Hedonistic Living

Sunday

I wake at ten with an aching below my ribs and a burning between my thighs and the psychological weight of five thousand words to edit before midnight pressing against my chest. I get fucked by my boyfriend, take a king-sized joint to the face, then crawl out of bed. The plan is to make it outside as quickly as possible, forage the world for caffeine, return to the crypt and lock in. But I wander into the bathroom and feel unhappy with my reflection and climb up into the sink with a pair of tweezers and pluck my eyebrows for half an hour instead. Tom sits on the edge of the tub, yawning, looking up at me. The burning feeling between my thighs won’t abate and neither will the newly persistent urge to urinate. I am a wise enough woman to know what this means. Tom catches me wincing and asks me if I am feeling alright. I explain. Say, remember last week, when we ate mushrooms and then had sex for like seven hours straight? Feel debased by the torturous coupling of my afflicted pussy and writing deadline. Imagine myself spending the day in the bathroom, naked on the toilet with my MacBook on my lap, leaking pink urinary tract infection piss and editing simultaneously. My eyes well up at the image and I begin to cry. If this is my divine punishment for last week’s gluttonous amount of premarital sex, please God, forgive me. Tom and I leave the bungalow at noon for Intelligentsia. I order a croissant and a triple shot dirty iced chai despite what the caffeine will do to my afflicted pussy. Figure I can’t afford the migraine. The beautiful girl at the register is sweet to me because my eyelashes are still wet with teardrops, I think. I sit across from Tom out on the little concrete patio in my miserable mood while we wait for our drinks. The atmosphere is coated in one big low-hanging cloud, suffocating me and the rest of the city beneath an eighty-five degree blanket of heat. Feel faint and desperate in my little dress. Back in my bedroom, I strip. Turn the air conditioning up. Close the curtains. Get high. Drink one liter of still Mountain Valley. Then another. Get up to piss one thousand times. Edit my diaries and pull my one hundred percent cotton underwear low around my hips. At five, Tom calls the dog walker and asks her to tend to the dog so that he can tend to me. He feeds me Thai food for dinner in bed at seven p.m. with all of the windows open and “Forever Ever (feat. Young Thug)” by Trippie Redd playing on repeat. We get stoned over and over and he naps while I type and then I nap too, sometime around nine, and don’t wake up again until a few minutes before midnight, head swimming with words left to rewrite.

Monday

I don’t press publish till one a.m., and when I do, I feel no relief. Feel depressive and jaded and lonely. (And desperate to stop feeling depressive and jaded and lonely.) I shut my laptop, turn the lights out, lie down beside Tom and try to sleep. Thirty restless minutes of listening to Tom snore pass before I make my mind up to turn the lights back on and climb on top of him. I kiss his face until he wakes up and then convince him to get dressed and go for a walk with me. We both leave the bungalow in Los Angeles Apparel hoodies and loose fitting jeans. The streets are dark and warm and empty. I grip Tom’s hand and dodge cockroaches in my ballet flats. We walk to Playboy Liquor looking for Juul pods, but Playboy Liquor is all out of Juul pods. Like, forever? I ask the fat guy behind the cash register. He shrugs. I pull Tom down Wilcox to 7-Eleven instead. The floors inside are filthy and the Indian guy behind the counter is blatantly drunk. He’s blaring sitar music and swaying unsteadily with his hands gripping the register like he’s steering a big ship. He charges us seventy-two dollars for two four-packs of five-percent virginia tobacco pods and blows us each a kiss goodbye, cackling to himself about nothing. On the quiet, breezeless walk back uphill to the bungalow, a jacaranda petal falls on my head, rolls down my chest and lands on the top side of my foot.

And after three or four hours of dreamless rest, I am up again. I spend the morning writhing and squirming around the bedsheets, lamenting the relentlessness of my UTI and my own pigheaded inability to do what’s best for my health when doing what’s best for my health dares to disrupt my total devotion to hedonistic living. I think about all of that spicy curry I ate for dinner last night and all of that smoking and fucking I did all day and get flooded with self loathing. Stupid, stupid girl. I sit on the toilet and cry while an online doctor prescribes me nitrofurantoin from a chat room. I set the prescription to be picked up at a pharmacy by Tom’s apartment, peel myself out of the bathroom and follow him into the car. I stare out the front windshield with tears in my eyes, pushing my back deep into the heated seat for relief.

