Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (29 page)

In a lesser man such an attitude would seem sociopathic; in a greater one
foudroyant
; but the happy detective is of the middling sort, the sort who come to LA either because they’ve made some money and want to spend it, or because they want to exhaust some spiritual capital with breatharians, sucking up
prana
or checking out
chakra
. Not that Mac Guffin is a slacker; he works full time on the
LA Times
editing the culture section, and whatever time he has left over he dedicates to his detection. He doesn’t do divorce, obviously, but he’ll handle missing persons, straying dogs, industrial espionage – the cases that require legwork. And if he gets tangled up in loops of wire with razor-sharp barbs, then so much the better.

‘I’m at peace with myself,’ he says. ‘I’ve found my niche. When I was a young man I wasn’t exactly searching so much as yearning for something I couldn’t even identify. Nowadays it’s different: I’ll be crunching over broken glass down a back alley out in Alhambra, I’ll see the body slumped over the wheel of a BMW, and I’ll breathe deeply of the cordite and the blood and the urine, and I’ll think to myself—’

‘It’s a wonderful world?’

‘Yeah, kind of.’

I hit the gilded boulevard moving purposefully. I’d arranged to have dinner with the happy detective in Culver City; it was a short drive from Venice Beach where he lived, but a ten-mile walk for me from Hollywood. I’d have to walk back to Hollywood the following day after my meet with Michael Lynton at Sony in Culver City; still, it was inevitable that on a circumambulation such as mine, which aimed to mix business, pleasure, therapy and the solution of a major cultural murder, there would be certain ... longueurs. It helped to think of myself as a one-man Bennet sisters, clopping through a prelapsarian Hertfordshire – its elms, beeches and lime avenues superimposed on the concrete chicane of Sunset, in the same way that a 120-foot-high Jennifer Aniston was plastered across the façade of the Hyatt – and naturally, if when I arrived at Netherfield Park I had so much as a sniffle I would be compelled to put up there for weeks, wrestling with marriage proposals and the foxed endpapers of my family bible.

Along the Strip the Jeffs beamed down in front of me looking utilitarian in their baseball caps and denim shirts. Sound Jeff taped the mike to my chest while I looked away to the tattered copra that had been wind-whittled from the palms,
a torn Detour candy bar wrapper, a Häagen-Dazs coffee and almond crunch box, a roasted peanut crunch wrapper and the paper napkin that had been used to wipe the eating-disordered mouth before being discarded in the gutter with all the rest. It all spoke to me – and I spoke of it – as evidence of an uncertain narrative trajectory. It was all very well suspending disbelief in the road movie of LA, but sooner or later you had to question where it might be taking you.

No one had expressed this better than L. Ron, whose Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE) I had passed shortly after leaving the Roosevelt. His sometime friend, colleague and early champion of Dianetics, A. E. Van Vogt, said of Hubbard: ‘(He) wrote about a million words a year ... I have seen typists working at that speed, but never a writer.’ No wonder he could maintain such resolute narrative headway, his plots moving forward like the starship
Hound of Heaven
, which, crossing the galaxy at the speed of light, exiles its crew by the passage of time, as back on earth whole generations and societies vanish for ever.

In the introduction to his final and most monumental exercise in ‘pure’ science fiction,
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
, L. Ron reprised his own career as a genre typist, relating how he had been brought in by the publishers of John Campbell’s
Astounding Stories
to inject a little humanity into these tales of futuristic hardware, because ‘[I] could write about real people.’

Well, I could write about real people just as well – real people like my old buddy Morgan Freeman, who, together with smouldering, stick-thin Angelina Jolie (rub up against her and you might catch fire!), was starring in
Wanted
, a thriller about a secret Illuminati of assassins, the billboard for which
stood proud of the Viper Room. On our walk out to Uxbridge, Morgan had told me enough about the movie for me to feel that I’d seen it already: ‘There’s a neat CGI effect,’ he said, ‘that makes the air appear like kinda limpid water – it happens whenever we’re fighting each other, and then if we fire a gun we can warp the trajectory of the bullet.’

