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.
Phiclass="underline" 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.’