Bed Freestyle
Sunday
I wake up early, eight a.m., in my bed with the new curtains closed. The bedroom is a crypt, perfect, completely lightless and cold. Tom has to go soon and he’s getting dressed. I just smoke a joint and lay. All that is real in this moment is my self imposed Sunday deadline, all the work I left myself to do. Tom leaves. Doom looms. I swallow two aspirin for my head and pace the room, smoking, listening to new Isaiah Rashad and not liking it and picking pieces of clothing up off of the floor and dropping them in the closet until I feel suddenly spent and get underneath the duvet again.
My alarm goes off at two later that afternoon and I wake up all alone and immediately want to roll back over but there’s no time, I’ve got to finish writing, so I crawl out of bed, light a joint without delay and open up the windows and tie the curtains back. Let the heat out, let the light in. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, pink and tan and warm all over from my oversleeping, and feel the urge to pick up my phone and call Amy and tell her that I can’t make it in. But I run the bath really hot instead and then sit on top of the duvet in my towel for two hours, making the sentences I typed into my diary all of last week look nice. At four, I put on a black mini skirt and a black cable knit sweater and black kitten heels and get into my car and use three freeways to get to my desk.
At seven o’clock, the sun sets and I drink hot green tea with honey and eat pretzel goldfish alone in the break room for breakfast. My hair feels greasy and the interior texture of the sweater I’m in is irritating my skin and I’m not wearing anything underneath. Claustrophobic and nauseous again, dehydrated maybe. Someone reheated pizza and now the windowless room is so warm and everything smells like burnt crust and there’s this awful lump of tomato sauce coagulating on the counter like a blood clot by the kitchen sink.
We’re standing in a dispensary on Venice Boulevard ten minutes before closing and the brunette behind the counter looks bored. She’s like, thirty-three maybe and anorexic and she’s wearing these little shorts and a stupid bowler hat like a girl at a bar in Brooklyn in 2011 or whatever year it was that girls in bars in Brooklyn were wearing stupid bowler hats. Tom wants something specific and the hipster tells us that she doesn’t have it and so we get something else and when we leave, Tom tells the hipster goodbye and the hipster says nothing. Tom seems tired and I go quiet, following him back to his apartment in the dark.
On the way to Perch, Tom smokes a joint on the 110 and says that the last time he was in Downtown it was past midnight on Easter Sunday. We give the valet guy the keys on Hill Street and then we take the ancient elevator up to the top floor, where the bar is. The elevator is slow and there’s this black guy in there with us and he has long dreads and a bottle of champagne in his hands and when Tom asks me whether or not I think the rooftop will be busy, the black guy inserts himself. Nah, it’s been chill. And when the elevator doors open he’s right, it is chill. The lights are dim and the view is profound and as we mill around the bar, waiting for the bartender’s attention, a cover of “Lost” by Frank Ocean plays and I wish it was just “Lost” by Frank Ocean instead. Tom orders two espresso martinis and we drink them on a little bench next to a group of eight: seven men and a woman in a cheap looking strapless wedding dress. The bride is middle aged and bleach blonde and drunk and talking loudly in her smoker’s voice and drinking something pink out of a frilly looking glass. He hasn’t let me have any fucking sugar in six weeks she slurs, pointing at one of the seven men accusatorially. I am still in my kitten heels and the little skirt I wore to work and my hair is so greasy and I’m hungry but the martini is strong and I’m drinking it quickly and my body gets warm with synthetic dopamine. Tom’s phone rings and it’s his mother calling and he picks up and starts talking to her in a language I don’t speak. He says a word that sounds a little bit like my name and I wonder if he is talking about me.
Monday
Perch is closing and I’m loaded, which is good, and a Justin Bieber song is playing and everybody is crowding around the ancient elevator, trying to go down. It’s Tom and I and the sloshed bride and her seven grooms and a group of six or seven other guys, vultures in Chrome Hearts, lingering till closing time in the hopes to find a girl drunk enough to fuck. How depressing. We listen to Gunna on the 101-South back to Hollywood and Tom drives fast. He parks his car in the red on my street and then we crawl into his backseat and stay there for two, two and a half hours, drunk, smoking joints, rolling the windows down and then up and then back down again.
I dream something about shoplifting a steak knife and a pack of cards and an ostrich feather from a grocery store that looks like a hospital. I am nervous because I know I am being watched but I come to consciousness before they can catch me. I look at Tom, asleep with his jaw unhinged in corpse pose, and then look at my phone. It’s ten o’clock and Cal called twice a little after nine and I try to picture myself sneaking out of bed and through the kitchen door onto the back steps to call him back, but the room is so dark and so cool and I have a feeling that when I shift myself up, all the blood will rush and a migraine will come. So I lie back down and sleep for three and a half more hours and when I wake back up again it’s one and Tom is still in corpse pose. I sit up very slowly and crane a little bit to look at my reflection in the mirror that hangs on the closet door and decide that a shower would be good.
