LOOSE ANGELS
Nowhere felt as permeated with fake brick wall falsehoods, with the whorrific dull hum of unfulfilled longing, as did LA. Nothing seemed real. And not much was. Except for the people that grew up there. They purely did not give a single solitary fuck about any of that lalaland porniconography bullshit. Mostly because they were too busy working to stay alive. You liked these people because they had real world problems. And they treated you like a real person not an opportunity to get whatever they could get outta you.
But what is there to get from a 23 year old who's already rough trade? From a murky dirty bitch with an unpretty pockmarked face? No money, no honey, and thighs that rub together on most days, even though you were throwing up everything you ate. From some feckless femi-nazi who shoplifts on a regular basis cuz stealing from corporations cheers up that glum, especially when angry and drunk, which is, again, on most days. But you found expensive cheeses much to your taste. That and fruit seemed to be the only foods you could stomach without the constant nauseous pangs of female shame that made you heave into a shape that glamourized near invisibility. Faded, yearning to be erased. Long long before being diagnosed with caeliac's disease --whose symptoms include vomitting, headaches, depression, mood swings, constipation, rashes, dizziness, migraines, diarrhea, seizures, fatigue, distaste. Just from eating wheat. What a fabulously obtuse waste.
This was how you learned how powerful the power of suggestion really was: Keeping steady eye contact and waving a receipt for the one box of tea you had actually purchased in the security officer's face, you held a bag that contained not only the tea, but also blocks of fancy cheese, a carton of orange juice, a box of frozen fried chicken and a fifth of tequilla. You angrily exclaimed with the shrill disgust of a spoiled teenager that he was mistaken for stopping you at the exit. "Look, I have a receipt! GAH!!" And it worked. He cowered without examining the crumpled slip of paper, apologized and let you go.
Decades of poverty induced shoplifting forays keenly attuned you to when you were being watched or suspected. Especially during the holidays, when you'd bring home hauls that surpassed a thousand dollars in worth. You wanted to spread the love and cheer you could not afford, but felt that others deserved.
Those internal signals warned you to stay true to hightened survival intuitions too. "Don't go down that street." "Stay on this side of the door." "Slow down, an animal's going to run into the road at the bottom of this hill." Once, during shop class in New Jersey, it said, "Get up from that stool and come over here to the other side of the room." So you did and stood there fumbling for a second, not sure what to do. A loud snapping sound came from a table saw. Something silvery flew across the room. The sharp circular blade thumped, it's teeth stabbing hard into the wall at chest-level where you sat only moments before. When you were 3, living in Germany, "Setzen, Jetz!" is what that intuitive voice, in German, said. Then something violently shook the chain of the swing you were sitting in. Your father was mowing the lawn behind you when a bolt came loose. The shaking of that chain was the lawnmower blade spinning off and slicing through the air a few inches above you.
If only you would have listened every single time you heard those whispered warnings, then Los Angeles might not represent the City of Utter Failure that it so disasterously means to you these days. But back then, you were still starry-eyed and full of hate. And if a disembodied voice was the only thing that wanted to protect you, you were grateful. It was better than no one. Though you were never sure why you would be worth saving.
Working for minimum wage at the Nuart Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, you stood in the shadow of a towering Rutger Hauer at the premier of the director's cut of Blade Runner.That did not seem real, but it was Really Fucking Awesome. So was meeting Dennis Hopper as he stared down at some stray drips of red paint below a stairway railing. Rubbing the dried drops with his shoe, he wondered aloud, "Is that blood?" As he would do.
What was not awesome was being completely annoyed by the reoccurring appearance of Christian Slater with his sloppy entourage of rich young white coked up yes-friends. He'd stand there, all fidgety and fuckfaced, demanding free entry to obsessively watch himself on screen and impress everybody. Somehow, even from your lowly position of being a nobody in the box office, this sad arrogance seemed pitifully real. You said no and made him buy tickets at the full price every time. Pffft. Thespians. You saw no skill or craft in his lame imitation of Jack Nicholson.
Who's a critic? Everyone.
You didn't own a car in LA. Back in Boston, walking around with your headphones on was a calming form of exercise, an impoverished necessity to get home from work, but one that you had come to enjoy in some semi-meditative way. However, here in LA, you received much public humiliation for performing this derided activity. People honked, laughed, threw old sneakers at you and screamed, "GET A CAR!" So you turned up the volume on your Loop tape, attempting to drown them out with 'A Gilded Eternity' and just kept walking.
Arriving back at your cousin's apartment on 12th Street in Santa Monica, you tried to eek out some small sense of contentment by smoking a shitload of purple haze. She had agreed to let you stay on her couch until you landed on your feet. But there was no real ground on which to land and you now felt ashamed of using your feet at all.
This feeling of envious disability was exacerbated by the fact that the $200 rent for your cousin's comfortable one bedroom apartment was paid for in full every month by her parents while she was a full time student at UCLA. They also paid her full tuition. Contrast that with this: While staying with your parents in Burlington, Massachusetts, they charged you $200 a month to live in their house while you attended classes at a small art school near Salem and worked at a mental institution near Danvers so that you could afford to pay both the rent and tuition yourself.
Proudly, you brought home one of your first paintings to show your parents, having received an A grade. The assignment was to combine various elements of another artist's work into your own unique vision. You did a variation of Magritte's work and painted a thick colorful cartoonish oil image entitled "A Fish With Toes And Tits Surrounded By Small Multicolored Flying Penises Wearing Bowler Hats." Your father, a frustrated painter himself, was mortified. They had absolutely no intention of ever supporting you in this pursuit of a college education, suggesting you be more like your brother, do something useful and join the military.
This might be why landing on your feet in LA was a bit difficult. You felt legless. And passionately despised every ounce of this demonstrative counter-productive self pity that you were swimming in. So you took to flight instead by getting really fucking high most of the fucking time.
*u can call me ph!*