The pharmacy parking lot is beige and empty. I pout in the car while Tom runs inside. Watch a couple of fat seagulls flutter and squawk around a mound of trash. Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Pure misery. Text Tom: what’s happening. No response. Another ten minutes pass. Feel agitated. And just as my agitation settles in, Tom appears with a grin and my little paper prescription bag in his hand. I kiss his cheek and say thank you but my voice comes out cold and hollow, like I don’t mean it. Ever sensitive to my each and every shift in mood or tone, he stiffens.

The air is hot and dead in Tom’s apartment and I am trapped in a hot and dead mood to match. I oscillate between feeling tormented by my urinary tract alone in the bathroom, alone in bed and alone on the black leather couch. Tom checks on me intermittently, offering fresh air, food, water, nicotine and weed. I decline everything, fall asleep curled up like a cat in a hot patch of sunlight on top of his duvet and don’t wake up again until seven, when I feel Tom’s mouth pressed against the wet back of my neck.

Later, in Hollywood, sometime around eight, I slice an avocado in half and dress each part with olive oil and sea salt and share it with Tom for breakfast. We sit across from each other at the kitchen nook and eat without talking. I think about the way he spent most of the day orbiting around me and my pain and subsequent bad attitude and feel sorry. I put my spoon down, look up at him, reach across the table for his hand and do my best to apologize. Sorry for being a brat all day… it’s just… I’ve been in so much pain… But his hand feels rigid in mine and he doesn’t look up at me and somehow my apology turns into a fight that doesn’t end until he takes his things and leaves my apartment. Typical. So typical that I sit alone with my half eaten avocado in the wake of his absence and feel nothing. I light a joint and remember that my car is parked outside of his apartment all of the way across the city and sigh. Fuck. Without thinking too much, I order a Waymo to pick me up and take me there so that I can retrieve it right away. Seventeen dollars for a twelve mile, forty minute driverless ride and a little peace of mind.

I wait two minutes on the curb outside of the bungalow for the robot car in the moonlight. And when it arrives, I slide into the backseat, buckle the seatbelt behind me to cheat the sensor, extend my body across the leather from door to door and press start ride. I spend the first few minutes in a kind of fugue state. Then the car makes a right onto Santa Monica Boulevard and I begin to cry without really knowing why. I look up at the huge moon and connect my Spotify and play “Forever Ever” on a loop until my eyes dry. I open my laptop and turn on the PhotoBooth camera and make a twenty-one minute movie in the robot car, and by the time the doors unlock in front of the liquor store on Venice Boulevard, I feel good, numb, balanced, desensitized.

But when I round the corner onto the residential street I last parked my car, I get blinded by a familiar pair of headlights. The night is so bright and breezeless and the streets are so wide and empty and there is this general surreal impression to the scene. Am I dreaming? I stop in the middle of the road and blink. I watch the driver’s side door open, watch Tom get out and walk towards me. How did he know? There’s this hard look on his face and he stops before he can reach me, leaving three or four dramatic feet of asphalt between us. He clenches his jaw tight and asks, did you come here for your car or did you come here for me? I can’t speak. He repeats himself, this time slowly. Did you come here for your car… or did you come here for me? The truth is that I came here for the car, of course, but that’s not what he wants to hear and for some reason I am having an impossible time lying. Not for moral reasons, but because I do not want him to have the satisfaction (not even the faux-satisfaction) of believing I came here for him. I let him repeat the question six more times while I hit my vape and stare ahead at the big moon over Venice in silence, petulant. Before he repeats the question a seventh time, he says I am only going to ask this one more time. But before he gets the chance to begin again, I look up at him and say I am never going to answer this stupid fucking question. Which incites him. He walks away from me fast, disappearing around the corner and presumably into his apartment. I unlock my car, start the ignition and peel out fast.

