Escape From New York
Down on the West Coast/ Sex and Another City/ The Odyssey
I arrived in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, after two canceled flights, two delays, a bus, a couple Bloody Marys, and a crying session which transpired in the parking lot of a Joann Fabrics in suburban Milwaukee. It was about four AM when my head arrived at its new pillow in Echo Park. What’s followed has been nothing short of Odyssidic (except, unlike Odysseus, my boyfriend dumped me — or was Penelope down to try being open? I forget.)
New Year’s was a blur — in an effort to stave off the dread of not finding someone to make out with at midnight, I had a sexy, sweet television composer (for The Masked Singer) over that afternoon to fill my mouth with a protective injection of cum. That evening I wore a Rick Owens sweater my little brother Lane had given me for Christmas — the nicest, most expensive piece of clothing I’ve ever received, from my fabulous junior-in-high-school brother (I believe RueLaLa was utilized to maximum effect here). I was shy that night, surrounded by West Coast gay guys — the real reason I’d come here in the first place (needed a fresh Grindr grid).
I wanted to escape — my apartment, my grief, winter in New York, unresolved social dramas and memories of my ex-boyfriend, the dogs barking incessantly outside my bedroom window, my routines, my hours spent longing for texts that would never come, my disgusting grocery store and the film of grime on my bathroom sink and the whole fucking situation — and instead surround myself with tall horny men and palm trees. Naturally, it rained, hard, for three weeks upon my arrival, pouring down in thick sheets, flooding the streets with instant-ready whirlpools and rumbling rivers and scaled-down tsunamis. I wondered if Noah might build an ark outside The Abbey, and whether he’d wear a leather puppy mask while doing so. The palm trees, I learned, housed rats: a considerable real estate upgrade from my old infested ceiling on Bedford Ave. There were dogs here, too, setting each other off from neighboring fences to create great circle jerks of sound. But none of that mattered: I was elated to experience the change.
And the gay guys: enthusiastic at first — I was thrilled to be Christened “fresh meat” by a really hot man standing beside a space heater as gails of precipitation slammed down around us. After a couple weeks, though, the novelty of my arrival seemed to wear off for prospective Tinder matches — I found myself driven to mania by the slightest delay in response to a carefully angled photo of my boner. Still, if there’s one thing I take away from my time here so far, it’s the epiphany that I’m actually a hot Jessica Rabbit (read: Keira Knightley with bigger tits) type, and there’s a lot of men in this world trying to let me ride their faces.
LA is many things: neon signs glowing pink and orange and green; sun-dappled sidewalks ensconced by archways of foliage; another city where I’ve shit myself in bed and, unrelated, wailed loudly down the streets over another twink’s ghostly behavior. Above all, Los Angeles feels like a place designed to be compared to New York: at parties, the same conversations prove endlessly inexhaustible. Over and over, in varying iterations, everyone (myself leading the charge) seems to want to debate and dissect one topic: which coastal metropolis is better?
It’s a question without an answer: obviously, the cool thing to say is New York. Yet there’s something really, really fabulous about LA, something contrary to what I would have expected: in its way, Los Angeles feels more adventurous, and unpredictable, and down to hang. Anything can happen here — you may end up at a gay guy’s house party at 3 AM and find out he has a wall-sized poster of Lana Del Rey modeling for H&M on his wall, ensconced in Christmas lights. You can go to a spa and suck five aging girthy cocks in a row. You can go to Lena Dunham’s brother’s house and hide in the bedroom, you can meet a hot guy who’s starring in a new Netflix series, you can call a twink a jerk, you can give a mouse a cookie (not that I would), you can wear a big, heavy old key around your neck.
Disneyland is an option here: you can ride on Thunder Mountain even as the rain pelts your face like little bullets shot from the rifle of Donald Duck, known by the coastal elite to be a gunslinging scary Conservative type. Be careful not to lose your Nightmare Before Christmas-themed Mickey ears bestowed upon you by your friend’s mom (named Alisha Keyes, though she works in corporate at Chevron, not as the mastermind behind such classics as “My Boo” and “If I Ain’t Got You.”)
