Postcard from Tinseltown

Eight Encounters with L.A.

2025

I pulled up to the swanky L.A. hotel and fell out of the truck like I was all twelve clowns climbing out of a VW Beetle with a clatter of spilled spare change and the boink of empty plastic soda bottles bouncing out in my wake. The entire valet staff was nine years old and all of them hastened to help with my bags, jogged after me as I wandered away with the keys still clipped to my beltloop and Luna tucked under one arm until I about-faced, climbed back into the truck to dig out the cooler, crawled out hollering fuck no I don't need help with my bags, I need a fucking lighter, who has a lighter? don't kids these days smoke weed? tripped on Luna's leash, walked out of a flip-flop, and made my way through the sliding glass doors and across the marble lobby to the desk, where they offered to bring Luna her own bed.

I blinked at desk clerk who was objectively pretty in a way that reminded me of expensive decor.

She's a dog, I said.

Yes, they cooed. Such a cutie.

Luna objectively looks like a stoned gremlin.

She doesn't need her own bed, I said, and went trailing up to the ninth floor carrying four mismatched Goodwill bags, wearing one flip-flop, and carrying my weird looking dog.

“L.A. is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.” —Jack Kerouac

1999

One of the last bottles of wine I ever drank was at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The hostess asked if I wanted a table or if I'd prefer to sit at the bar. It was early evening, summer; I remember because it was too hot to wear stockings. I was wearing a suit with a skirt. It was the late 1990s. I was there for something or other—the only times I've ever been to L.A. have been for work, save one, and that's a story for another day, if it's story at all. I sat at the bar. I ordered a bottle of wine, maybe something to eat. I opened my notebook, jotted down the place, the date and time, as I always did, always do. Who knows what happened to all the notebooks from all these years, where they accrued for a time before dispersing, where they got lost or tossed along the way, what they'd reveal or conceal, where they've gone. The wine was opened and poured; I tapped the pen against the page. The evening softened, melted, slid down the windowpanes.

It didn't and doesn’t bother me to eat alone; it gave me time to think, to breathe, and, back then, to drink. When I quit drinking, I wondered would it be lonely, would it be strange. I thought often of the man at the corner store on Pine Street who asked once, as he rang up the half-case I'd set on the counter, what my plans were for the evening; when I smiled ruefully and gestured at the wine, he laughed and said, "It's decent company, at least."

It isn't lonely to eat alone without the company of a drink, and it’s far more familiar now than strange. Easy for me to say, though, looking back at that woman at the bar, gilded with the fading summer daylight, hair falling over her face; from here, you can't see the dark circles and hollows, you can't see the sallow, you can't see the hauntedness at her shoulders, or the hunted in her eyes. You only see the tailored suit, the ramrod back that over the course of the evening softens a little, starts to slip, she leans on her elbow, bends over her notebook, hand on the stem of her glass; the glass is filled and refilled, she dangles one high-heeled shoe from a toe, forgets herself, swings her foot like a girl. The shoe slips off; you see her half-notice, glance beneath the bar. The shoe’s tipped on its side, too far to reach. She straightens up, puts her chin in her hand, and sits there wearing one shoe till it's dark.

"When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right." —Phil Ochs

2025

It's a Saturday night, I'm in L.A. for a reading, and I've met a friend at the hotel bar. The bartender doesn't like us; we’re hipsters with grey hair. There's a girl seated at the bar with a guy who looks terrified someone will notice she's out of his league. She's animated, gesturing, telling a story. She's spectacularly large-busted and wearing jeans and a bra. Probably in some taxonomies it could be called a shirt but in fact it's a bra and her spectacularly large, entirely bare bosom has defeated the purpose of the elegant bar's elegant floral arrangements and complicated light fixtures and all the other people at the bar and the entirety of the swanky hotel's faintly ironic decor. Nothing is happening at this bar but this bosom. The other customers are trying to wrench their eyes back to their drinks and each other, the ceiling, the floor. The poor kid with her looks like he's being given a lie-detector test in his head. The bartender is in a Mood and shakes the shaken drinks with overmuch force. We manage to catch his attention, place our order, of and about which he will have us know he neither approves nor particularly cares. Defeated, we retreat to a table. The light is awful. I've already hit my head on something once because the seats are too high. I sit down more carefully this time. We joke about something. He's one of those people who doesn't really eat. I wonder what will happen to these people when we're all scavenging. I mean it's one thing when you're at a swanky L.A. hotel bar to say, "Hurry up and get at this before I eat it all" and another when you're rationing your last six grains of weevilly rice. I won't even offer. You snooze, you lose, my dude.

We talk about whatever we're there to talk about. There was a misunderstanding, crossed wires, an omission, an unkind word. There are gestures indicating erasure, dismissal, it's nothing, it's past. We joke, remind ourselves we like the other one because they're funny. We talk about narrative, film, the girl at the bar. He wants to know, in all honesty, what is he supposed to look at when she's dressed like that. I say it's a fair question because it's a fair question. He says if she doesn't want people staring at her chest why doesn’t she cover it. I say maybe she does want people staring at her chest. Maybe she doesn't care what people do. Maybe, when she's getting dressed, she isn't thinking about you or what you're going to look at. Maybe she’s testing the edges, the boundaries of what it is to be visible, beautiful, trying it out to see what it's like to walk around in that body, in this world.

