American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (29 page)

The Speer circuit resists. It’s nothing like Vancouver, Forks, Cannon Beach, Port Orford, Red Bluff, Grass Valley, San Francisco. Long shadows of palm trees. GIRLS! GIRLS! Everything closed. Everything suspicious of pedestrianism. When Dylan Thomas was here he behaved as badly as was expected, pissing into Charlie Chaplin’s plant pot and groping Shelley Winters. I can’t remember if he got together with Mamie. She doesn’t mention it. Dylan spoke, frequently, of his ambition to date an ‘ash-blonde’ movie star.

The vagrants, door-sleepers and shopping-cart homeless encountered on my walks were uniformly agreeable, making their requests, when they did, simply and directly without time-wasting bullshit stories, or metal-mouthed aggression. Until now. As I stepped, in apologetic English fashion, over a pavement bivouac (the only one in town), a midnight cowboy in leather hat reared up. ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay the fuck away from me?’ He was a ruined Warren Oates, using the fly-smeared head of Alfredo Garcia as a pillow. His anger had a blade that went beyond performance. The empty streets turned to sand. Brain-damaged from too many fake barroom brawls for Andrew V. McLaglen (he wasn’t old enough for Ford), he
recognized me as some other self; someone who had been here before. The one-line bit exhausted him. He lost his spine and subsided on his Indian-blanket sleeping roll.

On this stretch of Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson, Billy Wilder’s vampiric diva, morphed into a bad-journey swansong. Into
Swandown
, the Andrew Kötting film. The pedalo voyage that was calling me back to England, to the sea at Hastings. Seeing the heritage real estate
HOLLYWOOD
letters on the hill above Griffith Park, I remembered Kötting’s visit when he was chasing his father’s inflatable effigy across the globe for the
Deadad
project. A
Carry On
remake of
Hamlet
, with the ghost (mute) as the chief character and Hamlet (his son) as a muscular clown. Kötting frolicked in the park, besuited like his rubberized father. Having failed to teach the deflated blow-up to surf at Venice Beach, Andrew pumps the wrinkled condom-skin to giant size in Griffith Park. ‘A Mecca for the movie maker and industry to which he wished I’d aspired.’ When the camera rolls, Kötting (channelling Kerouac) stands on his head. If a Hollywood career had been the aim, father would have understood this foolishness.

The first heart attack came at forty-two. Mark, Andrew’s brother, depicts a physically powerful, angry man, his dead dad. A respected businessman reserving blows and obscenities for home. The young boy welcomed the daily return from the office up west by hiding in a cupboard, ‘shaking like a dog, with a brother’s breath in my ear’. One morning, after watching the bowler hat pass along the privet to disappear among other commuters, he sneaked to the deep freeze to scoop out a chocolate ‘lovely’ (‘chocolate with fake cream on top’). His mother had been beaten and folded inside. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she warned.

Later that day we stood on Steve Cochran. His star was set into a paving stone on the east side of the 1700 block of Vine Street. A cosmology of absence. A cemetery with no bodies. Extinguished gods and undying goddesses. Paw prints of immortal monkeys, dogs. Hoof marks of the horse part of western double-acts. And humans on all fours offering cleavage to the flashing bulbs.

Like all good tourists we took a ride in a small open-top bus through the dormitory suburbs of Beverley Hills and Bel Air. We gaped at the architecture of pride, nervous front inflated by unreal wealth and the certainty that it could all disappear as quickly as it came. A catalogue of copycatism, botched quotation; other people’s good taste expensively acquired. Spanish colonial. Fall of the Roman Empire. Gothic bungalows for morphine-addicted Hungarian vampires. The landscape was not Surrey, not St George’s Hill; it could revert, overnight, after fire or earthquake, to barren desert.

