1. An Incomplete List of La Weather Eternal Sunshine, June Gloom, Infernal Heat, Demon Winds
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF LA WEATHER: ETERNAL SUNSHINE, JUNE GLOOM, INFERNAL HEAT, DEMON WINDS
THEY’D BEEN CALLING IT the summer of exsanguination; not that I worried about those things at the time.
When you’re young, nothing can touch you.
You never think it’s going to be your body on the ground, your organs spilling out onto the sidewalk.
At twenty-two, nothing but the risk of ubiquity is ever all that real.
I’d gone out with my cousin Roro, who had recently taken a wealthy lover, and her best friend Nessa, whom I tolerated only because it had been two decades with no other choice.
It was Roro who’d forced me out that night, to a cowboy-themed party at a new club in one of the warehouses off Melrose.
During the Uber ride over, Ro kept saying things like “Did you know that’s a real-life cement factory?
?” as if trivia could make me forget I’d just lost my job.
Or as if any part of me, at my most beautiful and my most selfish, could be persuaded to care about gentrification in the least.
I knew about the recent string of murders to the extent that dead bodies were part of Roro’s pitch to persuade me to come out with her.
She was an artist, the unpaid kind, and thoroughly obsessed with death.
“If I die getting serial murdered at the club,” Roro told me over the phone, “you’re going to feel like shit. ”
That night, I saw a man step in front of a bus that should have killed him, and then I watched him walk away. Then, characteristically for the person I used to be, I forgot him.
Until I saw him again.
Back then, whenever the void came calling, I liked to play a little game with myself called Could I Survive It?
A simple game, where I would imagine myself in some kind of terrifying situation, and it was like a puzzle, sudoku or something, to see how I’d make it out alive.
Maimed, fine. Scarred, possibly ruined, sure. But importantly, alive.
A fall from a great height in my car. A tumble downhill on foot. A low railing on a rooftop balcony. An earthquake in this spot, or this one, or this one. A strange man standing too close. Could I Survive It? You get the gist.
As I said, the rules were very simple—all I had to do was come out alive—though I had a confidence about the future that was totally unearned, born from a place of stubbornness and imagination.
I didn’t actually understand the specs on my car, which aside from being precious to me was a danger to the environment and only technically in working order.
I didn’t understand physics, either, being not very interested in physics and only sort of paying attention whenever I was put to the task by force.
I’d gone to a performing arts high school, one with an endowment from the de Witts, though of course it’s getting ahead of myself to mention them now, or maybe not.
Because it would be very difficult to explain any of this if you didn’t understand that the de Witts had always been there, hovering around the circumstances of my daily life.
It wasn’t so much a matter of saying yes to them (although I did). It was more like … taking my entire existence to its inevitable conclusion.
The only way I would have made a different choice is if I’d been born a different person, in a completely different place.
One thing you wouldn’t find a lot of in LA is a life lived without some degree of performative irony.
Earnestness is not acceptable currency here, where the most successful occupants have never lived without the presence of an audience.
The denizens of this city are never not performing, so that the performance becomes the mask becomes the person in their entirety and so on, indistinguishably.
Enthusiasm in Los Angeles is really only suited for objects of beauty, clandestine affairs, and drug abuse.
Many people here are artists who have identified their price (every artist has a price or there would be no such thing as industry).
The art created in Los Angeles has a certain spatial disregard to it, too.
A lack of concern for order, because this is a place with one finger at all times on the pulse of disdain.
I remember seeing as a child one of those T-shirts, the iconic “I (heart) NY” shirts inverted to say “LA doesn’t (heart) you,” and I understood something fundamental, which was that a New Yorker could never be happy under these conditions.
It was simply too distinct a scorn. The East Coast has a wrathful energy, something related to the cold, the cramped spaces, the feeling like there will never be room for all of you, that some things must remain in boxes for the pure utility of space.
Even the schools, all captive and forcibly indoors like that.
