The Lost Art of Walking

2. Los Angeles

John Paul Jones, the bass player of Led Zeppelin, has a story that he still trots out in interviews, of how he was arrested in the 1970^s for leaving his hotel room and daring to walk the streets of Los Angeles. ‘I didn’t realize you’re not supposed to walk anywhere’, he says.

D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land, writes about the one-mile daily walk from his home to his office (actually in Lakewood, in Los Angeles County, rather than the city). He describes being ‘stopped by a sheriff’s patrol car on a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday, dressed in a coat and tie, and ordered to identify myself and explain my destination. As a pedestrian, I was a suspect’.

Waldie was perhaps channeling Ray Bradbury, author of the dystopic science fiction short story ‘The Pedestrian’, in which the hero is picked up by totalitarian cops who know he must be up to no good simply because he’s a walker.

There are at least two pop songs — ‘Nobody Walks in L.A.’ by Ashford & Simpson, and ‘Walking in L.A.’ by Missing Persons — that express much the same sentiment, although the actual message of these songs is not so much that nobody walks in L.A., but rather that nobody who’s anybody walks in L.A.

Jean Baudrillard, in his book America, writes:

‘As soon as you start walking in Los Angeles you are a threat to public order, like a dog wandering in the road.’

All these add up to a fine and persuasive legend, and as they say in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

♦

I had moved to Los Angeles with my then girlfriend, now wife, a few years earlier. We’d gone there partly for work, and partly in order to live out certain fantasies, both Epicurean and apocalyptic, about California. I admit I didn’t go there for the walking.

We found a place to live, bought a couple of cheap cars, my girlfriend started her job, and I sat in the house, writing as ever, and then doing the sorts of things you do in L.A., going to Musso & Frank Grill, to the Getty, to a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright sites, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, to the beach. Life was conspicuously good. I had nothing at all to complain about. And I became completely and utterly depressed.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: ‘Good. Any halfway civilized man who’s lived in Europe or on the East Coast of America and then chooses to move to the vacuous wastelands of Los Angeles deserves to be depressed by the thinness and vacuity of the culture, by the superficiality and prefabricated good looks of the people, perhaps simply by the ease of being in a place where the sun usually shines and the living is too easy’. Well, only up to a point.

I soldiered on through my depression, didn’t do the obvious L.A. thing, which would have been to see a therapist or have some mood-lightening plastic surgery. Instead, I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I carried on with my housebound, sedentary writer’s life. My writing was going well enough. I tried to be cheerful but it didn’t work.

And then one day I was sitting gloomily in the sunroom reading the newspaper and I came across one of those ‘recent medical evidence shows’ types of articles. The evidence came from Duke University and it concerned the treatment of depression. The research said that a twenty-minute walk three times a week was better medicine, and did patients more good, than all the antidepressants in the world.

This shouldn’t have surprised me. Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy and a hero of mine, realized something similar in about 1621. He regards walking as a cure for melancholy, and says:

‘The most pleasant of all outward pastimes is that of Aretaeus, deambulatio per amoena loca (strolling through pleasant scenery), to make a petty progress, a merry journey now and then with some good companions, to visit friends, see cities, castles, towns…to walk amongst orchards, bowers, mounts, and arbors, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such-like pleasant places, like that Antiochian Daphne, brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river-side…’

He’s free-associating by this point, and you could draw a parallel between the obsessive, indirect yet forward movement of his prose and similar qualities found in the act of walking. The effect is spoiled, however, because although Burton says walking is the most pleasant way of banishing melancholy, he doesn’t think it’s superior to a great many other ways of doing it. He also highly rates watching a battle.

Duke and Burton aside, even I knew that exercise stimulates the production of endorphins, ‘nature’s painkillers’, and the fact was, just about the only exercise I’d ever done, certainly the only exercise I’d ever enjoyed, was walking.

Alight went on.

For most of my adult life I’d lived in London and New York, which, we are constantly being told, are two of the world’s great walking cities. In these places I hadn’t just walked for twenty minutes three times a week, I’d walked every single day, sometimes for hours. It was how I got around. It was how I related to the city. In my spare time I’d head off to some unknown part of town and explore it on foot, alone or with other people.

I frequently met others who did very much the same. There was even a solid literary tradition. In London you had Dickens, De Quincey, Iain Sinclair — in New York you had Walt Whitman, Alfred Kazin, Paul Auster. Other great cities had their own great literary walkers. In Los Angeles it was different. I’d heard the pop songs, read Baudrillard and some John Paul Jones interviews. As far as I was aware back then, there was no tradition, no history, no literature of walking here. I now know that I was wrong (more of that later), but at the time I thought walking in L.A. was a foolish and freakish thing.

