Los Angeles is a place you never really leave. The greenhouse gasses trapped by the mountains are burned into your skin by the sun; tattooed. Smog will seep out of your pores at night for decades. It’s a metaphysical space; check out anytime you like. The weather never changes; no matter what time of year you left it, it stays that minute forever, waiting for you to return. It is built on an Indian burial ground and consists of a thousand square miles paved like a parking lot. Asphalt fumes rise from below, and emissions from the factories that bracket it to the Pacific Ocean waft down from above in the form of man-made brownish-pink clouds. Sometimes I would smoke just to clear my lungs.
They say that L.A. doesn’t turn people bad; bad people go to L.A. in order to be bad. I think it just makes it impossible for you not to see these people, the L.A. people. Like a heroin addict who, dropped in an unfamiliar city, finds a way to score; L.A. people know their own. They don’t live only in Los Angeles; they live everywhere. Your mind doesn’t let you recognize them when there are higher forms of life around, but once you see them you can’t unsee them. You’re surrounded. Suddenly it is impossible to hide from the world’s dark aspect on the brightest day, because the man selling you the sunshine has something sharp beneath his smile. The desire to tear you apart? Indifference, were that to happen before his eyes? Maybe just that look of malnourishment like a sick animal that wants to consume everything, can’t assimilate any of it, and turns it all into waste. This isn’t fertile waste; it is a barren patch where nothing will ever grow. You can’t make something beautiful without the raw materials that comprise beauty, and you can’t make an omelet out of shit.
I’ve escaped, but I haven’t really escaped; wherever I go it is there already, waiting for me. I’m the apostate of Nihilism.
¶
We met through a friend at a concert, and I invited her to another friend’s concert. She came late to both. Now, being late is the moron’s way of being important, but when you don’t know someone you think their insensitivities are cute. We started talking because she was always going outside to smoke and started inviting me with her. When I took her number I said I’d call her so she’d have mine on callback.
She said, “And then I can stalk you from afar.”
“Why from afar?” I said.
¶
I wonder if not caring about anything ever made anyone happy. I wonder if anyone has ever been actually happy. Is actual happiness only theoretical? If happy is +1 and absolute desolation is –1, I wonder how close to either of those anyone has been, not counting the “fooling yourself” category of inflation. And what if you are the one trying to care when all else are doing their best not to?
¶
When she first came in, late, to my friend’s concert in her mixture of torn thrift shop and top shelf contemporary clothing, I didn’t recognize her. She was standing right in front of me, but it looked like she’d come in with this other girl. I felt a vague twinge of recognition.
“Do I know you?” I asked her.
She was wearing a different hat. I’d only met her once, after all.
¶
We were standing outside; she was smoking and laughing at my borderline or over-the-line offensive jokes. I was slowly realizing that she had been interested in me from the moment we met.
We talked about people we knew when we were in elementary and middle school that we didn’t have any contact with anymore. I think she brought it up. She said she was possibly going to track down the guy (she always said “guy,” it drove me crazy; what better way to convey interchangeability?) to whom she lost her virginity. Apparently they were drunk and fourteen and it was awful. She thinks they can do better now. I remember thinking this was an odd way to flirt with someone.
She told me about the AA meetings she began at 18 and how she doesn’t speak to men at them because she was “13th-stepped” by her first sponsor; she explained that means an older man sponsoring a younger woman for the purpose of taking advantage of her.
¶
Los Angeles is full of would-be Fausts working on the contracts for their souls, but the Devil never shows up to sign them. At least I have determined that I’m not one of them. That is only theoretical, however, as I was never actually given the chance. You can’t be certain what you would ever do until you’ve been tested.
¶
After my friend played his set, she went downstairs to the facilities. They were in the corner of a presently unused lower level of the club. After a moment’s deliberation, and another moment’s hesitation, I followed her down.
She was exiting the restroom as I rounded the staircase. I walked up to her, raised one finger, said, “I’m about to make a fool out of myself,” and kissed her.
How can I describe the importance of the kiss?
Before the kiss I saw her as a game. Her alluring and disturbing aspects were engaging and safe, for they were none of my concern. I saw the opportunity for a healthful and engaging affair, perhaps, a sort of amusement park ride that would thrill and threaten, but all without any actual danger; any danger to me, anyway, it seemed she might be a danger to herself. From the moment of the kiss I was no longer a spectator. I was involved.