I make it back to Hollywood a few minutes after eleven. I park in a spot that I shouldn’t, unlock the front door, undress, sit in the middle of my bed alone and get high. Feel free, mostly, but also a little bit like I might cry. I get out of bed and start filling the bath, ready to sink into myself, but just as I am about to, there’s a knock at the front door and I know that it’s him. I wrap myself in a fluffy white towel and go to the door and there he is. I say hi and motion for him to come in, but he won’t come in. I roll my eyes behind his back, slip on a pair of ballet flats sitting by the entryway and join him in the dark on the front steps. He is furious with me but also so obviously obsessed that it makes it very difficult for me to take him seriously while he attempts to dangle me over the edge. Being dangled over the edge used to really freak me out, but now, thanks to Tom, I find the experience to be quite relaxed. I dissociate in my bath towel while he says things about breaking up that I know he doesn’t mean. I stare into my neighbor’s dark window and think about that scene in Girls where Hannah’s publisher dies and she and Adam are arguing over her lack of grief. Adam says something like if you died, I wouldn’t know what a tree is and then Hannah explains that if he died, she would be very sad, sure, but she would also naturally worry about logistical things like how to pay the rent for their shared apartment.

Tuesday

Around one a.m., after two hours of arguing loudly with Tom in a bath towel on my doorstep, I say something banal that he interprets as malevolent and he leaves again. I watch him walk all of the way through the courtyard, through the front gates and out onto the street. I feel nothing. I go inside and lock the door behind me, shut the windows and all of the blinds, run the bath again and finally sink in. I exfoliate everywhere and shave everywhere and moisturize everywhere and it feels nice. I wash my face, apply tretinoin from tits to forehead, roll perfume oil across my wrists and neck, comb my hair, brush my teeth and get into bed. Turn the TV on and let The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season two play on mute all night while I rest.

After a dreamless sleep I open my eyes, reach my ankle towards the blackout curtains, part them with my foot, look at the light and try to deduce the time. The light is pure, fresh and bright. Too early, I think, and force myself back to sleep. When I wake up again, it’s noon. Better. The full moon is tomorrow and Cal’s twenty-eighth birthday is tomorrow and my phone is still dead and there are sirens speeding by and helicopters whirring up above and I can hear James roaring his stupid fucking leaf blower around below in the yard. I sit up, shut the window, close my eyes and picture myself perfectly still at the center of it all.

And just as I am beginning to feel serene, there’s a knock at the door. My pulse gets fast and my chest gets tight and my body goes frozen. I sit very still and stare ahead at the wall with wide eyes. The knocking gets louder, then softer, stops for a few seconds, then starts up again. This goes on for five minutes, maybe, until it stops completely. I count to one-hundred in my head and then feel safe to get out of bed. I sneak down the little hall into the living room in an XXL Gold’s Gym tee shirt and baby rib thong feeling like I’m being watched until I turn the corner and remember that I shut and locked all of the windows and pulled all of the blinds closed before bed last night. Thank God. I push the front door open an inch and peek out into the courtyard and feel relieved to find it empty. Emboldened to investigate further, I slip my ballet flats on and go out into the sunshine in my tee shirt and underwear. I check the backyard, the little wooden bench beneath the bedroom window, the laundry room, the storage room, the alley. I go all of the way out to the front gate and peer out over the iron spikes to the left and right. Neither Tom nor his car are there, but my neighbor’s boyfriend is. Guy around my age with glasses who is always wearing a plaid button down and smoking a cigarette on his girlfriend’s steps, which are right by the recycling bins. He inspects me inspecting the street. I let him through the gate.

Blonde guy with a neck tattoo in a BMW? He asks.

Yeah… he… I stammer. (Shy at hearing a third party description of my boyfriend.)

He just left.

Right…

Are you okay? He asks.

Yeah. I think so, yeah.

I laugh, then he laughs. I am in a tee shirt and underwear and cannot make eye contact with him. I ask him his name, less because I want to know and more because I am running out of things to say. He tells me and then I tell him mine and then we say nice to meet you, officially and he goes up his girlfriend’s front steps and I go up mine. Lock the door and lie back down. Blonde guy with a neck tattoo in a BMW. I look for my phone, find it, remember it’s dead and feel completely disinterested in bringing it back to life. Wonder how long I can go on with a dead phone before my mother orders a wellness check on me. And before I can decide whether it would be days or weeks, my cortisol spikes at the sound of Tom’s voice calling out my name from what at first sounds alarmingly like somewhere inside of my apartment. Then I remember the little bathroom window. Curse myself at having left it open with the shade pulled up. Sit still for a moment, figuring that Tom must have left, come back, entered the gate code, snuck up and around my back steps past the kitchen door, paced up some more and shouted straight into the open bathroom window. He’s saying my name over and over and he’s getting louder and louder and I’m nervous the scene will turn embarrassing if I don’t face him. So I get up and stumble into the bathroom and there he is, face framed in the narrow window screen above the shower head, looking coldly at me. I squint up at him, blink a lot and rub my eyes, pretending to be freshly conscious from a dream.