Be that as it may, for the sake of my own sanity, I started walking. And the truth is that the moment I started walking, I saw plenty of other people doing the same. There were people dog walking, streetwalking, power walking. There were always tourists, in Hollywood or Santa Monica or taking self-guided tours of downtown. People walked with their kids, kids walked by themselves, old people walked together. There were walkers everywhere.

Some, of course, may have been walking to their cars, having been forced to park some distance away from where they really wanted to be. Some may have walked unwillingly because they were simply too poor to own a car, because they had lousy jobs or were freshly immigrated, or both. Some of the walkers were homeless, pushing shopping carts full of recyclables. A few were simply mad. I joined them. I became an L.A. walker.

♦

I had first set foot in Los Angeles in 1975. I’d got there by hitchhiking. When I was twenty-one years old I crossed the continental United States on foot. Sometimes I think I only ever did it so that sometime later I’d be able to say, ‘When I was twenty-one years old I crossed the continental United States on foot’. It also had something to do with having read a lot, arguably too much, of Jack Kerouac.

The received wisdom about Kerouac back then had him as the king of the hippie hitchhikers. This, as we now know, was inaccurate in almost every way. He wasn’t a hippie, and he wasn’t a king, and although he did a certain amount of hitchhiking, he was just as likely to catch a bus or hop a freight train or be driven by Neal Cassady in a borrowed or stolen car. I was ready to experience all these modes of transport, but my initial plan was to stand by the American roadside with my thumb stuck out to get lifts along the way from Toronto (I had good, dull reasons to start there) to Isla Vista, in California, where I had a semi-legal job lined up.

Today it sounds to me as absurd, difficult, and dangerous a plan as it must have sounded to my father at the time. To be fair to him, he didn’t raise any objections on the grounds of personal safety. After all, he’d run off to join the Royal Navy when he was sixteen, in the middle of World War Two, and found himself in the thick of it on a minesweeper in the Mediterranean. His worries were more on the grounds of practicality.

I remember him saying to me, ‘But what if you don’t get any lifts?’

The idea had literally never occurred to me.

‘Of course I’ll get lifts’, I said.

My father thought about this. ‘Well, I hope so’, he said. ‘I mean, if you had to get from here to London’ — ‘here’ was our home in Sheffield, in the north of England, 165 miles from the capital — ‘then I suppose you could get there eventually just by walking. But getting to California, well, it’d take you forever’.

And, of course, I did get lifts, plenty of them, some of them colorful, only one of them with obvious lethal potential. I’ll spare you most of my hitchhiking stories, but the fact is, when you hitchhike you do a lot of walking, far more than you want to. You get dropped off in places you don’t want to be, in places where no other car would ever stop to pick you up. So you walk on to the next crossroads where more traffic joins the road, or to a nice long, clear stretch where a car can pull in easily, or two miles farther to a field where you can sleep for the night.

My best hitchhiking and walking moment came somewhere in semi-rural Oklahoma. There was a bleak, empty highway on my left and weed-strewn railway tracks on my right, and I admit that my memory may have made the image a little more cinematic than it really was, but the story is as true as I can make it.

A long way up ahead I saw an old black man walking toward me. He was lean, loose, in work clothes. His walk was solid and serviceable, but so very weary-looking. We were approaching each other for a good long time and we made eye contact long before we got within hailing distance. When we finally came face-to-face the old guy said, ‘I wish I was where you just comin’ from’. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to think of some witty thing I should have said in reply.

♦

Eventually, and a little reluctantly, my hitchhiking took me to Los Angeles. Even before I’d left England everybody had told me that L.A. was impossible without a car, and I saw no reason to doubt them. I’d even read Kerouac’s opinion, in On the Road, that ‘Los Angeles is a jungle’, and though I certainly wished he’d come up with a more interesting metaphor, I again thought it was probably true.

♦

There are plenty of lacunae in my memories of that first visit, but I do remember the lift that took me into L.A. The driver, who looked like a hippie from Central Casting — bearded, mellow, soft-spoken, and pretty well-heeled, judging by his car — proudly pointed out as we approached the city that we were driving on a twelve-lane highway, and he made a detour so that he could drive down Sunset Boulevard and show me the Strip. He was especially keen that I see the huge billboards, and as I remember it they were of the Marlboro Man, Peter Frampton, and Joe Cocker, but again, time may have buffed up these memories.

My new pal dropped me off on Hollywood Boulevard, at a fleapit that called itself a ‘motor hotel’, and even so cost far more than I could afford. I’d hoped that somewhere along the way I might have been befriended by fun-loving hippie chicks who’d invite me to stay in their commune in Laurel Canyon, but that hadn’t materialized.

Hollywood Boulevard was a scary place in the mid-seventies, though no doubt I scared more easily then than I do now. There were a lot of people on the street who looked somewhat like hippies, but you could tell they weren’t the mellow, peace-loving type of hippie. They were only there for the drugs and the sex, and you just knew they wanted bad drugs and bad sex.

