HOLLYWOOD BUS STOP
The Dark side of Tinsel Town
© Copyright Tracy Williams 2021
Hollywood Bus Stop was originally published as a short story
‘Tales From The Hollywood Bus Stop’ in Ambit Magazine, Issue 199, January 2010
Chapter 1
I’m sitting beside the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. And I’m waiting. Waiting – like I always did – in Hollywood. Los Angeles overhead is its usual flawless blue, as if some cosmetic sky surgeon has removed all clouds and creases of grey. Palm trees stretch upward, desperate for rain. But no rain will come. We will all remain dry here, I know that now. Star after star after star will stay pink and dry on The Boulevard. That’s Hollywood Boulevard, to those of you who have not lived through it. We – the survivors – haughtily refer to her as ‘The Boulevard’ as if there were no other street in the world.
Where is he? I know he’s here somewhere. Look at this crowd… I know what he’d say about them too. He’d say, “how can there be so many goddamm beautiful women in this town? Don’t they realize how long they’re gonna last in Hollywood? They’ll last until eleven o’clock in the morning because there is another bus arriving full of beautiful women to replace them… Goddamm primadonnas. They don’t know how to play the game.”
That’s him speaking back in 1995, during the filming of The Hollywood Bus Stop. No one has ever seen it – and I’ve got the footage.
By two in the afternoon the Roosevelt crowd are stripping and jumping into the water… Peaches is screaming; ‘Fuck the Pain Away…’ to this concatenation of egos and for me – subsumed in this poolside posing – it seems as if I never left this place; just another afternoon in Tinsel Town.
At the table next to me sits a peroxide blonde in less than a bikini. She is starvation thin save for her huge, unmoving breasts. On her lap sits a tiny pink poodle. In her mind… She’s Jayne Mansfield. Though Jayne is long-gone, I have not forgotten. For Marilyn, for Jayne, for Jean, for Greta and every other blonde who dared to weather the tempest of Hollywood’s mercurial waves, for those I suppose, and for other reasons too, I am now writing this for you…
Fifteen years have passed by for me, now where the fuck is he? I read somewhere that leaving Los Angeles is like giving up heroin. And as I sit here – trying not to stare too hard at Jayne – I can feel the junk slowly creeping back into my veins. Oh please, please God of Lost Angels – please – don’t let it get me again.
His name was Gilson Simoes. Everyone called him Gil. And in a town often nick-named ‘Holy-Weird’ Gil was the weirdest of them all. I got to Hollywood on June 1st, 1994. Marilyn Monroe would have been sixty eight – had she made it – on that day. Her star is outside McDonald’s. Gil walked over Marilyn every day for twenty years, on his way to get a cheeseburger, the only food he could chew.
Gilson; come back to The Boulevard, you mad lizard in the stars, this story is yours, you goddamm primadonna… I’ve travelled five thousand miles to write this out, now talk to me!
***
Ray-bans serve as a disguise for a sudden uprising of tears. Not Hollywood tears, you understand, not tears which render me more vulnerably attractive to the proverbial close-up, not tears designed to manipulate the masses into cheap, quick-fix emotions. Mine are real tears; testimony to an overwhelming desire to take the dreaming Jayne Mansfield into my arms. Gilson named the original Hollywood Bus Stop ‘Dreamers…’
O Hollywood, what you have done to us? I long to step out from behind the palm tree like the Good Witch of the North, to fling the pink poodle into the pool like Frankenstein, then to loudly proclaim, “it’s okay, Jayne – whatever your name – you can be your real self now… Look into my eyes, Jayne. It’s all over, Jayne. The nightmare has ended… I promise no one will ever hurt you again.”
I got to Hollywood on a one-way plane ticket paid for with stolen money. I had three hundred American dollars in cash and no other money in the world. In a small bag I brought with me one blue silk dress (the only dress I owned), a portfolio of photographs taken while I had struggled to become some sort of model while studying literature at King’s college. The modelling was usually naked, but rarely paid. This and other impecunious pursuits kept me in Vodka until I jumped ship. I also brought a demo tape of two songs I had recorded in London; songs which had not quite earned the record deal to which I felt entitled, even though I could not sing and had been coaxed into a band only because the musicians felt that blonde hair and a big mouth – and even bigger nipples – would attract the attention needed to become famous. Most importantly – in that bag – I carried a surfeit of childhood dreams instigated and manipulated by motion pictures, dreams which had turned to chronic nightmares the longer I was exiled from Hollywood.
******
Perhaps I was reckless or perhaps it was some enigmatic metaphysical force which took me, eventually, five thousand miles away from all things familiar. I was ten when I made the decision to leave for Hollywood. I was twenty-two when I arrived. On the day I departed from not-so-great Britain, I had not one safety net upon which to land in the event that jumping ship resulted in disaster.
