It’s a party in Bel Air, which means we had to a) convince everyone to leave Venice for a night, and b) convince them it wouldn’t completely suck with the most tangential facts (Joe Francis used to live there, the current owner invented the StairMaster), while also painfully keeping the better, yet equally irrelevant, facts quiet (there are three Keith Haring murals, it was built by a rare Black modernist architect).
My friends try to get out of the Uber at the gate like they’ve never set foot in the Hills before.
About the gate: it flies completely under the radar while giving off the vibe of being uncomfortably stark naked. People say it’s the lack of sidewalk, but to me, it’s the Stepford-wivian hedges. The blasphemy of controlled natural things.
I love it only because I don’t belong here. I am bringing with me a carful of other people who don’t belong here. We are all going to rub our non-belonging-ness into this joint. You can feel it in the energy inside the car as we curl around the house. The driver leans all the way into the wheel to get a good look at the place.
I’m not worried because I know we’re bringing the only true currency. The last time these people felt something real was when their nose bled at Coachella.
The house is pink, encrusted with cars that look expensive and gaudy. A little desperate, but that’s LA. Subtlety gets you nowhere in the devil’s playground.
I do love this town. I understand its desperation, its delusional dreams, the way its plastic perfection is vacuum-sealed in exclusivity until you start to believe you’re perfect too. Hollywood isn’t just the entertainment industry; it is entertaining. Its entire ethos is summed up by the cliché of a casting couch. We are all young Black Dahlias from Ohio, wetting our mouths to feel special.
The least interesting thing you can be in LA is beautiful. The second least interesting thing you can be is a celebrity’s girlfriend. This place is filled with both. I feel a whiskey shot shiver. I love fucking up paradigms. I’ll be the demonic angel you never thought you needed.
I leave the girls behind because it’s the only way to be approached. I’m at the chrome bar, overlooking those LA twinkly lights that make you feel like you’re inside a legacy studio bumper, when an actor approaches me. I know he’s an actor in the same way we all know: he’s on a TV show, the kind that’s just slightly smarter and more “arty” than the other shitty shows on Netflix, made in a frenzy to provide us with a distracting circus. A lidocaine shot, depending on if you like to go up or down.
Importantly, the show is about Hollywood, which is the equivalent of giving in to the casting couch. The second season got canceled, then bought by a competing streaming platform. That was just enough buzz to give the general public the illusion that this was culturally important material, when it was really just the result of bickering, penny-pinching producers.
Why can’t an art form exist and breathe through its enfants terribles and aesthetic nihilists without being picked to the marrow by PowerPoint vultures, their smiles shaped like emails?
The actor smiles politely at me as he leans over the bar in that paranoid way famous people do so you don’t think fame has made them rude. The desperation turns me on.
So I turn my back to him.
“What did you get?”
God, I love this city.
He is charming, of course, as they all have to be, with that quiet mischief and wounded sincerity particular to the newly famed.
We both know he’s here because he grew up a beautiful boy with some crushing experience that made him soft and absorbent. Acting was the only place that allowed the possibility of making good money in desolate Kentucky, where the only heroes were on the screen.
And we both know I’m here because I grew up in a big city. A sad girl with too many references, fluent in exits, too early exposed to everything others find electric in a city: art, appetite, danger, desire. The only time I’m not bored is when I’m somewhere that moves as fast as I do.
Which is now. In the exhilaration of knowing this conversation will be predictable and boring. And the boring-ness of it will make the story interesting. Because most people would kill to be here, furiously flirted with by a global heartthrob. And it’s doing nothing for me. In fact, it’s confirming a theory I have involving a form of undiagnosed congenital insensitivity toward the things that excite normal, healthy people. Not depression exactly, but a kind of tired dopamine receptor system. The kind that drinks black coffee on a fire escape, preparing to spit on all the interesting people below.
He tells me the party bores him. All these “industry people.”
“What industry?” I ask.
It forces him to admit he’s an actor.
“Anything I would’ve seen?”
I look around for my friends when he answers.
He shifts. The last thing he wants, after all those manic years of hanging with the right people at the right parties looking the right way, is for me to think he’s just another struggling actor in LA.
This is how it’s going to go:
For the rest of the party, I’ll be too focused on hanging out with my friends to acknowledge his advances. We’ll be the only girls there who look like they’re having actual fun, and that will be more interesting than anything else going on. We might even start a skinny dip.
He’ll be out of practice. It’s been years since he’s had to really work for a girl’s attention. This will compel him further, it will remind him of normalcy. I am, effectively, giving him an exhilarating, forgotten, perhaps even nostalgic experience. The thrill of a flirty but challenging chase he hasn’t felt in a long time.
Every time he gets one in the bag, a smile, a touch on his arm, he’ll smile dumbly and come back for more.
I’ll leave suddenly, without saying goodbye. He’ll do the work to find out how to reach me. When he finally does, I’ll answer his texts with monosyllables until the whole thing peters out.
The next time I see him will be at La Poubelle or Basement or someone’s after-party behind the Chateau or whatever. We’ll exchange words that sound like a DM conversation. And the whole thing will feel like déjà vu, a banter pre-loaded. Timing off and charm glitching at the edges.
I down my drink and spot my friends near the pool. Someone already barefoot. Someone dancing too early. There’s a dangling bottle of tequila and the vapes have been swapped for actual cigarettes. It’s coming off delightfully messy.
We’re not special, just louder than the wallpaper. And that’s enough, here.
I tell him I’ll see him around. I won’t.
As I walk away, I feel the warmth, the pulse, the blur. And I realize I love it not because I’m above it, but because I belong in it.
The cesspool shimmers. I shimmer back.