One may find themselves at a bar called Spanky’s in LA, wearing a little black minidress and slipping quietly inside behind their cis girlfriends as a bouncer exudes the vibe “trannys will die beyond this point.” It’s crazy how the straight world still exists exactly as it did in high school: while my sisters and I powdered our noses in the women’s bathroom, a man in full military garb (heaven knows why) stomped into the lavatory to demand I get out. “You’re not allowed to be in here,” he barked angrily, rubbing his combat gear compulsively. I slunk inconspicuously from the restroom (while my wonderful friend Aissa chewed the infantryman out) and slithered between straights down the hall, into a room where everyone was smoking cigars and blunts indoors.
A man had locked eyes with me on the dancefloor earlier in my tenure at Spanky’s. He approached me now: tall, thick, wearing some tacky gold necklaces, and asked me a question. “Are you drunk?” he wondered. My friend, now beside me, texted into her phone as I gazed back at him, nonplussed.
“Erm… a little, I guess. It’s 4 AM,” I replied.
“Ok, well then… can you go tell my friend if you’re a male or a female? We can’t figure it out. Hahaha.”
My stomach cooled into a bed of icy frozen octopus tentacles. It was a familiar feeling: that of realizing I was being mocked, made a spectacle of for the amusement of some hetero pricks. Of course, now, I realize that’s perhaps why I like to wear big heavy keys around my neck with corsets and cowboy boots and whatever the fuck. (*Waiter from A Bug’s Life voice*) Someone order the Spectacle? It’s the same reason I’m quick to rip myself apart — my appearance, my personality, my direction in life: beat them to the punch and you don’t get this horrible guttural pang of having the sensationalism placed upon you.
I couldn’t help but wonder: is someone going to call me a tranny and beat me up if I walk out of this place by myself? Of course this man was harmless. And I was used to the question “are you a boy or a girl?” Hell, I’d built my whole personality — even this newsletter — around it. But usually it was a query offered up to me by toddlers. It was startling to hear an adult man ask such quandaries, even if it shouldn't have been.
My friend looked up from her phone as I guided us away from him. She’d missed the entire conversation, God bless the angel. I hugged her tight, snorted some coke procured from a hot bi guy (our most important natural resource), and went home for the night, laying awake cokey in bed.
I don’t know why it bothered me so much: I’d never cared to define an answer to that question for myself before. Maybe it was because I’d just been at a gay club and felt too feminine to be wanted by the big roidy shirtless guys who were sucking each other’s faces, even though, yes, I’d made out with a balding San Diegan not five minutes prior in the Los Globos women’s bathroom. Then, at Spanky’s, I’d felt too masculine to walk with the cis girls. I know many people have gone through much worse: like getting murdered, or having your Grindr messages screenshotted and posted to Twitter.
I began to have the sinister, sneaking suspicion that I enjoyed being miserable, that my unexpected gasps for air and twitching face, that my roiling gut and my burning tears made me feel interesting, like I was the girl in Possession, or Regina George after she finds out about the Kälteen bars.
The other night I went to this house party that I was referring to colloquially as Vampire, due to it occurring in the home of a former member of the band Vampire Weekend (side note: saw them in 2015 with my sister Winnie — one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, and I usually hate standing up).
Around 2 or 2:30 in the morning, as the party decidedly passed from its nexus into its dying dance, a fabulous metrosexual (redundant) who looked to be in his 40s or 50s sauntered past the kitchen island in a glittering ensemble of daisies and diamonds. His choker of pearl spelled out the solemn syllable “Miu,” half the name of its designer. “Does that say ‘Miu?’” I asked, tipsy.
His pants had daisies painted upon them, and a gay guy drunkenly pointed and went “Daisy Buchanan!” And another gay guy went, “Oh yeah, like in The Great Gatsby.” The man said “What’s that?” And I said, “You haven’t heard of The Great Gatsby? It’s an American classic.”
“No, I’m Australian,” he explained. “We don’t have that over there. Can you sum it up in a sentence?”
So each of us summarized Gatsby in a sentence. I forget what the first two gay guys said. I went third: “On Long Island, a bunch of people are rich, then this girl gets hit by a car.”
