LA on my mind, I can't breathe

If there is a God, he skipped over Los Angeles. 

This is what I think as I’m standing in a driveway on Halloween night, ass-to-ass with at least a hundred other desperados and prematurely botoxed bon vivants trying to brave the Laurel Canyon chill through skimpy polyester costumes. We’re all aiming to get into the house that stands before us, hidden by a domineering wooden gate. Me and my gay, male, and mildy famous entourage link hands like baby ducks in a row so as not to get swept away and potentially lost forever in the cloud of vape smoke collecting overhead. The chatter does not quell as a young man already inside the party, who has elected himself head of security, jumps to the top of the fence. 

“YO! Anyone who doesn’t know the host, get out. For real.”

He’s failed at seeming threatening; nobody budges. The crowd pushes collectively forward toward the gate, desperate to see whatever the unseen host, a 22 year old influencer (and thus a popstar by proxy), has going on inside her home. 

“Noah, pull up your follower count. Show the bouncer,” I snidely say to my friend. 

I hear a scoff next to me. It came from a short girl in a Britney Spears costume no older than I was. 

“Do we really have to?” she asks, with an oh the humanity glint in her eye.

“Probably,” I respond, in jest. “One of us girls is gonna have to take one for the team and blow the door guy too.”

Her eyes widen. She would go on to post about this interaction on TikTok in an effort to expose whatever shady shit she thought was going on inside the party we were all shut out of, providing half a day’s worth of drama to the platform. Poor thing couldn’t tell I was joking. I break eye contact as a hoarse voice booms from the gate. 

“MAKE SOME FUCKING ROOM!” 

A red sea parts and through it comes a plasticy woman only a few years my senior who has more money than I’ll ever touch in my lifetime. A notorious alcoholic, she’s a beloved internet trainwreck; the digital age’s Mary Wollstonecraft or worse, a Courtney Stodden. Her bouncy gait is swallowed by the house and she is not to be seen again by the 80 or so of us who remain. My friends and I have been trying here for a half hour. What for? We order and wait for an $80 uber, split between the five of us, and head to do this all over again across town at another identical party.  What else do you have to do here?

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I find myself in a sort of codependent relationship with this city that raised me. Past its prime and constantly trying to convince everyone it’s not, the novelty of Los Angeles has somehow still not worn off on me despite how jaded I may sound. Underneath it’s hedonistic vanity, there is a special and storied culture made up of city natives who have withstood the transplants and new media titans that threaten to push them out. I feel indebted to this place. I want it to know there are still some people who do not seek to use it for its opportunities and then discard it, that there are some people who’ve been here from the start and seek to cherish it forever. I also worry the beast will become so large and all-encompassing and I will fall too deeply in love with it that I won’t leave when it hits me. Standing outside of the party that night I realized I am not above the opportunistic culture bred by this city, but instead am an active participant. I can scoff and chide and roll my eyes at it all I want, but at the end of the day I crave its inclusion. I try to rationalize partaking in it all by never getting in too deep. I don’t make the sponsored videos that keep the lights on in the content mansion, but I’ll overhear them being filmed while I’m crashing on the couch. I don’t social climb, but I do collect social currency. I keep myself suspended between judgment and indulgence. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully take the plunge. 

I don’t quite know how this all came to be, how everyone here has been touched in the same very specific way. From the old homeless woman following me around CVS pretending she needs money for a baby she cannot be pregnant with to the guy who deferred my measly attempt to plan a hookup by propositioning me for a “working lunch” instead, I guess we all really want something that’s just out of reach. Like the Greek myth of Tantalus, we are up to our asses in opportunity but at the same time completely starved of it. I think some type of deep sickness can come for you here, even if you’re careful. It’s like a parasite you absorb from the tap water that’ll feed on everything inside you so you always feel unsatisfied and deprived. You could try to run from it forever (or however long it would take to lap the city from end to end), but the thing that causes the emptiness is within you, always. No matter how fast you go and no matter what you do to yourself, it’ll coil its way around your guts like twine around a sausage, squeezing everything down and out until you’re thin and cold and fucking agitated. And what do you do when you like the feeling? When you start seeing the worm eating the shit out of your stomach like it’s a beloved childhood pet, where does that put you? 

It puts you back behind the counter at your minimum wage food service job. It puts you in front of a camcorder at a casting studio in Burbank for a job you don’t want but would probably kill to get. It puts you in a spare-bedroom-turned-podcast-studio where you’ll let a bit too loose on purpose to drum up fodder for yourself when the day you’re famous and feeling neglected by the Twitterverse finally comes. We’re banking controversies and clawing at ourselves for attention, ten pounds lighter in every photo and aimlessly padding down every street. We’ve got our public and our private and neither have met in a long while, because it’s scary to let the levee erode down far enough until those two selves converge into one. When the pressure gets too high and water finally rushes toward land all cold and white and hard, it’s an awakening; a fucking event. We revel in watching the facade crash down for others but dread the deluge that’s coming for us. But to at last let your own blood and sweat seep through the muslin overlay of perfection growing threadbare from years of ruching and manipulation in the name of upholding that coveted and paradoxical balance of out-of-reach relatability is the kindest thing you can do for yourself. Let go and let it all spill out. I want to learn to love the flood. You have to learn to love the flood. 

To live in LA is to die a bit too, to wither away and be reborn again and again in digestible increments that are taken in stride and performed like the projects we soft-launch on Instagram every other week. Even still, I know that I would not be who I am and I would not be doing what I’m doing without Los Angeles. I yearn for its acceptance and swear I miss it when I’m gone. I talk about how it built me like I’m a fucking 1950s gangster, but it’s true. LA taught me cynicism and resilience and the importance of standing your ground. My city changes as rapidly as I do, and we’ve watched each other come of age. It’s the friend that you dread seeing because she only ever complains but still makes you laugh harder than anyone else ever could. It’s the mold festering in a beautiful hunk of blue cheese. It’s the hand that chokes you out but caresses your face to apologize. I am of its essence; its multitudes flow through me and keep me glued together. One day I’ll be ready to leave, but a piece of me will never be able to resist its magnetism. I pray that it won’t forget me in wake of my inevitable return. 

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Two weeks after the party, I’m in the passenger’s seat of my father’s car. He grips the steering wheel, hot tears crowning in his eyes. Like most Gen X fathers, seldom does he reach a point of total emotional upheaval. With each sentence more frenetic and impassioned than the last, I don’t at all know how to deal with what I’m being given. 

“Thirty years. Thirty fucking years I’ve been here. I’ve seen hundreds of people leave this town. Not me. I won’t.” 

He stares at the road ahead. Desperate to avoid eye contact, my eyes zone in on the cuticle hanging from my left thumb’s nail bed. I pick at it using the longest of my neatly filed fingernails, the residual black polish leftover from my Halloween costume chipping onto my lap the deeper I scratch into myself. In this moment I wish to dig a hole in my hand large enough for me to crawl into and hide inside forever. His mouth opens again, and even harder I abrade. 

“I’m not a star fucker. I’m not. I’m a cool, amicable guy. Sometimes you don’t get whatever it is you wanted. I’m still trying. I’m going to make it work… it’s all gonna work out. You can count on that.”

We drive down Sunset Boulevard. The aptness is not lost on me, as it never is. Blood from my thumb dribbles onto my pants. 

“God help us all,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Or whoever.”