And there were a lot of hookers, of both sexes, but predominantly male. Thanks to John Rechy, we now know that the real industrial-strength action was taking place not on Hollywood Boulevard but half a block south on Selma. The main drag, however, was quite action-packed enough for me. The hustlers walked up and down, wearing their cowboy hats and fringed suede jackets, looking like extras, or perhaps leads, from the movie Midnight Cowboy, or more feasibly Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. As a matter of fact, I owned a fringed suede jacket at the time, and I was glad I hadn’t brought it with me to America.

I remember seeing a street musician standing in a doorway somewhere near Vine Street playing a saxophone, and I stopped to listen to him. He had a great act. He’d start out playing a recognizable version of ‘My Favorite Things’, and then veer off into ever wilder improvised Coltrane-style free-jazz squawking, until he fell on his knees writhing with the intense emotion of it all. Then he’d stop, stand up, and do it all over again. It impressed the hell out of me.

I did by chance meet a fun-loving woman who had a couple of tickets for a David Bowie concert at the Hollywood Bowl and offered me one of them, but the journey there seemed unimaginably difficult to both of us. We didn’t have a car so we thought it was impossible.

Now I look at the map and see that you can walk from Boulevard to Bowl quite easily in half an hour at most, and I suppose a bit of careful map reading would have told me that at the time. But I believed the myth and the hype, that you couldn’t get anywhere or do anything in L.A. without a car, and you were wiser not to try.

♦

Three decades later, newly arrived in Los Angeles, I was ready to defy the wisdom. In the name of self-medication I began to take regular, long, sometimes arduous walks in L.A. In fact there are a few places in and around the city where people go walking: Griffith Park, Runyon Canyon, Venice Beach, the shopping streets of Beverly Hills, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, parts of downtown. A long drive may well be involved in getting to any of them.

There was something a bit obvious about walking in these places, but I didn’t want to be completely self-denying or self-punishing, so I walked in all of them. Then, since I was living in a movie town it seemed natural enough to visit some movie sites: places where Hollywood stars lived or at least had lived and, in some cases, died. Is there any other city in the world where you can buy maps and guides telling you the locations of the homes of its most famous living citizens? I bought several.

If the data were to be believed you could, for instance, walk along Franklin Avenue, a largely unsung street, where Dorothy Dandridge had lived before she went bankrupt, where Gary Cooper had lodged with his parents, where Joan Didion had lived in her yellow Corvette period. Live stars were a bit thin on the ground on Franklin, however. For them it was recommended that you go to, say, Aldercreek Place in Westlake Village, where you could saunter past the home of Frankie Avalon, or to Folkstone Lane in Bel Air, where Tony Curtis lived, or to Cornell Road, the Agoura Hills site of chez Kelsey Grammer.

Once you started walking in Beverly Hills, the famous, and the ghosts of the famous, were to be found on every street: Greta Garbo on Chevy Chase Drive, Barbra Streisand on North Bedford Drive, everybody and his uncle on Roxbury: dead legends such as Lionel Barrymore, Lucille Ball, and Dorothy Parker, and live ones such as Mia Farrow and Peter Falk.

Inevitably these walks of mine didn’t result in my seeing any movie stars. In many cases I didn’t even get to see the houses because of high walls and hedges, and signs promising an armed response. But if you’re the sort of person who’s moved by the notion that somebody famous is (or was) here, then there’s still a frisson to be had from looking at movie star homes. And some days, I’m that sort of person.

My star maps told me not to go knocking on doors and bothering the stars, and I didn’t, and in a lot of cases I wasn’t even sure the information was accurate. I felt sure that movie stars moved more often than these maps were updated. Which brings me to the story of the time I walked with Christina Ricci.

It was on Valley Oak Drive, a long, quiet, traffic-free dead end, like many of the streets in the Hollywood Hills. I walked all the way to the end of the street, then immediately turned and started walking back. It was the natural thing to do but I feared it made me look shifty and up to no good, as if I was casing the neighborhood.

As I turned on my heels I saw walking toward me down the middle of the street what at first appeared to be a child, or at best a very young teenage girl. She was incredibly thin, had brassy, dyed blond hair, and was wearing minute hot pants. She was looking lost and she spoke before I had a chance to.

‘Have you seen a dog?’ she asked me.

‘No’, I said, and then, even though I have no interest in dogs and can barely tell one breed from another, I asked, ‘What kind is it?’

Either sensing or sharing my indifference to dog breeds, the little girl said, ‘Oh, it’s just a tiny dog’, and she mimed holding a puppy that wasn’t much more than a single handful.

It was then that I realized the little girl was a fully grown woman, was in fact the movie actress Christina Ricci. I’d have realized sooner if she hadn’t had the blond hair. Of course I didn’t tell her I knew who she was, but my eyes probably signaled recognition — I’d thought she was great in the Addams Family movies. She evidently lived nearby, and as I found out later, had just moved into a Lloyd Wright house on the street.

