how to fall in love with los angeles part 4

Kyra and I went out on the west side because we didn’t want to spend money. At the bar there was a group of men in their 30s who were obviously not from LA. 

People in their 30s in LA don’t go to this bar because the bar has nothing to offer besides a smattering of hot 20 year olds and rotating dj’s that always play remixes which were worse versions of the mid-2000’s hits all the 20 something’s really wanted to listen to. The hallway to the bathroom is sort of cool I guess. But again the demographic is really out of towners and fucked up just-out-of-college kids with money to blow. A perfect place for women to not spend any of ours. Anyways one of the 30 something year olds was particularly hot, so even though these weren’t the easy targets we initially had in mind, Kyra was talking to him while I kept the friends busy. My friend Wes said this is called running a 2 man iso in basketball. Like most of us, Kyra’s priorities were to fall in love and to save money, in that order. The guy really was hot and since he clearly didn’t belong at this particular bar there was hope he might actually be good enough for her. I took my eyes off the prize and ran the iso. 

About half of them were married and of course as usual that didn’t seem to matter. 

Some time into the endeavor the hot one still hadn’t offered to buy Kyra a drink and one of the married ones had his hand on my thigh. He started sliding it up and down and I felt his wedding band drawing closer to what he wanted. The metal made me cold and I shivered. I’m sure he thought I was shivering for different reasons. 

He kept leaning closer to my ear, supposedly for the noise in the bar.

I felt his breath against my neck when he told me I should marry somebody now, somebody with money who could take care of me. Marriage was the way to go, he said. And stroked my thigh again. He grabbed the back of my neck this time and said, “Believe me. You’re young. I know these things.”

I said that he wasn’t making a great case for marriage. He said the right women understand that men need to have their fun then asked me if I was wet. I wasn’t. More importantly I wasn’t in control, something that should have been so easy in a place like that, and I definitely wasn’t saving money. By this time Kyra had deduced she was definitely not falling in love either. We left promptly. 

It’s times like these where it’s very clear my father is capable of being wrong, something that never crossed my mind before age 12 and crossed it every other hour after that. That taking his advice would inevitably lead to pathetic unrewarding situations such as these would never occur to him.

My dad always calls me in the morning when I’ve barely had a chance to wake up, which for me and for most people in LA is like anytime before 10:30am, and he kind of spews some manic idea at me and then hangs up. 

One of his ideas is that I should always have my nails painted red and more than a few men in rotation. This is one of the ideas he went back to often.

He thought it would work better for me if I stayed busy. I should take advantage of my youth by taking advantage of as many men as possible. It would work even better if they were rich. 

He likes to think of most things as a game, people as players to be manipulated, yearning as a poison you should always control. I have a sort of poison. I am not in control. 

Maddie and I go out on Thursday and we end up at a nice house in the Palisades. We’re drinking and dangling our feet in the koi fish pond as the sun goes up. I cannot finish the job. I go home to him. The Uber gets lost on the way. There is no service in paradise. I must stay in control.

I get a second martini and make sure I don’t pay for it at Tower Bar on Friday. There is the possibility of me getting into a nice car that will take me to a nice place, nicer than this. The door opens. I cannot finish the job. I go home to Cole. I am in control. 

Someone claims they're in love on Saturday. He follows up on Sunday and looks for me in the same bar in Venice on Wednesday. I am at a different bar, a bar that gets to be called cooler from its location alone, in Los Feliz, poisoning someone else. I think to myself that in my dad’s manic idea, I am something like a virus. I’m sure my dad doesn’t see it that way. The bar closes. Everything closes too early here. My game is always played in a time crunch. I go home to Cole. The boy who says he is in love keeps calling. I decline the calls. I am in control.

It’s not very hard to be desirable, even in Los Angeles, where there is so much to desire all of the time. Maybe because of that it’s easier. There’s a sort of old American greed that’s more romantic than harsh, more pure than capitalistic, although of course that is here too. There are so many big things to disappear inside of. There are so many long roads to lead you away from home. It’s easy to feed into this feeling, to become one with the scenery, to make yourself look like part of the set involved in that old Hollywood idea, and to become desirable too. Many of the men who claim to want me are not from here. Not that I’m so special. On certain nights I seem like I am. I poison them with dreams that will never come true. Part of it is for my father and part of it is for myself. I don’t want to be the only one so hungry. I do not want to be alone in always wanting more, more, more.

I feed myself pretty LA dreams of nights on the top of the mountain, of some lovely fights I’ve had on the beach at Point Dume, climbing over the rocks in the dark like some children, tumbling in the surf like dogs. 

It’s not so simple as excess, because excess abounds everywhere here, and that is still not enough. 

I lay on the sand and watch Simon and Cole surf in the water. I talk with Brad and Rosalie, a couple who are the product of a bar game far less poisonous than mine, played at a bar on Main St. that is far from being cool now, and turn back occasionally to stare at the mountains. Cole always catches a wave right when I turn around. It’s natural law. They always have to catch one good one before they go home. He comes out of the water with Simon and I run over to meet them. I jump up on Cole and wrap my legs around him even though he’s wet and it makes me cold.

“How was it?”, I say.

“Not bad. Got a few good ones”, he says.

And that is enough. We all make the trek up the stairs on the side of cliffs and I turn back around occasionally to yell a response to Maddie. Whenever I stop to turn around and yell I have to grab the railing briefly because I have awful balance and because the beach at Point Dume is so beautiful you kind of need a steadying hand just to take it in. Such a wide expanse of force it’s dizzying. My feet feel unstable in the face of it. Simon’s laugh is so loud that I swear if I were next to him I’d fall down the cliff from the reverberation. We’ve made plans for the night even though we’re already tired. Somewhere the man who kept calling has given up by now and gone to the beach too. He is probably staring at the mountains and they are telling him they’re much better than me. 

I am in control, because on days like these I don’t remember my father’s ideas and my desire is quiet, feasting on paradise. I am home.