Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read online

  WALKING TO HOLLYWOOD

  ALSO BY WILL SELF

  FICTION

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity

  Cock & Bull

  My Idea of Fun

  Grey Area

  Great Apes

  The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

  Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

  How the Dead Live

  Dorian

  The Book of Dave

  The Butt

  Liver

  The Undivided Self

  NON-FICTION

  Junk Mail

  Psychogeography (with Ralph Steadman)

  Psycho Too (with Ralph Steadman)

  WALKING TO HOLLYWOOD

  Memories of Before the Fall

  WILL SELF

  Copyright © 2010 by Will Self

  Illustrations © 2010 by Will Self

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  Extract from ‘Here’ taken from Collected Poems © The Estate of Philip Larkin, and reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9566-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Marti

  While the names of some real persons are used for characters in this text, these characters appear in fictionalized settings that are manifestly a product of the narrator’s delusions. There is no intention to suggest that the characters in the book bear any other than the most superficial similarity to actual people bearing these names, and any other resemblances to living people are accidental and wholly unintended.

  Contents

  Very Little

  Walking to Hollywood

  Spurn Head

  Very Little

  ‘Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness’

  – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  1

  Sherman Oaks

  At three minutes past noon on 8 October 2007, I found myself standing listening to Sherman Oaks beside a dew pond on the crest of the South Downs in Sussex. A single cramped ash was reflected in the gunmetal disc of water, a disc that was ringed with pocked earth and cupped in a fold of cropped turf. Had an eavesdropper crept up on the pair of us, they might have thought Sherman’s magniloquence prompted by the very finitude of this watering hole, that the way he lectured not only me but the thrushes flitting overhead was an attempt to break free of this claustrophobic scene: the sky closely sealed by a lid of cloud, cut-outs of hedge and woodland stuck on the receding crests of the downs.

  I knew this not to be the case.

  Sherman had always been a big talker. I remember him aged seven or eight, rolling around in the boot of my mother’s car when it was her turn to do the school run, spouting a stream of wisecracks and making razor-sharp observations on the foibles of the world. A precocious anarchist, at thirteen Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski’s, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this – in a thick, mittel-European accent: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

  It’s barely worth remarking that the impact of this stunt would be hugely enhanced by the perpetrator’s stature: at eight Sherman had been less than three feet tall, at thirteen he was perhaps three-foot-two, thirty-five years later he had gained, at most, an inch.

  Assuming Sherman did do it – and I have no reason to doubt him – his dwarfism was the reason he got away with it, for in the North London of the 1970s the uneasy ridicule that disability once provoked had mutated into a tolerance that already verged on de facto acceptance of collective responsibility: we were all to blame for Sherman Oaks’s restricted height. Not that our peers felt exclusively this way; after all, children are always in a state of nature – always nasty, brutish ... and short. Sherman may not have been overtly persecuted, but he undoubtedly felt excluded – forever eddying while the life stream flowed forward all around him.

  In my early teens I felt that way too. It wasn’t commonplace spottiness – my face was mailed in acne. Then there was Dick Holmes, who could’ve used a D-cup bra. Together we formed a mismatched trio: the Small, the Fat and the Spotty lanky one. I daresay there are plenty of outcasts who sink into introspective angst, but with Sherman to goad us on there was no chance of that: he made me march into the chemist’s, where I bought the useless salves for my hurting face and confronted the pharmacist, claiming that it was the product that had done it to me. He got Dick Holmes to dress up in his mother’s frock and buy us booze, and he himself led us into the reference section of High Hill Bookshop, where he sat insouciantly on a table reading the Britannica aloud. When confronted, he said he was a five-year-old genius.

  Still, as the lugubrious narrator of La Jetée would have it: ‘Nothing tells such memories from ordinary memories; only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.’ Sherman, having none to spare, never gave an inch. I was in awe of his chutzpah – he was our own home-grown Vamana: Vishnu incarnated as a dwarfish trickster. As for me, I had already imperfectly grasped an awareness that would harden within me even as my acne scabbed then flaked away: whatever the emotional scars I might bear my life would remain coddled and my instincts conformist – only a striving such as Sherman’s against his crushing disability could be accounted an exercise of will at all.

  On his sixteenth birthday Sherman threw a party at his parents’ house on Norrice Lea. The studious entrepreneurialism of Mr Oaks – he manufactured cash registers in a 1950s block near Hangar Lane that looked like a cash register – had kerchinged the family this Lutyens villa, complete with redbrick loggias and a sunken garden. Twice-my-height privet hedges hid the mullioned windows, behind which lay an enormous open-plan kitchen – the first I had ever seen. Beneath track lighting (again, the first I had ever seen) gleamed two of every white good, for although Sherman bought ham at the deli then wolfed it straight from the wrapper, Mrs Oaks kept strict kosher.

