Like Honey

Sunday

The body revolts against the lifestyle. I wake up at nine with a swollen eye, a hickey and a splitting headache. The body is a problem I can solve. Just need eye drops, arnica, aspirin, a liter of sparkling Mountain Valley all to myself and two or three favors from God.

Alone in Tom’s car, slouching north up La Brea Avenue, I shuffle the music and “Mardy Bum” by Arctic Monkeys comes on. I turn the volume way up and scream along and feel surprised to hear all of the correct lyrics coming out of my own mouth. Despite the decade that’s passed since I last screamed along to this song, Alex Turner and I are in sync. Screaming along to “Mardy Bum” is like riding a bike. I guess. Oh I’m in trouble again, aren’t I? I thought as much! I drive up Sunset Boulevard to the Gower Gulch and pull in to a parking spot in front of the nail salon and place an order for a four shot hot americano with a quarter inch of cream from my phone and then turn the ignition off and sit in my car and stare at nothing and wait and think about how lucky/bleak it is that I can get what I want (four shots of espresso made in a kitchen that is not mine) without having to interact whatsoever at all with another human being.

Three o’clock comes around and I am supposed to be at my desk by four but I am thinking of showing up closer to five. I mean. What do they want from me? I take my time. I languish in the shower, let the hot water turn my skin all pink. I sit in the empty bath wrapped up in my towel and look at my phone and wait for the will to rush to arrive, but it never does. So I dry off slowly and pull a long dress with no sleeves on over my head and feel okay in the mirror and then get into my car and drive twelve miles down Santa Monica Boulevard back to the west side.

I’m sitting at the desk in kitten heels and a dreadful disposition. Work is terrible. I argue with Tom. My left eye starts to burn and then waters for hours uncontrollably. The pace is slow and all of the crucial tasks were completed before I arrived and I feel so upset with Tom and so annoyed with my left eye that I click my heels all of the way down the hall and into the little office where Max sits and tell him that I have to go, like right now. And he doesn’t ask any questions, not really, so I leave.

I call my mother from the 405-North to wish her a happy Mother’s Day but she’s in a mood because it’s seven o’clock and I had all day to call and didn’t till now. I thought you forgot, she sighs into the phone.

At nine, Tom shows up at my doorstep with half an ounce of weed and a halfway decent apology. We sit in my dark bedroom for something like three hours, arguing a little and then making up and then arguing a little more and then making up again and ultimately deciding that we should just be happy. He falls asleep and I finish writing and press publish at like, eleven-thirty and then collapse on top of him and feel nice. He pulls my head into his chest and says watch me take care of you and give you everything.

Monday

I dream something about shopping for stuffed animals in Italy and don’t wake up until ten. It’s probably another bright warm day in Southern California but I wouldn’t know because the blackout curtains are drawn. Tom is asleep in his work clothes. His shirt is still tucked into his slacks and his belt is still buckled and he slept the whole night with his jacket on. I wake him up and ask him if I should go to work and he says no which is exactly what I want to hear. And so I call Amy up and tell her that I can’t make it in. I click the phone off and Tom pulls me into his lap and we stay like that for an hour or two, bullshitting. Kissing and listening to music and talking about things I could do to make my apartment perfect and I like him so much and feel a little bit scared.

On the way back to Tom’s apartment, sometime around three, we stop by a coffee shop on La Brea to put an end to our hunger and migraines and general energetic suffering. Tom is wearing a white tee shirt and jeans and I am in my baby blue and white pinstriped pajama pants and a black cardigan with beat up black ballet flats and big sunglasses. We order a chocolate chip cookie the size of his palm and two iced dirty chais because it’s so warm outside. And then we get back into the car and he puts on “Gardena’s Finest.”

It’s five o’clock and I’m drinking mint terra yerba mate and listening to Jay-Z in the passenger seat of Tom’s car. We are sitting parked in front of the Cinema Cleaners on Jefferson Boulevard, smoking joints and looking at our phones and, for some reason, putting off going inside to drop off his dry cleaning. Two hours pass like honey before we make any moves to exit, and then we finally exit. I ask the Mexican lady at the front about her day while a guy who tailored a suit for Tom once asks him how the suit’s been doing lately and then we get back into the car and he says let’s go home baby.

Tom and I are sitting in his bedroom and he’s making a beat and still has his sunglasses on and the mood between us is nice. I am on the black leather couch with my laptop, writing. My cardigan is unbuttoned and my bra is showing and I have something like four hormonal zits on my face because my period is coming. We work for three hours. He writes a song and I, for the first time in something like six months, write a story. I am staring at the words on my screen and beginning to feel a little bit faint from all of the blue light and concentration and weed and so when Tom tells me that he wants to do laundry but has to do it at the laundromat because the dryer in the basement is broken, I see an opportunity for escape and join. We smoke a joint and then drive to this little laundromat off of Grand View.

