You don’t have to make it a national crisis every time I’m not perfect
Reaching out to you to keep things friendly and civil, when we have so many friends in common, is not the same thing as texting me whenever you’re drunk and full of cocaine
Emotional situations that other people experience as a drizzle, I experience as a thunderstorm; a thunderstorm, as a hurricane. Therapist Lauren wants me to do breathing exercises and visit a psychologist who can prescribe something that will calm the tornado-like spikes of anxiety that ravage me, that turn a dashed off late-night text, which others could easily ignore, into the kind of crisis that makes me lash out. Bea should know better than to fuck with me, but eight out of the last ten post-midnight texts I’ve sent, she’s answered by inviting me back to her apartment, and asking me to fuck her the exact way she wants it, and slipping out at 4:00 a.m. Bea doesn’t want more of me or none of me at all, she wants both of those things at the same time.
I made a sharp left onto Westerly Terrace and encountered a bungalow, partially hidden behind a huge bird of paradise plant, with a row of glass bricks instead of a front window. I made a note for JD and flipped my camera so I could take a selfie for my Insta story, with the banana leaves behind my head and the light diffusing through my curls. I made sure to get the glass bricks in the pic and typed a quick “#glassbricks” in white glowing script, hidden in the bottom corner of the post. I turned off my phone before posting. I turned on my phone again. I turned it off. I looked hot enough to attract thirst-follows, maybe, from some freshly minted baby dykes who went around with their undercuts, following everyone whose faces they recognized from the last Gay Asstrology dance party or Cruise, the dyke night at the city’s oldest (I think) leather bar, the Eagle. I wanted everyone to look at me and think I was hot, but I didn’t want them to know I wanted them looking, not so soon after a breakup. I wanted them to look at my face and thirst for it, I didn’t want them to think about what was inside. I retook the photo with a new framing, so that my pretty little face was a bonus feature but the glass bricks were the most prominent subject of the pic.
Glass bricks are having a moment. Looking at something, looking for something, can make it into a trend. My friends started Instagramming pictures of glass bricks; then a new bicycle store in Echo Park made sure to say in the announcement to lease their building that they would ensure that the glass bricks would remain; then a new bar opened in the building with an Elliott Smith mural and took down part of the mural to install a wall of glass bricks, and we were all so mad at them for doing it, but that’s capitalism, that’s gentrification. The deconstructed pieces of the once-public mural were now hung on the walls of the bar, where you had to spend money to look at them.
Glass bricks are a trick. They are neither translucent, like a window, nor reflective, like a mirror. Glass bricks obscure, they provide nothing to the observer, but to the person inside, they let in light. Despite their opaque properties, which shrug off inspection, we bring our gaze to them, we spot them in the wild, our urban safari, phones up like binoculars, snapping pics.
I approached the base of three consecutive pedestrian staircases, steep and long, made of concrete and painted bright turquoise greens and sunset oranges and marigold yellows. I sprinted up all three of them as fast as I could. Halfway through I couldn’t think anymore; on the last staircase I couldn’t breathe, my thighs burned, I neared collapse. I landed, heaving, into the highs of the Silver Lake hills, where the real houses stood.
I walk so often among the houses of wealthy Angelenos that their exteriors feel like something I own, the way I feel ownership of public spaces in the city: the area of Echo Park Lake where I always sit with friends, the winding trails of Elysian Park, the good places for Instagram pics near the abandoned zoo. The interiors of the houses, though, I need an invitation to see, like everyone else, the way we are all vampiric. But I’ve seen inside dozens and dozens of them over my years in Los Angeles, of course, like everyone. Sometimes friends would housesit and throw a party. Also, a small subset of young married Silver Lake and Los Feliz couples pass around my contact information to new people in their neighborhood, so I have a steady supply of clients who want their spaces cleansed from the bad energies of previous owners. Every now and then, a neighborhood house suffers a real haunting and I do a quick exorcism. Ghosts, like pests, aren’t welcome in the houses of the wealthy.
DONT TEXT BEA
You don’t have to make it a national crisis every time I’m not perfect
Reaching out to you to keep things friendly and civil, when we have so many friends in common, is not the same thing as texting me whenever you’re drunk and full of cocaine
Today 12:39 PM
maybe we just shouldn’t ever text, like a full texting fast
so that every time we see each other, its awkward? That’s what you want?
maybe it’s my job to actually enforce the breakup
I walked along San Jacinto Street, where house after house features glass brick accoutrements. At 1823: a drab-gray concrete block enhanced by art deco-style cutouts in the doorway and windows shaped like cubes, glass bricks three by three. I would live in a house made of them, and feel safe enclosed in my opaqueness that didn’t reflect back at me a single speck of my body or mind.
