American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (27 page)

And still those illuminated night-pages are forged and Argentine defenders in Mexico are tracked. Pages of poetry, fresh as paint, wait for an appreciative audience, every morning, on the blog. ‘The body of the beast seeks its elected donut.’

Seeking our elected donut, or better, a late breakfast among the broad avenues of the university encampment of Berkeley, we came unexpectedly on a door familiar from our previous trip: Serendipity Books. A serious temptation always. Superstitiously, fearing the power of being drawn back into that particular undergrowth, I had avoided used books, and used dealers, on this trip. But Peter Howard of Serendipity was the man. It was my belief that the whole trade depended on the energy of Howard’s operation, the way he sopped up libraries, swallowed discounted stock (with the good taste to rescue Douglas Woolf from oblivion). He was never afraid to back a hunch, to pay for the unique item, the annotated script of a significant movie, and to sit on it, if necessary for ever. And now, shockingly, we learnt that for ever had come.

There was a small handwritten notice on the door: Peter Howard had died. I was reminded of a like message on card pinned to a musty book dormitory in Hastings. ‘Regret. Closed morning for wife’s funeral. Open 2 p.m.’ There was a light inside, a woman in lime-green polo shirt and blue shorts was working at the heaped desk. Her name was Nancy and she happened, by some extraordinary coincidence, like a Nancy in a childhood adventure story, to be cataloguing one of my books. Could it have been
Slow Chocolate Autopsy
? While we were chatting, the phone shrilled. And I found myself talking to my old colleague Martin Stone, who was in Paris, his current base.

Many years ago, at the period I describe in
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
, I introduced Peter to Martin, driving him from Hackney to the treasure-trove hideout on Cannon Street Road. Peter had spent three or four hours going through my shelves – most of them in our bedroom – evaluating
every
book, every pamphlet. Having filled a
couple of boxes for shipping, he took off his baseball cap (he was a season ticket-holder for the Giants) and joined us for dinner. There was an indentation in his head, as if he had used it to stop a bronze baseball. ‘Meningitis,’ he told Anna. ‘My wife diagnosed it.’ A lump of his brain had been cut away. I realized that this man was something out of the ordinary and that Martin, with his magical eye for sleepers, his fabled history in rock music, his way of forming collections around drug literature or M. P. Shiel, would be precisely what Peter required. They became friends. Peter packed more boxes for shipment. They were still under the table in Cannon Street Road when he returned on his next scouting trip the following year. Peter became a patron. He induced a reluctant Stone, anaesthetized by booze and pills, to fly west, to cruise the USA, teasing out lost libraries in trashed cities and remote prairie towns. Serendipity published a tribute to Martin, written by Peter Howard, to be accompanied by a set of commissioned art photographs; including one of Stone lying, as if in Poe-like cataleptic trance, in his coffin. The special edition was offered for sale at many thousands of dollars. After twenty years, I believe, one copy was sold.

The overwhelming book heaps, the compact shelf system, the mounds on desks, chairs, blocked aisles, the chambers within chambers, provoked memories of Ed Dorn leading Tom Clark into ‘the complicated lower-level underworld of the old Pike Street Market’ in Seattle. Clark sketched Dorn as: ‘a restless, obscurely driven young seeker in the lonesome days of 1952 or 1953’. The two poets excavate the caves where I found books by Gary Snyder and delirious pulps by David Goodis. They emerge ‘out of bright subterranean illumination into soft luminous-gray daylight underneath a low, thinly weeping sky’.

When Helene Dorn returns to the city where she began her affair with the poet, she feels somehow disquieted, out of herself. Dorn, when he was making his way towards hard labour in a logging gang, explored the secret spaces of the market and the bars of 1st Avenue with the man he called Bill Elephant; the tough utopian backwoodsman and sardine fisher who took the poet under his wing. Seattle
was the edge city: a cluster of cultural possibilities around the university, fishing fleets heading for Alaska, charity shops kitting out trail crews in hard hats and heavy spiked boots. The Pike Street Market, as I interpreted it, was the point of exchange between William Gibson’s form of scavenging as rough trade, in a place where he patented a new language from the electively non-verbal technologies of the silicon-chip wizards and the global coffee franchises, and the frontier romance of young Ed Dorn, devouring Wyndham Lewis, reading Conrad aloud with his wife; a survivalist shack life on the edge of the Cascades. Seattle, Dorn reckoned, was like Hudson Bay. You bought what you needed for the Arctic winter, the gold fields, the frozen forests.

