“Well fuck her then,” I said.
“Fuck me, I guess,” he said, almost making a joke again.
I remembered a screenshot he’d sent me, it was of sexts he’d sent Noz right after they got back together after one of their screaming breakups; she’d asked him if he would fuck her from behind, and he’d responded in detail exactly how he’d do just that. Reading the exchange had sent a tremor of arousal through my whole torso; I’ve learned that other people’s sexts are the best porn. This was a particular guilty and twisted moment of lust, considering the circumstances.
He backed off, let me go, had a sip of beer. The bar was closing down, emptying out. We were slowly being left alone. Behind the bar, Meghan cleaned glasses with routine disinterest.
“I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” Ezra said, thumbing his nose. So he did have coke.
I nodded. “I’ll go after you.”
He stood up, and from below his hair looked even more dramatically ruined. I thumbed open Instagram, looking for a few specific old posts. Ezra and I had a series of Instagram pictures from our urban hikes in the hills of Silver Lake and Echo Park and Highland Park. We’d have a stranger, or a third person with us, take a picture of our backs, our boyish brown curly hair, us looking out over a vista, some neighborhood of LA spread out below us. On our hikes, in our pictures, we had been twins, but we wouldn’t be anymore; I’d still have my hair and he’d have some shaved head thing (shaved heads had always been too Nazi-ish to me). We wouldn’t look the same anymore. We looked nothing alike from the front, from the back was our only opportunity to match. Now we were separate, in some new and unsettling way.
When Ezra came back from the bathroom, he passed me the little baggie and a pen cap under the table. From her bar perch, eyes locked to her phone, Meghan shouted last call with all the enthusiasm of someone contractually obligated. I took what remained of my tallboy in a single gulp and Ezra rattled his can, checking its level of fullness. We could both do with another.
“Another round? Close me out?” I asked.
Ezra nodded, and I went to el baño while he went to the bar. The Mujeres room was cramped, two stalls and a cracked porcelain sink, no graffiti. Someone was in the back stall. I heard her tearing plastic, one last tampon before bedtime. In my stall, I pulled down my jeans and peed a little, gently, while I got a big bump ready on the scooped stem of the pen cap. I flushed to cover the sound of my sharp inhale.
U up?
The door banged, I was alone in the bathroom. I looked at my phone.
I had three new texts. Nozlee had texted me back “lol” and then “hey can we talk?” and I thumbed her away, not ready to hear her side quite yet. Second, some incoherent nonsense from Lydia, who was with a group of our friends at a whiskey bar downtown. Then also a complaint about Lydia from Georgie; they were in some kind of cold war. I scrolled, I opened my text thread with my ex, Bea. I closed my messaging app. I opened Instagram, I closed Instagram, I opened my text thread with Bea. I wanted to, I shouldn’t, I did.
DONT TEXT BEA
Wednesday 5:37 PM
i didn’t do it to hurt your feelings, i just wasn’t thinking about it!
you not ever thinking about me is basically the whole problem
Today 12:59 AM
u up?
We’d only broken up two weeks ago, so I wasn’t yet used to all the absent moments in my day and brain that came from the lack of her. In moments like this, my guard down and my mind alight, the gaps where she used to be seemed so unnatural, something that desperately needed filling. Not by just anyone, but by her specifically. Not knowing precisely what she was doing, thinking, and feeling at this exact second made me feel crazy. I wanted the certainty of her love, of her body in my bed, and instead I was stuck with the uncertainty of whether or not she’d text me back, and when she’d do it, and what she’d have to say when she did. When someone breaks up with you, what they’re saying is “you don’t get to know my thoughts anymore.” I really, really, really wanted to know her thoughts.
I had to put my phone down fast before I further succumbed to temptation; luckily I had other temptations to distract me. I took another bump, into my left nostril this time.
I’m not a saint of restraint, so I picked my phone back up again immediately. I summoned all my strength, used it to avoid Bea, and opened my text chain with Miguel.
Miggy
You should go
You should respond to him
And then go
Today 1:01 AM
are you reading this shit?