Were you sleeping? He asks.

Yes. I even yawn. (Perfect actress.)

Can I come inside?

Sure.

I let him in through the kitchen and then guide him into my dark bedroom, where he sits at the edge of the bed and apologizes for yesterday without apologizing for anything specifically. I stay quiet throughout the ten or so minutes he monologues, too busy pretending to be sleepy to say anything. He says we have three options… either you say something, I leave, or we go get coffee. I blink some more. Wait. Pray for a fourth option to arrive, and it does. Or, I can just run to Intelligentsia for us, come back with chais, he says. That sounds nice, I say. I lie in bed, watch him put his shoes on and leave, then get up and go into the bathroom. Tie my hair back. Spray rose water on my face. Roll the last few drops of Malin+Goetz Cannabis on my neck. Assess myself in the mirror. Puffy cheeks. Red splotches from stress. Dark under eyes. (Which I like.) And this terribly empty impression behind the irises. I smile at myself with no teeth until I get my eyes to crinkle in a way that looks sincere.

Later, Tom reappears with a giant croissant and two iced triple shot dirty chais. He stands over me and looks at me gravely and says I need you to be honest with me and then asks me if I am sure I didn’t hear him knocking at my door before, sometime around noon. I blink. Lie. You knocked? I didn’t realize. He tells me that he knocked and knocked and knocked and then did circles around the apartment, inspecting every window of the bungalow except for the two in my bedroom, which are impossible to reach. Thank God, I think, until he says but I was already coming up with ideas for how to reach those too… find a ladder, maybe… I picture him setting a ladder against the bougainvillea and palm fronds that line the back wall, climbing up through them towards my bedroom, wrestling the window screen off of it’s hinges, mussing his body through the blackout curtains straight into my bed. I picture myself screaming, pushing the ladder back and watching him fall. If I killed him, nobody would blame me. Officer, he’s a total control freak! Tom tells me that before I came to the bathroom window, he was already taking a closer look at the screen, wondering if he could remove it, and if he could, wondering whether or not he could fit his body through the open pane. My eyes widen. A little frightened. (A little intrigued.) He notices my widened eyes and says what, you think I’m crazy? I nod. He laughs. What, you think you can tell me it’s over and I’ll take no for an answer?

Tom goes into my kitchen alone to take a meeting on his laptop, which he brought. All along planning to find a way inside… all along planning to find permission to stay… I lay in bed and can’t help but laugh at the absurdity. I plug my phone in. Wait for it to come back to life. And when it does, I find a million missed calls from Tom, of course, and one long message breaking up with me at four in the morning. I smile at the message, imagining the desperation and fury with which he must have crafted it, then the desperation and fury with which he must have abandoned himself, gotten into his car and sped his way back over to me.

At two in the afternoon, I lay alone in my fluffy white bed and put 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini on the TV. I set the air conditioning to high and let a little bit of heavenly light stream in through the parted blackout curtains and light a spliff to solidify my numb feeling. I listen to Tom’s voice on the phone in the kitchen and watch 8 1/2 on mute. Such a sumptuous movie. I like the eyeliner and the bedrooms and the way that the women dress. I like the candleholders and all of the fire, and the way that all of the fire looks in black and white. I like that elegant woman in the low back dress sighing into the phone of the hotel lobby, I forgive him for everything. I like that scene where Guido’s tacky lover has a fever of one hundred and four degrees and she’s convulsing in bed in a lace nightgown while he forces her to drink water and wipes sweat from her busty chest with a cold cloth. She’s suffering but her eyeliner is perfectly intact and the beads of sweat dotting her face look like rhinestones. It’s all so Man Ray. I like the beautiful confessional booths and I like all of the discussion of catholic consciousness. I like the way the older women look and act. I like it when His Eminence says to young Guido, why should you be happy? That is not your task. Who told you we come into this world to be happy? I like Luisa with her short hair and thin glasses, smoking cigarettes in her crispy white high-collared blouse. I like it when Tom comes into the bedroom to visit me, looks up at Luisa on the screen then back down at me in bed and says, holy shit, you have the same face, because I find her pretty. I like the Grand Hotel La Fonte. I like Jacqueline the seventy year old showgirl’s last dance. And then there’s the perfect ending, where Fellini essentially spends twenty minutes losing his mind trying to answer The Question: WHO THE FUCK AM I TO MAKE ART OUT OF MY ORDINARY LIFE?

