At Café Solipsist on Hollywood Boulevard the climate-controlled atmosphere had turned sour, like scum on a forgotten halfcaf-decaf-mochaccino-frappe-latte. Bradley and Jennifer Pitt poked listlessly at their polyunsaturated salads and avoided eye contact, while over at the bar Nick Cage and Tom Cruise compared jaw clenches and shared slurred thoughts on loneliness and whether or not to get a dog.
Up in its glittering labyrinth Bennifer Affleck stalked about disconsolately, its two heads squabbling sporadically or nibbling for ticks. At times it stopped to fix its fur with fresh buckets of hair-gel, and for a short while before yoga it decided to try to find its guest bedroom, long sealed shut behind an avalanche of money. But it soon got a paper cut on a bundle of $100 bills and retired to its Zen Chamber to scream and fling bonsai trees out of the window.
Tom Hanks, Confucian by local standards, sat on the floor of his den stabbing a basketball with a bayonet. ‘Life is a like a box of anthrax chocolates,” he murmured. ‘And that’s all I have to say about that.” And insiders on the Boulevard agreed that Gwyneth Paltrow, a vision in black sackcloth and grey ashes (Lagerfeld’s ‘Miserere” line), was almost definitely unhappy, although it was a tough call.
‘Cyclists aren’t even real sportsmen,” Mel Gibson told his 15 children where they stood arrayed before him. ‘Hezekiah, take your finger out of Mary-Magdalene’s nose. I mean, all you’ve got to do is pedal and keep the thing pointed straight along the — Enoch! We don’t carry baby Lamech by his toe. See, you’re bumping his little head on the floor.”
‘I think it’s, like, beautiful,” said Angelina Jolie, paging through a heavily illustrated copy of Find Your Inner Swami and Let Him Make You Money. ‘It’s so serene, just you and the road. I’m going to start a foundation in Cambodia that encourages cycling as therapy for orphaned amputees. Beautiful.”
And all because Sandra Bullock is seeing Lance Armstrong, the world’s most famous prostate. (‘Protestant?” bellowed Mel. ‘I told you! I told you! Saints preserve us!”)
The coy denials from the representatives of both parties have only served as ironclad confirmation of their union, and deep in the heart of Texas Mammy Bullock and Maw Armstrong are sure to be fantasising about a wedding. ‘We’ll invite old man Bush from across the road, you know, the president’s pappy. He’s still a wonderful speaker despite that drool thing, and I do love it when he says ‘Read my lips’. So gallant. And then the reception, with 18 tons of meat on the spit — I wonder if those nice men down at Houston would lend us one their rockets for cooking purposes, otherwise we’ll be here all night. And line dancing! Now where did I put Billy Ray Cyrus’s cellphone number?”
Of course it won’t come to this: the Constitution of the republic of California prohibits A-list actors from marrying real people. But until news of their break-up leaks out (after the media torture the information out of a close friend by fanning him with wads of banknotes) the rest of Tinseltown has its reconstructed nose out of joint.
Suddenly if you’re not seen with a sinewy, leathery homunculus with saddle-sores and skin cancer, you’re nothing. The invites dry up, your salad arrives with dolphin-unfriendly Japanese anchovies in it instead of the humanely killed variety, and you have to share your slot on Larry King with a boy in a bubble and a dog that can howl Barbara Streisand songs.
‘You could at least try,” Jennifer Pitt hisses at her husband. ‘I think you’ve got lovely legs. I don’t know why you won’t at least just take a ride around the block. No you won’t fall over. Oh don’t be such a baby.”
Across at the bar Nick is examining Tom’s backside. ‘I don’t know, man, it’s a little big. You’d need a saddle that looked like a futon, you know?”
‘You think?” says Tom. ‘But how about my forearms. They’re pretty damn stringy if I say so myself, and we both do jaw-flexes better than Lance. Check this out: nnnngggg—”
‘Whoa! You the man!”
‘No you the man!”
‘And you’d look great in a yellow jersey.”
‘I would. Real hot. Wanna go rent a tandem?”