California Dreaming
Some strange reflections on LA
My first experience of Los Angeles occurred the summer after I turned 18. It was 2004. I had just limped my way to the finish line of my freshman year of college at a private university in Washington D.C. My boyfriend of five years and I had gone to the same college (a mistake), and he was a year older. We were in a period of having broken up, but still sleeping together, by that summer. It was messy.
Being home for summer vacation, and all the other girls from college now temporarily out of his immediate grasp, we were basically back to dating normally. This boyfriend of mine had been relentlessly cheating for years, but couldn’t quite bring himself to end things with me or tear himself away completely. I didn’t have the self-esteem to do it and was mostly in the dark about how deep his betrayals ran. It was a profoundly painful time in my young life. That is its own story, but somehow through all of this I had become good friends with his friend and bandmate, Zach, a drummer from Los Angeles.
Zach had far-reaching and impeccable taste in music. The first night I met him, I was unquestionably still with my boyfriend, and Zach jokingly hit on me and put his arm around me (perhaps not-jokingly at all) at the hookah bar/restaurant we were at with fifteen other people. He was making un-subtle moves on me and I was interpreting it as comedy.
He was tall and traditionally cute, and he wore glasses and his hair very short. At the time it was the fashion, amongst hipsters and celebrities to wear trucker hats. And polo shirts with popped collars were worn to signify preppyiness both unabashedly and post-ironically. Zach committed both of these sins, simultaneously. My boyfriend wore neither. One night, at some party at someone’s apartment off campus, in a complex where I would later live during my junior and senior years, Zach and I sat on the floor of a living room talking about whether or not Frances Bean Cobain would get a nose job and hoping she was doing okay. Courtney Love had recently released her worst album. Zach told me about the band The Arcade Fire. At some point he reached over and popped the collar on my navy blue polo shirt, messed up my hair by ruffling it with his hand, and then smiled, stepping back from his work satisfactorily like a photographer saying, “that’s better.”
As his bandmate’s girlfriend, Zach pretty quickly took to confiding in me like I was his sister. I knew all about every one of his crushes down to the most intimate details. I knew that he was actually, confounding, turned off by a girl who wanted to have a lot of sex and that it was really important to her and that he didn’t. I knew that he liked one girl at a time, and overwhelmingly, obsessively (but not unhealthily) so. He had moved onto the girl who wanted a lot of sex after breaking up with Amanda. When he first started hanging out with Amanda I heard everything about it. “We made out in the practice room,” he told me one night, finally, after talking about her non-stop for weeks. Amanda was a tall redhead who played keyboards with their band briefly and who was a journalism major. He held a candle for her for a long time. While he was singing her praises to me, I only heard one story from my boyfriend about her.
“She went to Mexico, and she said that she drank a bunch of espressos, and then had diarrhea so bad, she said it was like peeing out of her butt,” he told me.
Once I was in my boyfriend’s dorm room waiting for him, and he walked in with Amanda. She sat down and started eating a muffin on his bed. They had just been playing music together. I was jealous but I didn’t see her as a threat. I didn’t think she was particularly pretty.
Later, I would find out that both Zach and my boyfriend had liked her. In fact, Zach would tell me bluntly over a beachside lunch in LA, that my boyfriend had also been dating her at the time.
“He dated her,” he said, trying to get a major point across to me, looking me in the eyes.
“He did? Are you sure?,” I fumbled.
“Yes. He did.”
Then I was heartbroken, eating our sandwiches, for a full minute before pushing it out of my mind entirely, back to where I could not be bothered by it at all. The waitress was a friend of Zach’s. She had long wavy blonde hair and she was sweet and bubbly. He asked her to go bowling with us later. Later that night she would meet up with us at the bowling alley, which was full of pink and blue neon lighting, disco balls, and loud music. Zach said he wanted to show me something and led me over to a big glass case on the wall, like a trophy case in a high school. It held two bowling balls. Inscribed under each ball, on gold plaques were the names, Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz.
Upon returning from Los Angeles, I would report to multiple people that I had seen Justin Timberlake’s bowling ball.
The nice waitress brought her cousin, who was also visiting LA that week. The waitress was named Sarah and she was a singer too, and a really good one, according to Zach. She was too shy to sing, but we bowled together, and she was incredibly nice and laughed easily. Her cousin was a young guy our age. After bowling, we sat at a table in a dimly lit lounge eating dinner. The cousin told me that he had just been an audience member at The Price is Right show that day. I was very excited to hear all about it and then he added, “you can only go on the Price is Right once. Once in your entire life. Once you go on it, you can never be on it again.” I found the finality and seriousness of this rule very funny. Only being allowed to be a Price is Right show contestant once, specifically stated and legally stipulated, according to the rules of the show, struck me as hilarious.
