I wish her a happy birthday because she wears a silly turquoise and gold tiara and they are the first words I speak in the U S of A. My mind feels stupid and I smile like a halfwit. I decide I love Americans, even the rude ones. Especially the rude ones.
LA is hot and dark and it smells dirty. All the city’s a film set and I am Jennifer Lawrence. Am I the modern Shakespeare? Kate Winslet — Gweneth Paltrow — all passing through my head like a beauty parade in Miss Congeniality. Congeniality. That’s me: I make life congenial for other people, and I am not quite sure where that leaves myself, me, I.
I cancel my expensive pre-booked taxi and ask some security guy in a dark suit how to take the bus to the Uber depot. I repeat my question, cautiously, all softly-spoken and sour-apple British, wondering if he heard my cut glass accent over the honking horns and must and big yellow suitcases and falls-apart emotions of the airport terminal. “I’m listnin’, lady, I heard ya” he drawls. His voice sounds like cold foam on top of coffee, just before you add the sprinkling of sugar to coarsen it up. (The man is large and leather skinned and has eyelashes thicker than fat black caterpillars). There are some cats in a plastic blue basket to my left, wheeled on a suitcase trolley by a man in a rainbow baseball cap who looks perennially pissed off. A retired couple bicker in the seats behind me; I believe their holiday to Germany had reached its natural end. They revert to looking at their phones, poking at the screens with singular extended forefingers in some odd kind of synchronicity which makes irony out of their tight, untalkimg mouths. I wonder whether all married couples eventually become half of themselves (what’s mine will never be yours), morphing like wet watercolour paint into the dripping parts of an unfinished soul.
I spell the address for the taxi driver and think Christ I am going to die. E — for egg? R — for road, like a road (I gesture though the windscreen to the dusty tarmac track which unfolds before us, a black brick road in my yellow brick cab). My tired brain runs hamster-like through child-friendly nouns. I consider leaping out, but my pink suitcase, my writing, my bear, is in the boot. I see palm trees and think I really need to brush my teeth. The fur has grown on my tongue in a way that scratches like an old plaster in chlorine.
He insists on driving with the windows down, but I like the breeze in my hair.
The drive from the airport is one of my favourite parts of any trip. It is a peep-hole into the city, at a random unknown hour of the day. In India, it was all babies in the street. In New York, it was picket fences. In Australia, it was service station sushi. In LA it is a Cadillac with a blown exhaust, and blackout windows with a middle finger sticker pasted to their centres. A belly button hole growing like a turnip’s root from the city’s homeless heart. I see only three stars in the City of Stars but the moon is so luminous that it floodlights the dark etches on the sky.
I awake for good at 4:20 in the morning and brush my teeth for the third time in six hours. My bare feet are noiseless. I have not yet located the sea; LA is a darkened mystery outside penthouse suite windows, flashing occasionally in the daring red of a ferris wheel or paramedic blue of an emergency. It feels as though someone has laid all the toys under the Christmas tree, then covered them in a musty green blanket: there are moth holes; I see shapes, high rises of presents backing onto vast delves of midtown park land, a tumbletown of promise all wrapped up and tucked in for the night, moving slightly at the touch of my delving fingertips. I pour myself a tall glass of ice water from the door of the fridge and sit in the dim light of the countertop, wondering where the mountains are. I have sipped bone broth in the sky and discussed the Brontës outside the single cubicle of an airplane loo. I refuse to calculate the time in London, or to reply to messages from people in a living world. I see a lit sign for ‘Ocean’, and the arrow points both ways. I take a picture like it’s the most American thing I’ve ever seen, like my camera roll won’t soon be full of 7-Eleven signs and glaring In-n-Out burgers and crosswalks in the middle of a freeway. I take a picture of the kitchen for good measure, and return to bed.
The dawn is yellow. My tiredness has become a headache like screen doors behind my forehead. I want to keep the insects out. I have a repulsion to food and a starving need to eat. It feels like the entrails of a hangover, cooking on high heat in a frying pan. A metal and salt stench fills the air, livers and kidneys drugged and drugging and saturating in their grip of my soul: I cannot move, but my mind is bored doing nothing. I am in La La Land and there is bird poo on the window and the sun is bright bright orange. I find the sea. I open the doors. I open all the kitchen cupboards, to make myself feel at home. (I close them all again, leaving a knife and a fork on the countertop. In the morning, I will not remember where they came from).
