‘That? — That!’ I guffaw. ‘C’mon, that’s first-grade stuff: watch me.’
When I’m done, the voice seems gratifyingly transported. ‘Beautiful,’ it groans, ‘just too, too beautiful, darling…’ Then it pulls itself together and crackles. ‘A still easier one: give me man-having-tiny-plastic-balls-torn-from-his-face, followed by a mickey finn.’
And that one is easy, because the V masks come barrelling back in and I have someone to do the scene with. I’m still frantically mugging when the pearlescent drop appears at the bevelled end of the hypodermic and the house lights go down, and the spot focuses in tighter… tighter on my face… and… blanks… out.
I came to being thrown from the back of a Lincoln Town Car that was taking the bend in Mulholland Drive immediately to the north of Runyon Canyon Park at twice the limit — or so I estimated as I windmilled into a ditch right at the feet of a family of joggers in full nylon kit.
‘Oh my God!’ the mommy ejaculated.
‘Oh my god,’ the daddy rather more agnostically echoed her.
‘OMG,’ their tweenage daughter cried.
‘Oh!’ said a toddler in an all-terrain buggy.
‘Wuff!’ said their Airedale, nuzzling between my thighs with his square-haired head.
‘Frodo!’ the mommy called it, reeling the poor unfortunate in by its extendable lead. Once the dog was landed the daddy approached:
‘Are you, like, OK?’
‘Kind sir,’ I said, clambering to my feet and straightening my torn clothes, ‘there is no question of similitude at all; thanks to Laura Harring’s breasts I have been spared any serious injury.’
He didn’t recoil, nor did the rest of the FoJ — once they’d floated off on their air soles, paws and tyres I realized why: it may’ve felt as if shells full of silicone gel had broken my fall, but for the second time that day my fingers crept up my T-shirt and discovered only the same old skimpy pectorals. Ho-hum, I sighed, picking bitumen from my knees, snuffling up the bouquet garni of the mesquite and looking out over the Los Angeles Basin. I may’ve lost the breasts, but I stood at last on those exposed ribs and gullies of the Sierra, stacked with hundreds of thousands of dollars of firewood and the palm froth of kindling. In the distance the skyscrapers of Downtown rose up straight as ruled lines, the Y-axis for Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust.
From the angle of the sun I estimated it was a couple of hours until dusk. A more timorous hiker would’ve probably given up at this point, slumped back down the hillside to his bungalow at the Marmont, eaten far too many cashews and nutted-out in front of the TV, but I was made of more suicidal stuff: I would follow the great silicone migration along the escarpment. True, my circumambulation had been ruptured by the van and the car rides, and I had also been kidnapped, possibly even abused, although this was debatable: was an actor like a child, passively acquiescing to perverted direction because she knew no other authority?
And now that I came to think back over the episode, as at first I made my way along the verge of Mulholland, then dived down a winding side road into the dark heart of affluent suburbia, it dawned on me that not once during that strange interlude had the voice referred to me by name. Who was playing me, then? As I walked I ran my hands over my face repeatedly — but one angular middle-aged male face feels pretty much the same as the next, and it wasn’t until I crept under a carport and crouched to frame my features in the wing mirror of an Infiniti that my hunch was confirmed: this was not homely Pete Postlethwaite’s face, or Thewlis’s haughty mien. But as to whose lumpy nose, rag-rolled cheeks and equine teeth were described on this face mask — well, I was at a loss, so I squeezed a blackhead.
And soon lost interest, plodding on along the road towards Mount Olympus. Somewhere up here Huxley’s house had burnt down, a domesticated fireball of mystic books — what was it his friend Gerald Heard had said? ‘Man is the general name applied to successions of inconsistent conduct having their source within a two-legged and featherless body.’ Poor Aldous, his visual field so savagely foreshortened by myopia and his attention span — sooo long, a stretch limmo of awareness, capacious enough to seat the entire casts of all the movies ever shot in Hollywood, in Culver City, in Burbank, in the Valley. Will Hay and the Fat Boy sat up with the driver, and in the back compartment Manuel P. Zlotnik carousing with Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough… and all the rest.
That was Aldous’s misfortune: spaced out in Schwab’s, he had seen Los Angeles’s hair was burning, that her hills were filled with fire, and with that he broke through from the monochrome world of the 1950s to the other Technicolor side. Poor Aldous: if all the movies ever made had been spliced together, wound on to a reel the size of a Ferris wheel and projected on to a screen two inches in front of him, it still wouldn’t have been long enough to divert him, it still would’ve seemed over in a blink of his mescaline eyes. For he had seen the future: the after-image of the movies, flickering on the inside of his lids.
I had noted the flyers for Location Services stuck in the mailboxes along Willow Drive, and now I reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard only to discover that in my flat-footed abstraction I had lost the straight way and that the sun had dipped behind the shoulder of the mountain. The canyon was a deep place and with Saturday fast fading the snorting beasts were rampaging back from the beaches, their headlights piercing the gathering shadows. The hardtop snaked between steep bluffs terraced with real estate and there was no sidewalk. I got out the map crumpled into my pocket, but once I’d unfolded it saw that the available routes back to Sunset were all equally wiggling — they wormed across the rumpled paper, the apotheosis of the grid, as if the plotting pens of an EEG had simultaneously registered the nightmares of the city’s entire populace.
I tried walking on the left-hand side of the road, but each time I rounded a bend I was horribly aware I was invisible to the beasts that came at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour, panting hydrocarbons, their fenders-for-jaws snagging the pandanus along the verge. I sprinted across to the right — but here my terror was still greater, for each time a beast came charging up the hill, its headlights ignited visions in my eyes — while they, I knew mos’ def’, could see nothing at all.
I tried switching from one side of the boulevard to the other as it wound down through the canyon, so as to provide the beasts coming from either direction with the greatest possible visibility — but this was no good, for darkness was upon us all now, and as I pelted like a picaro (or do I mean a picador?) beneath the points of their chrome horns I couldn’t prevent myself from witnessing the abominations inside these Escalades and Infinitis and Tahoes. I may have been a cryogenically preserved Disney head bowled chuckling down this lane of death, I may have been a silica grain impelled by time, but at least I wasn’t like these… these… sinners.
No wonder they couldn’t slow down, when this lustful man’s penis was so engorged, so turgid, that I could see it thrusting up towards the windshield. No wonder they couldn’t see me, when this gluttonous family’s minivan was so stuffed with their own fat and discarded food that even as they screamed by I noted the high tide of gnawed drumsticks, frayed corncobs and crescent burgers pressed by paps and thighs against the greasy windows. No wonder they had no care for the future, when, like this derivatives trader, they urged their Crown Victorias forward, while their heads were reversed.