‘Oh, well’, said Christina Ricci, and she then seemed to be at a loose end. Having reached the dead end of the street, she, too, had to turn back, which would mean walking along with me.

I like to think I look reasonably presentable when I’m out walking. I don’t think I look like a stalker or pervert, but as Christina Ricci had seen, I was certainly a man who had walked to the end of the street and then turned on his heel and started walking smartly back. Was that a man you could completely trust?

An odd, socially awkward, and in my experience unique, interaction took place. Christina Ricci and I walked half the length of Valley Oak Drive in each other’s company. We weren’t quite walking together, but we weren’t quite walking separately either, and we both felt obliged to make some polite, stilted conversation as we went. We talked about dogs. It was excruciating. And as we walked, a chorus of canine barking came at us from behind various neighborhood gates and fences. None of the barks sounded as though it came from a dog of the size she apparently owned.

What I didn’t tell her was that as I’d been walking that afternoon, I’d seen a lot of handmade signs attached to trees and lampposts: WANTED posters for lost dogs and cats. Some generous rewards were being offered. The fear, a reasonable one, in fact a strong probability, was that these family pets had been snatched by the coyotes that roamed wild in the area. If Christina Ricci was going to find her little dog, she had a strictly limited amount of time in which to do it.

♦

I felt I was starting to get the hang of L.A. My walks, perverse and contradictory and laborious as they sometimes were, became a profound source of pleasure and satisfaction. I was making the city my own, asserting my own version, marking territory, beating the bounds, drawing my own map.

I was doing myself good. I was feeling much, much less depressed. I can’t say that I finished each walk and thought to myself, ah yes, this is precisely the kind of serotonin-stimulating activity that those boffins at Duke University were talking about, but then I didn’t need to. When you’re not depressed you don’t spend much time thinking about depression. And that was the state I was in when I went walking in the Hollywood Hills two days before Christmas, fell, broke my arm, stopped walking, and got depressed all over again.

So after a couple of months of nursing my arm, of inactivity and escalating misery, as the opiates ceased to deliver much in the way of painkilling, I knew I had to start self-medicating again. I did what I had to do, picked myself up, dusted myself off, and started walking again.

I undertook a series of long, unfocused but serious walks on the boulevards that run more or less east and west across L.A.: Pico, Olympic, Sunset, Santa Monica, Beverly, Melrose, Wilshire. I referred to the walks, only somewhat ironically, as ‘transits’. There was nothing conceptually rigorous about these expeditions. I went at my own pace, without specific expectations or goals, and I noticed what I noticed.

One of my enduring memories of Sunset concerns a couple I saw walking along ahead of me, near the Hollywood Freeway. The man was middle-aged, lean, bearded, a bit raddled perhaps but essentially holding it together. His female companion was not. She was younger than him, as wide as a house, disheveled, with huge flopping, untethered breasts, and I guess she was suffering from some mental problems. Suddenly, she looked down to the side of the road, at something in the bushes, and she reacted with delight. I looked to see what she’d found. There were twenty or thirty medicine bottles lying there, empty as far as I could tell, but still containing some powdery residue. The woman swooped down on them with absolute joy, and the man wasn’t able to stop her, though he tried. About a week later I happened to see them again, in a supermarket some miles away, and I fell into conversation with the man. He told me he liked my shirt. He said it was the kind of shirt worn by men of influence.

On Wilshire Boulevard I saw a man with no legs, indeed nothing at all below the pelvis, with a sort of thick plastic diaper around the bottom of his torso — he was not actually walking, I suppose, but he was propelling himself at some speed. He had a block of wood in each hand, like wooden door handles, so that his hands didn’t have to touch the sidewalk, and as he moved they made a noise somewhere between the sound of clogs and high heels.

As I was walking down Rampart Boulevard, a car pulled up next to me. I looked over and saw the driver was a woman talking on her cell phone, with an unruly little girl bouncing around in the passenger seat. I thought the woman was lost and stopping to ask me for directions, but no, she’d actually stopped the car so she could give the little girl a good slapping, which she then did, with her cell phone still at her ear.

Some of these walks could be tough. It gets damned hot in the middle of the day in L.A. in the summer. I nearly got run down once or twice. Dogs endlessly snarled and yelped at me, and street people hassled me with varying degrees of seriousness.

On Los Feliz Boulevard, a young black man who appeared to have all his worldly goods scattered at his feet gave me a bright hello, which I returned, and when I was past him he called after me, ‘Dude! Are you in the movies?’

‘Nah’, I said laughing.

‘You look just like that dude in Die Hard 2’, he said.

For no good reason I said, ‘I wish’, and then we both had a good laugh.

