The Man In the Rubber Mask (16 page)

I spent ten days in Melbourne waiting for my work permit to come through. It rained every day. I heard on the radio one morning, ‘This is the wettest ten-day period in January since records began back in 1850.'

My suntan peeled off, it was like going back to London. In fact Melbourne is very like London, it's like Streatham to be accurate, presumably built at about the same time. The one thing Melbourne has over Streatham is trams, old green rattling things, that can take you all over the city for about fifty pence. They're brilliant and remind all English people who visit just what a good idea they are and how stupid we were to allow the car manufacturers to destroy them.

On 8 January I caught the number 35 tram down the St Kilda road, got off outside the American consulate building and picked up my passport. I turned the page and saw what had taken such a struggle to get. An H1 visa, allowing me to work in the United States for a period of six months from 10 January.

On my last night I went out for a Vietnamese meal with all the friends I had made in Melbourne. Early the following morning my mate Wayne took me out to the airport in his battered Honda. It was a great way to start a journey to immense, undreamed-of wealth. Sitting on the ripped seat of a rust-bucket car with my bag stuffed on top of the kiddie seat in the back.

I got to the airport about an hour before the flight. I had a first-class ticket waiting for me. You don't have to hang around when you're on first class. I didn't know how rich people lived, but I was prepared to learn.

A nicely dressed young man carried my one small bag to the plane with me. I only had to carry my ticket. I was shown to a huge leather seat up in the nose bit. It was like an armchair. I sat down and was offered champagne. I don't normally drink, but this was too much, how could I refuse? Before I'd got over the bubble effect of the champagne, the plane started to move. This is the life, I thought, get on the plane, plane flies. No hanging around watching people try and stuff too much luggage into the overhead compartment.

I also discovered why they put the first-class compartment up at the front of the plane. It's about ten times smoother than the back, where I normally have to sit. You can barely feel the plane moving. Then I discovered my toiletries bag. You may be able to tell from this that I love flying, which I do, but this was the best. A little leather toiletries bag (I've still got it) was full of the best gentlemen's bits and bobs on offer: aftershave, face cream, mouthwash, toothpaste, toothbrush, not a little fold-up one, a posh proper toothbrush. Nice pongy soap, a little flannel, a plastic thing for getting fluff off your clothes. I was in heaven.

Then they bought the food. Oh boy. I mean, I love airline food when it's on a little tray with little plastic pots and salt in a paper tube. But the first-class food, I couldn't believe it. Dead posh and really nice, what's more, I could help myself to the trolley. This is my big problem with being in posh places. Being served by people makes me uncomfortable. I like serving people, or doing things myself. Really, when I was sitting in the first-class compartment it was as if Kryten was there, dithering and offering to wash-up.

There were only two people in the first-class compartment, me, and an orthodontist from Beverly Hills who had been visiting his daughter in Sydney. He told me I had ‘potentially good teeth', but that if I went to see him, he could give me star-quality teeth. I said I didn't like perfect white teeth, I thought they looked fake. He said he would hand-sculpt my teeth so they would look naturally perfect.

The orthodontist and I had three members of the cabin crew to look after us, so they weren't exactly stretched. The nice thing about Australians is they didn't give me a second look, they were quite happy to let this scruffy oik help himself to the
Beouf de la La-De-Da avec les veg et tous les
trimmings. I had the time of my life, but as I normally don't drink, I was soon flat on my back, grinning and dribbling slightly, sleeping in my super-comfortable, great big, lift-your-feet-up leather chair. I was so happy I'd said yes to Linwood Boomer. I could see him in my dreams, waiting by a big door with the word ‘Hollywood' written on it. He was always about to open it in the dream and let me see what was there, but he never quite did.

The plane landed in Los Angeles two and a half hours before it had taken off in Melbourne. I started the journey at twelve-thirty in the afternoon in Melbourne, I arrived in Los Angeles at ten-thirty in the morning of the same day, but I'd been flying for eighteen hours. I stood in the immigration queue scratching my head, with that special expression which only happens to people when their internal body clock has completely blown a fuse. No amount of watch-gazing or mental mathematics can alleviate the hollow burned-out feeling you get after a long-haul flight. I love that feeling, it's better than taking drugs. I was completely out of it as I handed the official my passport. He looked at my work permit, looked at me, looked at my work permit again, smiled slightly and said, ‘Welcome to the USA, sir.'

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘You're welcome,' he said, and I knew I'd arrived. As I walked out into the main concourse there were three hundred limousine drivers standing behind the barrier, each of them with a card bearing someone's name. I scanned the cards, none of which looked anything like Llewellyn. I was prepared for something akin to Llewellyn, like Lew Allyn, or Lew Ellen. My name has been spelt many different ways over the years, but there was nothing. A huge black policewoman with a massive gun was standing with them, she looked at me and registered my anxiety. She didn't offer to help, just let her hand brush the butt of her gun as she adjusted the belt.

I kept going past the throng of people waiting for passengers to emerge and sat on a seat in the waiting area. The shock of America is always pretty intense I find, it operates on a higher level than any other country I know. Anything can happen in America. You can make it. If it seems hopeless in Europe, or Africa, when you arrive in America you know immediately it is possible. That's why so many people want to go there. They've heard this is what it's like, and it's true. People go to America and they do make it. They become wealthy beyond the dreams of kings. I'm sure if you did a statistical analysis you'd find out it was very few of them. Most people are poor as usual but the atmosphere is utterly infectious. Even the limousine drivers are happy to be working, happy to serve you and look like they're about to make it big, somewhere.

‘Mr Llewellyn?' asked a deep male voice.

I looked up into the suntanned face with perfect teeth and a carved sculpture of super shiny hair on top.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Hi, I'm John, I'm your driver at this time. Would you like to follow me?'

