Work Text:
I keep telling myself I wasn’t supposed to stay this long. I was scheduled for twelve Earth months. Twelve turned into “just a few more days,” which turned into eight presidents (nine different terms, if we’re counting properly), which turned into the death of one Generation X actor who specialized in playing quirky, laconic drifters, which turned into me recognizing the faces of the baristas on Melrose.
This city makes self-extending lives out of nobodies. It’s like the atmosphere is sticky. Like if you inhale too much smog, you get glued here. Like after enough nights on Sunset, you belong to the star-lined and -crossed concrete.
I fall asleep on my rented queen mattress every night with that same pain behind the eyes. The ache that means my brain has been subtly re-mapped by this place, this density of people, this hot thin layer of air where the acids of failed dreams fall back in a baptism of sin.
Just after two in the morning, I stand outside the apartment building and I look down at my shoes. They have grown out at the corners, cheap leather flaking. They are technically biodegradable, which is funny, because I used to be the most dangerous sage on my crew manifest. Now I am buying biodegradable shoes and eating late night tacos from a food truck named after a pun.
Los Angeles is a dream incinerator. I breathe the destruction and creation in.
I meet a producer at a bar you definitely know. I won’t say the name. You’re allowed to picture it. We all have a picture of it in our heads: neon signs, graffiti in the bathroom that is almost too aesthetic to be unplanned, the girl in the leopard mini leaning over the outdoor ashtray, the drinks too sweet, the patio heater flickering. You know the bar.
He asks me what I do, and I tell the truth. “I watch.”
He laughs like it’s a bit. As if I’m playing a character like the Queen of LA on my bus route. LA loves a bit. LA will take absolutely any sentence and assume you’re angling for attention. He inhales his vape and exhales rank artificial fruit. “So you’re a director?”
“I’m not paid,” I say. This is also true, though not in the way he assumes. He tells me to come to his office Monday, but by Monday I will have forgotten his name. I will remember the exact pressure of his palm on my lower back, though, and all sixteen microscopic skin tears from his fingernails. Humans shed so easily.
I like nights here. The way it gets in my veins. There’s something deliciously violent about the light. The way the city glows unnaturally: sodium orange. LED white. violent-pink Instagram filters bleeding out of rooftop parties. It is not the proper darkness for thinking or authenticity, but it is exactly the correct darkness for staying.
I should go home. The command node embedded in my neck sends a ping once a quarter, reminding me. My ship has been parked in a dead dune behind a shuttered Air Force auxiliary field for forty-eight Earth years. If I walked into the desert right now, if I pulled back the camouflage shell, she would still power on. I think. Who knows?
A drunk girl in a silver dress trips over a scooter on Sunset and screams at the sky that she deserves better. I believe her. I believe every human who screams here that they deserve better. They’re right. They’re inconsequential in the cosmos. Brief lives gone yet immortalized by the last bad check they wrote.
I could leave. I won’t. I was never supposed to stay, but I am still in Hollywood. This city is my religion now. These broken, bright prophets are my data set. Your species with your awful want is my eucharist. I am fully contaminated by you. I know every color of your ruin. I’m not going home. Every night it feels like this place is very slowly making me more real. My own transubstantiation into humanity. Some part of me has decided I want to be here when you finally combust the whole thing from the inside — not as a scientist, not as a target, but as a fellow burning thing.
I pass the graveyard voices and see Elvis at the Chevron on the corner of Vine. He’s smoking a Marlboro and the thin orange ember in the dark looks like a tiny particle accelerator firing. He doesn’t look at me. He’s eating Funyuns. His hands shake. The light overhead flickers like bad 60hz. I log the data next to the Queen of LA and the troll on the corner. They looked at me and smiled. Neither are confused. Neither had anything left to lose.
In the predawn, two girls in leather skirts corner me in the ladies’ at the Frolic Room. I don’t remember their names, but one has stars glued to her temple. She says she’s an actress. The other says she’s a poet. They ask if I want to do rails in the stall. I tell them I don’t have a nose constructed for that delivery mechanism. They laugh like I’m being arch. They think I’m sardonic and playing a bit. They don’t have the brain chemistry to imagine I might actually not be from here.
On Hollywood Blvd, one of the homeless men screams about the snipers on the roof of the Scientology building. He believes in them like it’s gospel. He points right at me and says, “YOU SEE THEM, TOO!”
I do not see snipers. But I do see other things. Bright flashes of ephemera, gossamer floating above the city.
There’s a woman who sits cross-legged on the sidewalk next to a 9-1-1 location where Buck and Eddie almost kissed. She has a little cardboard sign that says GOD ISN’T HERE. She has exactly one shoe. She eats fruit from an open tub like an animal. She stares dead at my pupils and says, “Your aura is not chromatic. Your aura is not human.”
I could kiss her for that. She’s the first one that ever guessed anything close to true.
There’s a man who could be James Dean’s ghost. I see him once a month leaning against the red fire hydrant outside the old Formosa Cafe, hair shiny and pomade-set, jaw cut to matinee perfection. He has that same doomed softness in his eyes. He looks like he’s perpetually five minutes away from the fatal drive.
I want to ask him if he remembers dying. I don’t. He’d assume I’m speaking metaphorically. Everyone here always means metaphorically when they talk about death.
I go home at dawn to my subleased one-bedroom that smells like turmeric and mildew and eucalyptus from the cheap shower steamer bombs I buy on Insta. I sit on the floor and I think about how many planetary rotations have passed since my first day.
I was supposed to file an exit report decades ago. Instead, I’m here on this ugly plastic laminate floor thinking about Elvis eating Funyuns and that woman with one shoe and James Dean’s doppelganger and the two actresses who wanted to do drugs with me in the bar bathroom. All the lives which disappear in the light.
All the ghosts in this town aren’t dead. That’s the real trick. This is a place where history’s dead children walk among us in cheap human drag. It could be anyone if not for luck. Even the young who pass through temporarily leave changed. Their hearts stopped by joy and pain, sunshine and rain.
Every night, I tell myself I should go home. Every night, I unlock the deadbolt and step out into the hot metallic air and every night this city opens its cracked neon mouth and devours me again.
I am still in Hollywood, and I am never leaving.