The response ellipsis indicator popped up immediately. Apparently there’s not much to do when you’re dead except text back, but it still took a few seconds to actually generate the text; what I didn’t know about the afterlife could fill the entire universe—apparently Miggy was, in death as in life, still typing out texts with his thumbs.
Miggy
U texting Bea when you shoudn’t?
no leave me alone
its so annoying you can read all my
texts, im supposed to be allowed to have privacy
what am I supposed to say to georgie and lydia? i see both sides
lydia should be allowed to have a life outside her friendship with georgie, and georgie should be pissed that lydia is lowkey abandoning her
bea texts me more than i text her, it doesn’t matter if i occasionally text her when i shouldn’t
She’s not forcing you to text her back
And you’re texting her at night
Fix your own side of it or stop complaining, imo
Miggy always thought he knew better than me what to do about my life.
Miggy
Fix your own side of it or stop complaining, imo
i’ve gotta put my phone away or i’m gonna hit her up again
I left the bathroom stall. In the dark mirror, I checked my nose for white residue and, finding none, scrutinized all the other facets of my appearance, to remind myself what my face looked like. I fussed at my hair (my hair, alone, un-twinned); I licked my left index finger and rubbed it roughly under each eye, as if I could wipe away the dark circles. My fingers jerked against the vulnerable skin beneath each eye. I left the bathroom.
Ezra was still at the bar, flirting with Meghan over the end of his tallboy. She looked semi-interested; her shoulders were sloped towards him. Her phone, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, was the only thing giving her ass any definition. I stuck my hand in Ezra’s pocket, passing him back the baggie. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and gave me a little squeeze. His side was warm and he smelled like the end of the night, when all the deodorant has worn off and bodies smelled human again. I felt a warm crackle in the part of my brain that was right behind my eyes and also in the tips of my fingers. I felt happy, realized it was the cocaine, still felt happy. I hoped Ezra felt happy, but he just looked exhausted. We paid, we left together.
Outside, Ezra looked both ways on a mostly empty street, a few neon signs crackling, late nighters like us leaving the cluster of fancier cocktail bars a couple of blocks down the street, giggling as they got in their cars, revving their engines.
“You wanna kick it at mine for a bit?” Ezra asked.
“For sure,” I said. “I have my car, do you have yours?”
Ezra has a high tolerance for alcohol but even so, I was glad to hear he’d taken a Lyft to the bar, so there wouldn’t be a moment of uncertainty when I tried to figure out if he was sober enough to drive.
We slid into the Fit. Ezra clicked his seatbelt on, then I lurched out of the parking spot and onto the mostly empty street, lit up all night long by streetlamps. Ezra put on Lana Del Rey, “Ride,” something for us to sing along to. He rolled down the window and smoked out of it.
“I’m sorry if I’m holding you hostage,” he said.
“You’re not.”
“I’m not going to fall apart if you don’t want to hang out and just want to go to bed.”
“I feel good, I want to stay up.”
The coke had me feeling good, like the little blue Adderalls my best friend used to give me in college, like hiking the hard path of Runyon Canyon and all your effort rewarded by the stunning vista, like the moment in a horror movie when the haunted teenager finally destroys the ghost that killed all of her friends. I chase all the little euphorias that life offers, chemical or physical or recreational. No single joy is more valid, more objectively good, than any other. They are all available for us, and meant for us to feast on.
At each glowing red stoplight between La Cuev and Ezra’s, I checked my phone to see if I’d gotten any more texts from Bea (nope) and then watched Ezra while he watched after-midnight LA. In theory, I wanted to hear Nozlee’s side of the story and give her perspective equal weight as Ezra’s, but he looked so piqued and furrowed and plucked, like the life had been wrung out of him. All the pain on his face was as a result of Nozlee’s actions, Nozlee’s selfish choices; and when Ezra felt bad, I felt bad. I started to simmer a bit with anger towards her; even though the breakup had been with Ezra, it was a blow to me as well.
