Book Review : Cliched Tour of One Man’s Fantasyland

Los Angeles Without a Map by Richard Rayner (Weidenfeld and Nicholson: $16.95; 187 pages)

Let’s turn the situation around for a minute. Suppose the name of this book was “Paris Without a Map,” written by a young Southern California man in search of love and high adventure. Suppose he told us things like: “The Right Bank of Paris is for the rich; the Left Bank is reserved for students and poets, and the poor.” Suppose he gave us a talk about the characteristics of the Metro.

Suppose he had fallen madly in love with a mysterious gamine named Zizi or Kiki who wore black turtleneck sweaters and fishnet stockings--a girl who danced the night away in Montmartre, but kissed him in public on the banks of the Seine? Suppose, when things went wrong in their affair of the heart, he agonized: “What had happened was not really about me and Zizi and Pierre. What happened was about me and Paris.” And then just for the heck of it, suppose somebody tried to market this fictional bagatelle to young, sophisticated, trendy Parisians? Downright incroyable .

After the Bunny

“Los Angeles Without a Map” is about a British guy who’s locked into a dull, stable relationship with a dull British girl. On vacation, Richard meets Barbara, a Playboy Bunny from Los Angeles. He chucks everything and follows her to--well--not the Los Angeles you and I see, but something like the Paris we saw when we went to Paris, if we were still under 20, and our IQs ran to less than three digits. Richard takes a trip to his own fantasyland, where as sure as coyotes chase cats, he digs up every cliche that you can pack into 187 pages.

Richard stays in the Chateau Marmont, where tour guides point out where John Belushi died. Richard rides in pink Cadillacs with bricks of marijuana taped under the fenders. He rents an apartment and finds a drowned iguana in the toilet. He goes to a Hugh Hefner party and spies the man himself, in flip-flops and a bathrobe.

Driving Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu, Richard discovers “. . . several people were killed here each year, crushed.” Richard gets a job as a mechanical man outside the Hollywood Wax Museum. Then he gets a job as swimming pool cleaner, and if you think he cleans the respectable pools in back of five-bedroom homes in the San Fernando Valley, you’re sadly mistaken about the nature of this book.

Racy Invitations

And, of course, there’s Bunny Barbara, who rips off her clothes on Santa Monica beach with some pretty racy invitations. Here the reviewer must pause to ask an obvious question--even if it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the author. Aren’t human beings all around the world more or less engaged in the sexual act from time to time, everywhere? Doesn’t the sexual act occur all across the planet, from Oberstenfeld, West Germany, to Villa Union, Mexico, to Fresh Water, Newfoundland? Doesn’t the sexual act occur perhaps more often, all around the world than drunk driving accidents or reported cases of chicken pox? Further (and Western literature tends to document this) does not this sexual act, except above the Arctic Circle, occur once in every 500 times out of doors? Surely this is not a phenomenon limited only to the area within the city limits of greater Los Angeles.

No matter. The Richard-Barbara romance proceeds apace. They marry, in Las Vegas, of course, at a chapel called the Hitching Post, at dawn. Richard continues with his exotic adventures: He visits houses where people live “on the edge” in the Pacific Palisades. He goes for a ride on Mulholland Drive, named, Richard tells us, “. . . after William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who became chief engineer of the Los Angeles water department and one of the city’s legendary rubber barons.”

Also, Richard drinks too much, goes through some bad hangovers, samples some crystal meth. When things go sour, he muses: “What had happened was not really about me and Barbara and Patterson. What had happened was about me and Los Angeles. . . . I’d prostrated myself before the looping freeways, the creepy mansions, the renegade swimming pools that turned to blood . . . the religious fruitcakes and the psychos on the bus.”

Words fail me on this one. Don’t buy, is all I can say. Maybe there’s a market for this in Manchester. But, please! not in Los Angeles.