Behind these secure gates, Michael Jackson died. W. C. Fields sat at the end of his drive with an air rifle, hoping to bag a few snotty kids. Peter Falk, his faculties in the long twilight, was housed with a pack of dogs. Kirk Douglas was holding on. Julia Roberts was an absentee. No place on earth has so many immaculate tennis courts and sparkling pools: unpeopled save for the occasional Mexican gardener. The occupiers are elsewhere, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara. The hills are alive with divorce-settlement real estate. Bus stops for the curious. Who are never permitted to step off the bus.

Lowry wrote scripts nobody wanted. Kerouac sent letters to Marlon Brando inviting him to option
On the Road
: Marlon to play Dean Moriarty and Jack as Sal Paradise. No response. Brando wouldn’t consider a character whose name combined his coming Method rival, little Jimmy, and the evil genius of the Sherlock Holmes legend. Hollywood is good only for literary swansongs, booze prose. Hardboiled sentiment: Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald. Hammett, Chandler.

On Rodeo Drive, Japanese tourists in swan-white trench coats are posing for digital smears, outlet by outlet, designer boutique by designer boutique, alongside brand-name signs. The Blockbuster warehouse is holding a closing sale of DVDs. Thousands and thousands of dead movies and I can’t find one of remote historic record or interest. They don’t have
The Beat Generation
. Or anything by Gary Walkow. Or Andrew Kötting. Or Rossellini. Time to go home.

Today I passed Los Angeles and tramped on southward in the direction of the Mexican border. Merciless sun on dusty roads. My soles burned on the hot ground, for months without rain. What a strange walking tour, from Europe across Asia to the Bering Strait and to America – with kilometre stones to mark my doleful passage.

So wrote Albert Speer on 5 September 1965. He had been brooding on the Kennedy assassination and concluded that it was indeed the work of a single marksman. A very American affair, he snorted. Attempts on Hitler’s life were plotted with ‘the precision of a General Staff operation by circumspect, coolheaded people, year after year’. And they failed. ‘That is the real tragedy,’ the slippery hypocrite concludes. Leaving his insane travelogue as an obituary.

We took our last breakfast by a breeze-ruffled pool, before heading back to LAX, and serpentine queues, searches, delays. No more mistaken-identity upgrades. Trying to check in online, we had to wait while a Toronto man, thirty years this side of the Atlantic, scrolled down the Man U score. Like Cal Shutter, he treated me to a lengthy analysis of the enigma of Wayne Rooney, genius and priapic basketcase. The real problem was that short move down the M62 from Liverpool to Manchester. Schizophrenic from the start.

‘Orange juice?’

‘Please.’

‘Fresh from the tree?’

‘Great.’

‘Tea or coffee this morning?’

‘Coffee, please.’

‘Awesome.’

I would never get on a pedal boat built to look like a swan.

– Roberto Bolaño

Unblemished Chilean skies. And lung-scouring air. The dry heat of an arid sea of sand, its ridges and maimed rocks. From the edge of space, if by some miracle you perched there like that Austrian stuntman, funded by energy-drink corporations and peddlers of aftershave, about to become a human bomb, a media event, the Atacama Desert would register, among oceans of blue, wraps of swirling mist, as the only brown zone. A patch of dried blood. A scab on the liquid eyeball that stares right back at you. The insanity of that heretical leap is a coda to a journey running from the visionaries who imagined a basket pulled by flights of swans voyaging to the moon, through the fireworks and bunkers of Wernher von Braun and Speer, to the adventurism of the American trespass of 1969, the episode described by an English poet as ‘squalid astral picnicking’. It is all a promo for a sugar hit. Speed made literal by the man in the nappy.

A dust of unborn stars and flakes of used skin shimmers through shafts of sunlight in deserted barracks, abandoned observatories. Star-watching is resistance. I wanted to go further south than Speer, to straighten out his endless, self-cannibalizing circuits of the Spandau garden; the rocks now defaced by whitewashed numbers. The border was crossed at Mexicali. ‘It is a dreary region,’ Speer wrote, ‘with here and there preposterous cactus like plants, trees from the backgrounds of Expressionist movies. At the end of the last segment of my life there is nothing left but statistics, production figures.’

