Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (11 page)

In the backstreets of Watts, Sherman told me about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific a thousand miles west of California and twice the size of Texas. He expatiated on how discarded plastic from all over the globe had become concentrated there: ‘Packing tape, plastic soldiers, widgets, grommets, webbing, shopping bags – you name it! It all pitches
up in the Patch, and there it photo-degrades, breaking down and down and down, into littler and littler blobs known as – I kid you not – “nurdles”.’

He seemed oblivious of the miniature gravestones and other Halloween decorations studding the front yards of the tumbledown frame houses – immune also to any sense of threat in this, one of the most feared ‘hoods in South Central. It occurred to me, observing the way cars slowed and fingers pointed, that here it was not Sherman’s restricted size that attracted attention – no one was playing ‘Child or Dwarf’ – but only the fact of our age, our colour and our class. All Hallows’ Eve was nigh, and the gun crews who tried dicking with us were warned off by our middle-aged, middle-class, white man horror masks.

We stood beneath the airy minarets of the Towers and Sherman tugged his beard. I understood where the nurdling had been leading: he was intent on matching Simon Rodia’s awesome feat of bricolage with one of his own: ‘There has to be a way to fuse all that plastic into a single sculpted agglomeration—’

‘You mean a body form?’ I queried, knowing full well the answer.

‘Yes, yes, a body form of course!’

And I saw the monstrous baby staggering upright from the horizon, its chubby arms formed by billions of nurdles.

At the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA I struck up a friendship with Felipe on the concierge’s desk. He had an outsized pencil that reminded me of the ones I had on my desk at home – one blue, one lead – writing implements that juxtaposed amusingly with my minumental figurine of Sherman’s
Behemoth
. Felipe used his big pencil to doodle while he waited for guests to ask him things: Where’s this – or that? How do I get to ...? Can you recommend? When he was distracted in this way I took the opportunity to swivel the ledger and examine the doodles, but there seemed no precise relation between the series of boxes, circles, triangles and these enquiries.

I say friendship, but I doubt Felipe thought I was anything but a saddo, flopping around the colossal atrium of the hotel, peering disconsolately into the ornamental fountain, or else standing caught in the fugue of minimal preference, looking from one souvenir to the next in the gift concession. I had a reading to give at the Los Angeles Public Library, but apart from this my time was my own. I forced myself out to wander the stepped pyramid of Bunker Hill, pausing in its cigarette-packet-sized parks to admire the crumpled tinfoil public sculpture.

There were no calls from Sherman – there couldn’t be any network coverage out there on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Baltie revved up the earth mover, then slipped the clutch. ‘Hey!’ his boss cried, rattling around in the jump seat as they doodled across the crystalline page, describing a line that could be erased only by a once-in-a-decade ‘rain event’. In Beverly
Hills Britney had retreated to the shower stall to speak to an interviewer from Coast FM – I could hear the pitter-patter lying on my bed at the Westin. The kids were arriving for their court-ordered time with Mom.

Felipe, seeing how loose my ends were becoming, malevolently suggested I might like to visit a
carniceria
out in East LA, so I walked over Bunker Hill to Broadway and waited among the baggage, the denim and the rolled gold for the 31 bus. It ground across the bridge over the Inca runnel of the Los Angeles River, then along 1st Street, while I watched in-bus American Latino TV: adobe men in white hoodies yapping like Disney characters for a public health campaign.

It was mid-morning and the
carniceria
sat beside the dusty road, a nondescript three-storey building. Inside, the narrow aisles lined with chiller cabinets smelt of blood and there was sawdust on the floor. Signs read
FOOD STAMPS ACEPTAMOS
, the lighting was yellow and blue, pigs’ trotters lay in a stepped pyramid climbed by lost flies. There was no one about – I reached across to where a cleaver lay on a wooden chopping board scored with never-to-be-erased blows. I hefted the cleaver – it felt right, perfectly weighted. I only let it fall, applying no force – only let the inertia carry it through its short arc, the same way my late father-in-law had told me to play a golf stroke: letting the weight of the club head follow through the ball, which in this case was a chunk of my thigh, and a neat slice of my jeans. The fabric absorbed the blood from the meat – a few drops fell across the sawdust.

