Will Self

It’s worth recalling the infamous “black dinner” from J-K Huysmanns’s Á Rebours, the so-called immoral book that the prosecution counsel insisted on reading lengthy passages from during Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency. Ostensibly the cataloguing of the decadent aristo Des Esseintes’s weltschmerz, far from being particularly shocking what will probably strike the modern reader most is how funny the book is – that and how extensively Wilde stole from it for his The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Anyway, here’s the dinner thrown to celebrate “the most unmentionable of minor personal calamities”: the host’s impotence:

The dining-room was hung with black and looked out on a strangely metamorphosed garden, the walks being strewn with charcoal, the little basin in the middle of the lawn bordered with a rim of black basalt and filled with ink; and the ordinary shrubs superseded by cypresses and pines. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth, decorated with baskets of violets and scabiosae and illuminated by candelabra in which tall tapers flared.

While a concealed orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing shoes and stockings of cloth of silver besprinkled with tears.

The viands were served on black-bordered plates, – turtle soup, Russian black bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, mule steaks, Frankfurt smoked sausages, game dished up in sauces coloured to resemble liquorice water and boot-blacking, truffles in jelly, chocolate-tinted creams, puddings, nectarines, fruit preserves, mulberries and cherries. The wines were drunk from darktinted glasses, – wines of the Limagne and Roussillon vintages, wines of Tenedos, the Val de Penas and Oporto. After the coffee and walnuts came other unusual beverages, kwas, porter and stout.

Personally, I had no idea a mule steak was – or is – black, but then what do I know? Standing on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and looking at the crowns of the palms tossing against the inky dusk mounting over the Pacific, I said to Mac Guffin (aka the Happy Detective), “I’ve acquired all sorts of savage food intolerances – basically all I can eat is a bit of meat or fish, some salad leaves and potatoes for carb.” Mac chewed on his organic moustache – a genial soul from the backwoods of Minnesota, he was a staffer on the LA Times before Sam Zell took the title and ploughed it into the ground; now he works as a consulting shamus known the length of LA for his upbeat attitude to homicide. The fact that whenever he turns up people get dead never seems to faze him: “I guess it was their karma,” he’ll say, poking at a corpse with the toe of his Belvius Vintage canvas lace-ups.

To me he said, “I know just the right joint for us – it’s right up the street.” I hadn’t doubted he would. Santa Monica is the kind of place where you can throw a Vintage Belvius canvas lace-up and hit a wholesome restaurant: Planet Raw, the Kreation Kafe – they’re all here. We strolled to Tender Greens, which was just that: a long glassy frontage revealed a submissive decor of teal tables, olive chairs and hessian walls. The beige-clad clientele sat around under lamps with ecru shades and the most aggressive coloration was the turquoise light over the counter where young people, wrapped in eau-de-Nil linen dished up unbelievably healthy food.

“What do you think these guys earn?” I asked Mac as we picked up salt-and-pepper grilled chicken, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes and “a small simple salad”. “Oh, they’re on minimum wage, I guess,” he replied. So, I thought to myself, even at $8 an hour it’d still take you an hour and a half to get dinner. Still, this was blackhearted quibbling: the truth of the matter is that Tender Greens dishes up ethically sourced food relatively cheaply at eight outlets in LA and southern California. The basic format – fish, red meat, chicken, rice, bread and salad stuff – so exactly conforms to the profile of my modish intolerances that the establishment could’ve been conceived by some anti-Huysmanns in order to cater to my dicky tummy.

Mac and I fatalistically forked our herbage – all around was the muted burble of environmentally friendly conversation: people drumming up support for tree-hugging jaunts, mass vasectomies, or cetacean de-strandings. It felt as if we were sitting in a biome that had been doctored to resemble a standard retail outlet. Mac dabbed his moustache with his hempen napkin while I told him about the Des Esseintes dinner. “Oh man,” he sighed, “that’s, like, unreal.” But later, strolling back to the Shangri-La Hotel where I was staying I wondered, was it actually any less veridical than Tender Greens?

Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is. Standing with the father of my youngest son’s schoolfriend we survey the prospect: a large triangle of close-cropped grass is bald-faced-on-to on two sides by semis of 1960s vintage – the contracting metal of cooling engine blocks ticks in the cool summer evening. There is a sense of spaciousness – exposure, even – at odds with the conurbation that we both know surrounds us.

“We’ve been here for over ten years,” the father figure says, adopting a hands-in-pockets stance, “and y’know what.”

“What.” I counter his rhetorical question with one of my own.

“During that entire time we’ve never so much as locked the front door once – not once. Hell, I even leave the key in the ignition of my car. And y’know what.”

“What.” If it weren’t that he was making an apposite observation this reflexivity would be intolerable.

“None of the neighbours has ever had a break-in either – and y’know why.”

“Why.” In point of fact, I know why.

“’Cause of the nick, of course,” he gestures to the hypotenuse of the triangle, which is formed by a 25-foot-high wall of ageing London stock brick; beyond this can be seen the peaked roofs, the mucal rendering, the barred lancet windows of HMP Wandsworth. We are both silent for a while – I’ve no idea what the paterfamilias is thinking about but I’m meditating on the crowd of felons in the nick: each one probably at this time banged up for the night in his cell. A particulate crowd – a crowd of isolates, each of one is not regarded and therefore becomes undifferentiated, faceless and to be ignored.

One might’ve thought that even to the averagely sussed, cracked-up, aggravated burglar, the juju that surrounds the prison – where, no doubt, he has spent time himself – would be countered by the following reasoning: “No one probably dares go near the gaffs in back of the nick – those straight-goers probably leave their doors unlocked. All I’ll have to do is stroll round and carry off some rich fucking pickings.” But as friend’s father’s testimony confirmed, if there’s one thing the crowd abhors, it’s reason.

Cut to Bodie, a ghost town in the middle east of California, on the Nevada border. Bodie once had upwards of 40,000 inhabitants, daily newspapers, taverns, hotels, schools and so forth. At the height of the Gold Rush it was the second biggest city in California after San Francisco. When the seams became unprofitable, the crowd ebbed away until at the time of the vast fire in the early 1930s that destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings there were only a handful of people left. Now the only residents are temporary ones; tourists who drive the ten miles of winding – and latterly dirt – road from Highway 395, pay their $20 and then mosey about the revenant of the town’s grid pattern, stopping to admire the echt weathering of the church, the general store and some barns, houses and assorted lean-tos. Up on the hillside is the flaking bulk of the Standard Stamp Mill, where the ore was crushed and refined – but this is, quite reasonably, classed as a dangerous structure and can only be visited in an organised crowd (called “a tour group”).

Standing in the cinematic rain, the sky umber overhead, I find myself curiously heartened by the way the State of California has resisted the impulse to gussy Bodie up. True, there has been some artful rearrangement, some gathering together of curios into implausibly exact arrays but on the whole Bodie has been left alone. The crowd respond to this arty desuetude by moving about the ruined buildings gently and quietly – or is it perhaps that only those who already feel themselves on the way to being revenants choose to visit ghost towns? Although there was some enthusiasm in the family for visiting Alcatraz, this proved impossible because the tour groups had to be booked long in advance, such is its popularity.

In Bodie, where absences touched one another lightly on the edge of the great expanse of America Deserta, I wondered at the strangeness of it all: to superstitiously avoid one jail but wildly flock to another is surely definitive proof – if any were needed – that there’s nowt so queer as folk. One of the reasons they need to corral visitors to Alcatraz is that the temptation to pilfer the few remaining relics is so great. I wish I’d had my son’s friend’s father along with me, so I could ask him what he thought of this paradox – but only rhetorically, of course.

