Los Angeles

or another lifetime when…

It’s hard to watch Los Angeles burn. I almost moved there twice. In the summers of 2014 and 2015 when I went there to start a book. And in the winter of 2020, before the world shut down, and I lived in Culver City for months, running past the Sony Studios lots every day, seeing if I wanted to stay there.

One of the sets was of brownstones in the West Village. I’d measure how badly I needed to escape Manhattan when I ran past them. Which felt surreal. One: because I was the only person running on the streets. And two: because LA is such a mirage.

It didn’t surprise me to see New York there. To see anything really. I knew I was in a man-made city built for lore and the movies. That its vastness was exactly why they chose it.

I grew up reading about Los Angeles because to me, as an immigrant kid, it was the other American city. LA and New York. Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, and John Fante’s novels about the place are etched onto my brain. There’s a strange unease I feel there much like the characters of those books.

So close to the edge of the world, the most western point really, next to the largest body of water, with the warm winds whipping through the city—and one can really feel them on the way to Palm Springs (another place I got attached to, spending two birthdays in a row there, and writing through them)—it’s all enough to make you go a little nuts.

And that’s why I wanted to move there. The cities that have drawn me in often have their own mythos and intensity. I’ve felt this way about Paris. London. Never San Francisco. Never Oakland or Chicago.

And it’s almost indescribable how a place can lure you with its darkness. No one ever moves because they’re looking for a worse life. But I remember thinking that Los Angeles is very lonely. All the months I spent there, I left with the same number of friends I had when coming. Nothing seemed to change. Not the weather or what people did or where they lived or how they lived there.

I used to hook up with this guy who made film trailers in West Hollywood. For years. Whenever I passed through there I’d just hit him up. And there he was. Same haircut. Same apartment. Still West Hollywood. Still trailers but a different movie.

That would never happen in New York, I told him once. What, he asked. I didn’t want to say it, but it felt like somewhere you could get stuck. It felt easy to stay there because life was slower, better, and more beautiful on the surface.

In Los Angeles time passes differently. That strip of gay bars in Weho is forever in the late 80s and early 90s. From the music to the aesthetic to the type of guys you see there. It makes sense. Those were America’s most glossiest decades. Also a time when the film industry was booming.

I know everyone is an actor in New York but in LA you have to drive at least twenty minutes to see another person acting. I would do it all the time going to AK bar. People used to think I was crazy for going from the west side to the east side often.

When I was renting a small duplex in Venice, I met a skater off of insta and we’d hang out days—all day—just doing nothing. Going from parking lot to parking lot to skate park. And it felt like the same day really. It didn’t matter if it was Monday or Tuesday.

I tried to write about that then, in those poems, but I didn’t love it enough to leave New York. That’s a tall order. It’s such an American place, LA. I can’t help but be fond of it. It makes me want to start again in a good way. Which I suppose is a great reason to move there at some point.

My friend R got offered $200 once, randomly walking on Sunset. For what, she asked. You know for what, the guy laughed. Then we ate at Mel’s and watched the cars go by. I hope the rates have gone up, at least. You can’t do much with two hundreds. It’s all quite wicked. That place. It’s so famous and nowhere.