And In My Head I Do My Very Best Saying Goodbye
Los Angeles, California.
May I recommend you NOT use FromYouFlowers.com for your floral delivery needs, for they are, in fact, a scam company. May I HIGHLY recommend you deliver a flower anonymously to someone incredibly important to you, even if they don’t appear to pick up on your subliminal peppered clues alerting them to your authorship, your psyche shattered by their nonplusness.
I am not a woman tethered to reality — but I’ll recount my understanding of events as best I can:
In WeHo we got drunk.
Vodka Red Bulls were pounded, the taste excruciating (I hate Red Bull), whilst C-list celebrities waved from a microphone onstage, their words obliterated by the various chittering gay guys all around me doing the damn work: babbling on.
Tati bought a five-dollar rose from a vendor on the street, not knowing of my recent struggles to deliver that exact gift, near-thwarted by FromYouFlowers.com.
In the Uber headed east I received the text: my flower had indeed made it to The Recipient, but its hidden prayer had not been answered. The tears were quiet at first, brimming at the pink edges where my balls meet my lids before tumbling over, through my eyelashes and down, down into my hands, clutched to my cheeks, a slimy veil over my gasping breaths and gargled sobs.
We exited the Uber and I tumbled to the sidewalk, wheezing “I can’t breathe” to anyone who would lend an ear. It was promptly decided we were better off heading home than proceeding into our destination: an outdoor parking lot/ bar with some fuckish name like “Ye Olde Rustic Alehouse.” Back on my couch, in the gorgeous Echo Park cliffside home I’ve been staying in for February, a chorus of heartbroken women joined me in collective mourning. We wailed, and talked, and watched Sex and, and healed. For the night, anyway.
I organized a Dinner for 12 friends this past February 12th to insulate myself from the inevitable pain I knew that day would bring: marking exactly 12 months since the Saturday morning I was dumped.
It was a complicated weekend, made moreso by a steady funneling of alcohol, old friends, coke, and cock into my bloodstream. My Second Meltdown occurred in the hour before said Dinner for 12 was to make its dozenly voyage. Something about not being invited along to an orgy with a celebrity twink, I had a rage stroke, you know the drill. I rebounded most impressively in time to wear my favorite green dress and what was left of Tati’s plastic rose in my hair. My friends are wonderful and I was happy and grateful and protected. I even made it through Valentine’s Day by seeing Fire of Love (a must-see — joined by Marcel the Shell and Triangle of Sadness in my top 3 films of the year) with my darling Misha. Miranda July looked cunty as all hell at the Q&A afterward.
But something turbulent still thrashed within me. So I went for a walk to clear my head.
I listened to Lana’s first album, when it was still spelled “Del Ray,” on SoundCloud. It was good... More of a nice beat to stumble across Elysian Park to, climbing up and down steep slopes and getting lost in the brambles. When that ended I put on “A&W” on loop, and lost myself. It’s really better than anything Shakespeare, Mozart, or Aristotle ever could have written. Combined.
I took the music out of my ears and felt a number of things: one, an appreciation for the beauty around me: the foaming golden yellows and mustards of late afternoon, the Pollack of wildflowers — purple, blue, yellow, white — splattered across the greens and grays and browns of the sloping hills, the trees and the grass; the enormous purple mound of cloud resembling snowy mountains like the ones they studied in Fire of Love; the fiery velvet orange and red of sunset, and me catching that incendiary disk of sun slipping behind Downtown LA, whipping out my phone to catch a video of its exact disappearance only to miss its final bow completely; the flowers, again: furry red hycanthiums (made-up name) and gristled, gnarly twisted branches on dying trees and bushes aching into archways, dappled with mummified cocoons, housing not caterpillars but tree mites, growing not butterflies but an irresistible gloominess; the naked, sunbaked parking lots of Dodger Stadium. I felt utterly at peace, knowing that, despite it all, everything would be OK. If the world could look this good now, surely it could pull off the feat again, and if I could be surrounded by such beauty, both visible and homosocial, then what, really, was there to actually worry about?
I had stopped drawing after the breakup, something I used to do every day. My mom’s friend has done my taxes for me for the past six or so years, and every year I’ve promised to do a sketch of her kids in exchange but never followed through on my vow. Finally I went to the art supply store and bought a nice sketchpad and some pens and watercolors and made an (admittedly disturbed) portrait of her four children. And suddenly I was doodling. I was starting to feel like myself again. And the rest would grow back. Eventually.