Peter Howard met his wife, Alison, in Alaska. They were up there, their daughter, Kerry Dahm, said, to build houses for Eskimos. When the project was done, they constructed a moss-covered raft and floated down the Yukon in the general direction of Berkeley and Serendipity: the book-rescue operation. A mausoleum of Americana with documents of the western lands, important first editions of Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. Howard, on his travels, amassed more than a million volumes. Beyond the shop, now in the care of Nancy, was a Berkeley warehouse, and the family home to which Peter finally retreated. ‘We all die,’ he told an interviewer, when his pancreatic cancer was diagnosed. ‘Businesses end.’ In the opening game of the season, the Giants were performing on the big television beside the bed. They were beating the Dodgers. ‘He died at the bottom of the sixth inning,’ Kerry said.

I drifted among the stacks. There was no obvious system. Ron Kitaj’s library – he did a frontispiece portrait of Dorn – contained many inscribed (and desirable) volumes of poetry. It now sat, as an obituary block, among so many others in this astonishing literary anti-mall. I brought items by Cal Shutter, Tom Clark and Michael McClure (whom we would be visiting later in the day) to the desk. The ever-helpful Nancy disappeared into the paper forest to search out – if not here, where? – the two mystery novels written by
Margerie Bonner in the shack on the Burrard Inlet. Meanwhile, I added Elizabeth Bowen’s
A House in Paris
in its splendid pictorial dustwrapper to the pile, a nostalgic gesture: I recognized the pricing and initials of Martin Stone. I had admired, around 1978, this same item, displayed on his stall in the Camden Passage Market. I would return it to London. Businesses end. This death and the dispersal through auction house of the whole magnificent, insane Peter Howard bibliophiliac landfill was the end of a business in the widest sense. The last grace note of the pre-internet world of bounty hunting, visionary maniacs like Howard, Greg Gibson and Martin Stone.

Stephen Gertz, a friend of Peter, drawn into the web like so many, describes meeting him for the first time: ‘He was standing in one of the aisles and looked like an aged, unkempt and unshaven derelict marooned far too long, surviving on a diet far too short on calories.’ Another millionaire vagrant, another man of the road. For years, in Hackney, we subsisted on their benevolence.

I looked at the young Cal Shutter at Malibu, the beach-bum poet on the white throne. I looked at the intense McClure, in his gunfighter pomp, posing with fellow outlaws in North Beach. Shutter’s numerous and fugitive booklets, in limited editions, some with serious price tags, dressed a couple of shelves. While the poet, a mile or so down the road, crept out at night with a begging bowl. Martin Stone, under a jaunty pork-pie hat, like a convalescent jazzman, smiled from the wall in a fading Polaroid.

Anna collapsed in a chair; the early start, the failure to snaffle a rock cake, the nightmare playback of our life among dead books, had taken a heavy toll. Nancy returned in triumph with both Bonner titles. I was dizzy with gratitude and turned, in trepidation, to check the prices. The pencil markings were my own. I had parted with both items, unread, many years ago, when Peter invigilated my stock. The cycle was complete. I could chauffeur Margerie back to Hollywood.

