, as I’m sure I will, and as my grandmother did before us.