Sunday
For seemingly no good reason, Tom’s alarm goes off at nine. But then he turns to me and says baby, there’s a two-thousand square foot apartment on the tenth floor of a historical building Downtown that I want you to see. He lights a joint and puts his phone in my hands and I blink awake, looking at the listing. Massive windows, concrete floors, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big rooftop, high ceilings, complimentary twenty-four hour valet parking and a doorman. Tom says we can go anytime between now and noon and I say okay but then we continue to lay. We talk and smoke and fuck and stain all of the linens with blood and other bodily fluids until half past noon, when Tom looks at the time and says shit and calls the leasing agent and asks if we can come see the apartment at one instead. The leasing agent agrees. So I open up my laptop from bed and publish last week’s diaries to the blog (immediately muting blog notifications in an attempt to brace for impact AKA the influx of negative reader feedback RE: my latest life choices/blatant sex and love addiction/bad habits in romance/whatever they’d like to call the psychological mechanism embedded into my brain that makes me so passive, curious and generally boundary-less) and then sit on the hardwood floor in front of the mirror and finger-comb knots out of my incredibly voluminous sex hair.
Despite the relentless heat, we both leave the bungalow in jeans. He wears his with a white tee shirt and white Nikes and I wear mine with a tight fitting polka dot top and black kitten heels with an explicit amount of toe cleavage. We sit on the clogged 101 and then the clogged 110, getting stoned and listening to the radio. Finding parking by the building takes forever, and when we finally do secure a spot, I open up the passenger side door and miss sinking my right kitten heel into a disturbingly large pile of (clearly) human shit by less than inch. I point at the pile and say look to Tom. Tom looks, winces, shakes his head a little and says things like this… when I imagined Los Angeles from my country I never imagined things like this…
A fifty-something year old guy named Guy greets us in the lobby. He has a thick neck and a sunburn and blindingly white veneers and a perverse inability to keep his eyes away from my polka dot enshrouded b-cup tits. Guy lets us into an ancient looking elevator and tells us about the building’s history as a textile factory while we slowly creak and shake our way up to the tenth floor. He unlocks the unit and says if you’d like, I can wait out in the hall and give you some space to look around, to which Tom immediately replies great, pushing past Guy and the threshold with my hand in his, leading me inside and shutting the door behind us.
The apartment looks even bigger and more luminous in person than it did on Tom’s phone this morning. It’s beautiful. I fantasize first, then worry. I picture piling the concrete floors with Persian rugs, filling the living room with beautiful leather furniture and incandescent light. I imagine bathing in the master bathroom, which really is spectacular. A bright, austere space dominated by glossy white square tiles that cover the walls and ledges surrounding the deep soaking tub built in beneath the enormous industrial window. It’s so clean that it almost feels clinical, softened only by the abundant natural light streaming in through the glass panes. Outside the window sits another historic building, tall and all brick with elaborate white terra-cotta ornamentation and repeating arches and decorative Gothic detailing. Tom takes a picture of me sitting on the tiled ledge, making a face like holy shit, then says you’re falling in love with it, aren’t you? And I am, or was, because something about his verbalization of my falling feeling puts an end to my falling feeling entirely. I quit picturing being happy in the apartment and start picturing being miserable instead. Miserable with my Persian rugs. Miserable in my beautiful bathtub. And so when Guy comes in to ask us if we like it and instead of saying yes Tom says Guy, it’s perfect, except when we were walking up here my beautiful girlfriend almost stepped in a pile of human shit, I feel so relieved.
I stand between Guy and Tom in the elevator on the way back down to the lobby, feeling a little bit depressed about the perfect bathroom and jealous of whoever will get to bathe there, but mostly just feeling free. Tom and I say goodbye to Guy, who takes one last long loving look at my tits and tells us to call him quickly if we happen to change our minds. It’s a hot commodity, he reminds us, somewhat pathetically.
