This last beast, sightless, sunless, ravenous, clipped my shoulder and sent me flailing into a drive. I wasn’t injured at least the skin wasn’t broken, and only swirled into an oily multicoloured whorl when I pressed it with my thumb — but I was finished. I slumped down on the concrete, my throat combusting with nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, particulate matter and, of course, hydrocarbons. It was the nadir — and then he came, and I was lifted up.
He came, tripping down the side of the boulevard, his silky three-quarter-length pants shimmying as his highly toned calves took the stresses of descent in their stride. He came, strips shaven into his scalp beneath the arms of his shades, a tattoo of a torpedo on his stringy neck, a tuft of hair on his decisive chin. He came — and when he saw me there, washed up on the shore by the metallic storm, he stepped aside and pulled away the headphones that cosseted his noble ears.
Despite the whoosh of the boulevard, I registered familiar close harmonies, staccato yet melodious cheeping from the tinny-tiny speakers: ‘Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, so do… (Aff-ect! Pro-ject!) And so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life… out of it, out of it… (Pro-ject! Dee-part!) And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the so-ci-ety of men—’
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened to the Latin?’
‘Excuse me?’ He hadn’t noticed me before I spoke.
‘That’s NWPhd, isn’t it? I saw those guys rehearsing down at USC a couple of days ago.’
‘Aw,’ he said, shaking his head dismissively, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that, this is my roommate’s MP3. I just grabbed it as I took off — this ain’t my kind of shit at all.’
‘You don’t dig Aurelius?’
‘Or who?’
‘Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher — it’s his Meditations those guys are rapping, I just wondered what’d happened to the Latin, they usually do the Latin as well as the English.’
‘Oh, OK, I getcha — my roomie, he did say this was some kinduva remix, so maybe they, like, dropped the Latin to make it more commercial, or some kinda shit like that.’
It had been a long and substantive speech — which I was grateful for, but I needed more; he, however, seemed intent on leaving, pulling the headphones back on and turning to resume his goatish descent. ‘Hey, wait!’ I cried.
‘Say what?’ He turned back.
‘You aren’t going to walk all the way down Laurel Canyon, are you?’
‘Fool, I live up there a-ways, so I do the walk down to Sunset twice daily — I’ve a little problem with my licence, you dig. The only time I don’t walk down is when I skateboard.’
‘Skateboard?’
‘You heard it. I got me one of those big three-foot boards with the meaty wheels. I start back up a-ways by the park. Man, I tellya that thing goes — I guess I must be hitting thirty by the time I get to here, and when I drop back an’ brake, the sparks fly.’
‘But what about the sinners?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean the traffic — the cars.’
‘Ain’t no traffic late at night to speak of, and when I’m walking I go right directly t’wards ’em. Then they see you — so long as they see you they won’t hit you. And if they do hit you, well.’ He started to rap: ‘It-is-no-grievous-thing to-leave-the-so-ci-ety of men.’
I was impressed by his nerve — and told him so, then asked, ‘Would you mind if I followed along behind you? The traffic terrifies me.’
He grinned. ‘Sure, man, whatever you need.’
It took us around half an hour to cover the two miles back down to Sunset. He loped on ahead, his life story trailing over his shoulder like the silk scarf of a valiant fighter pilot. Which in a way he was now — strafing the enemy with his gaze as they came swooping up towards us.
‘You know that TV show, man, Intervention?’
‘Can’t say I do.’
‘My folks, they set me up for that. One day I was sitting in my condo in West Hollywood doin’ meth, the next I was in the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Beach, Florida. Craziest thing ever happened to me. I’m only telling this you this’ — he glanced back at me earnestly — ‘’cause I’m pretty much recognized wherever I go. See this: I’m only going down to Radio Shack to get them to look at this busted cell phone I got, but I’ll be hollered at least three times. Three times!’
I was grateful to him — but put him down as another fantasist. The town was full up with them, after all, and if the senescent could masquerade as the juvenescent, and starlets could go supernova — why couldn’t a deluded drug addict be the star of a reality show? But then we hit Sunset and right away a car slowed down and the driver leant out the window: ‘Good to see ya, Virgil!’ he roared. ‘You stay away from that shit now, y’hear.’
‘I hear you, man,’ Virgil called back, but his face — a perfect vacuum of nature-abhorring need — belied his words.
I thanked Virgil for guiding me, and was on the verge of asking him back to the hotel for a drink when some cloudy premonition got in the way. The last I saw of him was his jaunty pair of pants fluorescing in the headlights as it floated across an intersection towards the discount electrical goods store.
Back at the Chateau Marmont the desk clerk wouldn’t let go when I grabbed the key fob. We tugged it this way and that for a while; she was trying to get through to me that: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you Mister Self, he’s waiting in the bar.’ But it had been so long since anyone had called me that I thought she must be addressing the man waiting behind me, scuffing his shoe irritably on the carpet. Eventually she gave up, released the key and passed across a stack of phone message slips, all of which bore the same name: Dr Zack Busner, together with a series of times — 8.30 a.m., 9.30 a.m., 10.00 a.m. — that grew progressively closer to one another, until, as the present drew nigh, he had been calling repeatedly: 6.58 p.m., 6.59 p.m., 6.66 p.m.
He was indeed waiting for me in the bar with his red froggy face, and his pale yellow young Orson Welles face, and his dead-black Sandeman Port face. His six eyes were weeping (‘It’s the smog,’ he explained), and his six wings were beating (‘I just flew in’), and there were so many ice buckets ranged round him on stands that it looked as if this great monster were waist deep in the crystalline chips and cubes.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there you are! Don’t you ever answer your phone? I’ve been leaving messages on it all day — calling here as well. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was surprise you.’ He passed a clawed hand over his face and I felt it.
I sat down opposite him, not speaking, just getting the measure of the situation and the degree of danger I was in. A waitress brought a menu and I ordered a bottle of Powerade®. It was quiet in the bar, that blissful early-evening calm when the barman is dusting all the bottles on the shelves so that they shine, and the atmosphere is quivery with the anticipation of what that night’s patrons will do to each other once their blood begins to boil.
When the waitress returned with my energy drink and poured it into a highball glass, I added a couple of ice cubes from one of the buckets and took a long draught. Setting the glass back down, I looked from one pair of eyes to the next, then said levelly, ‘There’s something you really ought to know.’