  The child of a ruptured family from the wrong side of the North Circular, I was awed by the opulence of the Oakses’ home. Our kitchen window still had several broken panes patched with cardboard and Sellotape – the result of my parents’ penultimate row. Our goods weren’t white at all, but yellowed with sadness and neglect. There was less than one of everything and the family dog had had a nervous breakdown, while my older brother – having absorbed the force of Christopher Logue’s clerihew ‘When all else fails, try Wales’ – had decamped. To Swansea.

  I was awed by the Oakses’ home – and captivated by the Oaks sisters. There were three of them
, ranged around Sherman in age and each seemingly more lovely and gracile than the preceding one. The youngest, Tertia, was an outright stunner. My mother, whose own neuroses and phobias made her a lightning conductor for any distress sparking across the suburb, speculated on what quirk of heredity had produced Sherman. But, while it was tempting to think in terms of throwback, or kick sideways, or even adoption, he shared with his sisters the same white-blond hair, fierce blue eyes and highly wrought features; it was the parents who failed to jibe – their doughy pans were both dashed with liverish freckles, and their bottoms were as broad as the seats of the Mercedes in which they purred the 500 yards to Greenspan’s in the Market Place, where they bought schmaltz herring and smoked salmon. While not discounting Mr Oaks’s ability to drive a hard bargain, the notion that they had got the kids in a job-lot was preposterous.

  Anyway, on this summer evening the old Oaks had been got rid of so that the teens could get drunk, dance and feel each other up shamelessly – either on the G-plan leather sofas in the living room, or at the top of the house, in a rumpus conversion fully equipped with snooker table, one-armed bandits and a 1950s jukebox loaded with 1970s rock ’n’ roll revival singles. Showaddywaddy anyone? Unlike my own house, where cobwebs smeared the ceilings, here the only spiders were from Mars and locked up in the polished beech cabinets of a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, from where they screamed to us of slinking through the city, smarming in and out of sexes, before bawling teen abandonment to the rooftops.’

  In the previous year the religious anointment of hydrogen peroxide had sloughed off my beastly mask. It had hurt, and no one – least of all me – believed that any great beauty lay beneath, so how to explain Tertia, who after two hours and twice that many Bacardi-laced Cokes, waltzed me backwards across the hall and into the oddly antiseptic gloom of her father’s study, where, her neat denim behind aligned on the desk blotter, she grabbed hold of my crotch while exhorting me to ‘Do it!’

  The alcohol certainly helped, but, with hindsight and the benefit of career résumés – gobbets of gossip sucked up gummily in dentists’ waiting rooms – I can only conclude that Tertia was practising on me. Of course, unlike her many subsequent conquests, I had no reputation to sully, family to alienate or assets to strip. Nor could she have wanted to humiliate me sexually – after all, she was only fifteen. Still, humiliated I was: it was all over in hundredths of a second, with four layers of clothing for prophylaxis.

  I say I had no assets – but there was one: Sherman. I understood enough of the family dynamic to realize that he, by reason of his charm quite as much as his disability, was doted on by both his parents. He was also their only son, and moreover, although we may balk at such dispositional crudity, their daughters were already outsoaring them, while Sherman would always remain their little boychick.

  My rapidly cooling semen pooling in my underpants, I recoiled from Tertia, who gave a precociously vicious laugh. There she sprawled, the diamonds of evening sunshine scattered across her bare belly, her father’s obsessively aligned pen stand, his Dictaphone, and paperclip holder, etc. Is it only a currently felt scar, rather than the memory, that makes it seem now as if there was more pathos and eroticism on that desktop than I would ever fully grasp – let alone experience?

  Then there was Sherman. So much was unsaid between us – could not even be framed, still. I knew these teen soirées were a nightmare for him; that as our hormones spurred us on, he felt he lagged further and further behind. Earlier that day, on the phone, he had said heavily: ‘Stick by me this evening, will you?’ Now I’d not only abandoned him but been seduced by his little sister.

  I yanked my way out of the study, madly scanned the kids in the kitchen, the living room, pelted to the top of the house and checked there, then tumbled down a storey to Sherman’s bedroom, where the sensitively truncated furniture and juvenile decoration belied the .22 air pistol and cubic inch of Pakki Black I knew he had hidden under the floorboards. He was nowhere to be seen – but had he seen us?

  I eventually located him in the most sunken part of the garden, standing by the perfectly round pond fringed with marigolds and primulas. He had his back to the house, and before I heard the words of his bitter rant, I saw all the tension in his blocky shoulders; crammed into them were all conceivable miseries – for now, forever. Over and over he incanted, ‘Fucking cunts, fucking cunts, fucking fucking fucking cunts ...’ – a bizarre accompaniment to Bryan Ferry’s complacent yelp of ‘What’s her name, Virginia Plain’, which was belting from the open french windows.

