Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (28 page)

I turned my back on the haunting – I couldn’t stand to look them in their other people’s faces. I walked along the musty dogleg of the cabana corridor and slid my key card into its slot. I hit the lights and a filament squirmed in a goldfish bowl. Christ, what a dump! Hemispherical vinyl bolsters were tacked up the wall above the bed – which was a squared-off mound of clapshot. I sat down on it and put Postlethwaite’s face in my hands. The Powerade was coming up on me, the 1929 Awards were getting louder and louder – sleep would be out of the question, and worse still it was so dark I couldn’t see to read.

There’s a knock on the door and when I open it a solid man-shape stinking of sweat and body paint pushes straight past me.

‘Hey!’ I exclaim.

‘Guest services – mind if I come in?’ A coarse voice sounds from head height in the drear.

‘You
are
in,’ I snarl; ‘what the fuck d’you want?’

‘Man on the desk says you gotta problem with the lights, can’t see to, uh, read. The dimmer switches in these cabanas are set real low, I can fix that for you.’

‘Why, thank you.’

Is my tone coquettish? I hope not. There’s a clanking as of a toolbox being opened and then the chink and scratch of a screwdriver applied to a switch panel. The light wells up in the cabana and I see the screwdriver twirling in midair. The voice says, ‘Say, you’ve got quite a build on you, you work out, do weights?’

‘We-ell, not exactly.’ Under the warm scrutiny of this void I feel the grotesquely magnified self-consciousness of an adolescent – and with it the lust. ‘But I do a lot of, um, walking.’

‘Walking, huh, you mean walking like this—’ The screwdriver clatters to the rug and it’s upon me, invisible hands pushing up the breathable fabric of my T-shirt, invisible thumbs circling the aureoles of my nipples, invisible fingers flicking the rapidly erecting teats. I moan, and slump back against the door to the patio, my pulse begins doubling its beat as an invisible tongue snails back and forth across my belly.

It should smell of chemical sweat percolating through a dermis abraded and abraded again, by hand, with a pumice stone, in a walk-up hotel room in West Hollywood – yet doesn’t. It should feel like a violation: the fat tongue shape urging into my mouth, the grappling hook caught in my hair – yet doesn’t. I sense myself levitating, I mewl and struggle – not to escape but so as to arrange for my T-shirt to twirl over my
head, my belt to whip away, my pants and underwear to slide along my legs, then flip over the TV set.

The vortex sets me down on top of the minibar, where I teeter on my fundament. What would the reverse shot show in this now glaring cubicle? No perfect buns, rock hard – the hollow in each gluteus maximus so pronounced that were it horizontal it could serve as a bird bath – but my own splayed thighs, my own puckered-brown anus growing pinker as it lengthens into a gaping vagina. Men as far off as Cancún or Coventry are watching this – but they can’t see this piece of beefcake, its wipeable hide, its brows knit and its jaw set with the effort of whaling into me. They can see my thighs gape still further to allow an unobstructed view, but for them there’s no glistening penis writhing with veins – so why should there be one for me?

I fly, legs akimbo, from the minibar to the sink in the bathroom. Kiehl’s bath products rattle in the cabinet, then tumble about my shuddering shoulders. I fly from there back to the minibar, which rocks, rolls and spews its tiny Rémy Martins, gives birth to its jars of jelly babies. Then from there – at last! – to the bed. I rise up from my knees as if on an invisible horse going at a vigorous trot. I reverse this posture and joggle on. I sink down on all fours and the cabana resounds with the crack of an invisible palm that sets first one of my buttocks then the other shivering like jellies, while my face crashes into the pillows and my hand grips one of the hemispherical vinyl bolsters.

Then I’m on my back, my labia pulsing, my clitoris vibrating. I groan and squeak – as abandoned as an abandoned chest of drawers being sawn through by a rusty saw. Still, what do I expect? Pornography is the CCTV of the Id, with its
fixed camera angles that capture the dullest views of suburban bedchambers and anonymous hotel rooms. But be not censorious, we actors are not malefactors – only ordinary folk going about our fucking business. It’s all perfectly workaday; and since I was never going to soar over the Hollywood Hills, then down into the Valley where the flightless birds fluttered and gobbled, they’d come to me for a turkey shoot instead.

Half the adult population of the world rasps, ‘I wanna come in your mouth!’ and I gasp,

‘Whatever.’

Their semen is as frothy as aerated cream and as toxic-tasting as typewriter correction fluid. ‘Did you get that?’ I ask the gauzy crew as, up on one elbow, I unceremoniously spit it into a tooth glass.

Afterwards we are surprisingly tender with each other. I lie in the crook of his arm while he tousles the mussed hair on my forehead. He sips a Rémy Martin while I reminisce:

‘I used to bunk off school – y’know, play hooky – and go to the Everyman cinema up in Hampstead. I can still remember those rainy Tuesday afternoons – it’s always a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the past, isn’t it?’

‘Sure, David,’ he says, ‘that’s sweet.’

‘I’d be alone in the fusty little cinema, watching the screen, which wavered and distorted, hot as a furnace. I’d be lying on that blistering tarmac, with the heat beating off the cowling ...’

‘So the road, that was your thing?’

‘Yeah,
Electra Glide in Blue
,
Two-Lane Blacktop
,
Vanishing Point
– I loved those movies.’

‘Me too.’

‘But then when I was at home it was different stuI – Continental stuI the BBC would screen late at night. I’d be crouched over the black-and-white set I had on a chair in my bedroom – it used to be my father’s study and the wonky shelves were still stacked with his books on planning and government. Before that it had been my elder brother’s – and his double bass was propped in the corner. All the rooms I’ve ever had since then have been sort of sets – trying to re-create that room.’

