I texted my friend at midnight: Are you still at the party? My friend said she still was there, she was in the garden, and there were a lot of familiar faces. I showed up and she was right, there were a lot of familiar faces. I’m constantly telling myself I’m an outsider. It’s an old story and I feed it affirmations, all literary based, like No One Belongs Here More Than You. It’s rare for me to feel a sense of belonging but that night, at a party of all places, I felt it.
I recently listened to David Sedaris read Miranda July’s Roy Spivey.
At the party, I saw a man dressed in jeans and a white shirt who wore a necklace. I wanted to ask him, Who are you? Why are you dressed like Steve?
“Did you notice the guy costuming as Steve?” a friend said.
“Yeah,” I said and laughed. We agreed that it was messed up.
Melissa Chadburn offers you social media advice and interviews Jodi Angel.
That evening I had spent two hours in traffic because of an overturned tanker truck and missed a reading but was on time to have drinks with a friend who was celebrating his birthday at a bar. It was the same bar Steve had chosen for goodbye drinks a couple of years ago.
Do you remember Steve’s Daily Rumpus emails about living in Los Angeles? I do. Once he wrote, “I have a tortured relationship with Los Angeles but here I am. Just for a little while.” In that same email he wrote, “I saw this eighteen year old girl, if she was that, waiting to order…She had to be anorexic but her face was like a doll. I’m not trying to make a comparison, I’m saying literally. It would take twelve minutes to describe how she was dressed but she was wearing stiletto heels, at least six inches. The shoes were black but the heels were transparent. Anyway, I have to get out of here, obviously.”
I think of that girl. I think of her on days when it’s smoggy, when I’m stuck in traffic, when things aren’t exactly looking up. During those times, I think of Joan Didion, too. I don’t think of Didion in the house on Franklin Avenue, bare feet on the hardwood floors, writing down license plate numbers and putting them in a dressing-table drawer. I don’t think of her in Los Angeles, avoiding the vortex effect, while Quintana is at UCLA Medical Center. I don’t think of her shopping for groceries in her bikini bathing suit or making a long distance phone call in a piano bar to a man in New York. That is how I thought of Didion when I was in my early twenties. Now I’m twenty-nine and think of how she worked at Vogue, was part of a literary scene, and then she was done with it and moved to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, she was getting older, she was making movies with her husband. She lived in a city made up of freeways, a city that wasn’t particularly easy or romantic.
This week I read Lisa Mecham’s Detritus and the newest getting pregnant with Michelle Tea article.
I’m in no hurry to figure out Los Angeles. I’m hesitant to offer my opinion of what I think about this city. For now, I like listening to what other people say. My cousin calls Los Angeles a shithole and my friend says nothing ever happens here except for lunch meetings, sometimes. All I want to tell you is that I should probably go to the beach more than once every two years and at the party, I wish the summer night air smelled like jasmine but it didn’t.
Some advice: Don’t be in such a rush. And try to be kinder.