The credits roll on 8 1/2 and Amarcord begins to autoplay. Tom leaves his laptop in the kitchen, undresses and lies beside me in bed. We share the croissant he brought back from Intelligentsia and watch. Amarcord is no 8 1/2. There aren’t nearly enough beautiful women but I do like that part where the schoolboys are getting interrogated by the priest about masturbation. When there are ten minutes left in the runtime, Tom reaches for the remote and hits pause. Mushrooms? He asks. Yes.

Before the mushrooms get the chance to psychoactivate and encourage a certain bedridden hypersexual agoraphobia in us, Tom and I leave the bungalow with nothing but my house keys. We cross Franklin and wander up into the hills underneath the giant freeway overpass on Ivar. We make loops around The Dell in the evening sunlight and touch each other’s solar plexuses as the familiar inner glittering arrives. We pass the lush Vedanta Temple and then pace slowly down Vine, which, through a chain link fence, offers quite a romantic view of the city and sky over the 101. It’s a little after seven o’clock and the temperature of the air feels the same as the temperature of my skin and the sky is getting pink and the mood is so nice. If only we could be on mushrooms all of the time… yes... if only we could be on mushrooms all of the time, this relationship would sustain itself just fine… At the red light on Franklin and Argyle, I turn to him. Heaven or hell? I ask, pointing west down Franklin towards the bungalow when I say heaven, pointing south down Argyle towards Hollywood when I say hell. Hell, he laughs. While passing a couple of homeless addicts sitting close together, lighting something on fire up high on the nearly vertical concrete slab by the entrance to the 101-South, Tom clutches his chest with both hands and yells SO FUCKING ROMANTIC! We laugh until we cry and kiss one thousand times while swimming down Hollywood Boulevard towards the sunset through a sea of freaks.

And when we finally make it back to the bungalow, he does a long exhale and says it’s like we really just went through something. Which brings both of us back to crying laughing again. We lie on the hardwood floor of my closet together in the red light, undress, have sex in front of the mirror, then lie there kissing until he suddenly pulls away, takes my face with both hands, looks at me like he’s afraid and says S*******, I think there’s something… I don’t want to say it, but something… dark… that comes over me… like last night, it came over me, and I can’t control it… I just love you so much… it drives me fucking crazy… if I could just figure out a way to trust that you won’t leave me…

Wednesday

Tom’s alarm goes off at a quarter to eight and he gets out of bed straight away. I sink deeper into the duvet, shut my eyes, sleep till nine. And when I wake up again, I sit up quietly and listen to his voice talking loud and fast at somebody on the phone, listen to his footsteps pacing around the kitchen. There is something comforting about this. I look at my phone, note the date and feel my heart sink. Cal’s birthday. Nothing comforting about that. I sneak out of bed and lock myself into the bathroom and call him. He picks up and the tender conversation leaves me depressed. I whisper into the receiver. I whisper I love you so much. I whisper I was with you the day you turned twenty-four and the day you turned twenty-five and the day you turned twenty-six and the day you turned twenty-seven… and… today… (voice cracking, tears welling) today you are twenty-eight and... I start to sob. He doesn’t ask why. Just says baby, don’t cry and tells me that in his dreams, next year and all of the years after that will be different, better, together. That we will forget about twenty-eight. That twenty-eight will shrink in comparison to the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives. The haunting concept of spending THE REST of my life with Cal momentarily sobers me. I wipe my nose and eyes, try to make things normal and nice. I ask him if he has any plans for today and he tells me that he doesn’t. Which makes me cover my mouth with my hand and start to choke back sobs again. And when he shyly asks me if I’d like to celebrate with him, have dinner together tonight, (somewhere nice, anywhere you want, he says) I lose it completely. Mute myself to wail into a towel, then lie. Tell him the first untrue excuse that comes to mind, which is, ruthlessly, that my grandmother is on the edge of death (perdóname abuelita…) and that I cannot go to dinner with him for his birthday tonight because I am in Las Vegas, tending to my ailing grandmother and also my father, emotionally, in this time of familial crisis. (There is something very wrong with me. I know this.) I let the guilty pit in my stomach expand into a guilty blackhole and swallow me. I rush off the phone, unable to digest any of the sympathy he offers over my farcical tragedy. Before saying goodbye, I ask him to send me the code to his front gate so that I can have something delivered to him and he tells me that he’ll send it over but never does. I get back into bed, bury my wet face into the pillow and cry, cry, cry until my body shows mercy on me and falls asleep again.

