Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (8 page)

Afterwards, when the books had been signed, I was on the point of suggesting we go get something to eat, when Thewlis
was whisked away by his entourage, leaving me with Dan. It was a shame, because I’d wanted to ask him about his role in Mike Leigh’s
Naked
. It was the first time I’d noticed Thewlis and I thought his performance mesmeric and bruising – like being beaten up by a hypnotist. It was widely known that Leigh worked largely by improvisation, encouraging his actors to bring their own characters to the set, then spurring them on to create dialogue and action spontaneously. In the opening scene of the film Thewlis’s alter ego, Johnny, was having vigorous congress with a woman in an alley. But was it rape? Some might say that consent is a very little thing – but is it? I wanted an answer to this, a question that had haunted endless late-night conversations in the mid-1990s – after all, Thewlis should know.

Much later that night I lay in Room 2229 unable to sleep and regretting having freed my mini-slaves. I rose, dressed and laced my boots – appreciating the neat job that had been done on the eyelet. Then I went for a walk around the cavernous hotel counting my charged paces in tens, then hundreds; counting the emergency stairs in tens, then hundreds; stopping beside service carts and riffling the shampoo miniatures – then moving on.

In the morning the driver who drove me to the airport was tight-lipped. I could understand why – the highway was wide and terrifyingly nondescript, the buildings resisted the anthropomorphism of scale, the sky over Lake Ontario was bigger than a nebula. I scanned the verges of the freeway; even though it was midweek I hoped against hope that Reichman had got the walking bug, and I would see him pulling his own suitcase back to Pearson.

The driver took a call on his cell phone and listened intently to the muffled squeaking.

‘Pest control problem?’ I asked when he hung up.

‘You could say that,’ he answered curtly. ‘The festival’s suite at the hotel was broken into last night. Things were done with the LongPen ... dreadful things.’

‘Excuse me sir, you have too many things in your pockets.’

We stood on a desert island of carpet tiles somewhere in the placid lagoon of Pearson International Airport. I was a pre-wrecked Crusoe; she was a squat mermaid of South Asian extraction with blue-black hair. She wore a nylon jacket with fluorescent patches that bulged at the hips and the fishtail of her lower body was poured into black slacks. At least it was healthy flesh and not all the necrotic
stuff
I had wadded into the Barbour, stuff she began to gingerly extract with rubber-gloved hands, laying it all out on the brushed steel.

I waited with the
Ohrwurm
boring into me: a tiny finger flutter of the keys, the entire orchestra dangling from the pianist’s hangnail ...

The security woman unearthed the tiny plastic tomb within which this vast and resonant performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto – by Daniel Barenboim with the London Philharmonic – was interred. She bunched up the skirt of the Barbour, appalled to discover yet another pocket – the poacher’s – and unzipping it removed the small corpse of my rolled-up plastic trousers.

Leaving Tor-Buff-Chester (a mega-region embracing Toronto that stretches all the way from Buffalo to Quebec City, and has an annual $530 billion of economic activity) was proving more difficult than anticipated. ‘The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones,’ contended Uncle Vladimir – meaning ‘bore’ as in ‘induce
tedium’. I didn’t feel that way: my ability to build a concert hall in the inches between my ears was the only thing that made all of this – the queuing, the carpet tiling, the pornographic X-raying of my possessions – remotely tolerable.

Then, aloft, as the Northwest flight skipped across the dimpled Great Lakes, I dipped
carottes coupées et pellées
in
trempette ranch
, while little Daniel braced himself in the aisle and puuuushed! with his fluttery fingers, so that the entire fuselage of the plane widened and the trolley dollies could dance about one another in Busby Beethoven routines.

There were 216 private jets booked into Miami International Airport for the Miami Basel Art Fair. ‘Fine art is a luxury good, and so there is a natural marketing synergy, a comparable customer profile and a similar trend cycle,’ or so said Jeremy Laing, the Canadian fashion wunderkind. I wondered if Sherman would be there: he was outwardly disdainful of money, contending that if he sought the maximum for his pieces and ruthlessly hired, fired and even circumvented his gallerists, it was only to further the work.