He stands in the garden. Only Hess remains. Coal is being unloaded from an army truck and heaped into an enormous glistening mound. ‘So much,’ Hess said. ‘And from tomorrow on just for me.’

The narrative extracted from all those bad journeys made Chile
seem like the place to which I should aspire but never achieve. No skies as pure as the dome above the Atacama Desert. Where the dialogue between origin and extinction is manufactured by monkish, rumpled men, and women with the courage to sift the gritty sand for years, hoping for fragments of bones from the disappeared. A foot in a ruined boot becomes a venerated relic. At this distance from the centres of wealth generation, capitals of greed, the outlines of the story are smoothed and given force.

My travels were over. I retreated with my notes and photographs to the coast. From London I brought a box of books by Roberto Bolaño, to which new titles were added by the week. After dark, I watched DVDs. The impulse to explore further in the real world, to invent a morality from obstacles, was subsumed in memory-fugues of advancing age and cultural disaffection. Journeys to the end of the light became nostalgia for earlier more heroic periods. Became
Nostalgia for the Light
, a film by Patricio Guzmán. Guzmán uses the time it takes for light to reach us from distant stars as a metaphor for interrogating the recent past, the horrors of the Pinochet regime. If a star-mirror could be created, would it not be possible to read, or to keep alive, events from history? We could solve crimes, witness battles, watch pilgrims straggle across hostile territory, by going far enough out to catch the still-travelling match-flicker of our dying earth.

Such innocent, animate faces. The way they respond to the unseen interviewer. Chileans are the heart of Guzmán’s film. You begin to see what that long exile means. Friends and families recalled. An intimacy so specific in range of reference, in relationship to land, so unified by what had happened, that the individuals gathered for the film become more than themselves. They carry away dangerous cargoes, in tattered rucksacks and cases secured with string. To Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin. Some of them find their way to Highgate, to the café in Waterlow Park where a bearded man in a contemplative slump is trying to set his coffee mug down in yesterday’s ring. While drawing obsessive grids of vanished canals in a sealskin notebook. And picking at a story by the
Flemish writer Georges Rodenbach. An author sad enough to suit the bearded man’s mood and the mood of the winter city of his chosen banishment.

Oscar X supplied me with contact details for scattered friends of Bolaño, themselves now on the move between Spain, Argentina and the USA. What was I looking for? I kept my shutters drawn, my back to the sea, and held Bolaño’s novel
Distant Star
firmly in my hands. The cover was haunting: a bifurcating set of tracks, like those ancient migratory paths across the desert in
Nostalgia for the Light
, leading towards snow-capped mountains and a cloudless sky in which a poet-airman is making the white contrails that form the novel’s title.

One of Oscar’s associates, Marcelo Cohen, reviewed
Distant Star
on its original publication. ‘I believe this is the first review of Roberto’s work,’ he told me. Cohen speaks of the requirement to keep characters with few specific psychological features ‘visible throughout very long journeys packed with incidents’. When information is concealed, it does not strike him as fraudulent. Behind the picaresque Bolaño migrations, the eccentricities of unshaven poets who are losing their teeth, sleeping on floors, is the transformation of Chile from the brief flare of its revolutionary moment into a death camp, a wilderness of unmarked graves.

Cohen is wary of the ‘sudaca’ risk: the term Spaniards use for South Americans arriving in their country as part of the political diaspora of the 1970s. The achievement of Bolaño, above all others, is to find his necessary place: in the off-season resort of Blanes. ‘It is a sunny afternoon, the summer season has not yet begun,’ Cohen writes. ‘In a sleepy bar, two locals gossip. Through the window is a view of silent houses, empty beaches. Only “sudacas” know that this is the best location in which to delay the worst, and only an immense writer could discover that this is the exact place in which the glory and the coldness of the world pass without hurry.’