At eleven, Tom wakes me from a dream, kisses my spine and asks if I feel up for a morning walk and cup of coffee. I tell him that I am, find a baby blue terrycloth dress shoved beneath my pillow, pull it on over my head from bed, comb my hair with my fingers and follow my boyfriend out through the front door and then the front gates into the sunshine. Eighty degrees, slightest breeze. The sky is bright and cloudless. We cross the street every time there is a chance to stay in the shade, keep out of the heat. Tom is wearing the grey pair of Los Angeles Apparel sweatpants that Cal and I used to share. In line behind a pretty young Italian girl and her middle aged parents, I touch Tom through the heavy fabric until he gets an erection. Neither the pretty young Italian girl nor her parents speak any English but luckily for them, the new twink barista with curly hair and glasses who kind of reminds me of that British gay guy in The Talented Mr. Ripley speaks Italian.

I drink my iced chai and read Joan Didion in bed, then spend two hours in the shower, diligently shampooing my hair and thinking about what she said. CALIFORNIA IS A PLACE IN WHICH A BOOM MENTALITY AND A SENSE OF CHEKHOVIAN LOSS MEET IN UNEASY SUSPENSION; IN WHICH THE MIND IS TROUBLED BY SOME BURIED BUT INERADICABLE SUSPICION THAT THINGS HAD BETTER WORK HERE, BECAUSE HERE, BENEATH THAT IMMENSE BLEACHED SKY, IS WHERE WE RUN OUT OF CONTINENT. I pick all of the black gel polish off of my fingernails and then dry myself off with pruned hands, moisturize everywhere, apply cuticle oil and then a strengthening clear top coat to mitigate the damage. I comb through my hair and massage raw coconut oil into the ends. I gua sha my face and tweeze my eyebrows some more. I feel better. Temporarily detached from all of the ambient CHEKHOVIAN LOSS.

Tom and I spend the afternoon and evening hours in bed, fucking despite my afflicted pussy and smoking bowls and eating sungold kiwis with the skin on and bathing in the air conditioning and listening to music and looking at beautiful apartments available to rent on the internet. At sunset, I put on a soft racerback tank top and cotton track pants over my white bralette and hot pink baby rib thong and leave Hollywood with Tom for the west side for what feels like the first time in a long time but is really just the first time since Saturday. We listen to “Forever Ever” on repeat and speed down four freeways, the full moon so big and so clear and so soft yellow in the sky. Tom drops the top, slows down and grips my knees while I stand up in the passenger seat on the 405, making a movie.

Our nightly walk with the dog around Venice is unusually social. I wait on the curb with the leash and discuss a number of banalities with the security guard while Tom patronizes the dispensary five minutes before closing to purchase us a blunt. We smoke one half of it with the security guard, then the other half of it with Ravi, the guy who owns the liquor store across the street. I remain silent throughout the vast majority of each interaction. Smile. Hit the blunt and my vape. Stare at the dog. Squint at Tom like, can we please go now, can we please go far, far away? We walk two miles in circles, kiss the dog goodbye and then get back into the car. We spend twenty minutes of the ride discussing what we should do for dinner before impulsively pulling into the parking lot of the West Hollywood Gelson’s and purchasing a large bag of organic tortilla chips, store-made guacamole, store-made salsa, a carton of dates and a wedge of brie cheese. In line for checkout, a few minutes before midnight, I get faint. Steady myself. Touch my hipbones through my track pants. Try to recall the last time I ate. Remember that it wasn’t today and feel pleased.

Thursday