The night breeze rumpled my hair and didn’t rumple his because he didn’t have any anymore. I touched the back of his head again, at least the stubble felt nice, and he leaned into it like a happy cat.
“I’m really grateful you came out tonight, you’re such a good friend,” he said, low like it was a secret. But of course I was a great friend; I was always there for Ezra. I took the last few turns and curbed my car in front of his apartment.
The building was gateless, a mansion divided into seven apartments sometime in the early seventies, and much more recently completely refurbished—new pipes and deep sinks, garbage disposals, gas stoves that looked vintage but worked like new (with big, reliable flames), central heating and AC, hardwood floors, and the holy grail of apartment living: in-unit washers and dryers. Above a recessed garage, the new landlord had painted a new name for the building: the Monte Vista. Twin palm trees decorated the front yard and at night, the dimmed floodlights made the fronds into claw-like nightmare shadows on the walls, like monster hands that were dragging the whole building back to hell for the crime of obnoxious gentrification. Ezra’s building had been featured in several articles in the LA Times and LA Weekly as an example of the changing nature of the neighborhood; the online-only hyper-local newspaper The Eastsider LA dedicated a slew of posts to it, just after the building was repurchased, during renovations, and at the unveiling of its new pink grotesqueness.
Ezra had been living there for five years, the building had gentrified around him. But the landlords hadn’t tried any tricky tactics to get him to leave, even paying for him to stay in a hotel the week they re-piped and re-painted his unit and letting him stay on at his old below-market rent price, because Ezra looked like the kind of person they wanted in the building. After he’d moved back in to his new and approved apartment, he’d felt vaguely embarrassed to bring girls home. The younger, newer ones hadn’t seen anything wrong, but some girls—a bartender who’d been working in La Cuev since it was Little Cave, a Latinx community organizer who advised everyone on which city council members to vote for, a Cal Arts graduate who’d made us come to her readings of incomprehensible experimental prose poems—they all had paused on the sidewalk and said, “Oh my god, you live at the Monte Vista!?” Not that it stopped them from going inside.
One girl had even posted about it on Medium and had gone viral, “10 Things That Happened When I F*cked a Guy Who Lived at the Monte Vista.” It was actually a pretty good piece, more an astute musing on living in a changing neighborhood than a review of Ezra’s length, girth, or prowess. But still, the headline made it seem like early Gawker shit. Ezra immediately decided not to be offended and to LOL it off, posting it to his Twitter feed, but he didn’t go home with another girl for a few months; even when he spotted someone he’d normally go for, he stayed with Miggy and me instead of going over to her.
Although I often cringed at my own role in gentrification, the slow eroding of communities and neighborhoods, I secretly didn’t mind the Monte Vista upgrades. I liked that the building no longer smelled like an ashtray. I liked the way the new paint job looked in Instagram pictures. I liked that it wasn’t pretending not to be pretentious; that is another form of authenticity, somehow. Monte Vista means “mountain view” and even that wasn’t a lie, the apartment sits on the rounded peak of a small hill street and there is in fact a small view out of Ezra’s living room windows, a swath of the city that gets all lit up at sunset; I liked to look out of it and watch the sky grow darker.
Inside, Ezra turned on all the lights, including the strand of white Christmas lights taped to the inside of the massive IKEA shelf that covered one entire wall and was stuffed with records, books, and a few crystals that Noz had brought in to cleanse the space. Ezra’s orange outdoor cat, Lotus, sat on the open windowsill licking her wrist delicately. She was petal-like in her composure, but our presence must’ve displeased her because after a few more deliberate licks, she decided to leap gracefully from the window ledge into the foliage below, away on her next hunt. Ezra would wake up with her wound around his neck like a furry noose. She, like all those girls he brought home to the Monte Vista, must’ve loved the smell of his pheromones, because she always cuddled closest to the place where his smell was the strongest, in the delicate spots on either side of his neck.