Marcelo arrived in Barcelona twenty days after the death of Franco in 1975. He lived where Bolaño lived without ever coming across him. ‘His name was not mentioned by my colleagues.’ Back
in Argentina, he read
Distant Star
in 1998. And was deeply impressed by the atmosphere of playful melancholy, the stoicism of exile, the acceptance of defeat. He wrote an enthusiastic but measured review. A year later, on a summer evening, Bolaño rang. He was sick in bed and he liked to talk. His manner, Marcelo reported, was ‘attentive and concentrated’. They swapped recommendations for the best English poets to read. They talked for hours.

Hastings seafront is a good setting for projects to launch or die. From the seventh floor of a building constructed in the 1930s to look like the
Queen Mary
, while offering the select few a landlocked version of the cruising lifestyle (cruising to war, military occupation, concrete cancer), I watched a disparate group fail to inflate a rubber dummy. Nothing unusual about this scene on a Sunday afternoon, the St Leonards end of Hastings was a refuge for the culturally and economically displaced. Times had changed, through cycles of boom and bust, retro stores clustering together for comfort, economic migrants hooked over the railings waiting for their expulsion papers, since the high days when the resort could advertise itself as a ritz destination, an English Nice or Menton serviced by the ‘American Car Trains’ of the South Eastern & Chatham Railway.
PERFECT SANITATION. FIRST CLASS HOTELS. GOLF LINKS, CHARMING WALKS AND DRIVES.

The inflated monster, a grinning man in a tight suit, was the father of Andrew Kötting. It was my first taste of Andrew’s working methods: round up the family, initiate some outrageous act of absurdity, achieve exorcism. Push on to the next adventure, quickly, before clouds of come-down depression blacken the sky. ‘He was clear in his mind but mad in his soul,’ Kötting said. ‘An easy-listening man’s man. When it dies, he dies.’ There were twin inflatables, Dad and Dad’s dad. And Kötting, his family around him (by order), pumping up the saggy skin of unappeased ghosts. A ‘memory-magnet’ re-enactment, he calls it. Against a sepia postcard taken many years before in the same place. The white boat-building never shifts. It has long since gone down at anchor. The pirates have departed. If you
climb up West Hill, above the Norman castle and the caves, Marine Court becomes a real ship moored alongside an unreal shore.

The Kötting exploration,
In the Wake of a Deadad
, travels to the end of the light. (The cone beaming from a projector in the darkened studio.) Hastings to Chislehurst, to Wuppertal, to the Faroe Islands, to Hollywood and Mexico. It is remorseless, knockabout, compulsive. Like a posthumous midnight phone call from Bolaño. The deadad figure is carried by the strong son, who is accompanied, at various times, by his brothers, his sister, his daughter, Eden. He needs no passport, clean shirt or underwear (he goes commando); freeing his briefcase for a ballast of Hamburg pornography.

I meet Kötting. He tests me on a cross-Channel swim (he swims, I pass the sick bucket). I test him with a circumambulation of Hackney (he refuses to swim around the borough). We plot a new voyage, Hastings to Hackney by swan pedalo. As part of my preparation I watch the
Deadad
film. There is nobody else in the gallery. Andrew hauls the effigy of his father to Mexico: ‘in order that he might meet other dead’. Like Ambrose Bierce. And Joan Vollmer. And Neal Cassady. And John Hoffman. And Malcolm Lowry. Who is not there, in body, but earthed in Ripe, a few miles down the road from Hastings. Hoffman, the missing poet from the Six Gallery reading, the one ventriloquized by Philip Lamantia, wrote of running into daylight, where he would at last meet his double. He died in Guadalajara, but it was not far enough. He spoke to Lamantia of his desire to go south again. He wanted to ‘build a raft and make it to Ecuador’. Or Peru. Or Chile. High deserts where men carve animals into rocks.

Kötting dresses Eden in a skeleton-painted body stocking. They drive from Mexico City to Pátzcuaro. At the side of the road, in a place where angels and other funerary ornaments are offered for sale, Andrew drapes himself in his father’s deflated pelt. ‘I stand inside him trying to take in
his
significance and everything that has led to me being here.’

