Asleep in the City of Angels

I fell in love with LA in theory first, reading Joan Didion before I understood what she was saying. I knew that her words felt perfect and I escaped into them in my bedroom in high school, but I didn’t know, exactly, what she meant by goodbye to all that, and this is the place where the kissing never stops, or why she wrote at length about the California murders that coloured the hot end to the 60s. 

I reread “Goodbye to All That” recently and thought about the migration from East to West that many New Yorkers and people not from there make to LA, when they get married, and they want to have a baby, or they think they might. They want land and space and time to live the next chapter of their life. I thought about what the city is and isn’t.

I’ve known LA in many shades, a rainy Christmas, a blistering July. I love it in that hazy way that you can always remember the face of your first love.

Source: Tumblr, artist unknown (https://slufoot.tumblr.com/post/126154823645/vogue-fairy-nymphet-the-king-of-coney-island)

I’ve smoked cigarettes outside the strip club, watched the lights change while driving down Sunset Boulevard, swam lazily in the pool at the Chateau Marmont. The Chateau is an old hotel from the 1930s where movie stars and rock stars and Hollywood stars have always stayed, and I remember, swimming laps around the pool, peeking through the doors of the private rooms along the perimeter, how Eve Babitz wrote about holing up and doing blow with her fellow party girls in Slow Days, Fast Company in one of its rooms. 

I’ve spent too much time in the sun and sipped warm beer on the beach in Malibu, watching the dog run up and down the broad strip of shore. I’ve gotten high in the dirty Venice sand while a sea lion flaps in the waves, watching dolphin tails crest through the cold Pacific water on the walk back to the parking lot, arms looped with my artist friend who loves the Doors and makes sculptures and likes to surf. I’ve wandered around the open air mall, the expensive grocery stores, opening glass doors in cool aisles of coconut yogurt, leaving empty handed. 

I’ve felt the depression of LA too. The longest I’ve spent there at once was a couple of months, by the end of which I started spending days on end shut in watching Game of Thrones, not really leaving the house, puttering around the concrete backyard barefoot in sweat shorts with cold coffee at 3 pm. My cousin and I would spend our afternoons pulling tarot cards and listening to country music on the pink balcony with her dog at our feet, sweating through thin cotton shirts.

It was in LA that I got the call that my dad was very sick, in fact, and living near me, back home. This was before I understood how blue the nights would be. I told his brother who called me that I was out of town, and I would visit when I was back, and then I called everyone else before speaking to him. 

“Do you think you’re maybe depressed,” I said without asking, chewing the skin around my thumb, sitting under the unrelenting sun on the pink balcony of my cousin’s rental home. I had just gotten in from LAX, and my skin was sour from the five hour flight. 

“Yes, I think maybe,” he replied, his voice was thin in a way that made me feel hollow. I knew it was the end, but I had to play pretend. 

“What if you talked to someone?” I suggested.

He said that he was speaking to someone for free at the hospital, and that it helped.

“Good, oh good,” I said, assuaging my guilt, preparing to end the call. “Well. I’ll see you soon.” After that I lit the butt of a joint and watched the palm tree blowing in the distance.

I first started going to LA the winter that I was twenty-one. I packed a bag, I had bad skin, I was too thin, I wasn’t eating, consumed by a crush that was only real to me, working nights at a restaurant, and finishing school with failing grades.

“Just come for a couple of weeks,” my cousin said to me over the phone. “Just come.”

I listened to music that reminded me of the boy who did not like me on the plane, smudged glasses on, looking out the window the entire time. I loved how long the flight felt, I wished that it wasn’t over when it ended (I always feel like this, in cars, relationships, planes, movie theatres, restaurants).

Photo by Georgia Mills

There’s comfort to dreaming in California. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion describes it as “the place where the kissing never stops.” She is referring in particular to a small school founded in 1965 by Joan Baez in Carmel Valley, where the students “worry a great deal about responding to one another with beauty and tenderness.” 

When I first came to California, I saw the beauty and tenderness in everything and everyone. I felt, as Didion describes Joan Baez, like “the right girl at the right time.” These also happen to be the conditions that lead to a great first kiss.

