The LA in my head
A friend of mine is actually from Los Angeles, though she lives in Berlin now, which should probably disqualify me from writing any of this — and if she read it she would take it apart sentence by sentence, calmly, the way she takes apart most of the things I claim to believe. She would be right. She usually is about places; she has the advantage of having actually lived in one.
But the LA in my head never had to be accurate. It only had to be possible.
It started with a TV show, which is embarrassing but true. I was fifteen, watching Californication in a terraced house in the suburbs, and on the screen there was a whole finished life: the light, the sea behind every scene, a man wrecking himself in the most beautiful place I had ever seen. I didn’t want his life. I wanted the sky over it.
It was never the Hollywood part; that was being sold to me, and I knew it even then. It was the ordinary things in the sun. A burger at In-N-Out, eaten in a parked car. Bungalows the colour of weak coffee. A parking lot at four in the afternoon, when the light goes long and even the asphalt looks expensive.
And brands, obviously — I was fifteen, and brands were how I thought about places before I had been to any of them. American Apparel, Vans, Converse. Even though Converse isn’t even from California. Boston. I looked it up years later and felt briefly stupid, then let it go, because that is how a myth works: it doesn’t check its sources, it just absorbs whatever comes close enough to the warmth.
And dust. The LA in my head is a dusty place — sun-faded, worn soft at the edges, nothing staying new for long. If I’m honest it is the only part of the fantasy that ever had anything real underneath it, the only line that runs straight from that suburban living room to what I make now. A place where things are allowed to age in public. Where the wear is the point, not the problem.
Eventually I went, of course.
Jetlag is its own kind of hangover, and I arrived inside it, half awake, half still somewhere over Greenland. The first evening someone took me to El Coyote — a Mexican place on Beverly, there since 1931, wearing every one of those years openly: string lights that never come down, burgundy booths, sombreros, photographs of people nobody looks at anymore, a margarita too sweet and too strong to be a good idea. I sat there with my eyes burning and thought: who builds a room like this and then just lets it stand for ninety years. In that state it seemed like the most romantic thing a city could do. To keep something simply because it had always been kept.
The hotel was downtown. A rooftop, a pool nobody swam in, the skyline behind it arranged like a screensaver. I stood up there one night, too tired to sleep, and thought: this is how I should be.
It was the exact sentence I had thought at fifteen, on a balcony in the suburbs, looking at nothing. Only the view had changed. I find that funny and a little bleak at the same time — that you can fly nine thousand kilometres to land on the same private sentence.
I won’t say much more about the trip itself. Holidays are boring to describe, and describing them tends to flatten the thing you were actually after, which was never the itinerary.
What stays is the feeling that everything there is possible. That everyone is just delusional enough to believe their particular thing is going to be great — and because they all believe it at once, it becomes a kind of weather, something you can feel on your skin.
I know it’s a postcard. I know about the traffic and the rents and everything my friend would say, calmly, over coffee, in Berlin.
I keep the postcard anyway. Some places are worth more imagined than arrived at.