How long did that first kiss last? A moment. It felt as though we were the only people standing in the middle of a great hall so vast we couldn’t see the walls around us or the ceilings above. It felt as though we were standing on the bottom of the ocean. As I pinned her to the staircase we noticed and dismissed that the darkened room had another occupant, an old drunk watching us silently, almost mournfully. I think some other people passed us on the way in and out of the bathroom. We weren’t exactly aware of our surroundings.
“What are you doing this week?” I asked.
“This, apparently.” She said.
I think I need to be in an unstable relationship right now, I remember thinking.
¶
She came over the next day and we became acquainted through an unusual game of her devising: one of us would tell a monologue about themselves and the other one would distract them. The distractions mainly consisted of the removal of clothing or its impending removal, coupled with the kissing of real estate other than or including the mouth. Only rated R. Well, NC-17. Upon the removal of her shirt (she rarely wore a bra, or underwear for that matter) I beheld not only her tanned and fit form, but also countless scars of slits an inch or less. She said she tanned for three weeks to conceal the scars after she stopped cutting. The scar tissue did not tan, making the slits stand out in greater relief.
She had to go home then for long-distance therapy with a remarkably expensive therapist subsidized by her mother.
¶
What she related to me in between distractions was summarily as follows:
Moderate poverty, unhappy parents, followed by sudden discovery of unforeseen financial wizardry by mother resulting in partial interest in several familiar national companies and a veritable deluge of money. Drop out and runaway at fourteen, followed by subsequent descent into alcoholism, substance abuse and mild self-mutilation coupled with frequent moving about to somewhat uninteresting towns in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Florida. Lesbian stints and gender bending, for several months she cut her hair short and went out dressed as a boy. Then AA and 12-step following parents’ divorce, it took on the third try. Endeth with her obtaining a Good Enough Degree and moving to Los Angeles to possibly attend the University of Spoiled Children or UCLA.
¶
People think constancy is being wrong and wrong and wrong about the same thing over and over and over. We’re lookingglass people.
¶
I went over to her place later that same day and essentially moved in. I didn’t sleep in my own bed for a week.
I called her up and said, “I’m going to come over there and do terrible things to you.”
She said, “I love it when you talk like you’re in a movie.”
¶
In Los Angeles, it is very easy to get by. Other than car expenses and rent, which gets you much more than in New York or Chicago, it is not difficult to stay afloat. Afloat is where you stay. After two, five, ten, or eighty years, you lift your head and realize your life has not evolved or progressed. Or you get a cramp while treading water and you drown.
¶
The question that arose for me over the next several days was: had she repented of her former life?
The stories she related to me while we spooned entwined on her bed began to take on the aspect of confession. They were stories about putting out cigarettes on parked cars and being beaten up by cops, getting thrown out of schools and buildings for drunkenness, sport-littering in national forests, drunk driving, trashing apartments and moving out in the middle of the night, etcetera. One could not escape the feeling that, whatever else might have afflicted this girl, in her quondam existence she was a real asshole. But was she telling me these things because she was ashamed of them? It is not strong, it is foolish not to be ashamed of what there is in one’s past to be ashamed of. That’s how I feel, anyway.
¶
The friend that introduced us, who once had a relationship with her himself, wrote a song about her called “Cactus Flower.” He dedicated it to me. He said, “She’s so pretty, but there’s thorns under there.” I wrote several songs about her myself, and I don’t write songs. She was the sort of girl one writes songs about, apparently. Quod erat demonstratum.
¶
We were running across Ventura Boulevard. We were jaywalking, something frequently ticketed in L.A. On the meridian she leaned over and whispered in my ear: “I love you.”
¶
I brought that up later, when she was acting like she’d never cared about me.
She said, “I meant it at the time.”
¶
“You’re wonderful.” She said.
“You’re gorgeous.” She said.
“You’re amazing.” She said.
“I’ve never felt this good before in my entire life.” She said.
“I love you.” She said.
How could I resist such a snow job? I’m only human. So I was left holding the bag.
¶
You don’t get numbers from people in Los Angeles because you’re never going to hear from them again. If you’re into futility you can try, but you’re really just wasting trees. They’re not going to call you and you’re not going to call them. After living in Los Angeles for more than a year you probably feel so boring you don’t want to inflict yourself on them, who knows but they’re thinking the same thing; they’re probably thinking they’re so incredibly interesting that nobody else is worthy of their company. You’re best off saying, “good seeing you, catch you later!”
¶
Each time I came to see her I would bring her something: a book, a CD, an origami starter kit. I loved giving her things. One time I brought her a dozen roses, a pretty standard gift so I thought. Nobody had ever brought her roses before. She cried.