Recovering over a proper bowl of minestrone soup in a good out-of-the-way Italian restaurant, we checked the map to plot a way
into the hills above Oakland, to find the McClure house. Ed Dorn was never quite comfortable in San Francisco. When he returned to Seattle, he had to abandon the faithful vehicle that carried his young family backwards and forwards across the States and down to Mexico (a predictable gastroenteritic disaster). The car was no Beat Generation Hudson auditioning for future movie fame, but a Morris Minor, which Dorn had failed to register. He left the papers with McClure and headed north by bus. Which felt right: after his day job as driver for a local Mafia boss, Ed shared luggage-handling shifts at the Greyhound Bus Terminal with Allen Ginsberg. And thus met – and bonded with – Jack Kerouac. There was much talk, interrupted by Jack’s habit, soon taken up by the Dorns, of breaking off to stand on his head. When he grew tired, he unrolled his sleeping bag and settled on the floor. At weekends, the gatherings would reconvene at Mill Valley in Marin County. Dorn, who always had the sharpest of eyes for technicalities, loved Jack’s way with a notebook: everything went down, the grit of spontaneous prose. Kerouac, for his part, squeezed Dorn for details of labours in the Northwest. He read and admired ‘C. B. & Q.’, the story published in the
Black Mountain Review.

Michael McClure and Amy Evans McClure, the artist, have an elegant house in the hills. Consciousness slows on this deck as you gaze out over the trees, the secluded properties, the distant Bay. A steep green slope at the rear of the house is planted with Amy’s ‘spirit guides’; her sculpted horse heads, Buddhas and lean, totemic beings. The slim, silver-haired Michael moves on preordained trajectories across an uncluttered room to the balcony. He speaks slowly and with care, as if into a very close microphone. An actor curating histories of alliances and friendships that go all the way back to the Wichita Vortex. The film-poet Stan Brakhage is invoked. When I mention Gary Snyder, Michael produces an inscribed copy of Snyder’s first book. Buddhist practice is important now and takes a large chunk of the day. In earlier times, Michael jogged. He did a regular three miles in Golden Gate Park. His sight, in one eye, is not
good. His hands tremble, but he has no trouble locating the page he wants in Blake or Shelley. Kerouac’s greatest book, he asserts, is
Some of the Dharma.
Witnessing McClure’s rhapsodic play,
The Beard
, a sparring dialogue between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, at the Royal Court Theatre, back in 1968, was my last electrifying experience of theatre.

I took a wrong turn, coming off Oakland Bridge on our way back to the Holiday Inn. I could see the exit lane, but I couldn’t get across to it in time. After chasing a number of wrong hunches into darker and darker places, we found ourselves stalled somewhere around San Bruno Mountain. I was all for junking the car and walking, letting the oils of my body compass take over. But we persevered through wastelots, docks, under concrete ramps, up steep and narrow streets without a lit bar or convenience store. I thought of Dorn, making his daily commute on 101, when he was assembling
Hello, La Jolla.
He trained himself to write with one hand tied to the wheel. ‘A rather open scrawl while one’s eyes are fixed to the road is the only trick to be mastered.’

We would catch a couple of hours sleep and start early, by 6 a.m., for the drive to Los Angeles. I decided that we’d have to take our leave of the scenic coastal route, and 101, and blast straight down Route 5, to give us time in Hollywood. And I remembered Ed’s scribbled squib.

Easy, Oakland,

there’s a roll-over

in the hotlane

Fire is stopped by ice. It’s always temperate and warm, but nobody notices. They don’t step outside, they don’t risk the sun’s hurt. The horizon is iced too, it tinkles. Dollar bills come straight from the fridge. Palm trees are apologetic.

The money view from the bathroom, from our shower cabinet performance space – bigger, more brilliantly tiled, more Potsdamer Platz than my entire apartment on the Speer trip to Berlin – proved the final banishment of any notion of middle ground. The towers of downtown Los Angeles were an event horizon; hazier, dumber (a pointless bouquet of ill-assorted modernist props), less imposing than the standard helicopter-shot credit sequence for a new/old movie. The distance (drive time) between our hotel in West Hollywood and the corporate centre (that was no centre) registered as a grey-blue scurf left behind by a retreating tide. There was a freakish whiteness out there: the whiteness of a freshly laundered Klansman’s hood. A necessary exaggeration in a town where exaggeration is the norm; inflate any claim by a factor of ten. And wait for the studio rewrite.