The right girl at the right time. I’m twenty-one in the back of a car leaving LAX, seeing the dream take shape out the car window: palm trees, hot pink begonias, blue sky, bright sun. 

Photo by Georgia Mills

You can dream your life away in LA, float along in a way that you can’t in New York, or Toronto. In gray cities that are weather dependent there’s a sense of alertness inherent to living there: is it going to rain, do I need a jacket. In walking cities like these, you move through the world in crowds of people going to work in the morning. There are consequences to getting lost in daydreams: forgetting an umbrella and getting caught in a downpour, not dressing for the weather and shivering in tight short strides walking down the street, falling asleep on the subway and waking up four stops away from the place you need to be.

In LA space and time are lost, left behind at the airport, the last connection to what’s real and cold before stepping onto the curb in the dry heat, with the palm trees that don’t belong here snaked between the buildings. Go out to dinner and there’s a B list celebrity at the bar. I can’t tell anyone’s age. Perfect bodies and tight skin and sun tans. One meal is forever over two bottles of red wine and a checkered tablecloth, after many martinis stumbling out of Jones’ Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard, stepping in and out of the 60s in dark, cool rooms, the Beverly Hills Hotel Bar and Sunset Tower and others like it, filled with slick hungry people.  

I’ve met actors and models and writers who are beautiful and don’t really look at you, unless you are Someone, who they want to speak to, and I’ve done that too.

With each trip to LA, I said goodbye to all that and hopped on a plane. I learned that LA is a terrific place to escape your life and run up your credit card, and it’s for these reasons that I often find myself sobbing outside of the airport when I land back home. I remember one February stepping out of the automatic doors in pink plastic slides from Target, feet bare, toes pedicured, to snow and gray and cold wet slush, crying like a baby. 

It’s more than the weather, obviously, or even coming back to reality. It’s the heartbreak of waking up from a Good dream, when your eyes land on the white flat ceiling above, and you remember that you can’t sleep in the drugged sweetness forever. On the plane to LA I fall asleep, and when I land I wake up in the dream. I never want it to end — the kiss, the sleep.

I woke up to reality when I got that phone call on the pink balcony.

After the call, the kissing stopped. The center would not hold. I was neither here nor there, I felt high and feverish all the time — head heavy, body buzzing, cold inside and hot to the touch. Caught between East and West. I had said goodbye to all that, in the callous way that you can when you feel young and free, and then all of that said goodbye to me. 

It’s been over a year since then, and I haven’t been able to get back to LA in the same beautiful, tender way. Like when your eyes open in the morning, and you wish that you could fall back into the perfect dream you were having moments before.

In the Dream, the kissing never stops, In the Dream —

Roses grow up the vines on the Spanish houses, and the sun glints off the blue water of the pool. At the hotel, by the pool, I’m smoking Camel cigarettes in June, tanning with oil in white cotton underwear, legs outstretched, toes painted with red polish resting on a small glass table. Perfect, beautiful girls dive under the water. Someone says that they saw the bleach blonde Australian singer here a few days ago, they were up until 6 am doing lines the night before, it was one of those perfect times, “it really is like that” they say later, driving me home. We were talking about celebrities and the magic of LA, it was raining at this point, foggy golden lights gleaming on the dark road.

Photo by Georgia Mills

I’m tucked away in the back patio of the little wine bar under the lemon tree, taking big sips of red wine, drunkenly twirling huge forkfuls of pasta, I haven’t eaten much today, I don’t eat much during the day every day that I’m here, then at night we get stoned and go to dinner. 

I sit in front of the stage at Jumbo’s Clown Room under red smoky lights, the new model I just met who I will be friends with on Instagram is dating the C list actor to my left, her mouth is agape at the stripper in the taxicab costume dancing to “Drive” by The Cars, when the opening notes come on, I will never forget this moment, how the sound reverberates through the dingy club, and how she says “I love this song,” breathlessly, I remember that she’s from Ohio or somewhere like that, and I can tell by the way she speaks to people.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion writes about how time stands still in the golden land, how each day a person is born anew, chasing the promise of a dream that will likely not come true. The dream itself is subjective. I realized mine the last time that I left: to wash my hair in the morning and make coffee and live the day as a person who is awake. I don’t know if you can be fully awake in LA. I would like to live in the dream there someday.