¶
We climbed down from her loft and stood in her kitchen kissing.
I reached out to pluck an eyelash off her cheek and she flinched.
“Did you think I was going to hit you?” I asked.
“It’s what it looked like.” She said.
“Are you fucking joking? What possible reason could I have to hit you? I would never hit anyone! Why the fuck would I ever hit you?”
“I’ve asked myself that about guys before.”
“Ummm…okay. I’m not sure what to say to that other than that I would never ever fucking hit you! Under any circumstances. No matter what you do. Ever.”
“Okay.” She said, but it didn’t end in one of those clinches where I comfort her and tell her that her past life is over now. When she said it, she almost shrugged.
I don’t know which was more upsetting and disturbing to me: that she thought I could ever hit her; that she had obviously been hit before; or that it would have been somehow expected or accepted if I had.
¶
There is an unspoken contract, without which no human relationship is possible. It is a pledge.
It goes like this: I swear that I will not intentionally harm you, or allow you to come to harm through carelessness or neglect.
¶
Her bed was in a hanging loft looking down on the layout of her apartment. I was still in bed; she was making progress on a new pack of cigarettes. I leaned over the edge of the loft to look down at her. We were talking about getting what we want.
“I’ve received everything I’ve ever wanted,” She said.
I found that a little improbable.
“I hardly ever get what I want,” I said, “and when I do usually it would be better if I hadn’t.”
“Have you ever tried just asking for what you want?”
“I’m pretty direct, as you may have noticed.”
“No, not things you want from people.”
“I’m not very religious…as you may have also noticed.”
“And I am?” She said, “I asked for you.”
This…gave me pause.
“You asked for me?”
“You are all the things I asked for, but those things happened to come in a package and personality I wasn’t expecting…you.”
“I do try to be unexpected.”
So I asked.
God wasn’t in, or he was screening, so I left a message.
¶
In Los Angeles, they seem to have meters that can detect if you really want something or really care about it. Caring is taboo. Therefore, it is uncool by association to give anyone anything they care about, even if they deserve it, especially if they deserve it. The only way to get it, what you want, is to honestly not want it at all. Then they’ll carry you through the streets and put your face on their pre-ripped T-shirts. Then they’ll give you the world, not that you’ll notice. If you keep caring they’ll either torture it out of you, or, if they don’t manage to, they’ll get bored with the torture and kill you. I have always been out of fashion.
¶
When she began keeping her eyes closed during sex, I knew the end was near: when you close your eyes everybody looks like darkness. She was beginning the first pressure on the manual override switch to turn off the connection. She was disappearing into a hole in her head. When she looked at me I had this strange feeling that I was being remembered.
She said to me, “Are you strong enough for me? People around me get hurt.”
I said I am, but that being strong doesn’t mean you can’t be hurt; it often means that you are willing to chance being hurt again and again and will not let that deter you from trying to get what you want. I didn’t interpret what she said as meaning that when she becomes too involved she will intentionally hurt people to drive them away.
¶
I said to her: “I’m wonderful. I love you. And I’m here.”
It was the best case I could make.
¶
It is a sad moment when you realize that all the words you used before with other people you will use again. It is inescapable. You have to kiss them with the same mouth. There are only so many configurations two people can sleep in and she’s slept next to people before. So have you. You call her “baby.” She’s been called “baby” before. So have you.
You have to kiss her skin without feeling their lips.
¶
I said to her, “You build up a collection of debts to people due to your past actions. You can’t make all of those right with the people you owe, but you have to make them right somehow or you’ll never have anything worth having. Even if you can’t work on your backlog you can’t just keep adding more to it or you’ll reach a point where you either scratch the whole thing and become one of the garbage-people, one of the people that make the world shit, or you’ll try to pretend it isn’t there but it’ll get you and it’ll fuck up everything you ever try to do. It’s not that you can’t cut and run forever, it’s that it is so easy to cut and run forever. If you convince yourself that it doesn’t matter, you’re going to rack up more debts than you can ever pay back in one lifetime. Why not get started now? See, Karma works. Before you can be happy you’re going to have to pay for every ant you crush, every cigarette butt you litter and every person you fuck over. The thing is: the only person there to make you pay is you.”