The Argentine novelist Rodrigo Fresán, now living in Barcelona, has a compelling image of J. M. Barrie in his early days in London, in a small room (he was a small man) near the British Museum. This is the critical moment in his life, when he realizes that what he does, and what he will do, and what he has always done, is to sit at a desk with his pen, his pots of ink and his papers. ‘Better than any woman,’ Barrie says. He stands at his window, in the smoky, sea-coal London dusk, in a wrap of comforting melancholia. And he counts the leaves of a London plane tree: one by one.

I looked down on Sunset Boulevard. If anyone in that moving stream cared to notice, among so many more seductive sights, a
naked forked man, a writer from London, was clearly visible, framed and flattened like a throwaway Hockney. In this gallery of steamed mirrors and mirrors reflecting slices of other mirror, I was clamped and helmet-headed. An intruder on a set where taking a shower was a cultural statement or a reference to
Psycho.
I could understand the street only by photographing it: palm trees instead of lighting poles, billboard tributes to Elizabeth Taylor’s space-blue eyes, underwear advertisements seven storeys high. From my spoilt viewpoint I could see the pipes, air-conditioning units, electrical hubs, and squares of native greenery beyond the remediation of Mexican gardeners. West Hollywood exploits this duality: searchlight novelties natives are too cool to notice against bougainvillea suburbs of professional dog walkers and bulging men dressed like cyclists who don’t cycle. The visible (dull). And the unseen (super-surreal and worthy of investigation).

Sunset Tower Hotel, 8358 Sunset Boulevard. 14th floor. Choice of power shower or found-floating bath with rim of black candles. To convince clients that they are really here, the designers of the latest makeover have dressed the suite with table-sized books of pictures. Better, they imply, to stroke a couple of heavy pages of the soft city than to try to make sense of what is outside the window.
Los Angeles
as captured by Tim Street-Porter. Diane Keaton, standing in for Mike Davis (who was busy with
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles
– with supporting quote from William Gibson), composes an introduction, some Davis-lite paradoxes. ‘Living in a fantasy of a fantasy, based on a dream of a past that never was, is forgivable.’ Diane recognizes that you can never, in this slide area, come to the end of the chain of thefts. ‘The appropriation capital of the world, the wild west of the imagination, the dumping ground of every revamped hybrid ever assembled.’

This status product, like a folio of billboard images from the boulevard outside (and about the same size), is signed, and limited to 5,000 copies. It takes its considerable place in our three-book library alongside a volume on burlesque and fetish; provided, I assume, as an instructional manual for timid guests, an amyl nitrate
prompt to up their game. After which, they can settle in a deep, Regency-striped chair, back to the clouds, for a virtual tour of
The Glamorous Homes of Vintage Hollywood.
With photographs by Eliot Elisofon. And whispered asides by screenwriter/novelist Gavin Lambert. The item is suede-covered and gravely respectful, granting access to the interiors you won’t get on the Starline bus tour. Rock Hudson’s statue-infested castle. Tony Curtis and his dog. Haciendas and manicured lawns under a fug of incipient Alzheimer’s. Iowa Gothic and New England Colonial. ‘An architecture of exile,’ Lambert calls it. Exile from reality. The tennis parties are over. George Cukor’s Mediterranean villa, just across the road from Sunset Tower – interiors by William Haines, bedrooms loud with Picasso and Matisse – no longer hosts lunches for handsome young actors, dinners for Truffaut and Andy Warhol. The walls of Harold Lloyd’s Greenacres estate have cracked, gold flakes snowfall from the ceiling. The garden where he photographed pubescent girls in light summer dresses has run wild.

It would make sense never to leave the hotel. That’s what Christopher Walken says that he does in London. Who needs it? Mike Davis defined Hollywood as the perfect synergy between gangster culture and the movie factories. A deluxe ghetto squeezed hard against
barrios
where nightmare is repackaged as idyll. To the constant scream of sirens. On my first morning walk I came across a high school boasting about the occasional attendance of the young Michael Jackson.