I lick brown mascara onto my tired eyes like a cats’ pink tongue into a bowl of milk. It makes me think of Provençal corners of terracotta tiled kitchens in the forgotten pockets of weathered France where everything smells of onions and blackberries and daisy chains and cow dung on mist coated fields.
I settle for house granola because I am testing the limit of my stomach. I might have to come back for their beef tallow burger. The barista is beyond cute – there is no other word – which doesn’t help. His eyes are green, sparkling and dopey all at once, like a tired child at someone older‘s birthday party, or a pretty flower girl asleep at the table at a wedding. His hair is curled and wet in that attractive way that implies he either just stepped out of the shower or that he hasn’t been home since the night before the night after. He looks young, and I want to touch him somehow. Two large Australian men sit down next to me and break me out of my fantasy. I pull a draught of hot coffee through my teeth, regarding them quizzically over the rim of the white mug.
Cinnamon and date syrup make excellent morning bed fellows. I picture them – then choose not to; I let them rest.
(Everything is ‘Haus’, like it’s a brand or a dietary requirement label, like Kosher or Halal. None of the rest of the café is German in the slightest – except, perhaps, the fact it’s called ‘Monica’). Food has alerted my previously deadened senses. They had been stunted, clipped, the wings of a bird, the stem of a rose (cut sideways), the burnt-out snub of an old woman’s tired cigarette, her yellowing hand folding with age like the flakes of a croissant, speckled with toasted almonds, flecked with cocoa. I feel good: I am in LA, eating sweetness and drinking bitterness dusted with spices. Life feels acutely unreal – and it is all mine. I think I could drink another gallon of coffee but fear my circadian rhythm might not thank me. I sip cool water instead, hear an American voice and catch myself smiling. Brooklyn – chai place – ‘boarding on the beach. I see plastic surgery which has erased every trace of history from her taught face, and croissants piled behind a glass counter which look the way her face should do. They resemble her neck (cruelly, and foolishly, neglected). I think of Nora Ephron. I think I am one of the many girls he sees every day; affected only because we don’t know how to be otherwise, falsely self-assured, always with passionately full baby-like lips and slightly puffy under eyes. I wear my sunglasses on my head. He has cleared my plate; I should leave.
You could walk for miles and go nowhere at all.
The traffic is a constant parade of black ants, a procession which occasionally speeds into finish-line sprints but which generally jogs with the purposefulness of nowhere in their satnavs, the marathon runners on wheels. At night, they curl up, shrivel and die completely, retreating to their hole empty bug-beetle shells which they discard, belly-up, along the sidewalks. LA is silent at night. It is as though in those dark hours she is holding a note, making semi-permanent the inhale-exhale between the competition of music and the commencement of applause. In that whisker, wine swill, ring twist, I sleep.
I am in a driverless car listening to ambient Disney music and am told to “buckle up”. I hadn’t realised they can’t take the motorway, so it will take me an hour and a quarter to cross town. No part of me minds. “Sing your heart out”, she says. “We’re not listening”. Whenever I catch myself smiling I glance at the rear view mirror. I am expecting a taxi driver’s cat-like eye, a single raised eyebrow reflected against the edges of a headrest, to catch my own. I am expecting to look coyly away, to cover my smile by looking out the window, embarrassment painting my cheeks the way the sunshine currently is. Wish I could be, part of that world. There is no Taxi Driver (sorry Scorsese). There is no cat-like eye, no raised eyebrow, no feeling that I need to pretend. I make no small talk: how long have you been doing this? Should I visit the aquarium? Instead, I sing. Loudly, and off-key, but I sing. I am going for cawfe. Another Waymo drives past. I want it to flash its lights, flicker its eyelashes in recognition, raise its hand in mutual unspoken salutation. It does not. My heart feels a little sad, at that. Then I see the Hollywood sign, and squeal. My hands fly to my mouth. I have no need to be embarrassed. I keep squealing. I clap like a delighted two year old. The car pulls over for a firetruck. That, above all else, seems incredible to me.