Not to insult your intelligence but if you didn’t pick up on the fact those final three sentences ^^ are the last lines of the second LA episode of Sex and, seek medical attention immediately. As Carrie says them she itches her freshly-waxed pubes, which happens to be what bullies called me in high school (just ‘pubes,’ not ‘freshly-waxed pubes’).
And might I recommend you watch all five Pirates of the Caribbean films in one week while sickly on the couch, ingesting a steady stream of Quil, both Day and Ny, over a bed of edibles? The Curse of the Black Pearl should have been nominated in screenplay and picture, and of course lead actress for the Great Mother of all time, Keira Knightley — me of course being a Keira Knightley type, and thus, when I was texting my hot Irish lover and we were talking about how he had just watched Atonement and I explained that I would love to watch another Knightley vehicle together since I call myself a Keira Knightley type visually and he said “you are…” then I said “keep that up and you can tie me to a bed for the rest of your life and visit whenever you want…”
What was I saying? The first one is soooo good, a classic, childhood in a film, etc. The second one is simply not as good as the first, although Davy Jones is heaven and I’ve never needed a load from someone more in my goddamn life. The third one is very pretty, but ultimately an overwrought mess that should have been an hour shorter. The fourth one is so fucking random and weird, with Penelope Cruz (!!!!!!!!!) wearing the most insane colonial hat of all time — but no more Will Turner or Elizabeth Swann. And the fifth one is just god damn corny — but then at the end Will and Liz come back!! And then after the credits there’s a clip that I randomly accidentally sat around for where Davy Jones comes and watches Will and Lizzie sleep and basically jizzes on them — it’s incredible. By the way, the cast in the fifth one, Dead Men Tell No Tales, includes but is not limited to: Effie from Skins (Kaya Scodelario), Javier Bardem, and (!) Paul McCartney.
The reason I had Pirates on the brain is that when I attended the Beverly Hilton a couple Mondays ago to interview the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hair and makeup team (Oscar nominees Camille Friend and Joel Harlow) the latter informed me he’d worked on all five Pirates films, prompting me to wonder the age-old question: there are five Pirates Films?
Sitting in the restaurant of the Beverly Hilton, I had a front-row seat to watch the red carpet — did I mention the interview was held there because Camille and Joel had just attended the Oscars Nominee Luncheon? Walking past the restaurant window outside by the pool, I saw Jenny Slate, my old pal Baz Lurhmann, the greatest Dilf of the moment, Martin McDonagh… I didn’t see Ana De Armas or Rian Johnson or Sarah Polley but I did interview them!
I took a picture with Tati by the pool, but then a security guard escorted me out of the area because I wasn’t carrying the proper lanyard. As I sat in my booth nursing my Arnold Palmer after the interview, looking down at my notes, a song began playing on the restaurant’s speaker system: “This Man’s In Love With You,” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It was a song I had gotten into deep in quarantine, when it was just me and my ex. It was a song that made my eyes sparkle with tears. I looked around at where I was seated, and marveled how far I’d come since I’d first heard it.
Tonight it’s a full moon, of course — my final night in Los Angeles. Luna never misses a beat. Misha and I prayed to her in the street. Tomorrow (today) I fly home: back to New York, back to my roots, back to spending $17 dollars on a lukewarm smoothie instead of $14 on one containing chunks of coconut meat. My last days on the West Coast have been peppered with cinematic moments: riding the cock of a park ranger in an abandoned parking lot in Griffith as sheets of rain hurled themselves at the windshield; entering an enormous mansion with a taxidermied zebra among its decor to pl*w a famous musician; spending two hours trying to reunite a lost black and white dog with its own in Elysian Park, only for the restless canine to run away from its rescuer… As the dog slipped from my grasp, I decided to make its very real, tragic fate about myself, wondering if the mongrel was a metaphor for heartbreak: too afraid to allow someone unfamiliar to escort it to safety, little Lassie here instead chose to gallop off into the grasses, entering the harsh unpredictability of the wilderness instead of being shepherded back to suburbia.
I don’t know if the dog ever found its owner. I don’t know if I’ll ever escape the pain of my past. But if LA has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes a change is all you need to see that there’s so much more happening in the world than just one’s own private melodramas.