At my request, Tom and I walk a few blocks in the hot sun to Bottega Louie for lunch. We sit on the same side of a tight black leather booth and order cappuccinos and freshly squeezed orange juice and fried eggs with fresh bread and bacon off of the brunch menu. We kiss and eat and try to talk over the echo-ing shouts emanating from the bakery area, where twenty or thirty people are gathered at a bunch of little two-tops in front of a rolled-out television for a viewing of the final World Cup game. The aesthetic juxtaposition is bizarre. Messi jerseys and macarons. Think: Who are these people? What kind of person comes to Bottega Louie to watch sports? Tom asks me which team I am rooting for and when I say neither he says isn’t one of your grandmothers from Spain? and I say sure, but what does that have to do with anything?
We leave Bottega Louie and spend half an hour meandering in circles looking for a dispensary. We walk to three different locations that appear on the map but do not exist in actuality. Reminds me of that warm afternoon weeks or maybe months ago, can’t remember, when I was pacing up and down that street alone in Beverly Hills, killing time while Tom took a meeting, and I kept routing myself to bookstores I found on my phone that were nowhere to be found. The sun is beating down hot and my slingbacks keep slipping below the achilles and so we decide to give up on finding weed, eat the rest of last night’s mushrooms, find the car and get to the west side before they can hit. And we do just that, but the shrooms never really hit. My mood is nice and if I focus really hard on being sensitive, I can feel a faint glitter in my solar plexus. A micro dose at best. We take the dog for a long hot walk up and down Venice and then lay around his apartment on the black leather couch beneath the open window, drinking cold water and eating refrigerated peaches until sunset.
Later, just after sunset on the way back to Hollywood, I look out at the sparkling valley over the 405 and try to feel the glitter in my solar plexus but can’t. I look at Tom just as he is about to exit for the 101 and ask him if he’d like to keep driving north instead, straight to the strip mall parking lot off of Canoga where we can get what we need to reignite our fading micro doses into proper doses. He immediately grins and agrees. First call tomorrow at eight a.m., fuck it, he says.
While Tom speeds through the Valley, I peek at the blog. Read a comment that says this show is getting hard to watch. Feel vexed and poignantly misunderstood and quickly write back THIS IS NOT A SHOW THIS IS MY LIFE, I DO NOT DICTATE THE PLOT WITH YOU IN MIND.
Because it’s true. This is not a show and this is also not a cry for help nor a call for advice. Maybe it fucking reads like a cry for help or a call for advice, but it is neither of those things. It’s a live archive. It’s almost like some readers are participating in an ongoing moral drama whose outcome they believe they can influence. It really depresses me that almost none of the comments are about the writing or the project itself anymore. All of the comments are about my choices, what should happen to me next. Like I’m fucking Truman Burbank. The readers want to know how it’s going to end. Some of them even want to save me, I think. Which is nice, I guess, but also completely missing the point. Saving me has never been the point. I never asked to be saved. Everybody thinks my new boyfriend is satan incarnate. Everybody defends me and despises him, lets my unreliable narrative go almost entirely unchallenged. I write about lying to him, missing and seeing and kissing and fucking my ex behind his back, saying one thing to him and meaning another, acting generally duplicitous and occasionally psychopathic, and yet nobody ever really identifies me as the problem, as toxic, a manipulator, a user, a liar, a cheater, a hypocrite. I admit to being all of those things, and yet somehow, against my will and also kind of against what is simply true, I am deemed by the readers to be one hundred percent victim, clueless, romantic, damaged, lost, in danger, a damsel in distress.
I split five grams of mushrooms in half with Tom and forget about it.
Monday
The alarm goes off at seven. And despite the fact that we spent the hours between ten p.m. and five a.m. awake and hallucinating in bed, he gets up and showers quickly and dresses and then reaches for me beneath the duvet, tells me that he’s going to let me sleep, work the first few hours of his morning from the west side. Feel astounded and excited by his willingness to temporarily separate. Take the gift. Don’t question it. Kiss him goodbye. Close my eyes.
