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.

She was a producer, and ordered me around like nobody’s business. Being a PA on any kind of set is taxing, but with Aedlin, it became hilarious. She didn’t take anything seriously, least of all her job. I was interning at a film studio that had her on retainer, but I was remote, so I barely saw her during the day. My day was preoccupied with pretending to be an upstanding citizen. I woke up at 10am, drank three cups of coffee over barely an hour of actual work. I realized very quickly that nobody in LA were interested in real jobs. In the beginning I gave both my internships as much energy as I could muster. All uncalled for. Neither of my bosses ever checked in on me, and soon I was spending my afternoons down by the pool with my friends. It was about twenty of us, in the media program, sent out to LA to do our internships by day and take classes in the evening, to maintain full-time student status. We were all grouped up into apartments in the same building. This was where Jade, Renee, Sam, August, Jack and I became lifelong friends. We infiltrated each other’s apartments, drove electric scooters to the bars (me always on Jade’s back, screaming for my life), took long lunches together, carpooled to class, and blew off our (unpaid) internships. Renee and Sam took us to all kinds of awesome concerts, including The Rolling Stones in their absolute geriatric age. Jade and I got the closest. Jade was tomboy hot in her athletic wear, hilarious, stayed up as late as I did, good natured with just the right amount of spunk, and we could jabber for hours about absolutely nothing. No awkward pauses. I refused to even go on a grocery run without her.

That was the matinee life.

In the soft, autumn shadows, I lurked around with the same kind of fruits, sluts, and weirdos from my art class days. The house parties of sophomore year were nothing compared to the sleazy undergrowth of LA. I was interested in Jack Kerouac’s California, what Green Day and blink-182 were singing about.

Aedlin always dragged us to dive bars and jazz operas. She didn’t like promoters, and she hated having to dance for our dinner. Xenon was our compromise. She had no convictions about dropping a thousand dollars so we all could get in without having to deal with a promoter. She was like Violet, but nicer, almost as if I had conjured her into existence by my sheer willpower. When she talked, it enchanted you, holding you up like a smoke ring. I was mesmerized by her. She could convince anybody to do anything. We snarled and fought like sisters. This one time I even threw a book at her head, something I’d never done to Alice or Jade or even Aria.

I manufactured the weird capers, Aedlin got everyone to get in on them. Being around Aedlin was like being in a movie, a movie where everybody mattered. She had that way of making you feel special and wanted. We encouraged each other’s rowdiness and bad behavior. We shared secrets on how to torture men and make them do what you want and wrap them around your little fingers. We broke into amusement parks at night and rode rollercoasters till dawn. We fell asleep on the Santa Monica beaches and played hide and seek in Macy’s and held board game tournaments in parks. Ellis, Aedlin and I loved going downtown and seeing how many fire escapes we could climb. We’d sit at the very top and look at the smoky chimneys, the glittering neon lights and drink vodka out of lemonade bottles and laugh till we couldn’t breathe. Ellis could climb just about anything, whether it was a tree, or a water tower, scaffolding, the roofs of villas, fences of any kind, grape vines, tops of cars.

A lot of memories from those days are murky, running together in rainbow grease puddles after rain. This was before my all-consuming need to document everything. I never took pictures, I never posted anything about that life on TikTok, the aquarium swims and stolen golf carts never made their way to my Instagram stories. My roommates didn’t notice me skulking back to the apartment at 6am, mascara and glitter smeared all over my face, hair all stringy, shoes under my arm. I gave up my art gallery job to channel Bukowski and unload boxes down at the harbor despite the fishermen making fun of me for it.

With almost no evidence, it was difficult to tell who was real and who wasn’t. The incident with Louis had left me feeling shaken. It had taken a lot for my friends to convince me that Louis wasn’t real. It was relieving. I had not after all, tried to kill somebody. Maybe I did, but it didn’t count because he had no phone number, no corporal presence in this realm. Louis had been my best friend all summer. I felt like the rug had been yanked out from under me. I poured through medical journals, textbooks, articles, autobiographies, trying to find the answer to that eternal question, does it matter? The words from the doctor in A Beautiful Mind haunted me: “Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?”

Aedlin had a phone number, so did Ellis, and Gillian, and Henry. Real digits, numbers and dashes withstanding. They appeared in a flash or two of blurry video footage, maybe dressed up at a wedding we were crashing, maybe crowding around a line of coke in the bathroom of some rich asshole’s villa, squealing in the back of the Evan’s Porsche. Others were friendly faces that we ran into over and over again like raindrops peeling down the glass of the same window. They all meshed together in a slew of toothy smiles and butter creased cleavage, greasy hair and chipped fingernails curled around tequila bottles.

One night Aedlin overdosed. She had a bad habit of just taking whatever was handed to her. I wasn’t there. I was at some nerd bar with Jade and the gang, singing Tame Impala songs at karaoke and dueling each other with light sabers. A memory, whether real or not, is still a memory. I read somewhere that the brain can’t even distinguish between our love for the people in our lives and fictional characters.

Henry was the one who texted me. I was too drunk to drive. None of the Ubers would pick up my request. I didn’t even know which hospital she was at. Nobody would answer my texts. I realized I didn’t have a way to contact almost anyone from that group. That night is still sour in my brain. It was the first time I hitchhiked. I went around and around the city, in a doomed opera sequence when the hero has just been killed. It took four or five hospitals to finally find her at Kindred. She’s fine, she’s fine, they snapped at us, but they wouldn’t let us up to see her. You’re not family. Henry and I sat in that waiting room, not speaking, not moving, nodding off sometimes. When they finally let us up, it was only for a moment. Aedlin was as chatty as ever, as if this narrow brush with death in the form of fentanyl laced cocaine was completely inconsequential. I got home early that afternoon, showered, and went over to Jade’s to help her make cherry pie for the Friendsgiving dinner we were having in a few hours.

Aedlin disappeared after that. I texted her a bunch, and she replied less and less, until it eventually just fizzled out like a smothered forest fire. I don’t know if she was done with me, or done with that life altogether. I bleached and dyed my hair back to blue. A few weeks later the semester ended. We drove the thirty-four hours back to the midwest in the December frost for the last semester of college, and tried to let bygones be bygones. A few years later I saw Aedlin on Instagram, as one of those born-again Christians. In all their machinations, Ginsberg and Burroughs never talked about a defector so gut-wrenching.