When I got home I went through the cast list of Die Hard 2 and I’m damned if I could see anybody there who might look like me. Not Bruce Willis, I think I can safely say. It’d be flattering to think it was Franco Nero, but putting all other objections aside, we aren’t even remotely in the same age bracket. And surely not Dennis Franz. Surely. Not even my worst enemies would say I looked like him. Whatever my physical failings, I do have plenty of hair.

And then there was the time I was walking in downtown L.A., a place where a lot of others walk, too. It was a busy weekday lunchtime. The streets were full of people. There was a lot to look at, a lot of distractions, and that was why I wasn’t paying much attention to the youngish, hippieish white guy who was standing not very far away from me as I was waiting to cross the street. He was a panhandler, however, and thought I was pointedly ignoring him. I might have if I’d been aware of him, but I wasn’t. After failing to get my attention for a while, he said loudly, in a sneering tone of voice, ‘Hey, who do you think you are? Jack Kerouac?’ As insults go, I couldn’t have asked for better. I didn’t respond. The light changed and I walked across the street smiling fit to bust.

♦

I walked for a while in the footsteps of those two great Angelenos Raymond Chandler and his fictional alter ego Philip Marlowe. I had a partial list of the places Chandler had lived, based on information from his selected letters, from two Chandler biographies, plus a certain amount of anecdotal evidence. Chandler seems to have lived everywhere: Los Feliz, Santa Monica, Arcadia, Monrovia, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, you name it, and all manner of places in between. It made for interesting but ultimately unsatisfying walking. It was easy enough to find the streets, some much meaner than others, but often I couldn’t find the actual addresses. Times and the city had changed too much.

I went, for instance, to Loma Street in what is now MacArthur Park, where Chandler lived in 1916 when he worked as an accountant at the Los Angeles Creamery. The address no longer existed. Later a mailman tried very hard to help me find one of Chandler’s old places on 12th Street, but our best efforts put his apartment exactly where there was now an alleyway that ran behind a Korean Presbyterian church. A bungalow court on Leeward shared an address with somewhere Chandler had once lived, but it was now a series of tightly packed bunkers, neat and recently repainted but thoroughly austere, and enclosed behind spiked iron railings and barbed wire, evoking captivity as much as security. It couldn’t have been like that in Chandler’s time.

My only really good score, easily walked to from my home, was the Spanish-style, ice cream-colored apartment block on Greenwood Place, where Chandler and his wife, Cissy, had lived when he wrote his first short stories for Black Mask magazine. At that time Chandler had lost his job as an oil executive because of alcoholism and its attendant problems, and I’d constructed quite the tragic and romantic picture for Chandler, and for myself. There are some very bleak apartment blocks in that area, and I guessed that Ray and Cissy, with no visible means of support, had holed up in one of these. I was quite wrong. There was nothing bleak about 4616 Greenwood. It looked like a very decent place to live. More than that, it looked like a fully authentic Chandler location: sun-drenched, lush, keeping its secrets. As I paced up and down outside, it was possible to entertain the fantasy that I was tracking down some vital clues about the man and his work. Finding clues, however, was a rarity.

I have since discovered that at the time I was doing these Chandler walks, an author named Judith Freeman was covering a lot of the same territory, researching a book about Chandler’s marriage. She doesn’t seem to have had much more luck than I did at locating genuine Chandler territory, but she wrote the book anyway.

Both of us must, at least occasionally, have walked where Chandler had once walked, and walking with Chandler was probably safer than driving with him, certainly safer than being on the sidewalk when he was behind the wheel. In a letter to Roger Machell, Chandler recalls driving home in his oil executive days, ‘plastered to the hairline in a most agreeable manner…We missed pedestrians by a thin millimeter…laughing heartily at the idea of a man trying to walk on two legs’.

Certainly Chandler’s Marlowe thinks nothing of having a few stiff drinks before and even during a long drive, and we do tend to think of hard-boiled detectives as drivers rather than walkers, but in the course of his inquiries Marlowe, like any good gumshoe, did plenty of walking, too. I thought it might be more rewarding to walk in Marlowe’s mythical city than in the remains of Chandler’s historical one.

I tried, for a start, to find the house where Marlowe lives in The Long Goodbye, ‘in the Laurel Canyon district’, a surprisingly bohemian area for a private eye, even in the 1940^s. The description of Marlowe’s house is what I’ve come to think of as pure Chandler. It sounds very convincingly specific and yet it’s actually deceptively general. ‘It was a small hillside house on a dead end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way’.

There is no Yucca Drive in Laurel Canyon, but there is a Yucca Trail (which is not a dead end), and sure enough when I walked there, I saw at least two houses that fit the bill in terms of steps and eucalyptus trees. Did Chandler scout this street, walk the neighborhood looking for a suitable fictional home for his detective? I do like to think so.

