Los Angeles
2009 – 2014
I have wanted to escape from this form since I became conscious of it. A kind of prison––doing time in it––I have felt here since I was a child, though I could not express the feeling except to sit on my own and watch the other kids run around and wonder why they seemed so content. Running away to LA was my first serious attempt at making peace with materialism, though I didn’t know this at the time––I was a teenager. Like an animal uncaged, I made as fast as I could to low-cut singlets, midnight gyms, tranny bars, casting rooms, cocaine; summoned by a shaman playing bongos on old ketchup drums all the way across the Pacific Ocean; an invitation to hawk my wares on the Boulevard, to state my name for the camera, stake my claim to glory.
Los Angeles is the playground of the ego. It is the place it is most embraced. Most adored. The more you parade about, the more your façade glistens with sweat or the cellulite crème of vain effort, the more your presence there is justified, the perception–reality of the city illuminated on the screen of its collective mind––feeding life back into it. One rests a little easier knowing where they’re at, the place is easy too, knowing what it is. Everything honky dory.
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I roll down the windows; air that escapes description, a feeling more than a decade later processing; I am not free in this place––I think I am. Quite tethered to unrevealed karmic pain, all kinds of samsara, and all ways of avoiding myself; sedating a wild animal I am as yet too afraid to approach––still, tonight speeding out of Hollywood, down the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, hot night, ashtray in my mouth, far from claustrophobic suburban dread––liberation in this strange Wonderland that has adopted me as its lovesick child.
Red, amber, green nuclear smog; heady, too much aftershave, chrome bumper bars, sunglasses on; flimsy lap belt barely around my waist, leaning forward babbling, cackling, screaming to Ads driving shotgun and Lisa eating cigarettes at the wheel. I stick my head out the window, so far out I am alive only by the grace of God, who does not smash my face into a lamp pole.
‘Dude get your fucking head back in the car!’, she hollers from up front.
For once, I am obedient.
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I have been in those mansions, up there in the Hills, in the Platinum Triangle, Malibu; sky-high ceilings, open-plan living, sticks of Japanese maple furniture, couches so plush you drown in them; cellars of French wine, Cîroc, Dom Pérignon soothing so much loneliness, so many unfulfilled promises; with Kaycee trying not to buy a bag, trying to be good kids…pressing the fuck it button anyway; 19-years-old swinging from the chandelier, or the naked lightbulb of a shitty dive off Sunset. Strutting the Walk of Fame like Elvis undiscovered, feeling the devil creeping up behind me, seeing its face in the faceless shrouded figures lurking like the back alley horrors of Korea; the wannabe rapper taking pleasure pulling his car up into you, unfazed as you cross at the zebra crossing like a good little citizen.
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On our second date we drive up to Mulholland; the city twinkles like a magic carpet beneath our feet; staring out both lost, gone, obliterated from the mind’s incessant activity, its ceaseless grasping––just for a moment. Snogging each other’s faces off, groping for jeaned crotches by the light of a tungsten street lamp. Most of my time in Los Angeles I bounce from bed to bed, massage table to massage table––to the chagrin of my ex-partner, now a towering friend. I have never really been one to see what I have until it is too late; now though, I regret nothing––I am not made to be paired it dawns on me. I have no qualms about that either.
Keep the sex too. Shove it, really. Without love…it ain’t much.
Excess pleasure, pleasure of any kind, cannot satiate any longer than desire can rear up behind again. Thirst is never sated, nor hunger. Mastered desire? Relish in pleasure, satisfaction? In reality, it is desire that has conquered…again. Los Angeles in this fashion becomes a race to the bottom of all that the physical world can (n)ever offer. Its offerings are basic because more is by definition never enough. But if you squint, or choose not to mind, it is probably the least conservative place on earth. Amsterdam, Berlin, Sydney…all uniform societies, ‘free’––to a point. If you are looking for a place where people genuinely don’t care what you do, LA is probably as close as you’ll ever get. The rest are amateurs trying their hand at off-the-rack capitalist individualism.
Los Angeles is the big fat fairy Godmother of be-whatever-the-fuck-you-want. She sits on her Botox throne refusing to grow old; wrapped in cum-stained motel curtains and Dior bijoux, she unapologetically blows pixie dust in your eyes.