¶
I said to her, “You have a choice. You can be an amusement, an attraction, like a theme park ride: ‘Take the ride: she’ll make you feel wonderful and she’ll make you feel alive; then she’ll make you feel miserable and alone, but she’ll make you feel. You’ll get over it soon enough and it will make you realize how much you want something real. Everyone should do it once!’ You can keep pretending you’re getting what you need out of doing this over and over again. Or you can take responsibility and begin to have things worth having.”
¶
Your love is yours and you give it. It can’t be taken. It can be mutilated, maimed and perverted. It can be tortured, mocked and scorned. It can be aborted, but only by you. It does not die easily and it fights back viciously.
¶
“You’re beautiful.” I said.
“I know.” She said.
“I don’t care if you know. I wasn’t telling you that you think you’re beautiful, or that you are generally classified as ‘beautiful.’ I was telling you that I think you’re beautiful. You can acknowledge it with a thank you or a nod of your head. You’re beautiful.”
“I know…thank you.”
“No, thank you. It’s always nice, however grudgingly, to be acknowledged as an individual.”
¶
She said, “I don’t think I really believe in love. In being in love.”
She always made her excuses in advance. I could even see at the time that this contention would in time be repurposed and used as a weapon. There was nothing I could do to stop that.
“I’m too in love with you to care if you believe in it or not,” I said.
¶
“Have you more often been the lover or the beloved?” she asked me.
“The beloved. I don’t often end up with the people that I like more.”
“I’m the exception?” she asked coyly.
“No,” I said, “I think you’re in love with me, but I don’t know if you’ll admit it until it’s too late.”
¶
I was lying next to her in her bed, her back to me, right arm through the hole created between her neck and shoulder and the bed, hand up to her side, other hand across her belly. This was the way we would sleep beside one another. I would wake up at dawn and lay there for hours holding her and watching her sleep. This day I put my hand over her heart and I could feel it. I could feel that it was blocked.
¶
In Los Angeles, everything is the same. There is no scale for beauty because there isn’t enough variation. How can one day be lovely and another miserable when they look exactly the same? The only beautiful days in L.A. are the few brief days after the infrequent rains; they drive the smog away and for a little while you can imagine it is a wonderful place to live.
¶
I said, “I want to repeat, because I’m not sure that you are truly hearing it: I love you. I love you and I am in love with you. I don’t know the other people that you’ve been with throughout your life and what it meant when they said those things to you and you don’t know it about mine and who has said them to me. I love you.”
¶
I do this thing where I don’t allow myself to protect myself from things.
¶
“You know what the really depressing and pathetic thing is,” I said, “we really do love one another.”
¶
In Los Angeles, people don’t enforce on one another. People are friends for the purpose of mutual deception. They don’t really want your real opinion on anything, even when they ask you for your real opinion. Mutually assured disaffection. You won’t tell them they’re too old for the part, and they won’t tell you you’ll never make it and should probably apply to law school. If you want to be their friend you have to tell them the things that are going to actually benefit them, but if you want to stay their friend you can’t. If you want no more friends, just say the thing that everyone is thinking.
¶
She was lying on her couch. She pointed to the incurve of her belly by her hip. “Kiss me here.” I did. She pointed to her left cheek. “Kiss me here.” I did. She turned over and pointed to the space between her right shoulder blade and spine. “Kiss me here.” I did. Left side of the small of her back. “And here.” Right inner thigh. “And here.” Left inside wrist. “And here.” Right cheek. “And here.” Closed eyes. “And here.” Top of the right foot. “And here.” Back of the left ankle. “And here.” Left pinky fingertip. “And here.” Right side where the shoulder meets the neck. Underside of right breast. Left incurve of her belly. Right instep. Two inches below her navel. Left aureole. Mouth.
I did.
¶
She ended it over the phone.
“I loved you.” I said. “I waited for you while you vacillated, even though I knew you were going to cut and run. I could have ended this a week ago; I asked you if you wanted to and you were too much of a coward to do it without enough distance to fool yourself, so you strung me along. I waited because I wanted you and I wasn’t going to gamble on these stupid games. I didn’t see the point: I wanted you so I didn’t fuck around about it. I waited for you; I wasn’t going to walk out on you to save myself or to prove a point or to make sure you feel as awful as you’ve made me feel. There was no point in any of that. Didn’t I deserve better than this? More than a phone call? More than more cowardice?”
“You don’t deserve anything,” she said. “You think you have some kind of rights over me? Because you say you love me?”
I said, “Yes. I do. Maybe not in the sense you mean, but I do. I hold you accountable. You will never square this with me. I do not forgive you.”