12:44 PM DONT TEXT BEA
maybe it’s my job to actually enforce the breakup
That’s ridiculous
You’re the one texting me in the middle of the night!
u were up
u just decided not to text me back for hours
maybe I should just block your number
At 1706, near the middle of the downward slope on the street, another concrete house with cube windows, this time painted purple and glass bricks four by four. The numbers escalating.
DONT TEXT BEA
maybe I should just block your number
Do people customarily tell you before blocking?
You’re not going to do it.
If you were going to, you would have already.
At 1672, more concrete architecture, and this time glass bricks walled in rooftop sun garden. I spotted a woman of indeterminate age sunbathing; when she turned away, I snapped a picture of the building and the back of her head. She looked like she was modeling the wide-brimmed sunhat she wore for protection. I couldn’t tell if I thought she was hot, because she didn’t look anything like Bea.
DONT TEXT BEA
If you were going to, you would have already.
i’m just so like, fucking tired of your shit.
Is this how you’re going to be acting to me at the memorial party thing on Sunday?
Down the street, something that looked like villa, Moorish architectural style, with curly wrought-iron gates and much more decorative glass brick windows in diamond shapes, lined with blue painted tiles. I wish I knew the owner, and they would invite me inside.
DONT TEXT BEA
12:54 PM
If you were going to, you would have already.
i’m just so like, fucking tired of your shit.
Is this how you’re going to be acting to me at the memorial party thing on Sunday?
maybe you shoudlnt come.
I suffer from volcanic thoughts. As I stood in front of a house that wasn’t mine, the stillness in my body seemed to force violent words and mean ideas out of the heavy, black parts of my brain and into the world. Words, now, that I couldn’t take back. An attempt to banish her from a celebration of our mutual friend’s life, a reckoning with his death. I don’t know much about volcanoes except that the lava that comes out of them hurts people.
DONT TEXT BEA
I’m not going to sit at home crying
Watching everyone’s
fucking instagrams
Just thinking about Miggy alone
I know that, like, I really hurt you when we broke up but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to just be shitty to me
But wasn’t a volcano an imperfect metaphor? I wasn’t spewing lava all over Bea out of some, like, sadistic impulse. I didn’t want her to suffer. I wasn’t some geologic thing, some rock formation; I was a can of pop and if you shook me up, I was just going to explode.
DONT TEXT BEA
I know that, like, I really hurt you when we broke up but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to just be shitty to me
we don’t have to talk then
Maybe you could say sorry to me.
The blue patterned tiles gleamed and nearby vegetation rustled, ASMR, and I did a calming exercise I’d made up for myself where I imagined that I lived in the Italian villa from the movie Call Me By Your Name and I could hear piano music playing faintly from a faraway room and everything was warm, and suddenly I could imagine being nice to Bea.
DONT TEXT BEA
i can do that.
i’ll tell you I’m sorry in person.
i don’t want you to be left out.
i want you to come to the party.
I know.
I’m going to come
I already paid for the hotel room anyway
I turned onto North Dillon Street, which curved sharply to the left. Midway through the curve, I felt an uncanny, apocalyptic vibe: a motorized hedge cutter left unattended and the clippings strewn around, carnage on an otherwise neat street. Where had the gardener gone? As I continued down the slope, I saw around the trimmed hedge to what was alongside it: a pile, taller than me, of still-leafy tree branches, recently cut, sawn off the tree they used to be a part of, stacked like dismembered bodies. They had been let alone, left behind. Something moved into my periphery.
I stumbled as I turned, startled. I thought I saw Miguel. But there was nothing.
Then there was a woman. And yes, she was a ghost woman, but her body was so distinct that I could tell the shade of brown her skin had been when she was alive, which usually meant that she was freshly dead, but she was dressed like a dandy from the forties or fifties (and not like someone from 2018 who was trying to look like a dandy from the forties or fifties). Maybe she’d died in costume. I hadn’t seen a ghost with a body this steady in a long time, which was unsettling enough to encourage me to take a few steps backwards.
“Hey Eve,” the ghost said, very what-the-fuck, because I was absolutely certain I’d never met this particular ghost before. I would’ve remembered her solid body, and her gorgeous round face.
“How the fuck do you know me, ghostie?” I taunted, sort of shakily.
“We have a lot of friends in common,” she said, enigmatic as fuck. Then, within the space of a half second, her mouth got really big and bloody, like she was ready to make me a meal.
A shock of sound, as the motor of the hedge cutter started up again. I turned my head fast, saw a Hispanic man in a fluorescent vest was back to work trimming the hedge. When I turned back, the freaky ghost was gone. I walked away as fast as I could, outrunning the odd feeling of something unreal happening just outside what I could sense, which shouldn’t happen to me or any ghost-seer. It took me a few minutes to get my breath back.