The laundromat’s ATM won’t break Tom’s hundred dollar bill, so we drive to In-N-Out. The west side is enshrouded in fog and everything feels quiet, uncanny. The drive-thru line is so short and a Thouxanbanfauni song starts playing and Tom says there are a few songs that make me feel close to God, and this is one of them. We both get animal fries and Tom gets a double-double and I get a cheeseburger with raw onions and the dog gets two plain patties and he pays the guy at the window with the hundred dollar bill that the laundromat refused to break. I am so stoned and so lightheaded and on the way back to the laundromat, Tom drives so fast that the inertia flips my stomach. He leaves me in the car to go start the washer and then he returns and we eat our food in the parking lot with the roof dropped and I feel so happy to be eating that I almost get emotional. We smoke another joint and feel so heavy and sleepy from the food that he puts his things in the dryer and takes my face in his hands and says let’s just fucking go home and nap. So we drive a minute or two back to his apartment and take our clothes off and lie down.

Tuesday

Tom’s alarms start going off at eight and we are not out of bed till ten. We slept and slept and slept and never got up to get his laundry from the laundromat and I smoke half a joint and he doesn’t because he has a meeting soon. My phone is malfunctioning and has been since late last night. I say I think I am going to buy a new phone today and Tom says okay. We wear our pajamas out and take the dog with us to the laundromat off of Grand View and I walk him in a square around the block while Tom collects his clothes. The sky is all white and thick and it seems like it might rain. We get back into the car and he zooms us back to his apartment and showers while I reread the story I wrote last night on my laptop and find it quite trite after sleeping on it and sigh. He asks me if I’d rather stay at his apartment while he goes to his meeting or drop him off and take his car and be free for five hours and then pick him up and I can’t choose so he chooses the latter for me. So I drop him off and we kiss goodbye in the alley and then I get on the 10 in his fast car and take the La Brea exit to Edgewood to Wilshire to Vine and drive straight to the Verizon store across from the big Chase bank on Sunset Boulevard (whose fountain I threw up in once, on Halloween of 2021 when I was roofied at a Don Toliver show at the Palladium, but that’s another story). I park at a meter out front and plan to go in and talk to someone and buy a new phone but then I think better of all of that intrepid human interaction and decide to place the order for my new phone on my broken phone instead. I select the iPhone 17 Pro in silver because the other two color way options are monstrous, fucking hideous, and then I sit and wait and sigh and wonder how long it’ll take for the order to be ready for pickup and decide to wait and sigh at home instead. Home, where I can like, make myself a cup of Blue Lotus masala chai and take my vitamins or something.

I spend a couple of hours alone at home waiting for Verizon to tell me that I can come pick up my phone, and during those couple of hours I:

1. Vacuum everywhere

2. Feed the cats

3. Listen to “Gardena’s Finest” one thousand times in a row

4. Exfoliate and shave in the bath and don’t wash my hair although I most definitely should

5. Think about Tom

6. Think about Cal

7. Smoke the other half of the joint I smoked this morning on the back steps in the cold air in my baby pink towel and silver flip flops

8. Chug water

9. Eat two handfuls of dry cereal standing in the kitchen over the sink. Like a dog

10. Moisturize

11. Gua-sha for like twenty minutes straight, sitting on the hardwood floor of my bedroom closet

12. Do a very bare minimum amount of makeup

13. Cut the hem off of my midi Cou Cou slip dress for some reason and put brown Dansko clogs on and get in my car to meet Tom

I pick Tom up in the alley and drive us in his car to Erewhon. He looks at me behind the wheel and smiles and says this is the view I have been waiting for. We order one cowboy brew and one cococcino and buy spicy tofu and sushi and eat together at two of the little wooden stools at the tonic bar, looking out through the big windows at Wilshire Boulevard. We talk about the state of our relationship and he tells me that he is falling in love and I want to say something back, something specific, but everything I say comes out nonchalant and vague and I can tell that he wants more and I want to give it to him but can’t and don’t know why. In the car on the way back to his apartment, we smoke a joint and I tell him that the new phone I ordered still isn’t ready for pick up and he says phone, phone, phone, you keep talking about the phone, what the fuck do you need a phone for?