‘I understand,’ he coos.

‘Sitting there late at night, staring at Giulio Brogi sitting on the abandoned station platform, looking down at the weeds struggling up through the ties and realizing – you see it only in his face – that he’s never going
anywhere
, that he’s doomed to remain in Tara, that he is ... he is ...’

‘His father.’

‘Right.’ I twist round to look at him. ‘So, you know that one?’

‘Sure I do – and I did the same thing. OK, it was a colour TV and I never had a hand-me-down room, but essentially it was the same in Sherman Oaks.’ His voice rumbles beneath my ear, a soothing voiceover to the smell-o-rama of cigarette smoke, brandy fumes and fast-drying sweat. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ he continues. ‘How even as kids we sought out unerringly those movies that told us not the truth about ourselves as we were, but about what we would become.’

‘Yeah,’ I weep softly. ‘The truth about what we’ve become, which is cheats.’

‘Cheats?’

‘Cheats, we’re lousy cheats – unfaithful to film.’

I must have slept the same dreamless sleep I endured for all the nights I was in Los Angeles. The only visions were Hal’s-eye views of the beds I thrashed about in, flickering stop-action as my grub’s body mutated under the sheet, until, in the grey dawn my white wings shakily unfolded and flew me to the bathroom.

At some point during those hours he had left me, and if the thousands of frames had been scrutinized there might have been five in which he tenderly disengaged my head, sat upright, then stood, the coiled diaphragm of his underwear held in a deliberating hand, the swirl of his shirt, the door half shut.

In the morning I could only deduce the memory of his presence from forensic evidence: empty Rémy Martin miniatures, the salted slug of a used condom on the wooden floor, a pummelled lube tube on top of the minibar, a screwdriver lying on the rug.

At reception I paid my bill and the clerk handed me a stiff manila envelope: ‘Several gentlemen dropped this by for you earlier this morning, Mr Smith.’

‘Several?’

‘Well, OK, there were five of them.’

Walking a few paces away, I slit it open; inside were the forty single-spaced pages of my position paper. In the designer dimness of the Roosevelt the dense type, studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as,‘45° where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’, seemed to belong to an earlier era – was this the evidence of Jesus’s morganatic marriage to Mary Magdalen we had all been seeking?

With the typescript there was a compliments slip printed with the legend ‘From the desk of the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center’, and, handwritten on this, ‘Many thanks for your interesting insights and observations.’ The signature was quite like Justin Timberlake’s.

‘Can I arrange a car for you, Mr Smith?’ called over the clerk.

I laughed towards his face – and was still laughing as I strode through the dingy lobby and hit the gilded boulevard.

^*
The exception being the framing device – which implies retrospection – not, counter-intuitively, those events that on Thursday, 12 June 2008, still lay in the future and that I flashed forward to by using Dr Mukti’s CBT techniques. The accuracy of these elements of my reverie was confirmed when they eventually came to pass.

^*
Jerry Maren, who played Little Professor Atom in
At the Circus
and who was the ‘prop’ for the gag in which Groucho declines to take the third light from a dwarf on the basis that it’s ‘unlucky’, has had the last laugh accorded by longevity. He’s the only surviving
Wizard of Oz
Munchkin and has outlived entire legions of full-size thespians.

^†
I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests – in the jargon – inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor golfing range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

^†
I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests – in the jargon – inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor gol: ng range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

A man walks these streets alone; or, more usually, he drives. He’s not an especially good man – nor is he an evil one. He understands, in the immortal words of multimillionaire Harlan Potter, that ‘A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’
You
– you know that a headline in the
LA Times
announcing that a US airstrike has killed eleven Pakistani infantrymen is bound to make you scrabble for change, lift the rubbery lid, smell the refried human beings.

A man walks these streets alone – why, hasn’t he got a car? Has he, like the failing screenwriter played by William Holden in
Sunset Boulevard
, had it repossessed? ‘You’re cutting my legs off!’ Yes, I remembered now: that was what Holden-as-Gillis howled despairingly as the tow truck jounced away. No, our man walks out of choice, and walks because only on foot can he engage in the sciamachy essential to his trade: fencing with the shadows of hat brims, gun muzzles and arms flung across brickwork by the beams of the Kliegs.

A man walks these streets alone: attuned to the tyre slap and engine howl, he is content in his solitude. If a Predator drone were to come dallying overhead, dipping into the canyons, then rising up to skim the apartment blocks, he would not flinch – for he is the happy detective. The happy detective knows no angst, for he has made peace with this moment and for all eternity; he remains sublimely unaffected by the thinness of his characterization while more rounded characters bemoan their stereotypy.

The happy detective accepts that when he turns up, so do the corpses: sluttish young women, their faces beaten to bloody pulp with brass statuettes; venal old men, the third eye just below their hairlines weeping blood; an Infiniti full of gang members riddled with bullet holes.
^*
If you ask him – and believe me, I have – whether it might be better for everyone if he stayed at home, played with his kid, bickered with his wife, he’ll look at you with his doggedly honest brown eyes, suck doggily on his brown moustache, hem a little, haw a tad, before replying in accents as flat as his Midwestern home state, ‘No, I don’t think that. I guess ... I guess I figure it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, it could be that I’m, like, the catalyst for some of these serial killings, but with an isolated homicide there’s no way I could be causing them before arriving on the scene. Lissen, what I believe is that if people are gonna get killed they’re gonna get killed.’