I’m sitting in the drained bath wrapped up in my pink towel, looking at the internet on my phone and waiting for the will to leave the bathroom to arrive but it never does so I drag myself out. I open the door slowly and peek into the bedroom and find that Tom hasn’t moved an inch and wonder for about a second and a half if he could be dead. He’s buried beneath the white duvet and the ceiling fan is going. I comb my hair and moisturize all over and go into the kitchen and swallow norethindrone and liposomal vitamin c and vitamin b complex and vitamin d3 and ashwagandha and then pour two ounces of raw kefir into a shot glass and swallow that too. I feed the cats and then take my wallet and keys and walk two blocks alone in the sunshine in a little dress and clogs to the drugstore on the corner and buy cat litter and a liter bottle of Essentia and a packet of allergy medicine and then walk back. It’s almost four and I have to be in Santa Monica for work by five and Tom is my ride. So I go into the bedroom and wake him and put on a $ilkMoney song and sit in the living room, waiting for him to get dressed. I look around at the decrepit state of my apartment and feel weary. The ashtray is full and spilling and there’s dust and cat hair everywhere, on every surface and balled up in every corner, and there’s empty and half empty glasses sitting all over, on the wooden table and on the book shelf and on the hardwood floor, and there’s empty juul pods and clothes and shoes and brown paper bags strewn about too.
On the 405, I light a joint and text Max that I am going to be an hour late and he doesn’t reply. I look over at Tom and say everybody is mad at me and Tom looks over at me and doesn’t say anything. It’s rush hour on a Monday and Tom is fried. I am wearing a black dress with long sleeves and the fabric around the neckline is pilling and I keep pulling long strands of thread out and wrapping them around my fingers until the soft skin turns white. I spend most of the drive feeling psychologically ill prepared for the public sphere, looking at the ETA on his map and feeling sick inside. He drops me off in the alleyway and tells me that he will come save me at nine. I drink a cold cup of coffee with cream and eat an apple at my desk for breakfast and turn the heat on and swallow two aspirin for my head and avoid prolonged eye contact with everyone.
I’m sitting in Élephante with Tom and I tell him that I am stressed and anxious and nauseous and not all that hungry and in a bad mood and a little bit histrionic. I tell him about the bad conversation I had with Amy over the phone and drink an Aperol Spritz and wish it was something stronger. We share grilled octopus salad and shrimp with garlic butter and mushroom polenta and a chocolate torta with salted caramel and mascarpone. Tom keeps trying to direct the conversation somewhere else but I am being difficult, monomaniacal, complaining a lot, and I think probably my catastrophizing is making him uncomfortable but for some reason I can’t stop. He pays the check and I light a joint in the passenger seat on the way back to his apartment and wish I was smoking it in my bedroom instead. He parks and we go upstairs and I undress and sit on the black leather couch with the dog and my laptop and write while he mixes a song.
Tuesday
It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m stoned in Tom’s car, bombing down three big empty freeways back to Hollywood. The moon is huge and baby yellow in the sky as we speed down the 101 towards my apartment. The Hollywood Hills start to sparkle near the exit for Western and I feel nice. Tom finds an open spot a block away from the bungalow and we go inside and undress and get into my bed and eat cape cod chips and drink sparkling water and talk about nothing till we fall asleep.
We wake up at noon and spend a languid post-coital hour in my bed looking at our phones in the dark under the ceiling fan. I read Worst Boyfriend Ever’s recap of the Rainbow reading and feel vaguely agitated at the inaccuracy of his portrayal of me. I highlight a sentence I don’t like and send it to Worst Boyfriend Ever and say you’re so annoying for this and then ask him if he wants to hang out on Friday. He says yes. My cheetah print ballet flats are still in the back of his van. I look over at Tom who is watching a video in a language I do not understand with the vape clenched between his teeth and feel nothing.
I’m sitting with Tom on the little patio outside of Lazy Acres on Western Avenue. We are facing the parking lot and eating beet salad and lobster bisque with bread for breakfast. It is four o’clock in the afternoon and so beautiful outside and the parking lot palm trees are glittering in the warm breeze. I am wearing a flesh colored spaghetti strap bodysuit with jeans because I am all out of clean underwear. Haven’t done laundry since who knows when. My ballet flats are black and so beat up and my nails are grown out and need to be fixed and my throat hurts and I am worried that I might be getting sick so I bought turmeric drops and a bag of propolis lozenges from the supplement aisle. There are girls in plaid skirts and white polos and Mary Jane’s with white socks streaming out from the Catholic school on Franklin across the street. About an hour ago I looked at Tom in my bedroom and said do you want to go to like, my favorite place ever and he did and so here we are. I bought us green smoothies and americanos at the tonic bar while he walked around, putting things in the shopping cart for dinner, and then we put his brown paper bags in the trunk of the car and came back inside to eat. The security guard I like said hi, long time when we walked back in. Tom finishes our soup and most of the salad too. We decide that we hate the bread and toss it and then get into his car and head west down La Brea towards his apartment. There’s a lot of traffic and “BED FREESTYLE” by Babyxsosa is playing and at the long red light on Olympic, I lean my head against the window and see that the little ice cream shop I used to go to with Cal when we lived together in Miracle Mile has been shut down and replaced with something else.