Dear Reader, let me tell you that I – more than most – can testify with utmost confidence to the fact that not one safety net is the only way to truly travel. Sensible people will refute this assertion, but sensible types live nondescript lives. Fly without a safety net, dearest reader! Jump into your fantasy without any alternative! You will experience a landing unparalleled by any other, you will earn freedom from fear; you will look upon yourself in awe. No one can help you do this and most people will vehemently insist that you do not even contemplate such adventure. They will intimate that you bury your head back in the sand of low self-esteem where the mind of the masses may safely stagnate. They will try to kid you – as they have kidded themselves – that existing is the same as living. Only you alone can change the course of your miserable existence and, in turn, your attitude, forever. Lay yourself bare to the possibility of serendipity and let the mind of the masses go hang.
***
In The Hollywood Bus Stop of 1995, Gilson Simoes asserts that, “a war zone is safer than Hollywood for a girl.”
“In a war zone,” he says, “you get an army on your side, you get a gun, you get a bullet proof vest… in Hollywood you got no protection… Young girls come here cos they wanna get famous, I dunno for what reason. They think because they got a good pair of legs and a beautiful ass, they’re gonna get famous and they spend their last dollar… But they don’t know how to play the game.”
Kids came to Gilson’s Casting from all over the world. Fragmented, lost kids with heart-aching dreams. A never-ending procession of cavalier innocence… Kids who, like me, felt they had been called to the place where magic was possible, because the place they were leaving behind was impossibly unmagical.
“They have no compassion!” Gilson would yell as he held up a newspaper clipping concerning the most recent suicide of another Hollywood starlet.
While some jumped from the Hollywood sign, others copulated under it. We fucked standing up, hanging onto a fence, faking orgasms for an imagined camera. One final glance over the chaotic landscape of opportunity, and we plunged to our death, as unwilling to yield to reality as Macbeth. As if suicide or sex were somehow rendered more meaningful due to committing such an act underneath that landmark.
***
When you are only twenty-two a twelve hour flight is time enough to meditate on the implications of your entire life thus far. On that Boeing 747 I spent twelve airborne hours overdosing on an excess of adrenalin shooting up from the abyss of my reckless ego, petrified by what I had done. Such a grotesque demonstration of the perverse power my ego had over my soul. I watched without seeing the clouds through the window as British night went back in time to California day. I smoked endless cigarettes as the air hostesses disseminated glasses of red or white wine to the holiday-making masses.
In some vague attempt to strategize upon that Virgin Atlantic flight on June 1st 1994, I did solemnly and silently declare to my innermost self; “Cardinal Rule Number 1: I must not drink Alcohol. Cardinal Rule Number 2: I must not spend money.”
Somehow, if I could maintain allegiance to these two rules, I might perhaps shield this little girl from total deprivation or whatever else was about to befall her in one of the most dangerous cities on the globe.
***
I buried the little girl I once was deep inside myself, beneath the hideous ego. She would – one day – be excavated… For now, it was up to my reckless, sado-masochistic ego to conquer Los Angeles without the inner child.
As I sit here writing this now; a middle aged woman – vulnerable and naked in the way only writing can render me – I can see that little girl sitting beside me, as untouched as if Hollywood never happened. Despite the indelible scars I got from six years on the frontline in Tinsel Town and while I owe a great deal of my character – for better and worse – to Hollywood, the little girl I always was remains undisturbed: we can thank the magnificent ego for that.
***
And so to Los Angeles; where the streets are as wide as British villages. Where walking across a road is like a mini expedition, but where the act of walking is only for schizoids and vagabonds. A city in which you are what you drive, (meaning I was nothing for almost six years). A place where you sit at a coffee bar with a so-called friend only to constantly look over your so-called friend’s shoulder in order to ascertain whether there is someone more important at the next table. Welcome to the sprawling conglomeration of extreme racial segregation; a city in which every race can be found but no race merges with another. The Mexicans stay way East, the blacks in South Central or Macarthur Park and as another stretch limousine carries another millionaire across the Beverly Hills border, never the twain shall meet. A city where ugly, clever Jews control and profit from the best-looking, dumb gentiles in Christendom. Welcome to the capital of capitalism, a city built on a symmetrical grid in order that direction requires no thought. Welcome to Los Angeles; the largest open-air asylum on the face of this earth, a place inhabited by the most mercenary, egotistical and ravenously ambitious, cut-throat talent in the cosmos. God knows, when I was twenty-two, Los Angeles was the perfect place for me.
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