¶
In Los Angeles, fake is better than real. If a breast isn’t fake, then what’s the trick? And if it is realistic enough to pass for a real breast then it is no better than a real breast, and real breasts don’t cost anything. It is for this reason that so many out prowling the beach look like distant suntanned or fake-n’-baked cousins of Frankenstein’s Monster. The recognizable signature nose of Dr. So-and-so from Beverly Hills, coupled with the famous breasts of Dr. Such-and-such down in Newport Beach. At first glance this would seem to be some trademarking plot on the part of plastic surgeons, but if so then the entire metropolis is complicit. The resulting aesthetic postulate: fake is better than real. In life, and in relationships as well: if it’s real then where’s the angle? Where’s the escape hatch?
I knew a girl from New York named Abigail. Her parents sent her to a very expensive liberal arts college, and then she moved to L.A. Her parents pay for a swanky apartment in Santa Monica and her SUV. She has not worked since college, two years. She took a baking class, which makes baking her only appreciable skill. Her new ambition is to become a plastic surgeon because before she became debatably beautiful she, as she put it, hated herself, perhaps with sound judgment. Having no actual qualification to be a plastic surgeon, she is presently encountering difficulties in gaining acceptance to medical school.
Her favorite sport is to go to a bar; find a guy that shows interest in her; feign interest for the duration of the entire evening; then give him a fake phone number. Second favorite is to set up trysts at difficult to reach locations at inconvenient times and not to show up. Sometimes she watches from a safe distance, but she likes it better when she is somewhere completely different doing something entirely unrelated.
You can’t make this shit up.
¶
The end came about in this way: she was speaking with me about patterns, about how she gets into the same relationship over and over again. She said that I was the only person she’d wanted to be with that didn’t conform to her pattern. She admitted that she always has one foot out the door and withdraws when she becomes too involved.
She said, “You are the most essentially different person I have ever met in my entire life.”
She said, “You are important to me.”
She said, “I wanna try to break the pattern with you. Will you let me try?”
Of course I said yes, I loved her.
Sometimes when we are not given the materials we need to build ourselves the same cage over and over, we take materials not suited to the task and play “round-peg/square-hole.” Within days she withdrew and I found myself cast in the roles formerly filled by her other male mistakes. One day I would be cast as a hanger-on, more into her than she was into me; the next day I would be just a manipulator who wanted to control her for my ego’s gratification; the next day I would be only interested in her for sex and only upset she was shutting me out because she wouldn’t sleep with me anymore.
I weathered these storms, but my quiet protestations that none of these situations resembled reality were twisted and heard as the last gasps of a hypnotist losing his powers.
Then she cut off communication and didn’t let me know where she was or what she was thinking for a full week. I sent her a letter asking, “Are we finished?” No reply. During this week I would lie down, stand up, sit, walk around; watch movies, at home stopping them after twenty minutes when I could not concentrate any more, in theaters walking out after the coming attractions, open books, stare at the pages and put them down; walk along Ventura or Sunset through the underpasses saturated with exhaust past the people talking to themselves; go for long drives and forget where I was headed, driving for hours going from freeway to freeway or sitting blankly in endless gridlock. My mind could not focus on any one thing. Even on her. To think of any one thing was too painful. At night I would lie awake staring at the ceiling and thinking hard about nothing at all except occasionally that with every passing moment she was performing the act of not calling me, not reaching out to me, not connecting to me. My thoughts were white noise. I waited.
¶
It is exhausting to be in love with someone. It takes a lot of energy to keep up. The more energy goes into it, the more anxiety you feel about it. Then you might start to suspect that you have put yourself in someone else’s hands and that they have dropped you. You barely realize that you’re falling when you hit the ground and shatter. You realize that no matter what they said or what they promised, you were there all alone and you leapt into unbroken air.
¶
“I don’t think you’ll ever become the person I’m in love with.” I said.
“I would tell you to go to hell,” I said, “but I think you already live there.”
“You’re going to do just fine here.” I said.
¶
Sometimes I go back there, to Hollywood or to the Valley. I drift off in the middle of a conversation and I’m there. It feels more real than dreams: driving down Van Nuys in the early hours of the morning; creeping along Mulholland Drive, the city below out of focus from the haze in the atmosphere; the time I took a wrong turn heading out to Long Beach before dawn and wound up lost around Terminal Island, a place that looks like the workers’ city in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” miles of humming metal superstructure laced with amber sodium ion lights. I disappear from where I am and I’m there, in the place with no weather.
I open my eyes and it’s still there.