Things I do while my boyfriend is away, between the hours of seven a.m. and one p.m.:
Sleep till ten
Look at my phone in bed
Bathe, shave, exfoliate. Too lazy to shampoo my hair
Sit for an hour in the drained bath, moisturizing and gua sha-ing and looking at my phone some more
Apply perfume oil
Smoke two joints in bed
Look at the blog and get irritated and feel misunderstood again. Delete a comment that says do you keep going back to him so you have something interesting to write about? instead of writing back what a stupid fucking question
Wonder if my period is due soon
Feel ravenous. Eat an Erewhon seeded bar for breakfast standing naked over the kitchen sink
Put on a black and white polka dot bralette and matching underwear and lay with my laptop underneath the AC
Tom returns with gifts. Four shots of espresso over ice, another six pack of Buddha beer, a family sized bag of air fried kettle chips, dish soap, cat food and two glass bottles of mint terra yerba mate. He tells me that he’s hungry and so am I, but I pretend to be disinterested in food because I already ate earlier, and God forbid I eat twice before like, sunset. I redirect my appetite by toasting two slices of country bread and spreading them with a calorically intense amount of crunchy peanut butter and fig preserves. I place the slices on top of each other and cut them in half and serve the sandwich to Tom on a jade plate. I sit across from him at the kitchen nook while he eats to watch.
I waste the hours between one and six drinking Buddha beer and smoking joints and playing dress up alone in my closet. (Which doesn’t really feel like so much of a waste considering all of the fun that I have.) I find and try on things I haven’t seen in months, years, forgot I had. A pair of black leather Prada boots with four inch heels and pointed toes and a silver zipper that runs all the way up the calf. A pair of suede chaps with fringe that I purchased as a teenager in Ojai. A cheap rosary made with hot pink beads and a golden crucifix dripped out in synthetic crystals. I slip the rosary around my neck, unzip the Prada boots and get into bed. Tom follows, then sex. It’s a bit athletic and in the midst of the act, the hot pink rosary beads break and scatter across the white bed, roll onto the hardwood floor and disappear everywhere.
We get high and drive down Hollywood Boulevard in the dark to the In-N-Out across from Hollywood High. We order cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes and fries and eat in the parking lot with the roof dropped, listening to the radio and looking up at the big yellow moon. “Gentle Persuasion” by Keith Mansfield comes on and I close my eyes. Spark a joint and take Santa Monica Boulevard all the way to Venice. The night is warm and breezeless, even on the west side. We walk the dog for an hour in the moonlight, lay around his apartment getting high and listening to music, then pull back onto Santa Monica Boulevard and hit every green light on the way back to Hollywood. We park in the hills, take our clothes off, brush our teeth in the bathroom side by side, turn the lights out, get into bed and fall asleep holding each other with the AC whirring.
Tuesday
Tuesday passes swiftly. We wake at seven, fuck, get high, clothe ourselves and leave the bungalow quickly to move Tom’s car for street cleaning and find coffee. Summer morning, seven a.m., seventy degrees. The air feels like nothing on my skin and Hollywood Boulevard is empty but for half a dozen or so sleeping homeless bodies tucked between Walk of Fame stars and the facades of shuttered buildings. We go into Intelligentisa, order two triple shot hot dirty chais and two chickpea curry puffs, sit on the patio kissing while we wait and then walk back to the apartment. At eight, Tom sits at the kitchen nook with his laptop to work and I do the impossible: take the first basketful of laundry down to the basement and begin running the machine for the first time in months. Feels amazing. The entire morning, afternoon and early evening get eaten by laundry. I go in and out of the kitchen door every thirty minutes or so, spend the entire day walking up and down the stairs, washing and drying and hanging and folding seven loads. In between washes, I kiss and fuck my boyfriend, finish my coffee, eat half a chickpea curry puff for breakfast, pluck my eyebrows into oblivion sitting in the bathroom sink for half an hour, lay in bed, pet the stray cays that live in the yard by the laundry room, get a little pink in the sunshine, run the AC relentlessly and get so high. And just a few minutes before sunset, all of my clothes are clean and hanging and I feel reborn, brand new. Tom shuts his laptop and gets into bed with me and lights a joint and falls asleep in his jeans before we can decide on something for dinner. I crawl over his sleeping body and creep into the kitchen to eat graham crackers and dark chocolate and drink Buddha beer in my underwear. I smoke a joint in the bathroom to encourage sleepiness, wander around the apartment aimlessly, look at my closet and feel pleased, put on freshly laundered underwear, get back into bed, lay my head on Tom’s chest and fall asleep.
