If you’re going to be upset with him bc he’s leaving, you should at least tell him you’re upset.
maybe getting laid in the desert is his way of grieving
It would certainly be an effective way to honor my life.
You should go
You should respond to him
And then go
Though I was pissed at Ezra’s decision to semi-abandon me, I appreciated that he’d thought of spending these last few hours before his desert trip with me at a bar we loved. I would try to take Miggy’s advice and be direct with Ezra, but it would be better if I could just erase the feelings of being hurt and have fun with him during the small window of time between now and last call. I could spend the car ride doing a kind of cleansing breathing exercise (in for four, hold for four, out for four) to eject my feelings of abandonment which were probably misplaced aggression and definitely a product of my anxious attachment style (I was sure Therapist Lauren would say as much in our next session, whenever I got around to scheduling it). I could clear all the passive-aggressive bullshit out of my veins and lungs and just be present for Ezra. If I went as is—hair scraggly, bangs damp with night sweat, eyes bloodshot from staring at the computer and internet’s endless scroll—I could get there an hour and a half before closing. And if I was being totally honest with myself, there was little I wouldn’t do for Ezra if he asked.
EzraIsTexting
Today 12:03 AM
u up?
im UP
u wanna come out for a last one at la cuev?
yeah comin
After hours lying on my back on the left side of my bed, I left it warm and rumpled when I got up. The right side was cold; it had been empty all night. And for a few weeks previous.
The wood floor in my bungalow creaked when I walked, haunted-sounding. The bathtub faucet perpetually dripped and the drain in the kitchen sink occasionally made a glugging noise like it was a throat looking for something to swallow. I could hear all of it in the quiet dark. My phone lit up again; maybe Ezra was calling it a night after all. I thumbed the message open.
EzraIsTexting
u wanna come out for a last one at la cuev?
yeah comin
Noz broke up with me this p.m.
The text gave me a sudden anxious energy, my grievance with Ezra immediately insignificant. I scurried around, found my black jeans, and then dropped them in disgust when I remembered that they used to belong to Noz and she’d given them to me when she was done with them. She was giving away Ezra now, as easily as the jeans, without even consulting me or warning me. With Miggy gone, our group had been reduced to three, and everything was fine as long as Nozlee and Ezra stayed happy together, and I loved Nozlee and she loved me and she loved Ezra and I loved Ezra and he loved both of us in different ways. But maybe Nozlee didn’t love Ezra anymore and so I couldn’t let Ezra see me in her jeans.
I put on my Levi’s and the muscle tee with the blue stripes that I’d stolen from Ezra, and the jean jacket that matched the wash of my Levi’s; I put my glasses on. I blew out the blue comfort and protection candles that I’d been burning while I lingered bed-bound, and dug through the crates I kept under my bed and pulled out three candles: one black, one white, one red. I put all three jarred candles into my bathtub and used an eyeliner to write three names on three squares of toilet paper: Nozlee, Ezra, Eve. I thought hard about a general anti-negativity vibe and lit one black candle and burned my name. I thought hard about Ezra’s heart healing and imagined him smiling, not caring and lit the white candle and burned his name. I thought about Nozlee’s heart pumping hot blood and her mind growing amorous, relit with revived love for Ezra. I left the candles burning in the tub, laced up my Gazelles, and finally ran down the stairs.
EzraIsTexting
Noz broke up with me this p.m.
oh babe oh fuck im sorry IM COMING
Ezra and Noz weren’t what you’d call a solid couple. They were both bad communicators to some degree, and stubborn, and both had demonstrated some capacity to kamikaze the best parts of their lives. It was something I could relate to. Therapist Lauren called it my “death instinct,” which didn’t necessarily mean I was suicidal, just meant that I had the drive in me to self-destruct, but gradually, muting my suffering with “ritualized comfort-seeking behaviors,” like drinking or making enemies or paying to soak at the Korean spa with the only money I had left to buy groceries. My death instinct came up often in therapy, even though Therapist Lauren doesn’t know I see actual dead people. She thinks I’m holding onto my death instinct out of some kind of fear, but I’m not scared of anything.
In my car, I tossed a bag of Haribo Golden Bears onto the pile of sweaters and empty water bottles that lived on the passenger seat. The gummy bears were another instinct or reflex, born in me by Ezra. Ezra was the kind of friend who would reach his fork into your salad bowl or pick up a taco off your tray to try a bite—but he didn’t have a sweet tooth. My gummy bears were mine, and mine alone. I dug my fingers in the small hole I’d ripped into the corner of the bag, I scissored my fingers until the bag split at its seams, I took a handful.
Chewing, finishing a bear, popping another in my mouth, I began the agonizing process of easing my car out of its tight parking spot, accompanied by a vision of spending the rest of my life executing endless, agonizing three-point turns. It was a likely future for me; I planned to live in LA until I died, and then probably for a while longer. As I twisted to make sure I wasn’t going to smash my taillight into the corner of the building, the Levi’s dug into that part of my side in between my ribs and hips, unprotected by bones and vulnerable. I untwisted, and the Levi’s dug into the small swell of my stomach.
