Beyond the main gates Los Angeles was waiting, her hot legs spread — and I entered them, devoutly. In the Hayden Tract, a phantasmagoria of Sci-Arc buildings with broken bone girders, staircases to nowhere and oriel windows bursting like buboes, I found a café where I could sit outside. I smoked, drank tea and finished Bret’s Lunar Park. There was room in the novel for Harrison Ford to have a walk-on part — he, who had himself once been a set carpenter, hammering away on the hulks becalmed in the Sargasso of the imagination. I left the book lying on the table — what did narrative have going for it anyway — only smelting kryptonite out of coincidence so as to trap us superheroes in the mundane.
Out here, by rights, I should have feared the zephyrs uncoiling from the brows of the Baldwin Hills — but instead I hitched up my pants and made for La Cienega; it — not they — would carry me the six miles north, back to Hollywood.
‘Surfer frat boys — that’s all I can think about.’
‘And you’re telling me he didn’t have a place to live?’
‘Yeah, but he was sooo cute, but crazy — when I first started dating him he admitted it.’
‘It?’
‘That he’d set the fire himself — the one he received the, uh, commendation for.’
I couldn’t prevent myself from eavesdropping: did she really say ‘surfer frat boys’? Or from looking from the sheepskin seams of her lambbag to her charm bracelet to her anorexic bangs. Her companion was just a hair head to me.
I’d regained consciousness in a booth in a McDonald’s, and, judging by my small pot of soda and skimpy burger, I’d only popped in to use the restroom. It wasn’t until I was back out in the street, striding through the tinted air, that it occurred to me to offer her this factoid: her lover was not alone. It’s been estimated that 20 per cent of all fires are set by the LAFD itself — acts of daring professional closure that could only make psychiatrists gasp in admiration as they drove their patients insane with neuropharmacology.
It wasn’t until I was back out on Cienega that I realized where I was: around the junction with Olympic. And this… this too needed to be noted: that every time Marlowe or Archer got sapped, then came to with a line of inconsequential dialogue in his ears surfer frat boys… it was a metaphor for Los Angeles’s sprawl, as its long lean boulevards stretched out from the rumpled bed. Too much trouble to describe all those Hummers with their wobble-board doors bass vibrating, too much effort to block in those body shops and dental technicians, the stench of a gas station and the street persons, who, skin like bacon rind, were frying today as the smog blew away. Keep on walking… Johnnie Walker, dapper in top hat and frock coat, his boots shined, his monocle screwed into his eye, strode out towards Hollywood, yet never arrived, pinned as he was like a butterfly to the billboard.
I came to again in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, getting ready for the party being given in my honour. (Well, not so much a party — that implies an importance I wouldn’t wish for a second to arrogate to myself; more of a gathering, really.) I was still thinking about the burning of Los Angeles and waiting for Faye to get back — it was that kind of bungalow. Naked, fresh from the shower, I wandered from the small bedroom, icy with state-of-tech TV and music system, to the kitchen, which, with its humming rhombus of an icebox, its foursquare sink — suitable for tanning hides — its chintzy muslin curtains and linoleum pong, suggested a happier era of making do belied by the dishonourable tray loaded with potato chips, cookies, cashews and liquor bottles.
I dressed and went outside to where evening had sidled between the palm leaves, and cheery lanterns lit up the mini-homesteads of this dinky banana republic. From the direction of the pool I could hear a little pre-supper goosing going on: a splash, a cry, the wet thwack of a bikini strap. Behind my bungalow Mike Myers’s moon face rose up, cratered by the Mare Imbrium of his fake beard. His karma is huge…
I walked towards the thwack, let myself out through the metal gate, skirted the porte-cochère, walked down the lane, then along Sunset, and, passing between two sharp-featured young women snapped into black Lycra, entered the Bar Marmont. My key fob bulged in the pocket of my short pants as I walked up some stairs, along a narrowing corridor, through a barroom the width of a train carriage and into a second, narrow as a toilet stall, then into a third no wider than a chicken run, at the end of which I climbed through a trapdoor into a hutch cluttered with armchairs and oil paintings and people — most of whom were thrashing about in a purse seine smoking area, accessed via french windows the size of marmalade jars.
They were all there in the limelight: the Jeffs and Bret, Michael Lynton and Ellen DeGeneres, James Crespinel and Judy Brown, Michael Laughlin* — who was explaining the genesis of his self-designed sneakers to a young woman whose name I never did learn — and Mac Guffin, who immediately drew me to one side: ‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘I picked up five fucking tickets minding your back all the way up Cienega.’
‘No one asked you to do that,’ I hissed. ‘And if you had to, why didn’t you ditch the wheels?’
‘Aw, c’mon fellah, don’t be like that — I’m just trying to look out for you; they’re on your tail — y’know that, don’tcha? They’re sharpening their knives, putting on their leather faces, cranking up their chainsaws, I mean, it’s because you’re paranoid that they’re now coming to get you—’ He broke off to take a highball glass full of fruit from a waitress struggling through the throng.
‘Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mac,’ I snarled; ‘why not just piss all over my party.’
‘Party?’ He shook his Labrador head, then began slobbering on a pineapple chunk. ‘Isn’t that a little grandiose — it looks more like a—’
‘Nice gathering,’ Bret said, cutting in appositely. ‘This is Brad.’ A tall, good-looking young man in blue jeans and a silky-black hoodie, the pink drapes of whose top lip parted to reveal expertly bleached teeth.
‘Hi,’ said Brad chirpily.
‘Brad is directing a movie called The Shrink.’
‘Really?’ I said with maximum disdain. ‘And what of it?’
‘He wondered if you might like to drop by the set — they’re shooting on location down at Venice; wouldn’t that be on your way back to LAX?’
‘Uh, yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to sound unconcerned, although I was whining inside: Is he trying to get rid of me?