We make it back to the west side an hour before sunset. It’s like we have two properties, two cars, west side, Hollywood, dog, cats, options, options… Tom says on the 10-West. We go upstairs and leash the dog and then go back downstairs and spend the last of the daylight pacing through the residential streets. We are on Inglewood Boulevard walking uphill and at the top, the whole city reveals itself. I can see Downtown and Culver City and the Hollywood sign, which looks so far away and so obscured by smog that it almost makes me emotional. I don’t know why. Tom is talking about money again when two fat ravens flutter past my body so closely that I can feel the wind from their wings. They land on a low power line and I stare and they don’t seem to notice me. And later, we are walking past this big house with a weak fence when all of the sudden a doberman snarls and lurches up at me and misses my right cheek with his teeth by an inch and somehow I don’t flinch.
To Do Tomorrow:
Fix my nails
Call out of work probably
Grocery shop
Fill gas, clean out the car
Pray
Bathe
Do like, one thousand loads of laundry. And pour bleach over everything in my life
Wednesday
It’s two o’clock in the morning and Tom has been in the kitchen cooking pasta for something like an hour and I am having a difficult time understanding what could possibly be taking so long. I’ve been writing for four hours on the black leather couch and I’d like to sleep soon seeing as I need to be at the desk by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Six hours from now. Six hours from now. Six hours from now. What does six hours from now mean to me? Nothing. Wish I was in Hollywood in my underwear eating sesame noodles. Or something. Feel faint. Haven’t eaten anything since that lobster bisque and I’m drunk on red wine and wearing his hoodie and just as I am about to lose all hope, he hands me a bowlful of wagyu beef rigatoni bolognese that changes everything.
At eight o’clock, the garbage men drag the big metallic dumpsters that live behind Tom’s apartment out to the street and it wakes me. I swallow hard and my throat feels coated in glass shards and I know that I am in trouble. I reach over Tom’s unconscious body for my bag, wanting liposomal vitamin c, but I knock the curtains open a little and a hot ray of light floods in. Tom opens his eyes and smiles and says good morning and asks me for the time and when I tell him how early it is, he says this is amazing. So we dress and leash the dog and talk about coffee and I ask Tom if he’s ever been to the La Colombe in Frogtown and Tom says no, let’s go. There’s a lot of traffic on the 110 and Tom is explaining Pokemon to me while I look out at the sea of cars through the window and try to count how many times I’ve been trapped in a situation where a man is explaining Pokemon to me. I count: four. At La Colombe, we order two hot dirty chais and share a chocolate croissant.
Nothing much happens during the evening hours spent together at my apartment. We introduce the cats to the dog. I shower while he works in the kitchen nook on his laptop. He showers while I work in the kitchen nook on my laptop. The cats fight with the dog and then make up. We lie around my bedroom drinking sparkling water and smoking joints and not eating anything. I go into the kitchen and pull a sack of cara cara oranges out of the cabinet and discover that they’ve gone completely bad, turned all blue-green, and when I move the sack a few of them turn to powdered-mush. I gasp at the horror and Tom looks over and sees and I tell him to close his eyes but he doesn’t, he just stares, not saying anything. I wrap the sack in plastic and take it out to the dumpster and then run back inside and wipe everything with bleach and feel queasy. My apartment is filthy to the point of perverse and it’s making my skin crawl. I go into the living room and look around, stare at my couch and hate the way it looks and think about all of the debris that’s probably caked underneath the cushions. I stand there and look, look, look and get myself so worked up, so disgusted about it all that I ask Tom to drag the couch out onto the street for me. And now the living room is so barren and the echo is so intense and there is all of this space to fill and I feel a little bit better but not completely.
I am sitting in a leather booth at Celadon Thai on Washington Boulevard across from Tom and he is telling me that my accent is hot. I ask him what my accent sounds like and he says that it’s so Los Angeles. He says it’s like the accents girls have in movies, or maybe not movies… the accents girls have in the porn I watch. You’re always dragging out your wordsssssss. We eat fried wonton shrimp and summer rolls and thai spring rolls and green curry with rice and tofu and mango sticky rice. We are having a nice time but then I make a joke that he doesn’t like and he goes quiet. We pay the check and walk the block between the strip mall and where he parked his car in silence. I light a joint to lighten the mood and when Tom sees that we’re almost out of weed, he drives us to the dispensary on Venice Boulevard. The security guard he likes is standing out front and the guy is feeling really chatty tonight. It’s cold out and I’m tired and not in the mood and Tom is tense and the security guy is clueless. He’s talking about a car accident he saw this morning and going into a lot of ugly detail and when a girl peeks her head out from the dispensary door to tell the security guy that he needs to quit talking and help her lock up and close for the night, I feel relieved.
Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in Tom’s dark bedroom and sweeping our tension under the rug and setting my alarm for seven o’clock and wishing my chest would quit rattling every time I take a breath.
Thursday