As we drove down the broad stretch of Highway 9, which, under its guise as State Street, forms the main thoroughfare of Hurricane, Utah, my 14-year-old confided that he found the girl on the illuminated Wendy’s sign “disturbing”. I can see his point: with her ketchup-red hair and pigtails akimbo; with the upstanding and presumably savagely starched piecrust collar of her shirtwaist; with her stylised freckles and unbelievably joyful smile, the Wendy’s girl (who, one can only assume, is the eponymous “Wendy”) has the same sinister aura of other humans-gone-logo. Still, she’d probably give that creepy Colonel Sanders a thrashing while beating up on that Chucky-doll-lookalike, Ronald McDonald, with a handy rolling pin.

The fast-food logo that’s stayed with me most powerfully from the time I spent living in the States as a child is Orange Julius. Originally a fruit-juice stand flogging sugary OJ – hence the moniker – the chain had branched out into burgers and hotdogs under the winking sign of a little pitchfork-wielding demon by the time we were cruising the streets of Ithaca, NY, in the mid-1960s. You might’ve imagined that the marketing of fast food under such a diabolic presence had eventually fallen foul of the religious lobby, but what put paid to it (or him) was a suit by the alumni of Arizona State University, from whose own logo Orange Julius had been freely adapted; thus proving yet again that branding (and associated litigation) is far more fundamental to the American psyche than even the Bible.

Anyway, I never remember being scared of the Orange Julius devil – yet even now, sitting many thousands of miles away, the very thought of Wendy baring her teeth in the desert sunset is enough to bring me out in a cold sweat. Mind you, this could be a somatic memory, because the air-conditioning in the joint was savage. “Quality Is Our Recipe”, that’s the Wendy’s shtick, a perfect little piece of nonsense in its own right. But then once you’re out in the American boondocks, you begin to suspend disbelief in these sorts of things – just as it seems entirely acceptable to bumble along the interstates in an SUV the size of a semi-detached house. Our hire car seemed grotesquely huge to me, until I pulled in to Wendy’s and parked it beside one whose wheel arches arced above it like the flying buttresses of Chartres Cathedral. Inside there was the full-strength mortuary light, tiled dissection areas and melamine gurneys; the troughs full of real plants genetically engineered to resemble plastic ones. In the queue, pimply teens fresh from football practice sported those flesh-coloured and obscenely padded calf-length pants, while jiggling with the effects of a lifelong corn syrup comedown.

My teenager suppressed his fear long enough to order a “Baconator” (“Two ¼lb patties topped with fresh-cooked Applewood Smoked Bacon in between a premium buttered, toast-ed bun. Topped off with mayo, ketchup, and American cheese. Now that’s not just a sandwich, but a tasty treat”). I perused the info boards above the servery. There were scary salads and berry tea infusions – if I didn’t know better I might’ve thought I’d stumbled into a health-food joint.

But then this has been the way of it with the big fast-food chains: their response to accusations of super-sizing their customers while etiolating their workers has been not either/or but both/and. Wendy’s is no exception, with plenty of signage about corporate responsibility and donation boxes for worthy causes.

I had the spicy chicken Caesar salad, my wife a cheeseburger. For some dumb reason I also got us two cryogenic storage dewars full of tea the temperature of liquid nitrogen – and when I closed in on the table they top-heavily toppled out of the slots in the cardboard carrier and inundated my wife’s vintage Prada handbag. I’d already scored a perfect zero two days before when I put the open sunblock bottle in a shoulder bag with her vintage Prada bag. Now the handbag was definitively fucked – only Laura Ingalls Wilder’s blind elder sister Mary would still have deemed it stylish.

Inevitably the rest of the meal passed off with a certain froideur. I tried making a few jolly remarks about the square-cut beef patties Wendy’s use in their hamburgers (“We don’t cut corners!”), but these fell as flat as . . . well, as a square-cut patty. The food was the usual dreck but the staff were sweetness itself when it came to mopping up this perfect tea storm in the desert town of Hurricane.