I was pondering this — in as much as anyone could ponder such an extravagant onslaught of visual imagery, tens — hundreds even — of thousands of full-motion shots of himself walking, streamed straight to his visual cortex — when I realized that one of the clips was in real time and that it coincided, more or less, with my own POV. I was passing by the John Wayne Cancer Institute; it was a pretty big cancer institute — but then he had been a pretty big guy. I had reached Santa Monica and regained some sort of equilibrium, standing on the sidewalk like any other rube and reading the following text:
‘Here are described the humble beginnings of the once swamp dweller whose fortune was lost many generations before his own birth due to the unfortunate and unexplainable misplacement of his great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s will and the deed to 21,138 acres of land which once encompassed the greater part of what is now San Francisco. Legend also tells that the soul of SCUSSUXYKOR III, an ancient Egyptian pharoah murdered by his very own soothsayer priest, sometimes dwells within his flesh. The astrological sign of the squid from the zodiac of the planet Jamzübati-Remoti on the outer Stewart Skippy Socrates solar system centered on the SUZIIR23 galaxy exemplifies the Amazing Chain Man.’
Which was written in marker pen on a piece of cardboard stuck on top of shopping cart, beside which sat a street person I thought I recognized. He was rattling hanks of chain between his hands. His bald head was surmounted by a twist of bandana, and above his beard was the benign expression of someone who believes that the everyday slights of this world can be fully explained by pan-galactic conspiracy theories.
‘Hey, Chain Man,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ he replied.
‘That’s a fine piece of writing.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Not to be picky, but it’s p-h-a-r-a-o-h.’
‘A-o-h what?’
‘Pharaoh — you’ve reversed the o and a.’
‘Right, whatever, dude.’ He let the chain hank fall to his lap. ‘But I’m a writer — not a fuckin’ speller.’
I make no excuses, I was weary and anyway facetiousness comes naturally to me: ‘Oh, OK,’ I chuckled, ‘so what do you write?’
The Amazing Chain Man got out a bit of a Marlboro and lit it before continuing, ‘Before the strike I had a pretty good gig churning out scripts for Stargate SG-I, did some stuff for Atlantis and Universe too — that was my eating money anyways.’
‘Oh — you mean you’re a real writer.’
‘Like, d’oh, we’re all real writers.’ He waved the tip of his cigarette to encompass the tramps, winos and bums who had congregated on these benches at the intersection of 7th and Santa Monica. ‘Whaddya think, that the WGA had a generous strike fund? There was too much fuckin’ product anyway, now they’ve gone head to head over the new media residuals for Dharma & Greg, well, most of us will never work again. Some of these guys, though, they’re, like, idealists.’
‘Like idealists — you mean they’re transcendental idealists?’
‘No, dummy, they’re novelists, short story writers — even biographers. They’ve come from all over to back the strike. They can read the writing on the walclass="underline" if it that’s all she wrote, that’s all they’ll be wroting too.’
I let this solecism slide and confined myself to the matter near to hand:
‘So this’ — I pointed at the cardboard — ‘is what exactly?’
‘That’s my shill, man, people see that they get to talking, maybe they ask me to write something for them — tell ‘em a story perhaps, y’know oral literature may be the way the whole thing is going, kinda back to the future trip.’
It was lost on me — the shill, the riff — I was already heading on towards the beach. Thomas Mann was calling to me from his exile in the sewer pipe — the Santa Monica Pier was calling to me too. Not all writers were down and out. I ignored the Amazing Chain Man’s cry, which followed me down the block: ‘I do kids parties too!’
There were no surfer frat boys for me down at the beach, no muscle Manns either, only tourists de-evolving into Segways, and kites tethered to the sand, and craft stalls selling serapes made from tin foil, and glass-bead purses, and figures carved out of pine with quartzite pebble eyes and detachable penises. And there was the Freak Show and the boardwalk cafés, and a wino who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a sign that read ‘Why lie, I need a beer’, and quaint little bungalows festooned with flags, and jogging families, and fat teens hunting for weed, and all the carnival of a Sunday afternoon that I had been exiled from by a circumambulation I now realized had been completely traduced, for I was but one of a legion of writers tramping round LA, we were all the same: poorly registered, our very images thieved from us — just another chapter in the tale of our immiseration. And in final confirmation of this Kazuo Ishiguro danced past, Netherfield Park tied to his head: he’d made it to Venice before me, together with the Bennet sisters.
I left the beach and floundered inland to where, at the intersection of Windward and Pacific avenues, a section of the old arcade was still standing, with its Corinthian columns striding along the sidewalk. I was so disoriented — so dispirited. If I’d had anything to write on I would’ve made a shill of my own, but instead the very ordinary chained man leant against a pillar and felt the whole city — from LAX to South Central, from South Central to Downtown, from Downtown to Hollywood, and from Hollywood to here — revolve about his head, a whirlpool of ’burbs and malls and office blocks and country clubs, through which cars drove and Metro trains clattered with absolute disregard.
Some scenes from Brad’s movie The Shrink were being shot on location nearby, so I headed on over to Dell Avenue with a view to hanging out for a while — the circumambulation might have failed, but not to visit a murder scene when I was in LA to find a killer seemed like a dereliction. This neighbourhood boasted the last-remaining canals, long troughs of stagnant water reflecting the façades of the self-conscious buildings. The vibe was arty, not artful — men who moisturized sat outside upmarket patisseries in the hot June sunlight, sipping cappuccinos with cashmere pullovers tied round their necks.
I spotted where the filming was going on from a long way off: there were maybe twenty or thirty trucks and SUVs parked along the kerb, and around a hundred techies wearing carpenter jeans and T-shirts merchandising Pacific Northwest grunge bands were milling about performing essential tasks. They were all elbows and earrings and had mouthfuls of crocodile clips but no time for me because time was at a $50-per-hour premium. So I pushed on through and discovered maybe fifty or so boys and girls armed with clipboards, and one of them fetched Brad, who swished his lips open in what I supposed was a welcoming smile — either that, or he might’ve been trying to dazzle me with his teeth.
‘There’s not a lot happening,’ he said, ‘but feel free to wander around — we’ll be doing a couple of takes… soonish.’