The Big Orange

[The following are excerpts from what will be a full volume of essays, poems, and short stories that capture the singular magic and discontents of Los Angeles. This book will be part of a larger series in which each volume is dedicated to a different city.]

L.A. SUN

If L.A. is best known for its promulgation of the moving image, it is ironically, at its core, a celebration of stasis. The sun that rises each day is an identical sun, the same depth and force and heat of the day before.

Other places experience a variety of suns: shy, exuberant, hidden, melancholy, resentful, diffident, gracious, brutal, weak, absentee. If there is only one sun, its understudies are cast with alarming inconsistency.

In L.A., there are no understudies, and the star rarely gets sick. Even the faces, and bodies, in L.A. carry the same celestial sense of stasis. Youth can be seen blossoming to a perpetual age of 27 then hanging there with determinacy until the age of 74 or so, when it is abruptly announced that they were somehow, internally, aging the whole time.

People in other cities sit in the basements of grocery stores while weather and its malcontents rattle the ceiling tiles. They are reminded, and habitually unsurprised, that the world is inconstant. Guarantees strike them as farcical. The pleasure of entitlement is enjoyed, if at all, with a sense of novelty and suspicion, like a free upgrade when renting a car.

THE MIDDLING CLASS

EXT. PARKING LOT - NIGHT

Beneath the cursive neon of the Black Cat Bar, AMAL (42), all cheekbones, plucks a joint from the mouth of MARJORIE (34), an apparent cardigan model who is huffing like an amateur.

MARJORIE

I’m married.

AMAL

I know. Everyone knows.

(indicates her ring)

So where’s the lucky breadwinner?

MARJORIE

Libya.

AMAL

(coquettishly)

He know you’re a sexual turncoat?

MARJORIE

He’s... one of those seven property developers who got kidnapped.

AMAL

And you’re here finding yourself.

(A serious, cruel shift. Marjorie is wounded and appalled.)

MARJORIE

Excuse me? You don’t know me.

AMAL

Oh, I know you. I know dozens of you. You love this sliver of being less boring. But what you’re really hoping for is that he’ll come home, “changed,” find you in the arms of some woman and think that you’ve changed too. But there’s still nothing more to him than a property developer, and there’s nothing more to you than a Brentwood housewife.

(With slow violence, Amal kisses her collarbone, her neck.)

MARJORIE

You hate me; what are you -

AMAL

Ruining our useless lives, stupid.

(A charged moment. Marjorie curls her fist in Amal’s hair.)

DISENCHANTMENT

Los Angeles is a city of barbarians waiting at windows, breath held for the crunch of glass on metal. The logic of collision. Silence and appetite.

From the roof of the Soho House, she glares down onto the sunny 45-degree angle where Phyllis Street meets Sunset, funneling the world’s finest motorcars toward the strip like a trap. She thinks of the valet, an underground athlete, collecting keys like lottery tickets. The owners vanishing into the Bermuda Triangle of Sunset/Phyllis/Cory Avenue, taking the elevator up up up, checking in constantly, rigorously documenting themselves, eager to not disappear.

She flicks her head quickly to the side, a youthful, bemused attempt to displace her sunglasses in one fluid motion. She is unsuccessful. Someone is, of course, amused by this gesture. Someone always is.

- Thomas.

- Marjorie.

She is of course not Marjorie. Marjorie is unbearable, has a half-life of eight hours. She is gratingly witty, and just a soft palate adjustment away from a 1930s London stage accent.

- Are you meeting someone?

- Right this very minute. Aren’t you?

Marjorie/Elizabeth/Eleanor/Skye surveys the universe through peripheral vision, each person a private little infinity. Each doing the same thing, checking to see who’s famous, theatrically not caring.

Imagination, she understands, is electric. The theory of ships passing in the night, of alternate realities, of just missing one another. Of chemistry. Collision. Of saying yes always meaning saying no to a thousand somethings (or someones) else.

Marjorie/etc. drinks affection like water. She knows that you can be all things to all people, but only one at a time.

And that, in the right hands, Los Angeles will crack open your chest into a million fucking little pieces.