DONT TEXT BEA
1:04 PM
I’m going to come
I already paid for the hotel room anyway
We’ll both have fun and be nice to each other.
i’m always nice.
I kept moving. I climbed as fast as I could, one foot after another, up a steep street called Hill, the cars parked precariously along one side, wheels turned in and parking brakes on to prevent slippage. I knew the ghost was gone, I couldn’t feel her anywhere, but I wanted to get far away from the place I’d seen her as fast as I could. My breath came out stuttered, but the more my quads burned, the safer I felt.
At the crest of Hill Street, on a brief asphalt plateau before the street again sloped downwards, I saw a dilapidated Spanish-style residence with impressive sparkling glass bricks bordering the doorway. The yard was empty and brown, but I could imagine how chic the house would’ve looked with a manicured garden of orange trees or palms, or even the rose bushes favored by some houses a few blocks over. It was summer, everything would’ve been in bloom. I took reference pics on my phone.
At one corner of the yard, a poster for the real estate agent representing the property was stuck in the ground. I took a few pictures before I realized I knew the woman in the picture on the sign, Paris Montgomery, a name like a TV character. She had light brown skin, long wavy black hair that was probably a weave, a blue blazer, and sparkling white teeth; she looked nothing like the boho-chic Coachella girl I’d known a few years ago when she was fucking Ezra. I wasn’t surprised to see that after she’d gotten tired of taking shrooms, she’d ended up getting a real estate license. She’d always had a normie vibe, unseemly corporate. But who was I to judge? I, a trashy piece of Silicon Valley runoff? Not dedicated enough to my job to be a real User Experience Specialist, not dedicated enough to my witchcraft to be a real Medium, not dedicated enough to other people to be a real girlfriend to anybody? On the poster was Paris Montgomery’s work number, a 310 area code.
I saw, to the left of the poster, a sparkle; it turned out to be sun reflecting off the metal of a crumpled beer can; blue shine. I was surprised to see the can was a Budweiser Los Angeles Rams commemorative can, just like the ones Ezra and I had been sipping from the night before. I didn’t think there were any left besides the ones in Ezra’s fridge. I zoomed in and took a few pictures, tapping my screen to adjust the focus. I snapped an artistically shadowy picture, with a rainbow-y spark of reflected light bouncing off the top of the metal.
I immediately texted the pic to Ezra.
EzraIsTexting
How’s the morning treating you?
I found a clue
I waited for the dot dot dot symbol of Ezra texting me back, but my screen was as still as the photograph. Ezra is always tethered to the phone, and even after a bad night he should’ve been up by now, conscious enough to send me at least a thumbs-up emoji.
Neither Ezra nor I have any family in the city, and neither one of us goes to work in an office; with no one else keeping track of where we are and if we’re okay, we’ve become accountable to each other. Because of Ezra, I know my absence will be noticed, I can’t just disappear into my apartment, or onto the narrow unpopular back-trails in Elysian Park, or into the anonymity of a dark, crowded bar. We keep the lights on for each other.
EzraIsTexting
i found a clue
are you awake and not answering?
jus tell me if you’re alive out there bc i have a bad feeling
I rewatched the Instagram story Ezra took of me last night; I watched myself: I laughed, I snorted. This time, I was listening closely enough to hear Ezra’s faint chuckle, see the shake of the camera as he laughed too. Maybe I wasn’t laughing at something Ezra said, maybe I’d said something to crack us both up, and we were laughing together.
I walked for twenty more minutes, noted the houses with glass bricks, stood at the apex of Redesdale Avenue, towering above the glistening Silver Lake Reservoir, made a quick two-picture Instagram post of an old photo of the reservoir that I took at the same spot years ago, when the reservoir was dry and empty. I took a selfie under a large swath of purple bougainvillea, draped over a clay-colored wall like a folded heavy blanket. Ezra didn’t text me back.
EzraIsTexting
if u don’t answer imma come over to your place
At the intersection of Redesdale and Fall Avenue, I walked uphill on Fall, relying on the strength of my now-quavering thighs to take me up. I w
as wet with sweat; sweating is a kind of purge, like vomiting, because it takes something that should be inside the body and pushes it outside to fix some perceived bodily problem. Vomiting saves us from poisoning, sweating from catching on fire. Fall curved and turned into Webster Avenue, and I found myself at the top of the three brightly painted staircases I’d walked up earlier. I walked back down to Silver Lake Boulevard and at the crosswalk, red light, I stopped and looked at my phone.
1:17 PM Lydia
Georgie and I had a little fight then hugged and made up, i don’t even really know what it’s about, we’re both on our periods and it’s the day after a full moon so we were probably filled with big female energy and spewed it out at each other, i’m feeling good tho
Today 1:15 PM
U UP? Page 6