In the novel, Terry Lennox, the ambiguously appealing, white-haired, facially reconstructed semi-villain, walks to Marlowe’s place from Fountain Avenue, a long and perilous ascent, steep as a ski slope in places, made more taxing by blind bends and drivers who have no expectation whatsoever of encountering anyone on foot.

Marlowe himself walks to Laurel Canyon in The Big Sleep, to the house of one Arthur Gwynne Geiger. He walks there from the Sternwood mansion in West Hollywood, first covering ‘ten blocks of curving, rain swept streets’ until he ‘comes out at a service station’, then adds, ‘I made it back to Geiger’s house in something over half an hour of nimble walking’.

I have walked various routes between various possible locations for both the mansion and Geiger’s house, but convincing though Chandler’s (and Marlowe’s) account is, the geography of the book is a long way off from the real geography of the city. There are no ten curving blocks, there is no suitably placed gas station. The best guess has Geiger living on Kirkwood Terrace, a street off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, with the Sternwood mansion a ringer for the Dabney mansion, a mock Tudor extravaganza in Beverly Hills, sometimes used as a movie set (Murder, She Wrote, The Witches of Eastwick, The Prestige) and also the site of a real murder.

The Big Sleep is also the novel in which Marlowe follows on foot a customer from Geiger’s bookstore, a sort of porno lending library, situated on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard near Las Palmas Avenue, a place that can be located today with some precision. Some sources place the bookstore in what is now the ‘new room’ of Musso & Frank’s restaurant, one of Chandler’s favorite watering holes, a taste shared by such writer/drinkers as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Parker, Hammett, and Bukowski.

Marlowe tails the customer, who gets increasingly panicky as he walks west on Hollywood Boulevard to Highland, then another block, then turns right and then left into a ‘narrow tree lined street with three bungalow courts’, the second of which is called La Baba. Eventually the customer cracks, ditches the smut he’s borrowed, and then saunters away, leaving Marlowe to retrieve the filthy goods.

The first part of the walk is easily replicated, but by the end you’ll find yourself walking into Hollywood and Highland, a corporate, multistory shopping mall that by some accounts is responsible for the revitalization of Hollywood, but which nevertheless has the look of something that will be a slum in ten years’ time. Chandler would have been horrified, and would have reveled in his horror.

However, my favorite Marlowe walking moment appears in Farewell, My Lovely, where he climbs the 280 steps up to Cabrillo Street in Montemar Vista, where he’s got an appointment with a popinjay called Lindsay Marriott. ‘It was a nice walk if you like grunting’, Marlowe says.

Cabrillo Street and Montemar Vista are Chandler’s inventions, but if you’re looking for a long trudge up a great many steps, Castellammare, on the Pacific Coast Highway, offers a very adequate substitute. I did the climb, and it’s a struggle to find exactly 280 steps — some now lead into dead ends, some are crumbling wood — but you can do something that’s not too far off the mark. The grunting is much as reported, but it really is a ‘nice’ walk, if you like walking. On the way you pass the house where the actress Thelma Todd was murdered, and the view from the top is just about worth the effort.

♦

There is in Los Angeles these days a place called Raymond Chandler Square. It isn’t a square in the usual sense, but rather an intersection where Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards meet. It’s pleasing in a way that Raymond Chandler Square is so ordinary, so unfancy. It’s the kind of place where the businesses don’t seem to be in it for the long run — but the last time I looked, the four corners offered a Greek pizzeria, a Popeyes chicken and biscuits restaurant, a place for cashing checks, and, more substantially, a big, serious anonymous bank building that is a contender for the fictional Cahuenga Building, which was where Marlowe had an office in Farewell, My Lovely.

Hollywood Boulevard is one of the places where people do actually walk in Los Angeles. When people like me complain about the lack of street life in L.A., other Angelenos tend to say, ‘Go to Hollywood Boulevard if you want some street life, man’. They mean that Hollywood street life is all about drugs and sex, runaways, people fresh off the bus, boys up to no good, the improbably and ill-advisedly transvestite, the kind of people who need piercing and tattooing parlors and smoke shops, who find themselves sitting on the sidewalk, with a dog on a string, eating pizza and bumming cigarettes, the mad, the lost, the winsomely deranged. One of my recent favorites was a guy, youngish, clean, healthy-looking, pushing a baby carriage full of his belongings and singing, ‘The devil’s been defeated and you can all go to hell’. Everyone, including me, will also tell you that it used to be a whole lot worse.

These days there are also plenty of tourists walking on Hollywood Boulevard as well, and many of them look frankly bemused. They know they’re in Hollywood, they know that they’re on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame, and yet they don’t quite know what they’re supposed to be doing there. Taking the names of people you admire and putting them in stars on the sidewalk where people can walk all over them still strikes me as an odd and not very respectful thing to do.