‘I’m just a very little man making very big things,’ he’d said when I last taxed him with posing for the cover of a glossy auction house magazine. ‘And you have to appreciate the costs involved: the planning, the technical drawings, the lobbying – materials and fabrication are only the tip of the iceberg.’

I hadn’t observed that the end result was as egotistic as any other monumentalism, and that really spending his money extravagantly might be of more benefit to others than these iron giants trampling down the hills, or standing forlorn in the Seine. I hadn’t, for the shameful reason ... but there was also Sherman’s indisputable generosity: restaurant bills paid
without a murmur, plane tickets chucked like paper darts, and opera seats offered offhand.

And yet ... and yet ... I was never entirely comfortable with his largesse; was it all adding up to a costly obligation? Besides, Sherman devalued his gifts by exhibiting the appetitive disdain I’d noticed in others like him – those who, by their own efforts, had worked their way up from a comfortable childhood to being seriously rich.

Sherman had shirts and suits tailored by the score; and, as he advanced through life, Baltie brought up the rear, picking up the clothes that had been discarded by his boss because they were slightly soiled. Sherman bought bottles of Cristal, drank half a glass, then, gripped by a whim for a pint of lager, climbed down from tables doodled with costly food – dots of Beluga caviar, scrawls of langoustine – and marched away, leaving Baltie to settle the bill. Sherman – having already extracted a Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto from the humidor that went everywhere with them – would wait at the kerb: a fire hydrant spurting smoke. Needless to say, the expensive cigar was stomped to shreds after a few puffs.

‘When I see a guy lighting a cigarette as I turn the corner, I don’t think he’s gonna be taking the bus!’

I could see her point, but I’d been waiting for the service for a while and even in the northern Californian sunshine everything was weighing heavily on me: I needed a smoke. The timing was wrong for a walk into town – besides without a Reichman to goad I didn’t really have the oomph. I thought of the days ahead of me, the paltry rituals of a man alone in a strange city: reading suppers – possibly a concert, an excursion to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Metroline bus blatted along I-29, through the cleft of the buttocky hills, one of which bore the tattoo
CITY OF INDUSTRY
. I’d never liked San Francisco in all the time I’d been visiting; for me the city always remained tangled in the fallen freeways of the 1989 earthquake, and these, in turn, contained within their distressed steel and clots of concrete the ghost of the 1906 earthquake with its subprime fatalities –
300, 3,000 or 30,000?
The tenderloin was a cut of putrefying meat, crawling with tramp-flies and shoved in the face of tourists, and in the Prescott Hotel on Post Street where I had slumped, stifled by swags, pelmets, tassels, throw cushions – all the amniotic padding of an embryonic luxury – I noticed for the first terrifying time that reflected in the mirror the label of the mineral water bottle read
NAIVE
.

I couldn’t believe that San Francisco had been hiding these big things from me – but there they were, floodlit: a concert hall, a city hall, some kind of library or museum, all stacked along avenues wide enough to gladden Albert Speer. No doubt in Sacramento there would be a state capitol that was a copy – near enough – of the one in Washington; it was the same throughout the States: prêt-à-porter legislatures and courts, bought from the Great Framers up in heaven.

I had booked the best seat in the house, the plush throne of B1 in the balcony. High above the stage dangled enormous transparent sound-bafflers, and as the soloist mounted the keys with his fingers, climbing up and up to the tremolo peak of the allegro, I wondered how great a compass of emotion might be contained between one note and another, dreadfully pinched by the minims. The
Ohrwurm
bored on into my cheesy brain, proof – if any were needed – that I was already dead.

I zombied back towards the Prescott under a full and ruddy moon, appraising the bitten-off cripples along Market Street: what diabolic ghoul could have taken that leg or arm? Surely not these slim Latino girls bussed in from the Bay Area? They sported fetching light-up devil horns and glittery red micro-mini dresses, and cavorted on the sidewalks goosing one another with outsized plastic forks.

