Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (36 page)

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?’

‘That’s my shill, man, people see that they get to talking, maybe they ask me to write something for them – tell ‘em a story perhaps, y’know oral literature may be the way the whole thing is going, kinda back to the future trip.’

It was lost on me – the shill, the riff – I was already heading on towards the beach. Thomas Mann was calling to me from his exile in the sewer pipe – the Santa Monica Pier was calling to me too. Not all writers were down and out. I ignored the Amazing Chain Man’s cry, which followed me down the block: ‘I do kids parties too!’

There were no surfer frat boys for me down at the beach, no muscle Manns either, only tourists de-evolving into Segways, and kites tethered to the sand, and craft stalls selling serapes made from tin foil, and glass-bead purses, and figures carved out of pine with quartzite pebble eyes and detachable penises. And there was the Freak Show and the boardwalk cafés, and a wino who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a sign that read ‘Why lie, I need a beer’, and quaint little bungalows festooned with flags, and jogging families, and fat teens hunting for weed, and all the carnival of a Sunday afternoon that I had been exiled from by a circumambulation I now realized had been completely traduced, for I was but one of a legion of writers tramping round LA, we were all the same: poorly registered, our very images thieved from us – just another chapter in the tale of our immiseration. And in final confirmation of this Kazuo Ishiguro danced past, Netherfield Park tied to his head: he’d made it to Venice before me, together with the Bennet sisters.

I left the beach and floundered inland to where, at the intersection of Windward and Pacific avenues, a section of the old arcade was still standing, with its Corinthian columns striding along the sidewalk. I was so disoriented – so dispirited. If I’d had anything to write on I would’ve made a shill of my own, but instead the very ordinary chained man leant against a pillar and felt the whole city – from LAX to South Central, from South Central to Downtown, from Downtown to Hollywood, and from Hollywood to here – revolve about his head, a whirlpool of ’burbs and malls and office blocks and country clubs, through which cars drove and Metro trains clattered with absolute disregard.

Some scenes from Brad’s movie
The Shrink
were being shot on location nearby, so I headed on over to Dell Avenue with a view to hanging out for a while – the circumambulation might have failed, but not to visit a murder scene when I was in LA to find a killer seemed like a dereliction. This neighbourhood boasted the last-remaining canals, long troughs of stagnant water reflecting the façades of the self-conscious buildings. The vibe was arty, not artful – men who moisturized sat outside upmarket patisseries in the hot June sunlight, sipping cappuccinos with cashmere pullovers tied round their necks.

I spotted where the filming was going on from a long way off: there were maybe twenty or thirty trucks and SUVs parked along the kerb, and around a hundred techies wearing carpenter jeans and T-shirts merchandising Pacific Northwest grunge bands were milling about performing essential tasks. They were all elbows and earrings and had mouthfuls of crocodile clips but no time for me because time was at a $50-per-hour premium. So I pushed on through and discovered maybe fifty or so boys and girls armed with clipboards, and one of them fetched Brad, who swished his lips open in what I supposed was a welcoming smile – either that, or he might’ve been trying to dazzle me with his teeth.

‘There’s not a lot happening,’ he said, ‘but feel free to wander around – we’ll be doing a couple of takes ... soonish.’

The house was a 1980s riff on the modernist Case Study aesthetic, all sliding glass doors, wide windows and external conversation pits. A portable generator burbled power on the ground floor, and this was piped up the steep concrete stairs to where cameras, lights and monitors were clustered about the small zone that was to be immortalized. It took over an hour for the eight producers, four directors, seven lighting
cameramen, fifteen sound recordists and thirty-eight lighting technicians to be happy with the set-up. I found the process utterly absorbing, all the more so because in order to get the lighting and the camera angle exactly right I was asked to sit on one of the banquettes as a stand-in for Pete Postlethwaite, who was late on set.

When he eventually arrived he came skipping up the stairs looking tanned, relaxed, fit and debonair, with two or three achingly beautiful personal assistants tripping along behind. He barely glanced at me as Brad made a fragment of an introduction – ‘Pete, this is—’ – and skipped on to a zone of mirrors and clothes racks where twenty or thirty makeup artists and wardrobe assistants began prepping him.

I might have been offended, were it not that Postlethwaite’s arrival was immediately succeeded by a still greater commotion – a running back and forth of production crew, the collective making of manifold phone calls, the passing of orders up and down the chain of command, the mournful note of a bosun’s whistle. I hunkered down in a corner and made myself as small as possible; when I looked up again a mass of denim legs was shuffling along the corridor. I stood and peered over their shoulders.

The cynosure of all this activity was looking grimly at a tray being held in front of his overly familiar face, a tray containing a selection of watches – the straps gold, chrome, leather; the faces jewelled, plain or black. It was Kevin Spacey – I recognized him instantly, because in common with all movie stars he had that quality of being pre-known, his face not so much a visage as an
a priori
category waiting to be filled with a serviceable identity. In this case the limp pennant of a mohair tie, the clever prostheses that filled out his cheeks and neck, the still more skilled weeding out of his hair and the inspired
tarnishing of his teeth confirmed that he was portraying Dr Zack Busner.

As Spacey’s hand ranged over the watches, picking one up and then dropping it with a ‘chink’ clearly audible because of the hushed reverence of the 250-strong crew, I was visited with an overpowering intimation of death: Death pressed me back against the rough concrete wall, Death rubbed my belly, Death circled my wrist with his bony finger and bony thumb and all the rottenness of this world oozed from the holes in his skull.