The air that morning, 12 June 2008, seemed like limpid water, and Camera Jeff’s lens a muzzle from which a bullet curled – was it the brutal, Powerade-fuelled congress in the cabana at the Roosevelt that made me feel as I had on those wet Tuesdays, when, emerging from the coruscation of the Californian highway into the familiar artificial twilight of a London night, I discovered that it wasn’t familiar any more, but strangely exciting – charged?

Surely it was this feeling, rather than the movies themselves, that so entranced career film critics? Because, let’s face it, there are only so many times any sane person can expose themselves to such hokum before they begin soundlessly lip-synching to the giant mouths on the screen, or running a chipped nail over the dead skin of the lips transfixed in the seat beside them. Bad rhyming quitting the Classic, leaving the Everyman, hitting the gilded boulevard, accompanied by some torpid fiddling about on the G string of a cello that suggests a troubled sexual repletion ... The alternative – that critics retained the childlike ability to identify so closely with the sassily imperturbable Fox (Jolie) that they left their own foetuses reposing in red plush, to float up the tractor beam then dive through the screen and penetrate her drum-tight belly – was too awful for me to contemplate. It implied a relationship between critic and star analogous to that of Thetans and those genetic entities they had entered, millions of years in the past, long before they
crawled from the primordial slime and became critics in their own right.

Either way, they were all wankers – an English term of general disapprobation drawn from the masturbatory that, to my way of thinking, has far greater resonance than the American ‘jerk-offs’. Sexual wankers, cultural wankers and – an Australian coinage this –
time
wankers, beating off their lives in the darkness while without the world goes on, a two-reeler, hand-cranked at an unrealistic speed, so that whole societies arise, then vanish forever, leaving behind only the dust of their own prematurely ejaculated
geist
. The money shot – again.

Wankers, and far more voyeuristic than honest subscribers to pornography, whose pay-perpreciation of the warped trajectory of a penis entering a vagina or an anus takes on the rarefied aestheticism of a Ruskin when set beside such gross satisfaction: piggy little eyes screwed up against the light, envaginating the madonnas on the hu-uge iconostasis over and over and over again. Is there any limit to the capacity of cineastes to be absorbed into these folds and curves of photons? They write their reviews, they expand these into essays, monographs and eventually entire books anatomizing their goddesses and gods. A chapter on their cheekbones, another on their clavicles, lengthy footnotes on the spaces in between their toes, because of the mind of the goddess – her ideas, her thoughts and feelings – there is precisely nothing to be said.

As I trudged on, my own warped trajectory brought me to the border between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The limpid water grew thinner and bluer as the sunlight gained in intensity. The grass along the verges was dense enough for any colt to crop. At the junction with Doheny Drive I spared a
thought for Bret: was he up there in his ritzy apartment hosing off the crusts of last night’s fun? Was he wearily contemplating another day in the word mine, chipping away at the computer to expose veins of terse couplets?

Ray: Well, yeah, uh, I guess.

Phil: Later on, OK?

Or perhaps plotting a silken road through cyberspace to the pharmaceutical kampongs of the Far East, where brilliantly hued mounds of OxyContin, Halcion and Paxil sprawled on the ratscuttle floors, their silica slopes illuminated by the rays of light that shot through the perforations in the corrugated-iron roofs high overhead?

I well remembered the last time I had visited the pharmacy on the South Lambeth Road to fill my prescriptions for Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin, the feijoada complexion of the Portuguese assistant, in the fatty mass of which swam morsels of acne. She had looked at me – quite reasonably – as if I were mad. Busner had prescribed the Seroxat for depression and the Dutonin because of my volatile reaction to what itself was intended as a dopamine governor. Then there was the Carbamazepin, a further tranquilizer necessitated by my restless spirit. I understood why, because left to my own devices I had a way of cabbing into the West End, scoring on the street, overdosing in the alley off D’Arblay Street, then beating off the paramedics who were reviving me, only to be found hours later wandering over Vauxhall Bridge, with the crotch of my jeans torn out and my jaw half dislocated, as if in the intervening period I had been practising enthusiastic
soixante-neuf
with a werewolf. American, natch, who, after his lectures at Richmond College – where his folks have paid for a
summer semester – cruises the Soho bars sporting a charmingly recherché sleeveless anorak. Or gilet.