It’s seven o’clock and beautiful on the 101-North. Tom is speeding past all of those car dealerships and palm trees by the Universal Studios exit and we are talking about ideas, talking about The Muse and debating the utility of perfectionism. The dog is in the backseat and we are on the way to La Tuna Canyon Park, a dubious destination that neither Tom nor I have been to before. But then we get there and discover that the park is on the side of the freeway, and luckily we both feel quite romantically about freeways. The mountains are so big and the sky is even bigger and the trail we walk is big and wide but there are wildflowers lining both sides. The blue sky turns orange and then pink. We are finished with our walk by eight which aligns perfectly with the sunset and everything is perfect. We get back into the car and Tom asks me if I’m hungry and I am, so he drives us ten minutes or so east to the Glendale Americana where we sit for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. “Bittersweet Symphony” by Verve is playing and I order the chopped salad and a Diet Coke and Tom has a Diet Coke too and a big bowl of spicy rigatoni.

It’s so quiet and dark and cool in my bedroom and the red lighting against the white walls looks so nice and I’m so stoned and we are in our underwear, Tom and I, and he is mixing a song and I am writing and he looks up at me after an hour or two of not speaking and says flow state.

Wednesday

It’s three in the morning and so humid in my bedroom and there’s a migraine sprouting from my third eye. Tom is still going and I keep sighing, trying to signal that I want to sleep, but he’s refusing to pick up what I’m putting down and I feel a little bit petulant about it. So I take my dress off and roll over and pray that we accidentally sleep through our breakfast plans and then feel a little bit guilty about praying for that.

We wake up at 10:59 a.m., a precise and unforgiving sixty seconds before we are meant to be sitting at a four top in the Superba garden with Tom’s artist and her wife. I think about my nearly but crucially unanswered prayer while I brush my teeth and button my jeans and think why, God, why? But then we leash the dog and drive down Wilcox to Superba and meet the lesbians at a big table in the corner of the little grove and the air is lush and perfect and there are angel’s trumpet trees all over. I order a cappuccino and a chopped salad and Tom says, make that two please. The lesbians order grain bowls and the four of us share bread with salted butter and fresh cheese. Tom asks the waitress to put in an order of unseasoned scrambled eggs for the dog and the mood is nice. I talk to the artist’s wife about cats and children and Tudor style homes and London and New Jersey and one hundred other things while Tom and the artist talk about music, music, music. The artist’s wife asks me if Tom and I ever have difficulty communicating due to our cultural differences and I look up at the sky through the treetops and say ummmmmmmmmmmm for a gauche amount of time.

We leave the lesbians waiting for their car outside of Superba and drive straight down Sunset to the Verizon store and interrupt two really stoned young black male Verizon employees in the middle of a retarded conversation about video games to ask if one of them could please go rummage around the back stock and retrieve my new phone for me. Eventually they do, and it’s gorgeous (in a way that I do not personally find interesting at all), so we get back into the car and drive home. It’s three o’clock and I have to be at my desk in Santa Monica by four. I leave Tom in my bed with his laptop and lock myself into the bathroom and shower without washing my hair. We rush out and the GPS says that I am going to be six minutes late which is not so bad but not so good, at least not today, because I never showed up on Monday and Amy is getting really sick of my shit, I think. Tom exits on Lincoln Boulevard and I develop a psychosomatic stomachache.

Work debases me. I meet the second new girl and immediately identify her as a lesbian and then feel thrown when she mentions her decade long romantic relationship with a man. Amy pulls me into her little office and says you’ve gotta cut the bullshit and then tells me that her life has been so fucked up lately and begins to cry. I apologize. I drink two cups of black coffee and eat an Erewhon seeded bar for lunch and still feel hungry, which in turn makes me feel fat. I miss Tom. I look at my greasy hair in the mirror and comb through the tangled ends with my fingers. I think about Cal and feel guilty. I think about my mother and feel guilty. I think about my father and feel guilty. I fiend for a joint. I hit my vape in the bathroom. I hit my vape in the courtyard. I hit my vape by the dumpster in the last of the sunlight. I check the mailbox. I look at the internet on my laptop. I edit my diary. I pray that the night wraps early. I bide time, bide time, bide time.

The night wraps early just like I prayed it would. I think to myself: God works in mysterious ways. Tom picks me up and speeds me to Hollywood and tells me that he wants a drink. So we drive up Franklin Avenue to La Poubelle instead of my apartment and sit inside and drink gin with lime and share a dozen oysters that don’t taste so good. The service is bizarre. We have two waiters for some reason and both of them seem concussed. The first waiter is this thirty-something year old guy with a cast on his arm who keeps coming over and asking if everything is alright and the second waiter is this young girl with a French bob wearing a long baby blue dress and every time she comes over, she stands too close and doesn’t say anything, just kind of smiles. But the light is so dim and there’s this old movie playing on the projector and I feel so drunk and when Tom asks so, are you my girlfriend or what I say of course I am and he reaches under the table for my ankle and pulls my kitten heel into his lap.

Thursday