“The hottest thing about her is that she is so skinny,” Zach had told me, after he hooked up with Amanda the first time. At a party in DC, I was later once smoking a bowl with Amanda herself, and we were also playing a round of Truth or Dare with some other people sitting on the floor in a circle. I have no idea where in DC this happened or whose party it was. The memory itself exists within a smoke ring. After months and months of hearing Zach exuberantly crushing on her, I quietly pulled her aside and told her that he actually really liked her. She was high and I was high, and she was delighted by this news, yet in a state of giddy disbelief. She and I briefly (briefly) made out too, during this same party. After I told her, they ended up dating for the next three years.
Once, when I was a sophomore, and they were dating and I was dating someone else, Zach messaged me on AIM.
“Remember when you visited me in LA, and you kept thinking I was mad at you, but I was just in a bad mood because of traffic?,” he asked.
“I remember.”
“Amanda and I just had a fight about basically the same thing, which I didn’t realize I was doing to her too. I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I told him.
Amanda ended up getting a nose job and moving to NYC after they graduated. I once saw a Facebook exchange between them where she accused him of being jealous that she now lives in NYC, and he responded that he was not, and that, “it smells like garbage and piss.” (He wasn’t wrong.)
Zach introduced me to Nick Cave, Lightning Bolt, and The Blood Brothers. We shared a holy reverence for music artists such as NIN and PJ Harvey. He referred to Fiona Apple as a saint.
Once, he told me I was “already prettier than Courtney Love,” saying, “you’ve got her beat, on that front.”
Zach and I had emailed back and forth a lot while he was doing “semester at sea” that Spring, a study abroad program where students sail the seas and disembark at various countries for an entire semester on a cruise ship. I was fascinated by the seafaring and travel alone.
I always liked him.
In the middle of the Spring semester of my freshman year I wound up in the hospital. The reason being a somewhat overblown reaction to what is clinically referred to as a “suicidal gesture,” on my part. This incident occurred after finding out about yet another girl my boyfriend had cheated on me with, one night. I was carted off on a stretcher in an ambulance in front of the entire dorm and forced to drink a charcoal concoction at Sibley hospital while wearing a white hospital mini-gown with blue flowers on it.
At some point after this small horror unfolded, I told Zach about it over email. His response was, “you know you can always talk to me. I’m always here for you.”
After the school year ended, I went on a trip to Paris with my mom. I had completed my first year, by my teeth, getting the worst grades I’ve ever gotten in my life and burning every single social bridge I had. Rather than dropping out, which is what I wanted to do, I managed to complete the semester. This was under the advisement of a sacred handful of close girlfriends from high school and a therapist who I saw precisely twice.
We went to the South of France and Arles. There I walked in the bright gardens of the insane asylum where Van Gogh went after cutting off his ear. I wore an exceedingly soft red sweater that I cherished, as it was my best and most expensive one. I was photographed in it next to a statue of Vincent in the asylum’s sunny courtyard.
In France, I drew in my sketchbook on trains while drinking Orangina and listening to John Frusciante’s bizarre yet genius synth-tinged indie-dream album, Shadows Collide with People. My hair was shoulder length, with blond highlights and I was dieting aggressively. I was going to be remarkably thin when I returned to school in the Fall. Thin and worldly.
By the time we got to Paris, I realized I couldn’t remove my fairly new navel piercing, which I had gotten as a sort of hazy, misplaced commemoration of “the incident.” When I had gotten the piercing on a whim one night in Georgetown, I had picked out a tiny silver ring. Apparently they had stripped the closure’s threads while tightening it. I couldn’t get it off. I was afraid my belly button ring would set off the airport metal detectors when I departed France, and I spent hours in my hotel room one evening trying to get it off, to no avail. It never did set off the alarms, but my dad had to cut it off of me with bolt cutters when I got home.
After returning from France, I resumed dating my boyfriend again, as if everything between us was fine, though we acknowledged we were broken up (logical.) I had a normal, nice summer. I had just started smoking pot, and most of the summer entailed going to the movies with friends, swimming, working as a nanny at a fitness center, working as a nanny for clients I found through my job at the fitness center at beautiful lake houses, having parties at the home of whomever’s parents were out of town, swimming in each-other’s pools, smoking pot, reading, and going on hikes. We were 18 - just teenagers - innocent enough that summer still felt like summer vacation.