I actually introduced Ezra and Noz years ago, when she was in LA to visit me. Noz wears her desire on her face, and I could tell from the moment she saw him that she wanted to suck his fingers into her mouth. Before they made it official, Ezra and Noz were on and off again for more than two years. Noz was an assistant art director and mostly working on indie movies at the time, always traveling to whatever state was giving the best tax incentives and coming back with some story about how Anna Kendrick’s eyes crossed when she took shots of tequila or how Walton Goggins remembered everyone’s names, even the production assistants and grips. Last fall, she got a job on the pilot of my lady detective show, and it obviously got picked up to series. That meant Noz had been in LA for more than ten months and she and Ezra had been exclusive for most of that time. For years they’d always been texting someone else, or fucking someone else, but given long months in the same city together, they couldn’t commit to anything but whatever it was they had; the smell of each other’s bodies, the familiar fights. Devotion like that turns a fucked-up thing into a real romantic love affair.
One more boring micro-adjustment in my car’s trajectory, one eye on the rearview mirror and one hand on the wheel, I was finally able to drive out of my parking lot and turn onto Sunset Boulevard, heading east. My phone connected to my car’s Bluetooth and the car started playing what I’d been listening to before, “leaves” by Miguel—the singer, not my dead friend—an LA song. “The leaves they don’t change here / You know I’m from here, I never saw it coming / Where did the summer go, when you loved me?” I sang along as I drove, the streets uncommonly empty, my voice mixing with Miguel’s in the closed environment of my car; I could trick myself into thinking that I sang well.
Sunset took me almost all the way into Chinatown before I swung north, onto the 110. This stretch of the 110 was like a country road converted to a freeway, twisting and hazardous to speed on, but everyone did it anyway. The mountains bloomed on either side of me, a state park bracketed the freeway. What should’ve been an uneasy claiming of territory, the roads taking over where mountains were supposed to go, was actually a natural-seeming partnership. The r
oads looked like they grew out of the earth the same as the mountains, both black at night, both dotted with degrading color, yellow for lane lines, green for the tree plants that clung goat-like to the sloped sides of the mountainous ridges.
I took a sharp right onto the Avenue 60 exit, stopped at an excruciatingly long red light, slid into a parking space in front of La Cuev, nodded at the familiar door guy, went through a gaping doorway that barely kept a boundary between street and building, and was inside.
The bar inside La Cuev is horseshoe-shaped and massive, with rickety uncomfortable chairs that no one sat on except during happy hour when the rest of the place was full. So close to closing, I knew I wouldn’t find Ezra there. Nevertheless, it had to be my first stop. The sole bartender left on duty was a woman named Meghan who I know as well as you can know a bartender, from slices of conversations while she mixed margaritas or cut limes. She has a band, she doesn’t have a boyfriend anymore. She’d gone home with my friend Georgie, once, but I didn’t know Meghan to date girls regularly; Georgie is pretty masc. of center.
Meghan put down her phone when she sensed someone come up to the bar and smiled when she saw me. I tip well.
I ordered: “A beer, whatever is on special please, and a shot of tequila, Well is fine.” Meghan heard me but took the bottle of Patrón off the shelf; it was late enough, I was enough of a regular, or maybe it was a flirt. I took the shot then ate the sour meat out of the lime, leaving behind a ravaged peel.
“Did you see Ezra?” I asked.
Besides the bar, La Cuev had two areas: a shadowy, red indoors to the right and a narrow outdoor smoking zone to the left.
“He’s outside,” Meghan said, taking my card.
“Will he need another by now?” I asked.
“Probably, he doesn’t look so good,” she said. “He also had a boilermaker.”
“Add it on, and another shot of tequila for me.”
She swiped my card and got to work preparing my order. I glanced into the corners, looking for apparitions. Seeing none—only the normal shadows and cracked stone walls—I closed my eyes to feel for unseen spirits. I’d felt a presence in La Cuev before—most bars are haunted, and I used to spend a little time with this one ghost man, a Mexican dude who’d died sometime in the 1990s, who had never given me his name, spoke only Spanish. I’d been trying to use a translation app on my phone to communicate with him, but after I brought my then-girlfriend in, and he saw us kissing at a dark table, he refused to acknowledge my presence. Now when I come into the bar, he floats on the ceiling, or disappears entirely. I could feel him lurking somewhere, but he wasn’t showing himself.
I somehow picked up the two tallboys and two shots, and made my way outside, past all the rickety tables and chairs, looking for Ezra. I looked for his familiar body; his heap of curly hair, his slender six feet and three inches, the slice of his cheekbones. I almost didn’t see him, because of what he’d done to himself. He’d cut off his hair, down to the root. It saved me that he was sitting with his back to the door, so that he couldn’t see the horror on my face at this mutilation; I took a moment to collect myself.
I’d last seen Ezra in person yesterday morning at Thursday Trash Tennis, wearing white linen pants and a white tank, greeting the day with a tennis racquet in one hand and a Tecate in the other. His curly hair had been intact then, bobbing as he smacked a ball almost to my baseline. (Ezra and I had been a doubles team for years, before things got serious with Noz; last Thursday I’d partnered with Dorothy, who had a good serve but much less charisma on the court.) It looked like he’d buzzed it without being able to see the back of his head, awkward tufts everywhere he couldn’t reach. Ezra had a good enough face to basically always look good, but he might’ve finally found the outer limit of his appeal.