We were on the road out of San Francisco, with Anna at the wheel, before first light: into a fury of lane-jumping traffic. We made some bad decisions, heading east on 80, before doubling back, honked at, blinded by the rising sun. After an hour or so, we settled to a numbing procession of miles through agribiz plantations and a breakfast detour to a sleepy town with one Mexican filling station and a single coffee outlet where sallow authors polished screenplays beside a dollar shelf of paperbacks featuring a run of
New Worlds
magazine with stories by Moorcock, Ballard, Aldiss.

I drove the rest of the way and brought us to LAX, where the car could be dumped, by lunchtime. The idea of negotiating Los Angeles in the Impala darkened our time in San Francisco, to the point where we decided to get shot of the vehicle right away and to manage our brief Hollywood interlude on foot or by bus. In reality, although a river of sun-splintered metal swarmed on Interstate 5 (1-5), progress was faster and smoother than enduring a route out of Hackney to the Blackwall Tunnel. Californians
live
in their cars, while Londoners, immigrant or older-immigrant (like me), white-van psychotics, tailgaters in aggrieved elbow-horn entitlement, treat their smoke-saturated tin boxes as weapons of revenge against a world of thieving bankers and corrupt politicians. Every ride a scalp hunt.

The rental people barely glanced at the heap, our trip down the spine of the West was a very ordinary excursion. The Latinos had a deal going with what they pitched as: ‘a personal limo service’. Which turned out to be a Nigerian multitasker with a Dalston grandma and a battered, low-sprung, Harrow Road cab with wedged electrical windows. What strikes me as we hit the San Diego Freeway is how new this landscape is, how trivial the human interventions.

Oil donkeys peck at low hills. We are in the Mexico of Hank Quinlan. Orson Welles created a convincingly sleazy border town out of Venice Beach for his Hollywood swansong,
Touch of Evil.
Death comes, with wheezing Shakespearean flourish, among the fouled ponds of the speculative oil field. Nodding donkeys, pumping away, day and night, take the place of actual animals. ‘Your future,’ as Marlene Dietrich said, ‘is all used up.’ In Los Angeles they dig for oil where other cities have allotments.

David Beckham, in the opinion of the cabbie, was more than an ambassador. He was
England
. Supernatural right foot. Carries a suit like a Vatican accountant. Every hair rethink is a cultural statement. Who else can fill underpants on a Hollywood Boulevard billboard
and
kiss hands with the Dalai Lama, Lord Coe, Tony Blair, Tom Cruise. That’s ecumenical! The cabbie was a good judge. He could
have been a basketball pro or a soccer star with Galaxy or Leyton Orient, if it hadn’t been for the knee. Our man was a preacher, supporting actor, gourmet fusion cook. He had a steady gig driving an Old Jewish-Russian man around to collect dues from restaurants. He chauffeured a nice young kid, AIDS victim from a wealthy Miami Beach family, to the hospital. He did benefit runs for senior citizens funded by the city. When we shook hands, he left me his card:
RAPIDO. CLEAN BLACK SEDANS. FLAT RATES ANYWHERE. COMMERCIAL INSURANCE
.

What happens next is mildly disturbing. But it conforms with the upgrade to business class for the flight to Vancouver at the start of our odyssey. The Sunset Tower Hotel had been recommended by our daughter, the one who visited Hollywood when she was travelling with a fated film on autopsies. The wrong corpses can sue. And bring down production companies and entire networks. The hotel had changed, evidently, from those more modest, transitional days in its lively history. But Anna found a reasonable deal for a last splurge before our flight home.

The mean setting for hospitality is a notch below hysterical. In taut-buttocked sepia uniforms, actors playing actors pose against restored sepia furniture and newer-than-new chocolate-brown drapes from the 1930s. Art Deco calligraphy defaces menus and mini-bar honesty slips like a runaway vineyard. ‘You’d like to check in? Awesome.’

‘Mr Sin-clair? We’ve upgraded you to a
junior
suite.’

In a blizzard of benevolence, with deskman and lobby artists behaving as if this beautiful blocky tower were indeed their home, the grope of underplayed civility (not servility) was
personally
directed. As if, again, I had been mistaken for someone else. A namesake. A person who had business in this town. A double. A smarter doppelgänger.