It was also a time of lost innocence. One night that summer, a bunch of us had a party at my boyfriend’s house that became nearly an orgy. I hooked up with a girl named Alicia in a threesome with him. I referred to it thence-forth as, “the night of sin and squalor.” We swam in the pool at his house in the dark, drinking copious amounts of liquor, and someone dared him to get naked, which is what started the whole thing. My best friend said to me at one point, wry and deadpan, “I just saw Tim’s dick.” I laughed and continued drinking. They would also have a threesome, in another room, with someone else.
Sometime in July, I found myself in my parents’ air conditioned basement on the cloud-like cream-colored leather couch watching MTV and talking to Zach on the landline phone, which I had painted with seven different colors of glitter nail polish sometime in middle school. I had called him and he promptly asked me if he could call me back.
“Can I call you back in like two minutes? I’m literally on the last few pages of this book and I wanna finish it.”
“Sure,” I said. He was reading something by Philip K. Dick.
When he called me back, we talked for a while and I said, “you know how you said I could come visit you in LA anytime? I want to.” A month later I was reading a paperback copy of The Informers on a flight to LA.
“What should I read, can you recommend any books? What should I read to prepare for Los Angeles?” I had asked.
“Bret Easton Ellis,” Zach said.
In LA, one of Zach’s female friends caught wind that he had a visitor in, from out of town. We had been sitting on the couch in his living room, watching a DJ Shadow concert video he wanted to show me, when she knocked on the front door. He opened the door, and she presented him with a cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream. As they stood in the doorway, enjoying their ice cream in the warm afternoon awkwardly, I just waved hello shyly and sat in polite silence. She barely acknowledged me, and it was clear she had pointedly not brought any ice cream for me. She spent most of the time flirting with him and marking her territory. Little did she know he and I really were just friends. Her name was Natalie and she was extremely tan, with brown hair in a ponytail. She talked about her mother getting various cosmetic surgery procedures, which she insisted were completely worthwhile. I felt like I was on another planet. (Also, what a fucking bitch.)
Zach took a picture of me on the Santa Monica pier wearing a purple floral lace-trimmed tank top from American Eagle during that trip. In the picture, my dark auburn hair is blowing in the wind and I’m smiling genuinely, my fair skin glowing. While driving us back to his parents’ house in the valley, he pointed out the window saying, “Marilyn Manson lives in these hills.”
“I would never want to live anywhere else,” he added.
I ran into Zach outside a bar in DC one night, about six years after that trip, after we had both long-since graduated. He and my ex’s band had been playing the Black Cat, a legendary DC music venue that my girlfriends and I got both kicked out of and banned from for being underage and wasted when I was a sophomore. I had been steadily approaching inevitably blacking out that night, and one of the other drunk girls I was with had simply glared at the bouncer, instead of answering his question about how old we were. The next day, someone casually mentioned a car we had passed which had been on fire, and I had no recollection of a flaming vehicle at all. The next time I was allowed to enter the Black Cat was to see the band Murder By Death, to which Zach had also introduced me.
I saw it in the newspaper, in the City Paper’s event section, that Zach and my ex were playing the Black Cat. I was then living just outside the city, in a suburb of Maryland, and when I read it I was vaguely jealous. They also had a great band name, which made it worse.
By then, I was dating a rich and handsome musician from Virginia whose friends told me behind his back that he was “Lacrosse Royalty.” I was informed that I was a “Lacrossetitute,” by one of his female friends one evening when I was high out of my mind in Philadelphia, before we went to see Animal Collective at the Electric Factory.
This new boyfriend of mine, Brett, was both a former jock and a prolific songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and artist. His parents were rich and had two homes, so we basically got to take over their huge mansion while they went to their lake house. (I should have married him.) We had the most athletic sex of my life for a year and he tricked me into performing on stage for the first time. Ultimately, the romance only lasted so long. It ended for good when I kissed another drummer who I had once slept with while we had briefly been broken-up, at one point. (So, Brett broke up with me twice.) I was an enthusiastic black-out drunk at the time and did a lot of regrettable things.
I’d run into Zach and my high-school/college ex both many times in the DC music scene. I told Zach I was in a band now too, casually, as we stood out on the street that night in front of the bar in Adams Morgan when we ran into one another.
“What’s your band called?,” he asked.
“Loch Ness.”
“How do you guys spell it?”
“C-H.”
“Good,” he said.
14 years after I visited Zach in LA, I would land a job in Santa Monica, working for a PR agency. I moved there alone, and I only stayed for two years. I ended up moving back East to attend grad school in NYC.