‘Oh?’
‘I never did see Citizen Kane.’
* A scene that was shot — or so she assured me — in Stevie’s old apartment building; or possibly Ellen DeGeneres’s (which, might be more apt); anyway, one or the other.
* The Sea Org was formed by Hubbard as his Praetorian Guard in the 1970s, when, facing what he viewed as persecution (or taxation, as it’s commonly known), the core group of Scientologists took to the waves in a couple of clunky old merchant vessels. Mostly comprised of pubescent girls clad in itty-bitty miniskirts and sailor tops, the Org members, while not actually physically abused by Hubbard, were manipulated by him into the most fanatical loyalists.
* Interestingly enough the Guy Fawkes kind — saturnine features accentuated by slashes of’ tache and goatee beard — sported by the anarchist revolutionary V in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel. Moore himself had violently objected to the Wachowski Brothers movie adaptation of his book, stating: ‘It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.’ The question was — and is — which V were the children of Xenu hiding behind?
11. A Touch of Evil
Going home always feels like the real getaway to me. To depart on a journey is to simplify your identity: you must present a serviceable persona to strangers shorn of ambiguities — be just x, or y, or possibly j. But when you scoop the strange coins from the unfamiliar bedside table and funnel them into your pocket, when you flex your passport and put it away in the zip-lock bag inside the zippered compartment, when you look at your face in the mirror above the sink — and queasily catch sight of the back of your spacey head in the mirror on the bathroom door — you begin to feel the first stirrings of adventurousness: who will I be when I get back? Will I have changed? Will they have changed? The world is all used up — only tourists or salesmen set off on journeys; the real explorers strike out for the known.
These were some of my more spacious thoughts as I got ready to quit my bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on the morning of 15 June 2008. Making some coffee in the kitchenette, packing my small bag, drinking the coffee and eating a cinnamon donut while I scanned the map — these were actions: easy enough to suspend disbelief in, having as they did the robotic character of the pre-credits sequence for a movie that’s gone straight to video before it’s even in the can.
Touch, taste — smell! Don’t make me laugh — all these are barnyard senses, grossly overrated, only pigs would want points. That my thoughts had a quality of being somehow pre-cogitated — at once a little glib and overworked — I didn’t let bother me. Nor did I make too much of the way that I was conscious of these thoughts not merely as subjective intimations but as actual declamations that resounded in space. It was inevitable that I’d be feeling a little spaced out — it had been quite a trip, although I couldn’t remember much about it. Still, I had a long day’s walk ahead of me if I wanted to make my flight, so: ‘I’d better not linger.’
At 8.12 a.m. I was standing at the junction of Sunset and La Cienega, looking down the long gentle slope into the nuages automoteurs that blanketed the Los Angeles Basin, out of which came the occasional set of headlights, dragging behind them a car. A billboard rose above the intersection, on it the sad black face of a giant captioned in the art director’s conception of the giant’s own handwriting ‘I lost me too meth.’ ‘Me too, brother,’ I muttered as I loped past. ‘Me too.’ Then I was working my way down, block by block, to Santa Monica Boulevard, egged on by Johnnie Walker, who seemed to be striding out from every billboard that didn’t feature a gargantuan speed freak. ‘Keep Walking!’ Johnnie’s copywriter exhorted — although he himself remained pinioned. ‘Keep Walking!’ I admonished myself, then noticed a strange phenomenon: my own shadow, legs parted, cast on to the smogbank by the rays of the rising sun.
Keep walking — early morning on Sundays is the time allotted for pedestrianism in LA. For an hour or so those of us on foot had the city to ourselves. There was a mackerel sky over the Santa Monica Freeway and a steady stream of joggers coming between the mirrored donjons of Century City. Then there were the street persons, old hags bent double under sacks who turned their backs on the haunting flares of sunlight. ‘You have really pretty eyes,’ said a scuffed-up ladyboy who pulled me up outside a deli somewhere around Glen Boulevard. ‘Can I have a light?’ I took in the shaving rash, the baseball cap, the hip-hugging cut-offs and the just-picked-up butt of filter tip stuck in a face that was dustily lacking in registration.
I gave him one, although he too had a disconcerting air of being pre-known, as did the petals lying around a storm drain and the WARNING. THIS AREA CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER, BIRTH DEFECTS AND OTHER REPRODUCTIVE HARM, as did the Elysian Fields of the Los Angeles Country Club.
A linguini of LAFD hoses had been vomited across the sidewalk from the engines parked by the kerb, and there, sitting at the metal tables in front of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, were the fire starters themselves, companionably planning their day’s arson. I stopped for a smoke and a coffee — decaf, of course. But, even so, this was a big mistake, because as I kept walking my bladder swelled and mutated until I was but a hollow man who could barely put one leg full of urine in front of the other.
What to do? Gas station after gas station taunted me with its signs: RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMER USE ONLY. Until I got it into my thick head and became a customer myself — but what to buy, not a candy bar, or a spare cap for my gas tank. No need for a newspaper or a rubber mat either… Aha! Quick Energy Drink® — small, portable, inoffensive. I paid and knocked it back. Then the Cha’ an meditation illness began, in front of the urinal, it was of course state law that employees wash their hands, but as for the rest of us we were free to walk the streets with our hands dripping blood and excreta. The incontinent recall of Buddhist texts, which is the symptom of this overstraining of the pupil’s psyche, can be rectified only by the master hitting him hard on the head with a stick. Otherwise the texts range themselves, left to right, across the pupil’s visual field, not interrupting his view of a homeless man foetal on the sidewalk — but augmenting it. More disturbingly, the texts are no mere phenomenological wallpaper — the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by the pupil, even as he stares through them at the sign for historic Route 66.
And still the texts proliferate — at first only ones the pupil is familiar with, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of. Yet these too are comprehended in their entirety, at once, even though he can see straight through them to a plate-glass window, and beyond that a store full of running machines. The pupil’s mind becomes bloated with a consciousness that inexorably ramifies, his ego, free-will, intentionality — whatever — it is trapped like a swarming water drop pinioned in a microscope slide. There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits — these are texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilizations, texts doodled on the Etch A Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid –
The Quick Energy Drink® had to have been a mistake, because this was the mosh-pit of soma I was chucked into as I continued west to Santa Monica — with one key distinction: I saw not texts but video clips. Clips of me walking out from the arrivals terminal at LAX and on to Century Boulevard, clips of me freaking out in a gas station, clips of me checking in to the Uqbar Inn, clips of me passing by donutmorphic drive-ins, clips of me surging through nuages maritimes in the Baldwin Hills, clips of me beating on piñatas east of Broadway — in short, video clips of me at every stage of my circumambulation, and not just the ones I knew had been taken by the perfidious Jeffs, but all the clips from the security cameras I’d long stopped trying to avoid.