I travel by taxi and scream at the Hollywood sign. A girl says she likes my dress and I order a hot coffee because mentally, bodily, I am still in October, in London, in spitting rain and a busy school. In the sunshine, I feel yellow and bohemian and whatever the opposite of lonely is when you are still entirely alone. The girl who complimented my dress sits on the street corner. She sips at a pale brown drink and wears healed Mary Janes and pale wash denim jeans and a football shirt and she wears shades the way I do. She is the cool-girl aesthetic of Pinterest, sitting in 3-D and reading a book. (I scoop hot pistachio milk coffee foam onto my forefinger, and raise the nail to my lips. I lick my finger. It tastes thick and sensuous and dusty and I leave lip marks in the coffee foam in a burning indentation of my kiss). I feel unreal and deeply grounded, like the roots of my coffee plant will stem out of my feet and leave me stuck, planted immovably to the floor. People discuss screenplays and character development, feeding the espresso shot to the Spitz and breaking off – “You rock. Have a swell day”– at the delivery of food. The kid in the dungarees has latched to his mother‘s breast; she wears him like an accessory, her jeans slug low, the rips in their fraying denim flapping open as she walks, displaying the folds of her tanned knees and the wrinkles which gather like manuscripts. A single breast hangs sideways out of her black ribbed vest, a mango slung over market stool, the limpet of a baby latched to its core as if sucking from the stream of its life blood. People have fine-line tattoos and earrings and sunglasses. I wear mine on my head, engulfed by shade. I cannot write in such time-still perfection. We are collared shirts and the tyres on pick-up trucks. We are in the moment of the day where peace hangs, where ice falls up a glass, where women embrace on metal benches. Dead palm leaves lie splayed on the road, the sun reflecting off the white paint of the zebra crossing in a glossy sheen which paints light up his ankles like dayglow stars. His jeans are cuffed short. It suits him. People offer advice unsolicited and close business deals with hugs. Chihuahuas sit on benches and highlighters scratch across books as though the act of highlighting another person‘s words somehow, in the brightness, in the starkness, in the sudden blaze of colour, somehow makes mirrors of the pages and in the fogged up glass English literature students ball their fists and wipe away the condensation and finally, at last, see their own make-up less faces staring back.
Buddy, what is this place? I sit and I write and Buffalo ranch dressing slips down my fingers by Echo Park Lake on a Monday. I am burning: the sandwich is so good, I do not care. Someone across the park is prophesying that God’s Will be Done, On Earth as it is in Heaven. She has a loudspeaker. Her voice floats over the fountain, over the lawnmower, a broken song. Wash and Clean and fill you beep—beep—beep, a dumper truck reversing, Oh, God, talk to me!
When I walk by later, the woman is temporarily quiet. She turns to her adopted daughter, who is walking away. “Liv, c’mon, I swear if I have to chase you down I’m gonna spank you” she shouts, and puts the megaphone away.
Some totally random guy turns round from the cash point and says “cute dress” in the middle of the Sunset Boulevard. Everyone is an actor in this little game of ours.
Bookshops smell the same all over the world. Dust and dust covers, curled paper like dry cigarettes. Rizlas and the upward growing bark off palm trees. He says he’ll be right back. He’s got to make coffee (he says). If I have to head out, I can go (he says). Be right back (he says). I am left alone in his shop along Sunset Boulevard, smelling the books and reading the blurbs and replacing them on the scratched shelves. They are unmarked, disordered. I feel suddenly guilty, getting writing out of his reading without the means or intention to buy anything. (I would buy everything. Including the abstract picture of a man in a hat, which resembles a scarecrow or a Van Gogh or a stop-motion cartoon, and which could show him smoking a joint or sucking on sugar cane (I wonder if it is a self portrait). Including the Bhagavad Gita and the Sally Rooney alongside the Wodehouse and the Hemingway. Including the Just thought of you — I’m in LA postcard, and the Didion essays and the Proust. I would take it all).
When he comes back in, he turns the music on, loud. I wait for someone else to come in, and leave. Have a great day (he says). Thanks for stopping by.
I suddenly looked for M&S and shook my head. I dance in the car singing to Disney songs all by myself. I feel suddenly quite happy with feeling young, babied, and old, alone and travelling and free. I am unformed but forming, and suddenly I like who I am becoming. It is easy to grow too serious. To be a woman. To want a career. To want respect. Now, in a driverless car, in LA, all I want to do is dance and sing. So I do. I throw my hands in the air, undulate my hips, swaying them into the hot seats, letting my dress ride up and my knickers rub the leather, throwing my head back to make my hair tickle the base of my spine. I suddenly know I am young. I know I am learning. I know I have so much to learn. But, Christ, I See the Light.