I had a handkerchief with me and I tied it round my leg, thinking I looked acceptably Peckinpah. Or at least I must
have done this, because when I was myself again I was standing on the parched grass of the Evergreen Cemetery, looking at the effaced tombstones of Civil War dead, and there was the tourniquet and the ferrous red on my spasmodic hands.

Sherman called that evening and when he realized the state I was in he had Baltie drive him back into town from Palm Springs. ‘You are fucked up, man,’ he said, finding me lying in my slough at the top of the yellow tower in the Westin. I’d stolen Felipe’s big pencil and scrawled stuff on the walls: ‘Very little application, very little hope, very little probity, very little ...’

‘Sherm,’ I croaked, ‘there’re things we need to talk about – stuff to do with the past.’

‘I don’t wanna hear about it,’ he snapped, then: ‘Yup, no, Vargas has the necessary financial instruments.’ He turned
his back on me and toddled to the window, continuing the call – which seemed to be something to do with piling up five dressed-stone body forms at Machu Picchu. It was left to Baltie to haul over the business directory and find a doctor who’d do a house call.

The next day Baltie drove us south through the flatlands to Anaheim. It was an interminable journey, strip after mall after strip. I suppose I must have been a little feverish, and despite – or perhaps because of – the OxyContin the doctor had prescribed, I kept slipping sideways from consciousness, only to slice back in as we pulled up at another stoplight and there was Sherman’s blocky head spewing words and cigar smoke: ‘There’s no sense to that, if the base plate is being fabricated in Manaus it will have to be taken
down
the Amazon ...’

At Disneyland, Sherman explained: ‘I think you’re in need of a little reparenting, you’ve lost your way.’ He reached up and took my hand with surprising tenderness. ‘I want you to think of me as your mother—’ Then, exactly like my long-dead mother, his attention was snagged by an incoming call, and he let go of my hand to field it.

We wandered along the ersatz Main Street USA, and queued for Autopia in Tomorrowland. Sherman’s grace was well to the fore: no matter how many kids pointed or called out to him, he responded with a cheery wave. ‘Don’t you love it here?’ he asked after we’d driven the dinky karts round the circuit for a while and were heading for the Small World ride, the three of us licking outsized ice cream cones.

‘Um, well, love may be a bit too strong, but Sherman, I have to—’ Once again I was frustrated, this time by the ride being shut. The Disney people wouldn’t admit what had happened, but later we learnt that one of boats had blocked the flume.

‘They were built for smaller people!’ Sherman crowed. ‘And now these fatties cram themselves in it’s definitely a smaller world.’

The day after that it was the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City and Sherman and I were riveted for hours by Hagop Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs poised in the eye of a needle.

The Armenian had been an extremely calm man, and there was the assumption that acts of such controlled creation necessarily implied taboos on acts of procreation.

We were staying at the Culver City Hotel and I couldn’t get Sherman on the house phone, so I took the stairs up to his floor. When I knocked on the door it swung open and there he was, naked, sprawled across the high four-poster bed. It would’ve been a cliché to describe him as ‘lost’ in the billowing breasts of the brunette who was sharing the bed with him. A cliché – and straightforwardly wrong, because in the split-second before he bawled at me to ‘Fuck right off!’ I saw that Sherman was quite at home.

Standing in the Chevalier Woods, my boots buried in damp leaf mould, I stared into the white face of a deer. Overhead a jet’s headlights carved a tunnel out of the autumn dusk. There had been no way of walking out of the O’Hare terminal, which was surrounded by runways, so I took the subway to Rosemont, then picked my way between office blocks to the banks of a cold and polluted river.

The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor – I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements – massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.

The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across one
doorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.