Fall.in.Los.Angeles

There was charcoal dust on my boob.

I looked down, wondering if I could blow it off instead of using my hand. I exhaled softly as a cloud of black puffed out. Miss Gillet had already told me to stop moving twice. Nude modeling wasn’t as fun as I thought it was going to be. The room was sticky and hot. The clock moved infinitesimally slowly, its little red hands mocking me. Of all the odd jobs I did in LA, it was still by far my favorite. Being a production assistant on movie sets and babysitting gigs of any kind tied for last place.

I was impatient to start my night. I was supposed to show up to the restaurant in less than an hour. As pencils scraped against paper, I did some calculations. If only these last two idiots would finish their sketches, I could change, and drive straight to the restaurant. If it was with my friends I wouldn’t have cared that much, but club promoters hated tardiness.

I was itchy and anxious by the time the guy in the front finally started packing up his shit. He wore a plaid shirt and giant, bug-eyed glasses. Very easy to hate. I cursed him silently as I got to my feet, brushing charcoal off myself. It was a miracle I didn’t get a UTI from sitting bare-assed on that stool. I knew by now not to look at the drawings. Some things were better left buried.

I changed in Miss Gillet’s office. It was my first time going to Xenon. It was a punk club, not at all like the mainstream nightclubs with their blah music and even blaher people, in their crop-top-jeans-white-sneaker uniform that you could find all over the city. By the time I was frequenting places like Xenon, I had fully leaned into my grunge punk degenerate side. I spent junior year in pajamas, watching the world through my computer screen, and now things were finally jerking back into motion.

I threw out all the clothes in my wardrobe that stank of the midwest, and filled it up instead with glittery tank tops, baggy jeans in black and acid washes, pinstriped miniskirts, ripped up stockings, strappy boots with buckles on them, silk slip dresses in white and crimson, band tees and graphic tees with obscenities, thick wool leg warmers with zips, anything leather, anything Diesel or Miu Miu that I could thrift. It was the complete opposite of the mainstream LA look, but it didn’t matter to me. I spent my days working remotely from the apartment, or going to lunch with the other kids in the program, before changing into heavy eyeliner and leather for after hours.

I pedaled downtown towards the ratty clubs on the cobblestones. I had gotten used to doing my eyeliner at traffic lights. Even with my own car, I was always perpetually running late to places; showing up to class with sweat melting off my makeup, running through garages, running over curbs to take gas station shortcuts, blazing through yellow lights.

Dinner was surf and turf. Never a huge fan of seafood, I picked out the slabs of red beef and downed three rum and cokes before we trooped off down to Xenon. Xenon became my favorite place almost immediately. The lights were all dim red and blue, blurry shapes grunting to old school garage bands, getting leather all sweaty, glitter running into our hair,  pumping Jagerbombs, a mosh pit every time the Ramones come on, cigarette smoke hanging ash everywhere, Green Day mushing into Linkin Park, boots with chunky heels, sharp elbows and nipples out, flashbanging the cameras, all dirty-haired degenerates, ending the night with the dreamiest of dreamy Lana Del Rey. It was a place that was free of the regular, unbearable crowd of LA with their lip filler and stilettos, their Instagram obsessions and cookie-cutter dreams, the exact people the Beatniks hated.

That was the freest time in my life. With no babysitters or worry-warts, no boyfriend holding my leash, no therapist, and a doctor that just filled the script for whatever I asked for. Ambien, something to take the edge off, Xanax, keep me up and soaring, Prozac, Valium, weird meshy nightmares of Klonopin, handfuls of Ativan that I liked just fine when it wasn’t being shot into my arm. My one and only rule was, I never took something I wasn’t prescribed. The last thing I wanted was a hospital stay to punch a hole into my LA fever dream. I didn’t have to stay on this side of sane, I just had to hide it well.

It’s funny how easy it is for one lunatic to attract other lunatics. I met most of them at Xenon, in the bathroom lines, grinding up against each other, over dinners the promoters threw all the time, at the glitzy after parties in the hills, as TikTok mutuals, as fellow drunks who rode the elevator together, at midnight swims in the apartment pool, in shared taxicabs, on reality TV sets, other patients in the research trials I regularly took part in for a paycheck quickie.

Aedlin was by far the craziest of us. She waltzed into my life one afternoon at a really boring dating show TV set I was PAing at, a real-life jezebel. I’ve come to realize that red hair does inexplicable things to me. My black roots were growing out into burgundy ends, chopped short and systemic. Aedlin, with her long, blood red braids, was the black cat to my black cat, the Loony Spice to my Creepy Spice.