And of course some people do far worse than walk. You can imagine my ambivalent glee when I discovered the existence of something called the Hollywood Entertainment District Public Urination Map, charting every act of public urination observed by the area’s security guards. You might think that part of a security guard’s job might be to prevent public urination rather than merely observe it, but it’s probably a hard thing to stop, certainly once the perpetrator is in full flow. No doubt a great deal of unobserved urination must go on, too. This is one of the unavoidable facts of walking on Hollywood Boulevard: anywhere you go not only has somebody walked there before you, somebody has probably pissed there as well.

If putting stars’ names in the sidewalk is odd, then taking photographs of them seems even odder, yet every time I go along Hollywood Boulevard I see people snapping away at the ground, at the stars, sometimes even filming them. And I’m always amazed which names they choose to photograph. I began to take note. In quick succession I noticed people photographing the stars of Sylvester Stallone, Michael Jackson, and Olivia Newton-John. I’ll let the historians of pop culture sort out the reasons.

The Walk of Fame runs east/west along the boulevard from Gower to La Brea, and north/south on Vine Street from Yucca to Sunset, forming a long, thin cross. The names at the far west end are Spanky McFarland and the Dead End Kids. At the eastern end it’s Benny Goodman and Stanley Kramer. On Vine Street we run from Jeff Chandler and Texas Guinan in the north down to Franklin Pangborn and Edward Small.

If you protest that these are no longer household names, then I suppose that might be the whole point. The names are written in concrete (actually brass set in terrazzo), but their fame is no more permanent than if it were written in water. The Walk of Fame might remind you that showbiz just isn’t the place to look for permanence.

I’ve often tried to determine whether there’s any logic to the placement of the stars. The current A-list is certainly represented in the forecourt outside Grauman’s Chinese and the Kodak Theatre, which is what you’d expect. And some of the stars outside the Capitol Records building on Vine certainly belong to recording artists, but by no means all.

Surely there’s more insult than irony in the fact that Edith Head’s star is outside Lady Studio Exotic Shoes. Why does the crew of Apollo 11 have four separate stars and why are they all at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine? And I wonder how Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney might have felt about having their stars placed outside the Frolic Room, a bar famous for its cheap beer and pickled eggs. But I imagine they’d be happier than Fritz Lang and Orson Welles, who for a long time were outside the entrance of the DMV until it moved recently.

There is one man who never walks down Hollywood Boulevard, and that’s a man with no feet and one leg who polishes some of the stars. He does it of his own volition and he doesn’t beg for money, but people who think he’s doing a good job slip him a couple of dollars. And there are other people who adopt the star of their particular hero or heroine and keep it clean.

Even so there are a great many more stars than there are people who want to look after them. You can see why some of the obscure ones get neglected, but there are some very big names whose stars are in need of a bit of spit and polish. Nobody is taking care of Ava Gardner or Liza Minnelli, as far as I can see.

If there’s a journey’s end for the Hollywood Boulevard walk, it’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where people congregate and pay a couple of dollars to have their pictures taken with a look-alike: a Marilyn, an Elvis, a Charlie Chaplin, a man in a Spider-Man suit, a woman dressed as Wonder Woman. Since changing facilities are limited on Hollywood Boulevard, most of the characters arrive already in costume, and in order to avoid commuting, many of them live in the area within walking distance of work. One of the best sights I know in Hollywood is to see Wonder Woman emerging from her apartment block on Las Palmas and striding up to Hollywood Boulevard, getting into character as she goes.

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The most extreme Los Angeles walker I know (and he is a kind of superhero) is called Mudman, a persona of the artist Kim Jones. In order to become Mudman, Jones coats his body in mud, pulls a thick nylon stocking over his head, puts on a foam headdress, and then straps to his back a large lattice structure made of wooden slats, tree branches, wax, wire, tape, sponge, and whatnot. Sometimes he also wears a glove on his left hand from which a number of long wooden spikes protrude all the way to the ground. The effect is visually and conceptually compelling, especially if you see him walking toward you on a city street.

Mudman is a living, walking sculpture, one that invokes a whole raft of visual associations. He looks grotesque yet vulnerable, sinister perhaps but not humorless. The idea of a man made out of mud is as old as the golem or Adam, and certainly Jones’s creation has elements of ancient religion, part shaman, part witch doctor, part Wicker Man. The structure on his back looks like broken wings, like a self-inflicted cross he has to bear.

But Mudman also looks like something out of pop culture, a blighted superhero, some kin of Swamp Thing or the Incredible Hulk, and it’s not clear what superpowers he has, if any, apart from being able to walk. The stocking, without holes for eyes or mouth, serves as a blank mask, more inscrutable than Batman’s or Spider-Man’s, though like them he definitely seems to be hiding something. At the same time this very blankness allows viewers to project their own fantasies and interpretations onto him.

