Grand tours: The Buick stops here

Great writers and their literary adventures. Hugo Williams in Santa Monica

How can you be nostalgic about a place you've never been to? Nostalgia is what the poet Hugo Williams was suffering from the first time he went to the United States on a poetry-reading tour in 1978. The tour was unsuccessful by his own admission, but the colourful journey is recorded to hilarious effect in 'No Particular Place to Go'. Born in Windsor in 1942, Williams was weaned on the America of jazz, Jack Kerouac and psychedelia. This was the world he was searching for when he set off at the age of 36, but what he got was a crude encounter with the post-Pill, grab-it-while-it's-going America on the doorstep of the grasping Eighties. Williams's latest collection of poetry, 'Billy's Rain', won him the T S Eliot prize in 1999. His 'Collected Poems' are published by Faber this month.

Santa Monica is the end of the western world. The freeway goes straight on to the pier and the pier sticks out into the Pacific and that's it. There's a road on the pier and wonderful old Fifties cars cruise up and down it, massive rounded bodywork almost touching the ground. Cars as well as people last longer on the Coast as they don't rust so fast.

There is fairground music coming from the pier, so I walk along it and come to an ancient merry-go-round house. This must be where The Sting was filmed. I remember April telling me that when she was growing up in Los Angeles she used to think that everywhere in the world had a film being made in it.

Bright red flowering trees called bottle-brushes express my happiness to be wandering around this seedy grandiose suburb where people still walk a little. The peeling Regency blocks on the front, the pier, the vine-laden palisades, remind me of Brighton. Here at last is the acceptable face of Los Angeles! Cross the Corniche by a footbridge, step over a miniature railroad, thread between bulging beach huts where whole families seem to be living, on to the pebbly beach – smell of tar and fish and salt. On the prom under the pier are all manner of ordinary and extraordinary folk having fun: students and blacks and Chicanos: the old, the halt and the strange. A rubbery black boy bounces his football under my nose then weaves away. Here are cross-breeds with spray-dyed Zulu pompadours, mini-skirted runaways in grown-up make-up, anorexic androgenes, fatsos in raggedy dark blue. The human form is manifested in such variety you'd think gravity was a different law to each of them.

Ominous Hare Krishnas settle like great pink laying-hens on the lawn outside the Life Guard Association where pensioners are playing chess. Genuine destitutes spread their last possessions beside the prom, while effeminate tourists from up the coast glide by on roller-skates. At Muscle Beach the children gawp through railings at seven-stone weaklings laying bare painful new protuberances like martyrs exhibiting wounds. An s/m blonde in studs poses shrieking with an exhausted-looking Popeye.

A personal friend of the Prince of Wales

A mile along the front from Santa Monica is the resort of Venice, home of Alternative LA, where the search is for Selfdom and the transport is by beach-buggy.

A crowd has gathered round an old man who is struggling to escape from a mountain of chains. They fall from him and he looks around for a volunteer to be carried across a bed of broken glass.

"How about you, sir?" he says, pointing directly at me.

"No-no," I tell him, trying to hide my toffee apple, "I don't ... I haven't ..."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe our volunteer is British. Give him a hand now. Where you frum, sir?"

"London."

"I'm British myself, you see. I was a personal friend of the Prince of Wales. I showed General Eisenhower how to breathe correctly. You see this ring? Douglas Fairbanks gave me that. Are you satisfied?"

"Not entirely."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, l shall now carry this young man across the Atlantic Ocean back to his native land ..."

The ancient picks me up in his flabby old arms and staggers with me towards the bits of broken glass. There is a crunching sound and I shut my eyes lest his naked feet should suddenly absorb what they are supposed to withstand. Dropping my toffee apple, I cling to his shoulder, trying to take some of my own weight. When he has finished he lies down on the glass "for a rest" and I have to stand on him.

Readers can order a copy of 'No Particular Place to Go', published by Gibson Square, for £7.99, including postage and packing within the UK. Contact Gibson Square Books, 15 Gibson Square, London N1 0RD (020-7359 2316).

Follow in the footsteps

Freeway and easy

Santa Monica always has been a holiday town – wealthy folk from Los Angeles were buying second holiday homes here in the late 19th century. When the Santa Monica freeway opened in 1966, it was the fulfillment of a dream for Americans; to be able to drive their beloved automobiles right across their country, literally from sea to shining sea.

Roll it

The beach is the star of any visit to Santa Monica and lying in the sun is the most popular pastime. But you could hire a pair of skates and cruise along the cycle path that runs from Santa Monica to Palos Verdes with Spokes and Stuff (001 310 393 9778) at 1700 Ocean Avenue for $15 (£10) an hour. Or try surfing, with Campsurf (www.campsurf.com). Be warned, the sun-bleached dudes have gone corporate and it will cost you $100 for one and a half hours of tuition. Book online.

Muscle in, chill out

The famous Muscle Beach in Santa Monica was shut down in 1959, but it moved to nearby Venice (001 310 399 2775). A day's membership is a very reasonable $4. Or chill out at the Yoga Garden Studios (001 310 450 0133) where a two-hour session costs $35.

When will I be famous?

Visit the dream factory with a tour of Universal Studios (001 818 508 9600) in Burbank costing $38.

Getting there

Virgin (0870 220 2782, www.virgin.com/holidays) offers seven nights at the Sheraton in September for £999 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights, transfers, a car and a one-day pass to Universal Studios.

Callum Watkinson