I stood up to discover although John had a wonderful deep smooth American voice, he was a little on the short side. Still, he wasn't letting that hold him back.

He picked up my bag and started making his way through the crowd. I was on my guard, I've been around, this looked like the oldest trick in the book: read the label on my luggage, ask me to follow him, then pull a gun on me in the car park, put me in the trunk of the limo, drive out to a desert ranch full of psychopathic killers, nail me to the floor and gang rape me to death over a period of three weeks.

John walked to a huge, and I mean huge, joke of a car. It looked six cars long, an absurd long black thing with about fifteen windows down the side. It was the cliché, it was the stupid stretch limo which is so embarrassing now, so out-of-date. Let's face it, a stretch limo is now, and always will be, a tosser's car.

John popped the trunk,
³⁰
put my bag in and opened the door for me. I was sleep-starved and feeling so weird that I couldn't help giggling a bit. I almost expected to see Michael Douglas sitting in the back, having a blow job and buying Rio Tinto Zinc like it was going out of style. He'd be wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit, with his hair slicked back, he'd be Gordon Gekko.

‘Robert, I want you to find out everything you can about Universal Television while you're there, I want to buy them out, I want to suck them dry, chew the fat out of the mother fuckers. I want to own their goddamn balls!'

‘Yes, Mr Gekko, sir.'

The limo was empty, huge and lonely-looking.

‘Can I sit up in the front with you?' I asked rather sheepishly.

‘Sure, Bob,' said John. No English person could call you Bob that quickly. I slipped into the spacious front seat, John started the huge car up and we hissed along the concrete roads. John had lived in LA for twenty years, originally he was from somewhere like Wilmington, Alabama. He seemed to have done everything, worked everywhere and of course, driven everyone.

‘I had Ellen Barkin in here yesterday,' he said as we pulled out of the airport onto a huge five-lane freeway. ‘She's a very, very beautiful lady, and very charming.'

‘Is that right. Yeah, I've always had a soft spot for Ellen,' I said, settling into the huge comfy seat and slipping on my dark glasses.

‘Of course, one of the perks of this job, Bob, is that I get to find out where everyone lives,' he said. ‘I could take you to Ellen's house, introduce you maybe.'

‘Oh yeah?' I said, suddenly panicking again. He had to be a serial killer, he knew where the stars lived, he kept a little black notebook next to a knife with a jagged edge. I would be the only person who could save Ellen. I'd run to her house, a police helicopter shining a light on me from above. I'd fight John to the death. I'd be injured, she'd visit me in the hospital, the doctor would say I might pull through, Ellen would cry, we'd kiss. Aaaargh!

Within minutes of being in Los Angeles I had slipped into movieland. Everywhere I looked seemed so familiar, and although I'd been there on two previous occasions, this familiarity wasn't from past experience. It was from the movies, the thousands of films we've all seen, filmed on the streets of Los Angeles. Tall palm trees, wide roads, absurdly stretched limousines. Big pick-up trucks with massive tyres, convertible Rolls-Royces with the roof down, bust-up old Buick station wagons full of migrant workers wearing blue nylon peak caps.

We drove over South Central LA at speed. It doesn't look like much, row after row of red-roofed houses, the odd palm tree, and every few miles a massive building with no windows which is an air-conditioned shopping mall. In the far distance the gleaming, glittering towers of downtown LA.

It is a frightening town, it is a depressing town, it is a town of the most cruel contrast between wealth and poverty, but it is exciting. However jaded and old-world and European I try to be, I can't help my pulse rate increasing when I'm there. I felt so vibrant and alive, maybe it was due to the fact I'd been through a time warp, but I have very clear memories of the first few hours of each trip to LA.

By now John had found out all about me.

‘So what's this series you're making?' he asked.

‘It's not a series, it's only a pilot, it's called
Red Dwarf
.'

‘Red Dwarf.'

‘Yes that's right.'

‘Red Dwarf.'

‘Yes, it's about a space ship.'

‘So it's not about dwarves?'

‘No, it's set on a space ship, three million-light years from earth, going the wrong way.'

‘Red Dwarf.'

‘Yeah, that's right.'

This was a very American phenomenon. There was something about the title that a lot of Americans couldn't quite latch onto. They are terribly verbally right-on there, and using a term like dwarf makes them flinch. It's a bit like us using the term spazzo, or poof. It's just not done. If an American actor said to you, ‘I appear in this show called
Red Spazzo
,' you'd blanche a bit, wouldn't you? I would.

‘Red Dwarf.'
John was still stuck on this.

‘That's it,' I said.

‘Actually, Bob, looking at you, you are perfect for a project I'm working on.'

This was it, I thought, he was a psychopath, his project was my grizzly murder.

‘It's a movie about a pool service operative. He goes to all the stars homes and cleans their pools, and he has sex with all these women. I thought about casting him as French, but I think English would be brilliant. The project is with Ted Rinvalklatz, you know, who did
Bunny Killers
last year. May I send your agent a script?'

‘Sure,' I said, I gave him my agent's card. We drove through Hollywood, across the hills and into The Valley. This was the home of Universal Studios, where you can do the Universal studio tour and see
Miami Vice
shoot-outs and Jaws comes to try and eat you.

We drove up a steep, tree-lined drive and pulled up in front of the Universal Sheraton hotel. Immediately there were smartly dressed men opening doors and trunks and palms as I carried my own, very small bag, into reception. I bid John farewell, he told me to expect his script at any time. I'm still waiting for it.

I checked in and got in the lift with a huge man in a suit and a very small blonde woman. The woman was Dolly Parton, she smiled at me. I didn't know what to do, I was tripping with exhaustion.