Los Angeles is the big fat fairy Godmother of be-whatever-the-fuck-you-want. She sits on her Botox throne refusing to grow old; wrapped in cum-stained motel curtains and Dior bijoux, she unapologetically blows pixie dust in your eyes.
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It’s just before midnight; James my brother-from-a-Hungarian-father-and-Spanish-mother by way of Harlem, and I are at a house party in Palos Verdes; Bud Light flows down a thin tube into the mouths of rich kids in their early 20s. There are parents…somewhere on the estate. James and I are both trying to socialise; both averse to small talk, now into our 15th year of friendship, this has never gone well for either of us.
A loudmouth chubby jock-type pulls me up for a slug of beer.
‘Where are you from man!?’
‘Australia.’
‘Where’s your kangaroo!?’
He bursts out laughing, rousing those around him to the joke, falling in.
I side to James…
‘I’m done man. Let’s go for a walk’
So begins one of many nighttime wanderings, a tradition reanimated countless times across the county, and later the Netherlands. It follows a few simple rules:
A loudmouth chubby jock-type pulls me up for a slug of beer.
‘Where are you from man!?’
‘Australia.’
‘Where’s your kangaroo!?’
He bursts out laughing, rousing those around him to the joke, falling in.
I side to James…
‘I’m done man. Let’s go for a walk’
So begins one of many nighttime wanderings, a tradition reanimated countless times across the county, and later the Netherlands. It follows a few simple rules:
- It must be the dead of night.
- We must have no idea where we’re going.
- We must never bring appropriate supplies, nor wear appropriate clothing (this last point has proven particularly sticky when the deceptively warm dusk suddenly retreats and the desert or North Sea chills to the bone)
- It must be gruelling, arduous, with the possibility of danger stripping us of the vestiges of boyhood.
We trek through perfect American candy land estates; wrought iron gates like Paramount and Mexican guards keeping watch in booths. Manicured pathways, four-car-garages, crimson stucco wash. We talk about philosophy, religion, relationships––he is six years my senior and a verified soulmate. We have both grown up before our time, in lockstep development long before we meet on the bench outside the studio at drama school.
‘What play are you doing?’, I ask.
‘The Weir’, he answers. ‘It’s about ghosts.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘Oh yeah man.’
Endlessly we walk, mostly in silence. All that is heard this late on the outskirts of Torrance, Harbor City and Carson are the wails of sirens; the clamour of a roller door as a homeless readjusts his cardboard bed; seagulls and foghorns of ships pulling out of the Port of Los Angeles. These walks in the wilderness of civilisation, with nowhere particular to go, epitomise the quest for what is not really there. Both of us are too young here to know what we are searching for; we are only ravenous wolves, desperately ploughing material for the immaterial. Captivated still by the shimmering cloak of fabulous reality.
Years and years later, with oceans between us and the contact simmered down low to the odd email, James and I forever quantumly entangled have the same ‘aha’ moments. Despite so much, and so far to have travelled, there are those in life that God gracefully grants us who––in this age of commodified, transactional relationships, this dried-out hull of humanity, with the attention span of goldfish––will always be your friend; standing firm like so few Ionian columns, ravaged by earthquakes and drowned by tsunamis, but still there, out-of-sight, upright, deep under the sea.
We drag our feet into Long Beach––8 hours since we left the party. Dawn broke hours ago, businesses are opening, early morning yoga mommies are shaking off the night. Bleary-eyed we wait for the Metro to take us back home to Hollywood.
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We’ve had this conversation so many times, there has been no resolution to the topic yet; where and what is home? Home can be a lush place with a bathtub overlooking the city and a glass of Moët in a silver bucket. Home can be the bus shelter you finally kick off your shoes at and bunker down for the night. Home is the teachings of the Buddha or any other text you come back to.
Sometimes I ache painfully for those days in Los Angeles. I am not even sure why. Most of my lifetime friends were made in five years there. None of us were locals––a band of questing stragglers, orphans, prodigal sons, who by circumstance found one another, and by heart will never sever. As far as experiential living goes, unbridled, pure living in God, those days are unrivalled, peerless, solid gold temple.
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