He laughed at that, and then his henchman escorted him away, out of the party to their Uber or whatever. That’s when someone turned to us and went, “You know that was Baz Luhrmann, right?”
We gasped and shrieked and howled with laughter. “What did he direct again? Elvis?” someone asked. “And The Great Gatsby!” I wheezed back at him.
A few days later, I interviewed Baz on the morning of Oscar nominations. It’s a huge day for my line of work: Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams (Parent-Teacher Conferences came early this year) read off the list of nominees beginning at 5:30 AM PST, so the East Coast trades would pick up the stories before the workday had truly begun, meaning I had to be up at 5 to prepare for reaction calls. Baz and his wife (4-time Oscar-winning production and costume designer Catherine Martin) spoke to me over the phone from Paris, where they were celebrating their anniversary, meaning he did not see that he was speaking to the woman who’d told him about the rich Long Island people and the girl getting hit by the car only a few days prior.
I spoke with Michelle Yeoh that morning as well, around 6:30 AM. My upstairs neighbor at the beautiful Echo Park bungalow I’d been staying in (who has a loud dog and spends many an afternoon hammering some unknown object into her floor for forty-five minute stretches) came down and stood outside my door as I spoke, at a normal volume, in an admittedly excited tone considering the historic nature of Yeoh’s nomination. She hissed, “Can you keep it down?” I flipped her off, maintaining my pleasant phone call tone with Ms. Yeoh.
I sit here now on the final evening of my first month down on the West Coast. Tomorrow morning I’ll move to my February sublet, and then, unless I somehow scam my way into attending the Oscars on March 12, I’ll be back in New York. I miss it and I don’t. I miss my friends. I miss Singers, and Fort Greene park, and the arch in Washington Square, and biking through Bed-Stuy listening to the Jackie score. But I have to say, a month in, I’m finding LA on the whole to be enriching and revitalizing and exciting. I’m looking out now at glittering hills, houses alight with festivity acrest the slopes of Silver Lake and Los Feliz and whatever the hell you call those other neighborhoods towards the sea. I think I might watch Frances Ha, or maybe I’ll finally start the spy novel I’m required to read for the book club I’ve managed to pry my fingers into while I stay here. It’s a thick book and I only have a few days left to pound through it. Maybe I’ll make some tea, except I don’t have any teabags and there’s no chance in hell I’ll be doing anything besides smoking too much weed and watching Frances Ha.
I suppose, ultimately, what I’ve learned in my Escape From New York (S3E13 hiveeee) is that a geographical relocation does not make one’s problems vanish. The Reverend Mother once said something to Maria like “You can’t run away from your problems. You have to face them.” She cunted out so hard for that. So, no, I’m not magically happy now and cured of all the pain this past year has dealt me. But I do feel Sex and Another City (S3E14 hive let’s eattt) has done me a world of good. The change, the breaking of the patterns, the sun, the rain, the celebrities, the different mattresses, and bedsheets, and bowls of weed, and restaurants, and new friends and old friends and people I had thought I might not see for another decade who’ve reemerged in my life unexpectedly, and the car my darling friend’s family graciously let me borrow that the keys are always getting stuck in, and the new blue zip-up shirt with the wide lapels that I bought, and the little Forever 21 minidress that my married Masked Singer boyfriend ripped off of me, and the key that I hung from my neck while attending a gay guy’s birthday party before hiding in his closet for an hour to talk about my dad’s rainbow eyeball tattoo with an extremely hot Twitter porn star, and my dearest oldest friends from college, and Taco Bell and Del Taco and El Compadre and getting a rimjob in a hot tub and all of that… It's filled me with a lot of hope and excitement for what’s to come. It has reignited my yearning to see where my life takes me, rather than just wishing for it all to quietly melt away. It has even given me the grounding to weather the difficult stuff, to break down into screaming, wracking sobs for a few hours but then to bounce back, to have my pout session and then shake it off and let some man with a giant green tattoo of a disco dancer on his left tricep give me a back massage.
One final thing — if anyone knows who the biological father (had two young children and a wife with him but a gay voice) was at my friend James Cherry’s art show in Chinatown at NOON Projects around 5:30 PM on Saturday, January 28th, I need him desperately because he’s my husband.
amazing, as always