Out of my purse, I pulled a little baggie of my homemade Cascarilla and poured a little hill of powder into the corner of either side of the window, where Lotus had trampled through and scattered the Cascarilla I’d left there before. Cascarilla is just finely powdered eggshell; I make my own in a coffee grinder, to get it soft and fine. It protects spaces and cuts off communication with spirits, and I use it to keep bad or needy ghosts away when I’m trying to have a fun time. Ezra’s house contained a very annoying and obsessive spirit that I constantly had to tamp down by spreading Cascarilla all over the place.
The thing about Cascarilla is that it looks like very finely chopped coke. More than once, I’ve done a line only to find that I was inhaling eggshell. Cascarilla doesn’t make me high of course, but for a few hours after that kind of mistake, I couldn’t see a ghost if I wanted to. I know a few mediums who wish they weren’t; they snort the stuff regularly. Sometimes they start doing it when they get married or when they have children, when suddenly the presence of a ghost while going about the normal day-to-day stuff is something to be scared of, instead of just a ripple in the natural ecosystem of the world. It’s a bullshitty impulse, hiding from themselves like that; Witch Colleen had always warned us against associating with witches who didn’t want to be witches.
Ezra, at the fridge, ignored my ritual protecting of his space; he was used to my witchy gestures by now, allowed them to fold into his life. Ezra cracked us two beers and I, with the baggie of coke, started cutting out some lines on the surface of a nonfunctional iPad mini that lived in the catch-all tray in the middle of his small kitchen table for this exact purpose. I’m good at details, fine motor skills: rolling joints, painting molding, chopping onions, decorating protest signs, shaving (my own legs and bikini line, other people’s), and slicing homemade pizza into eight slices of the same size. My lines always come out exactly even. In my purse, I carry a 2.5-inch black glass straw that I commissioned from a glass-blower hobbyist with an Etsy shop. 2.5 inches is the exact length of a dollar bill rolled up. The glass was fresh and cool as it dipped into the shallows of my nostril, and with a sharp inhale, I took in a narrow track of cocaine. It woke me up like orange juice. I passed the straw to Ezra, who snorted two lines in short order.
“So why did she just suddenly make this decision to be done?” I aske
d. “It can’t have been just the one fight.”
“I think I know what did it, ultimately,” he said.
I thought of a party last weekend where Noz would leave the room every time Ezra entered it. At happy hour last Monday, she didn’t ask him what he wanted when she went up to the bar.
“She wasn’t being nice to you,” I said. At Trash Tennis, she’d screamed at him over a pivotal missed shot. It was supposed to be a noncompetitive sport.
As the cocaine nasal drip wormed its bitter way down the back of my throat, I reached for the beer; it was a cobalt blue commemorative can of Budweiser, released when the Rams football team returned to LA in 2016. Ezra, Noz, and I had found the old, full case of beer in the back of Ezra’s closet the previous weekend, and made some good jokes about a time capsule. We had decided beer didn’t go bad and put it all in the fridge.
“There are some real problems with our relationship, right? The way she always wants to tip exactly 15 percent at restaurants, like, down to the penny, that dives me insane. Or how she sometimes zones out when I talk to her, or how she always complains about my friends—”
That one was new to me. I drummed my fingernails against the can of Bud, wondering what friends he meant.
“—But the essential problem, the thing that really made us be shitty to each other, was the fact that she never really apologized for sleeping with Andrew and I never really forgave her or let myself forget about it. Like, those nightmares.”
Ezra had very literal anxiety dreams, mostly of watching Noz have sex with Andrew, his now ex–best friend. In some dreams, Noz would be naked, giving Andrew a sweet, deep blow job; in some, she was on the bed in bastardization of the yogic child’s pose, her ass angled as high as possible, so Andrew could thrust into it. In one dream, Andrew assumed the same position, and Noz lapped delicately at his asshole. Ezra didn’t know what sex acts Noz and Andrew had performed so his mind filled in the details with versions of their own sex life, literally recasting his role with Andrew, down to the shirt Andrew flung into a corner during his and Noz’s passionate pre-sex make-out.
U UP? Page 3