Wednesday
I wake naturally with the sun at six, sneak out of bed and close myself into the bathroom. Inspect the soft skin of my naked stomach and thighs in the mirror, which is covered in deep red creases from sleeping pressed up against Tom’s jeans. I get back into bed and when he wakes up and asks me if I want to come with him to Venice, spend the morning working in his apartment, I say yes. Which pleases him so much that he gives me two orgasms before we leave.
On the way to the west side, we pull off at the Target on La Brea past San Vicente because my eye is suddenly red and twitching and I want contact solution. We go inside, do two laps around the tiny store and purchase a big blue jar of Nivea body cream, stain remover, a bottle of eucalyptus scented hand soap, a miniature bottle of contact solution, a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and two bottles of pink coconut water. The sky is thick with smog on the 10 and I am wearing yesterday’s jeans and yesterday’s tank top without a bra. Tom weaves through red traffic with a joint lit and no music playing, windows cracked to ash. I stare at the rear of the car in front of us, decorated with two bumper stickers, an upside down cross and an American flag.
After five or six morning and early afternoon hours of lying around Tom’s apartment, getting stoned and falling asleep a little bit in his bed and playing with the dog and looking at my laptop, pretending to work but mostly just reading things and looking at pictures while Tom worked for real, we leave Venice for Hollywood again. This perpetual motion. We stop at the Starbucks on Venice and Centinela for four shots of espresso over ice. Early Psychosis Intervention billboard on one side of the strip mall parking lot, Andrea Bocelli at the Hollywood Bowl advertisement on the other. I point to Andrea Bocelli and ask Tom if he knows him. He says of course and I say I was conceived after his show in Las Vegas, it was one of my parents’ first dates and he says whoa, romantic, no? and I say I guess so and imagine my parents full of love and hope in the cold desert fall of 1997, watching Andrea Bocelli sing “Bésame Mucho,” or whatever, and feel depressed. Should we go see the show? Tom asks, staring up at Andrea Bocelli. No.
Back at the bungalow, Tom sits in the living room to work and I lock myself in the bathroom, run the bath and soak. I fill the tub, recline till it gets cold, drain it and refill it over and over again until my fingers are pruned and I start to feel nauseous and pressed by the steam. I dry off, open up the door. Moisturize all over and comb my hair and roll perfume oil. And when I emerge in my towel, sometime around four, there is a perfect Zankou falafel plate with pita bread and tabbouleh and cabbage salad waiting for me on the kitchen nook table.
The work day ends and the early evening passes languidly between the kitchen and bed. We smoke and fuck and talk about love and money and pet the cat and eat fruit in our underwear. At eight, I pull on a very soft and thin white tee shirt and loose fitting jeans and the black ballet flats my mother bought me and follow Tom up into the hills to where he parked his car. The light outside is pink and dim and the higher up into the hills we wind, the quieter it gets. The drive to the west side is nice. Traffic is light and we listen to Yung Lean and take Santa Monica Boulevard all of the way so that we can keep the windows rolled down without the wind making things sensorially overstimulating. We pull into the parking lot of the dispensary off of Venice to procure another ounce. The security guard we like is at the door and I stand outside with him on the curb while Tom goes inside. He tells me that he thinks he’s going to adopt a German Shepard puppy next week and I say wow, that’s so sweet. But then I ask him if he’s ever had a dog before and he says oh, yes, twenty or thirty, probably. I am from Afghanistan, you know, and dogs are very popular. For fighting. I get a stomachache. Look at Tom through the big window and telepathically will him to hurry.
We walk upstairs, take turns taking bites out of a Bosc pear, undress, brush our teeth together over his big jadeite bathroom sink, shut the blackout curtains over the bed, crawl under the duvet and fall asleep.
Thursday
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