Ploughing my way through burger ’n’ fries in the laminated belly of the Pinecrest Diner, I envied them all the easily converted currencies of youth: sex and bullshit. Envied even the kid who sat opposite me, the hood of his H. H. Geiger alien rubber suit pushed up off his brow to expose the pained
maquillage
of pimples and white-blond bum-fluff.

At the Prescott yet again, I naively slept, then cynically dream-dollied myself in through the doors of the Moscone Convention Center. The Little People of America were gathered – no less grotesque than any who sport celluloid name badges, yet certainly no greater. My mobile phone rang and I answered it as quickly as I could, although not fast enough: a clutch of dwarfs swarmed about me. ‘Have some goddamn respect,’ said a termagant with a perm as tight and prickly as a burr. ‘Can’t you see there’re royalty present?’

What gives?
Sherman’s voice in my ear.

‘Um, n-nothing.’

Are you attending some kind of levee?

‘I thought the lady told you to cut that out!’

The phone was snatched from my hand, and before I could remonstrate there was a Nagasaki of flashes, a low moan, and the dwarfs surged towards the main doors – then were checked by a force field of awe.

Tiptoeing into the convention centre came a brother and sister; they had the same white-golden hair, worn shoulder length, and must have been in their late teens. They held hands, and seemed not so much shy as bemused by the adoration they had provoked. I noticed first the tiny patchwork denim bag the girl wore slung over one shoulder, then their savagely undershot jaws and keel noses, then their stature: for they stood at most twenty, maybe twenty-one inches high.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the burr-headed woman, clutching my leg so fiercely that her nails dug into the tendon behind my knee.

‘Beautiful,’ sighed the little man who’d snatched my phone. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his blazer pocket and mopped his eyes.

I understood that these were the dwarfs’ dwarfs, embodying for them all the aesthetic qualities the actual sized ascribe to the miniature. Wishing Lévi-Strauss was with me, I found myself being pushed forward and instinctively I offered my hand to the primordial dwarf girl. She rearranged the strap of her handbag and I was acutely aware of the quail’s ribcage beneath her doll’s cardigan – then the grossness of my fingers, with their elephant’s knees knuckles and fertile crescents of dirt beneath the nails. As our hands Sistined together she turned to quicksilver and burst into a spray of droplets, one of which hung from the chin of the burr-headed woman. I stared at this bubble world and saw in its mirrored convexity the dwarf conventioneers, the concrete and glass of the foyer, and my own moon face, cratered by its passage through deep space.

I awoke with the Barbour’s waxen arms wrapped around me, my face buried in its musty tartan lining, its double zips
nipping my neck – and couldn’t stop weeping until a young woman in the line for the breakfast buffet offered me a Kleenex and said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.’ Determined to walk away these black-and-blues, I went back to my room, packed the Barbour’s pockets, then headed out into the sunshine.

The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the jacket wasn’t a mistake – it was burden that had to be endured as I toiled up Nob and downhill, passing show couples with show dogs posing outside pacific patisseries. I cursed myself for a fool: far from being unencumbered here was I, beneath an ice cream headache, sweating with the exertion of carrying a shooting jacket.

At Marina Boulevard, where the Palace of Fine Arts hid its Moorish fakery behind an arras of pines, I nearly gave up – my progression was purely arithmetic. Only the previous week, when I was either 53,710 or 537 miles away, district officials
had scuttled the idea of plastering the Golden Gate with corporate advertising. ‘If you ain’t into this you real sucka,’ J. J. Bigga told the 500- –
50-? 5,000-?
– strong audience at the Cow Palace ... House repos were up 622 per cent to 10,427 in the last quarter ...
or was it 104,270, or even 1,042?
At Crissy Field I stopped a bucktoothed Scotswoman on a bike and asked her for directions to the inconceivably big thing that arced through the haze to the green hills above Sausalito, and she looked at me the way the sane look at the mad.