They take the ferry to the island of Janitzio for the night of the deadad. Surrounded by marigolds and small, sputtering candles, Andrew lies down, legs apart, arms stiff at his sides, hands open,
eyes open, never blinking, on the wrinkled skin of his father, on the Mexican grave. ‘Just the sounds of the night of the Day of the Dead for company.’ The father never stops laughing, showing his great white teeth. In the warm, red-gold glow of the marigolds, the mescal, the chocolate, the fruit. ‘Death enters into everything we undertake,’ said Octavio Paz, ‘and it is no longer a transition but a great gaping mouth that nothing can satisfy.’

The swan pedalo voyage was no more than the anniversary of Kötting’s Mexican ferry crossing. Pedalo becomes its anagram:
pelado.
Which means, as Lowry in his free-associating nightmare knew, a ‘peeled one’. A man so drunk he has no skin. I wanted our film to be Homeric. I wanted to follow Odysseus as he makes an illegitimate raid on the land of the dead, where the pale flares are human souls. To have converse with them and to return.

We pedalled under a harvest moon, a few miles beyond Tonbridge, candles held up, nightlights on the stern of the swan. The camera crew were tired, weary of tracking us; the rib pulled away into the dark. Emerging from a passage of overhanging trees, we alarmed a flotilla of swans; white shapes moving apart, then coming back together, leading us towards the place where we would tie up for the night. And where Andrew would sleep, while I went with the line-producer and the boatmen to Chatham.

The peeled ones, Lowry said, in some obscure way, are in control of events. They wait for you in the worst bars.

In 1822 around 4,000 citizens of Hastings – nobody was counting – marched on Priory Meadow (once the chief harbour of the Cinque Ports, later a cricket field) for an open-air banquet, a feast; medieval in scale and delirium, Elizabethan in poetry and song, revolutionary in rhetoric. The people, so they deluded themselves, had defeated (again, again) a corrupt council. They withstood the reflex land piracy of the aristocrats who controlled this coastal geography, everything that surrounded them: Lord Cornwallis (Lord of the Manor), the Earl of Chichester (owner of the Castle), Sir Godfrey Webster (Battle Abbey Estates). Politicians and lawyers, with far-seeing
generosity, allowed the squatters on this spit of sand given back by the sea, after a series of great storms in 1287, to sign leases for their own expulsion. They had seven clear years, with the honour of paying rent to the Crown, before every shack and upturned boat, every flint shelter, brewhouse and piggery, would be torn down; so that Mr Patrick Robertson, a wealthy merchant domiciled in London, after paying a ground rent of £500 per annum, could launch his grand project and convert the old libertarian squatter town into a fit resort for the gentry. Robertson visualized a gaudy reef of buildings running west along the seafront: hotels, places of assembly, a Bath for the bathchair colonels and their neurasthenic ladies. He tried to strike a partnership with Decimus Burton, who was already at work inventing St Leonards, an exclusive estate of villas, parks and terraces on the western fringe. There was loud talk of ‘legacy’ and ‘heritage’ (terms that nobody could distinguish with confidence). They took dynamite to the White Rock that once protected the entrance to the harbour.

Local historians (and I asked a number of them) are unable to put a name to the man who raised the flag and led the march from Priory Meadow. It was the Stars and Stripes, Old Glory; fifteen white stars winking against a night-blue sky, as dazzling as anything seen by astronomers above the Atacama Desert. Around the streets and over muddy ropewalks the procession surged; drums and fifes, tin plates, bagpipes made from bladders of pigskin. WE OWE ALLEGIANCE TO NO CROWN. The D-shaped scoop of land, gifted by the sea, declared itself:
The America Ground.

Cabined in Marine Court, the concrete liner, I acknowledged the futility of my American tourism, this incontinent expenditure of words: Hastings was the true America Ground. The one described by William Blake in 1793 as
America: A Prophecy.
Blake hazarded his own removal from London, by settling on the coast at Felpham in September 1800. He took a cottage belonging to a man called Grinder, host of the Fox Inn, for a rent of £20 per annum.