Standing beside the rack of plug adaptors, zip-up neoprene pouches and personal grooming tools, under the watchful eyes of a plaster Alsatian on a top shelf, I could feel the sine waves plotting the metabolic half-lives of these drugs tangle in my cortex, and in that moment I decided that a life in which happiness was mixed up like a mental cocktail was no kind of life at all. So I paid the assistant, took the plastic bag of meds home, tied a knot in the handle and chucked it up on to the top shelf in my study, where it lay for years, beside the yellowing typescript of my grandfather’s doctoral thesis ‘The Divine Indwelling’. This was his attempt to reconcile the then (1960) modish Existentialism with Eastern religion,
Christianity and science. My father, who viewed his own failure to find a publisher for this weird synthesis as a betrayal of his patrimony, once asked me shortly before he himself died what I thought of ‘The Indwelling’. I confessed that after attempting a few pages I had come to the conclusion that Grandad – a notorious autodidact who studied for seven ordinary degrees while commuting to London each day on the Brighton Belle – ‘had suffered for his learning – and now it’s our turn’.

‘What’ve you done with Pete Postlethwaite?’

Camera Jeff, Sound Jeff and Gofer Jeff were standing round me in a menacing semicircle on the verge beside the Will Rogers Memorial Park. On the far side of Sunset Boulevard, the Beverly Hills Hotel was flanked by three-storey palms. In there, I imagined, execs were strong-arming deals; out here there was an intervention going on.

‘What’ve you done with him?’ reiterated Camera Jeff, the Fletcher Christian of this mutinous crew.

‘We’re working on this together,’ I said, looking down at my Rockports nuzzling in the clover-dense grass.

‘Lissen, I was prepared to shoot some footage of you when we picked you up on the Strip where we’d arranged to meet Pete, but enough’s enough.’

‘Enough’s enough? What the fuck—’

‘Yeah, enough’s enough. You may think you’re a player in this town, while we’re nobodies, but this is ... this is—’

‘Bullshit!’ Sound Jeff pushed his angry red face forward.

‘Fuckin’ A!’ Gofer Jeff was dancing on the spot.

‘OK, OK, cool it you guys.’ Camera Jeff patted them down. ‘Mr Thewlis, we don’t want to alienate you.’

‘No, right,’ I laughed sarcastically. ‘Because you want to get paid, don’t you.’

A note of pity entered Camera Jeff’s voice, ‘Actually, that’s not an issue here – we were paid in full in advance by Mr Postlethwaite’s agent – a Mr Self?’

‘The name means nothing to me,’ I lied.

‘Anyway, this isn’t about money, it’s about our professional integrity.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Pete said this was going to be an experimental film – a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking round Los Angeles for a week. From the get-go we told him it wouldn’t add up to anything, but he insisted we trail him all the way from LAX Downtown, then from there to Hollywood. I didn’t know what to expect from him – I mean, I’d seen some of his work, but in the flesh he was, well, skittish.’

‘Skittish? You mean like “houynhmnhmnhmn”!’ I bared my yellow teeth and pranced on the verge. Camera Jeff chose to ignore this.

‘That’s right, skittish – ordering us about, then, when we miked him up he began talking this—’

‘Unbelievable bullshit!’ Sound Jeff bellowed. ‘I’ve had to listen to this crap for two days now!’

‘I don’t think that’s exactly nuanced, Jeff,’ said Camera Jeff. ‘I’ve listened to some of the recordings and it sounded to me as if Pete is having some kind of breakdown. Then this morning you turned up instead of him but wearing the same clothes and behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening – I’m gonna ask you one more time: where’s Pete? Is he back at the Roosevelt? We’re worried about him.’