  Worse was to emerge: first Sherman’s handsome face uglified by tears, then Sherman’s square fist raised like a pestle before being ground down hard into the mortar of his palm, again and again – ‘Fucking cunts, fucking cunts, fucking fucking fucking cunts ...’ – while in that hand, already mashed, glistened the innards, the greyish braided and bloodied fur, of Max Headroom, Tertia’s beloved mouse.

  I let him wind himself down. I let him punch me in the stomach with his gory knuckles. I took the mouse’s corpse and lost it in the compost heap. I took Sherman in through the side door and washed his Othello hands in the little sink in the little bathroom beside the great big kitchen. Then I got the hash. We sat back down by the pond and I stuck three Rizla papers together, split a Benson & Hedges and built a joint. We passed it between us, sucking up the smoke, acrid as Accra. Then Sherman said a lot of the unsayable things – about how it was for him, and how he feared it would be.

  Inevitably, after that night we didn’t so much drift as scamper apart. I never grew any more, only became annealed by a life that seemed at the time to have had plenty of significant events – addictions, affairs, marriages, children, the micro-mosaics of literary composition – yet which, when I came to in the dusty stalls of middle age, I realized had been altogether lacking in high drama: no blitz or pogrom had been visited on me; the angel of death awaited me in Edgware or Bushey, at a care home, in a cardigan.

  Of Sherman I had picked up bits and pieces over the years – he had done a foundation art course somewhere in the north, then dropped out. Next I heard it said he was in Berlin, squatting in the Kreuzberg – and incidentally driving his parents to despair. Then he was back in England and at Goldsmiths completing his studies. All this seemed apt: he was merely another contemporary I had lost touch with, his life to be expressed through the bare bones of his curriculum vitae, rather than felt for, or loved.

  Then, in the late 1980s, there began the inexorable rise of Sherman Oaks, the artist.

  From the very beginning the Oaks phenomenon caught the public’s imagination. His contemporaries may have been flashier and more pretentious – but, while they were conceptualists, at a remove from the fabrication of their works, he was an unashamedly personal actualizer, a macher, who hewed stone and wood; shaped, pummelled and spun clay; smelted and cast iron, bronze and steel. He created enduring facts on the ground – not airy abstractions of blood, meat and crumpled paper that had life only in temperature-controlled galleries. That he, a middle-class Jewish boy, should be working on such pieces alongside tough Northumbrian welders and phlegmatic West Country stonemasons made the enterprise seem that much more authentic. That Sherman was also a person of restricted height lent a greater poignancy to his monumental works, which, twice and three times life size from the outset, grew still larger as soon as he got the funding. And of course, every single piece derived from his own body.

  For the masses, with their fractals of I-know-what-I-like ceaselessly yet variably replicated throughout the nineties then the noughties, this was narrative enough – but Sherman evinced a modesty that, if not exactly false, certainly didn’t ring true to me. Not for him the dialectical twaddle of theorizers, or the de haut en bas of the new Kulturkampf. Instead, when interviewed he’d cackle disarmingly, ‘I’m a very small man making very big things.’ Then, if pressed, he’d add, ‘Believe me, mine is an utterly content-free art: what you see is what you get.’

  I tracked hi
s progress, first through newspaper and magazine items, then larger features, then radio and television segments. Invitations to private views arrived concurrently – at first to group exhibitions, then solo ones and eventually retrospectives. The evolution of his ‘content-free art’ had almost amused me. More remarkable was his ability, unerringly, to produce a likeness of himself – even when it was a 64-foot-high basketry woven from steel struts. Nevertheless, I would scrutinize the pasteboards for a while, tracing the fine lettering with my own gross digit, then whirl the duff Frisbee away into the pile of waste paper in the corner of my writing room; a pile that I bagged up weekly, then deposited outside the house, so it could be carted away, pulped and turned into more invitations to private views.

  I supposed we must meet again eventually – we revolved in interlinked circles of the social Olympiad – but I was in no hurry. I suspected that after the enormous success of Sherman’s Behemoth, a 128-foot-high body form set astride the Manchester Ship Canal near Runcorn, he would – no matter how small – have become too big for his boots. ‘Behold,’ read the inscription on the plinth, ‘he plunders the river and does not harden.’ The sculpture had at first been the occasion for local scorn, then regional and eventually metropolitan. But inevitably, when it became internationally regarded as an icon of the new and prosperous Britannia, it was appropriated as a symbol of national pride. Sherman had accepted a gong from the government.