It is insinuated, a cough behind the hand, that when (not if) we take dinner, there will be some special guests. We are promised a surprise. Sleep-swallowed in the ocean of the junior-suite bed, after
having swum a couple of laps of the candle-surrounded bath, before dissolving into hallucinatory visions of traffic on the boulevard, and endlessly recycling teases of silky models in black underwear, we decide, this one night only, to hit the hotel restaurant. And risk the awesome.

Every male who arrives pulls the maître d’ aside to demand the best table. ‘Of course.’ A seminary of Armani theologicals in loose black suits, hair tricked and sculpted or scraped tight into pimpish ponytails; most, even in the airless intimacy of this dim red chamber, hide behind aviator glasses and replicas of the Ari Onassis fuck-off shades. The women who accompany them, if they are going to be signing the tab, also concern themselves with the geography of the grazing pit. They favour jeans, heels, baseball caps and cleaner ponytails. All the diners look nearly like somebody from old television whose name you can’t remember. Probably, like us, they are tourists. What is most surprising is the absence of surprise. Like Hull or Middlesbrough, squat hirsute men who want to sit outside, smoking and scratching, pay a premium to feed brittle young women who don’t eat, but who toy, neurotically, with their iPhones and BlackBerries.

The people who make films, even films produced by dentists and money-laundering lawyers with vanity projects, are lunching, over mineral water, in a Peruvian place in West LA or a neighbourhood Korean restaurant in Santa Monica. Gary Walkow, who wrote and directed
Beat
, the only truly Mexican take on the Burroughs/Joan Vollmer legend, composed an account of the whole process: pre-production, shoot, aftermath. He called it:
As Bad As It Gets.
The virtues of his film were economic. An absence of budget meant economy of means, the simplest solutions. Plus: derangement, dysentery, international phone calls, volcanoes. The compact six-week shoot becomes a 500 pp documentary novel. Unpublished prose is more forgiving. As your own producer you are open to the risk of improving on history. Airbrushed self as blameless narrator: anti-hero, sole witness.

At the point where Jennifer Aniston is still up for the Joan Vollmer part that went to Courtney Love, Gary breaks bread with
his producers. ‘Roger was shorter than André, with curly hair, and a relaxed manner. Until he got upset. He lived up near Santa Barbara and wore blue jeans and ranch-style clothes to the office. André was tall and trim, a gym junkie. He wore out-of-date preppy clothes, and acted like an 80s hipster. He was very hyper and could speak at length without saying anything. He acted like he’d just snorted a couple of lines of coke in the bathroom – without leaving the room. He could channel this inner coke demon at will – or rather the coke demon channelled André.’

Walkow’s typescript becomes as hypnotic as his film when he flies to Milwaukee to persuade the fabulously nutty Ms Love to come onboard. This apparent nuttiness is the badge of rock-hard realism: she really can take care of business; her business, herself. She won’t give up a drop of blood for her film insurance drug test. The crew from DoP down will be Mexican, but Courtney comes with her own wardrobe and make-up people. Walkow would like nothing more than to retreat to his room to watch
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz.
And to fantasize about being John Huston shooting
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
But he has to field agitated calls from Roger and André. He has to charm Courtney. The only place in the world to relocate a stretch of authentic Beat history, from the stabbing of Dave Kammerer in New York to the shooting of Joan Vollmer in Mexico City, is a strip of ground not far from Lowry’s Cuernavaca. When Burroughs wrote to Kerouac from Mexico City in March 1950, he boasted that he was ‘virtually a Mexican citizen’. He couldn’t think why he hadn’t made the move years ago. ‘I have a pistol permit (to carry), by the way, so I don’t have to take nothing off nobody.’

To speak to Love, even when he is lodged in the same hotel (‘a grandiose relic of the Gilded Age’), Walkow has to go through her personal assistant in Los Angeles. They step out to eat – or, in Courtney’s case, drink: scotch and water. Gary sports his best black shirt, but he doesn’t fool her. He won’t be making sniffy runs to the bathroom. ‘The dinner wasn’t about food. First she wanted to sit outside and smoke. Then she wanted to sit inside and smoke.’