Mudman made his first appearances in and around Los Angeles in the mid-1970^s, evolving out of a series of performances and installations, often in Venice Beach, where Jones lived at the time. Over the years he has walked as part of art events in San Francisco, Chicago, London, Rome, Germany, and Switzerland. Sometimes his own feces have been added to the mud, and in Rome he didn’t use mud at all, preferring yogurt and cottage cheese.

Mudman’s most famous example of art walking, however, consists of two twelve-hour walks along the full length of Wilshire Boulevard, about eighteen miles from downtown to the ocean in Santa Monica. He did the first walk on January 28, 1976, which was his birthday, from sunrise to sunset — then a week later, on February 4, he did it again from sunset to sunrise. Along the way he had the kind of encounters you might expect; a gas station attendant who wouldn’t let him use the bathroom, a cop who told him to keep moving, and an old lady who asked him, ‘Does your mother know you’re doing this?’

The walking artist is no novelty. Britain has two of the greatest walking artists in Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and although Jones knows their work, he says his own art is more influenced by the work of Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, and Joseph Beuys. And yet, for all the mythic aura surrounding Mudman, some of his origins are firmly rooted in Jones’s autobiography. Between the ages of seven and ten he suffered from Perthes disease, one of nature’s more savage little jokes, a condition that affects only children, restricting blood supply to the ball-and-socket joint at the top of the femur and causing the thigh bones to soften and break. It certainly puts a damper on any attempts to walk, and it’s not strictly curable, though it will pass of its own accord if the body is protected and allowed to heal itself. Bed rest, leg braces, and wheelchairs tend to be part of the process and Jones endured all of them.

Jones recovered in due course. One of his legs is still a little shorter than the other, he tells me, but that doesn’t stop him walking. Nor for that matter did it stop him enlisting as a marine in 1966 and going to Vietnam a year later. It’s not entirely clear whether Jones had a good or a bad war. We know that it involved doing a certain amount of walking, or at least marching, but his main job was delivering mail. Mudman looks like a combatant but also like a war victim, like one of the walking wounded.

I asked Jones if he had any plans to do a Mudman walk in the near future, hoping I might walk along with him, or at least observe other people’s reactions. ‘I still do Mudman’, he said. ‘I haven’t done it in a while, but I plan to do it as long as I can. My favorite time to do Mudman is when no one expects or knows that I’m going to do it’.

Of course if you’re in Los Angeles you could say that nobody ever expects anybody to do any walking at all, but the fact is, I now realize, that’s simply not true. The longer I live in L.A., the more I become aware that the city does indeed have a rich tradition of walking: political, literary, artistic, recreational.

There is an annual Cesar Chavez Walk, for example, at which you’re invited to ‘walk alongside Chavez family members, students, elected officials, celebrities, and community members.’ By walking you join ‘the call for social justice’. Who could be so churlish as to walk against social justice? When Angelenos wanted to protest against the war in Iraq, they closed Hollywood Boulevard, and thousands took to it on foot. When they want to demonstrate in favor of Latino immigration, as they increasingly do, then Wilshire becomes a pedestrian precinct.

There is a long short story by Jim Harrison called ‘Westward Ho’, in which a dubious Native American character known as Brown Dog attempts to cross the city on foot, from Cucamonga to Westwood, some forty-seven miles. Back home in Michigan, Brown Dog is known as a ‘walking fool’. There’s plenty of walking in the fiction of John Fante, and Charles Bukowski’s novels contain a lot more walking than you might expect, much of it done when the hero’s car has broken down.

There’s a man called Neil Hopper who runs the website walk inginla.com. It features austere, minimalist records of his walks around the city. A typical walk might be called ‘June 23, 2007 Bell Gardens, Pico Rivera, Montebello’ or ‘September 24, 2005 Normandie Ave, Venice Blvd’, and that will be all the ‘text’ he provides. It’s as inscrutable as any art piece by Richard Long. There’ll be a Google map showing his route, plus maybe half a dozen nondescript photographs showing, say, a liquor store, a stretch of freeway, a midcentury motel, a cool old car. Beyond that there will be no indication of why he walks or what he gets out of it. The fact that he doesn’t even attempt to articulate his obvious pleasure strikes me as oddly noble.

Despite everything, some of us Angelenos keep on walking. It seems fair enough to question the essential wisdom and sanity of certain L.A. walkers, but for some of us it’s not only a passion and a pleasure, it’s also a necessary activity that keeps us (more or less) sane. We would be a great deal crazier, and certainly more depressed, if we didn’t do it.

And so to return to the naysayers, to the likes of Jean Baudrillard and his assertion, ‘As soon as you start walking in Los Angeles you are a threat to public order, like a dog wandering in the road’, the fact is, it takes rather more than a bit of pedestrianism to disrupt the public order of L.A. As far as that goes, L.A. can pretty much handle a dog wandering in the road, too. Print the legend if you must, but don’t expect all us Angelenos to live it.