I could tell by the rattle and the angle his neck curved back when he sipped that he was at the bottom of his previous tallboy. I slid the full one onto the table in front of him.
“Hi honey,” he said. I put the rest of the drinks on the table and he got up and wrapped me in a big hug. His eyes were red-rimmed, but pupils were small, his focus sharp; he wasn’t drunk yet, or on downers. The skin on his arms prickled in the cold night air, and I had no stretchy sweater to offer him; it was unfair that he was the sad one and I was warm and fine in my jacket. I watched his limbs for the restlessness of coke or Adderall or the Ritalin we got last time we were in Mexico.
“Hi honey,” I said. I sat down, put my phone on the table next to his, and rubbed my fingers on his scalp. “It’s all gone.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he ran his hand over it. “Some Britney Spears shit.”
His face was just so there now, without the hair, so unhidden; cheekbones, a forehead, eyebrows arched and expressive and rough like men’s eyebrows are. His lips, too.
“It looks good,” I lied. “It makes your face look good.”
He smiled big. Ezra has one of the world’s most beautiful smiles, a magnetic sun-like smile. The single drawback: his eyes squinted into slits when he grinned and I preferred his eyes to his mouth.
We clinked shot glasses, then tapped the bottoms on the table, then took our shots. Drinking with Ezra is always an act of physical nostalgia, a version of “going through the motions” without the negative connotations. Though the emotional circumstances of our lives are as temporary as fast fashion trends and so the conditions of our drinking together are always changing, that shot was an echo of every single shot we’ve ever taken together, an amassing of our long friendship, an expression of our love for each other. Love, like alcohol, is something the body consumes. Ezra reached across the table to squeeze my upper arm, reminding himself that I was there; then he lit a cigarette.
“So what happened?” I asked on his exhale.
He shrugged like he didn’t know, but that was a lie. Ezra had a PhD in Nozlee, the preeminent scholar in all her various forms of glory and bullshit. I sipped on my beer and waited. If he didn’t want to tell me, he wouldn’t have texted.
“I went over to her house after I finished my work, and she was in the shower,” he said, a storyteller setting the scene. Ezra ghostwrites “autobiographies” of aging male celebrities, and young adult novels “written by” young female celebrities, and an upcoming series of novels not unlike Gossip Girl about a warring group of Jewish high school students attending private school in Los Angeles. He’s comfortable telling dramatic stories about emotional melodrama.
“We’d been fighting on text for about like, the previous three hours,” he continued, ashing his cigarette on the ground even though there was a perfectly good ashtray on the table in front of him, unnecessary and a little gross, like the way sometimes men insist on peeing outside. “I expected we’d squash the fight sometime during the drive to Joshua Tree, and get In-N-Out, and have our weekend. She came out with her hair up in a towel, and she was really calm and said, ‘Let’s not fight,’ but I’m a fucking idiot, and I still wanted to yell at her about whatever the fuck, about her mean tone all the time.
“I mean, goddamn it. What do I care about her tone? If I hadn’t said anything we’d be on our way to the desert right now.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, and instantly regretted it. I knew it wasn’t about fault, it was about cause and effect: Ezra had pushed for a fight and it didn’t matter whether or not he knew that it would be relationship-ending. He was in desperate disbelief, understanding the reality of his situation, sure, but fixed on his last moment of control, his last action. He was circling some kind of drain.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She was very direct. She said, ‘I’m breaking up with you.’
“She said we fight all the time and it was getting too toxic for her and she might get an offer to be an assistant to the art director on a Marvel film and leave LA anyway, so we might as well call this a good try and cut off the cycle of abuse right
now. She said she deserves to feel good. She said we needed to start the process of getting over each other.”
“That doesn’t sound very generous,” I said, “it’s not like she’s some angel.”
“But whatever, I like a girl who’s mean to me.”
Ezra was drawn to the dynamism of a negative dynamic. Or actually, a dynamic that quickly flips from positive to negative and back again. “What does she want you to do to fix it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Go choke.”
“She should go choke,” I said, reflexively on his side in that moment, even with one close friend vs. another. “But like,” and I needed to be delicate about the next bit, so Ezra wouldn’t think I was accusing him of melodrama. “Are you sure this is real?”
“I’m sure,” he said. He looked really pitiful, defeated and tattered, the lines of his body a poor container for all that was going on inside.
“Because,” I said, still being careful, “This isn’t the first time.”
“This isn’t anything like the other times she broke up with me,” he said. “She wasn’t screaming at me or freaking out, she was very quiet.”
I could see how that would be a bad sign.
“The other times,” he continued, “she was deciding emotionally in that exact second to break up with me. This was like she’d thought it through and had already made her decision and was just, like, informing me of the new situation.”
I reached over and grabbed his hand, and he squeezed me hard, tight around my lowest knuckles, to anchor my body to his. I tried to squeeze back but there was nothing for me to do in the grip but take it.
U UP? Page 2