My high school was a sprawling campus in the heart of Hollywood, shaded by big mature trees, paths that stretched between buildings, insufficient tables for all the students, nowhere to sit when it rained.
There—maybe that was the difference? You could exist here, as vast as you pleased, so long as you did it creatively.
A New Yorker would be disgusted, for survival reasons.
Without hierarchy and order, the island of Manhattan would simply collapse.
I couldn’t tell you a single person on earth who wouldn’t know of the actor William de Witt.
But it was much more uniquely LA to also know of William’s grandfather, Killian de Witt, for whom the endowment of my school was named.
Killian was some kind of oil and energy mogul, with a fortune derived from a strain of old money traders in New Amsterdam—the kind of old money that, by way of some early twentieth-century liquidity, came to be lumped into Angeleno history with the Gettys, or Mulholland.
Without Killian de Witt, this city couldn’t have existed in this form, or any form of significance.
Any details about him beyond that were irrelevant to me, insubstantial. As with most people we learned about in history class, I could only envision him in black and white.
William was much more central to the workings of my life.
Not that it requires saying, but he was a real movie star, the likes of which I can’t say still exist the same way now.
Now we have internet fads, or It Boys of the moment, but William was a star the way few actors could be.
He was what I wanted to be—ethereal, eternal.
All charisma and sex appeal; inimitable, intangible.
Killian de Witt was only interesting to me insofar as he was interesting to William.
William was famously proud of his connection to his grandfather, which was also his connection to the city, like the inheritance of a throne.
(William de Witt’s father—Killian’s only son—had gone to New York in his twenties, and there William had actually been born and raised, coming up on the Broadway scene before starring in Hollywood films.) He gave a speech at my high school once while I was a junior, on my period, picking at the plum-colored nail polish my mother said made me look like I’d slammed my fingers in a door.
As William de Witt spoke about his deep love for Los Angeles, I ran my fingers idly through my hair, the strands falling down the bleacher seats, down and down and out of sight, someone else’s problem.
But for weeks afterward I entertained fantasies, teenage reenactments of that speech.
Alternate universes, less fixated on the legacy of the de Witt family or their historic fingerprint on the city of LA.
Instead, from the rosy desires of my overactive mind, William de Witt had seen me in that crowd, locked eyes with me, lost his train of thought, and publicly stumbled, such that from afar, my cheeks glowed sweetly, knowingly pink.
I knew I saw something in you, he’d whisper to me later, catching me in the hallway, alone in an empty corridor, the usual contrivances of the diabolical teenage mind. You have something I’ve never seen before.
What?
You have it, he’d say, whatever it is.
Hard to say what I wanted more—his desire (I was, again, in the spring of my sexual awakening) or the opportunity that his desire would present.
At the time, I believed they were the same thing; that if a man desired you, then he also respected you.
Which is of course wildly untrue and probably not even relevant.
A total fallacy, two unrelated things. But I felt I understood the world, specifically Hollywood.
Specifically fame, which is an ecosystem where you don’t climb a ladder.
It’s far too ephemeral for that. Instead, it’s just that one day you’re outside of it and the next you’re accepted.
There was also the feral, lurking possibility that it could all disappear just as easily.
Acceptance would always be conditional on the industry, on faceless studio heads who kept both eyes on unknowable profit margins.
There was always the threat that either you or your work could be canceled, and then poof, everything’s gone.
By the time I actually met William de Witt, I held as a tenet of professionalism that whatever he or anyone wanted from me, I would leverage it, so long as it had actionable results.
By then I was already making all my decisions on the assumption that I would one day be famous—that I would have to be, because I’d already gone too far to come back.
After the streamer pilot that was supposed to be my big break was canceled, I was living in a sort of purgatory, back in my mother’s apartment.
(Roro had decided to keep the lease we’d gotten together in Los Feliz and sublet out my room—she, of course, was the more practical of the two of us, which is to say, the only one with a day job.) I was, at the time, subsisting only by the grace of my mother’s forgiveness. Untenable.