I tell a story about having gone dancing when I was that age and realizing, at some point, that my bra—dark red—was much cuter than my boring t-shirt so I took off my shirt. Mostly to see what would happen. Would somebody stop me. Would I be too shy to dance.

Just testing the edges, I say, shrugging. She's young. She's seeing what it's like to be a body in the world.

Did anyone stop you? he asks.

No, I say.

I look at the meal we've ordered and he hasn't touched and I eat the whole thing by myself.

"Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls." —Ice T

2008

Once I stood outside the door of a hotel room in L.A. staring at the Do Not Disturb sign that did not say Do Not Disturb; it said, "We're Taking a Moment."

I stood there for a long time under the weight of the awareness that the old world was dead and the new world was L.A.

"Los Angeles makes the rest of the country seem authentic." —Jonathan Culler

2014

Once I flew to L.A. for a conference I was forced to attend because I was giving the keynote address. I hid in the bathroom for half the day, then in some empty galley kitchen I'd found in the maze of corridors the rest. As I made a dash from one to the other, I had to navigate around or through a group of men who'd jammed up an entire hall. As I tried to weave and duck around them without attracting notice, a man I'd never seen before flung his arms open and embraced me, said my name incorrectly and with some kind of borrowed bastardized accent several times in a row—Myra, Myra, Myra—while all his buddies watched. His shirt was white and he smelled like an airplane. I am much shorter than most men and my face generally gets squished in hugs. When he held me out at arm's length, beaming, I asked him who he was.

Years later—more than a decade—we had a brief entanglement. During an argument in a hotel room, trying to lighten the mood, I said, At least now you know how to say my name.

He laughed nervously.

I studied him. Don't you? I asked.

Of course, he said, making a show of being offended, glancing at me sidelong.

He didn't, though. He really didn't know.

"Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe." —Emily Mortimer

2025

My friend said we should go to the spa for a scrub. I know nothing about what people do in L.A., but that's true everywhere I go—when you travel this much, you're always in the dark, you don't know the customs, the in-jokes, the way things are done—so I said sure, let's go to the spa for a scrub.

Now it’s 8 p.m. on a weeknight and we're sitting in a boiling bath in a 24-hour spa that's densely packed with naked persons of every provenance, age, shade, shape, and size. My friend tells me stories—growing up Hollywood royalty, how her life turned abruptly upside down last year, the way her daughter looks when she gets mad. She thrusts a basket at me, loads me down with shorts, a t-shirt, and towels, points to the showers and q-tips and lotion on her way by them, moves like she's in charge. I toddle after her like a gosling as she strides from tub to tub. Someone calls out a number; she points and says to me Go! so I go.

I lie on a table and a tiny old woman in a bathing suit dumps a bucket of water over my head like I'm a horse. For the duration of the scrub - 30 minutes or so - I'm speechless, spluttering, drenched, scrubbed, drenched, scrubbed, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and drenched, I'm scrubbed till I'm pink and slippery as a cherub's butt and my hair's been washed so thoroughly I might as well have gone through a car wash.

I stagger back to the vast tiled room full of tubs to find my friend and spot her plucking herself out of the lobster pot and heading for the ice bath. I skid to a stop at the ladder just as she plunges in.

I stick a toe in and shriek.

Shh, she says, only her head above water, eyes closed. Don't talk.

My friend is stunning. Until tonight, I've never seen her look anything other than perfectly put together, perfectly made-up, always smiling, expertly coiffed.

Hair wet and floating on the water in ropes, teeth chattering, lips blue, whole body submerged in water cold enough to stop her heart, I can see—for the first time—past what she looks like and catch a glimpse of who she is.

After a minute during which I'm pretty sure she's died, she opens her eyes, turns them on me like they're high beams, and smiles.

"The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles." —Phil Ochs

2018

Once I spent a cold autumn in the mountains at a residency. The rooms were spare and drafty and people kept joking that we were on the set of The Shining, and I laughed as if I had ever read the book or seen the film. People argued over meals, slapped their hands on the table, leaned forward, prefaced all their remarks with, Look, I'm a journalist. I started doing the ditzy laugh and introducing myself as the creative writer just for spite.

One of the residents was a renowned filmmaker from L.A. Mornings and evenings, she’d build a fire. I liked her, found her presence impressive, sturdy. This wasn't so long ago, but long enough that I had not yet become an older woman with grey hair and a sharp tongue; she had, though, and I sat by the fire soaking up her presence, her peace.

She told me I should stop wearing makeup. I don't know how it came up. I said something about getting older, not being used to my body, my face.

She sat with her elbows on her knees, knees apart, listening, watching the fire.

You'd do well in L.A., she said.

I laughed. Not young or pretty enough for L.A., I said.

Not your looks, she said. You'd be a player. You'd have a lot of power.

She looked at me shrewdly.

I wondered even then if she knew that would sting me. I wonder if she meant it as the warning it was.

I said, I want peace. Not power.

But I don't remember if I said it aloud.

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2025

We were standing on the sidewalk—me and the friend I'd met at the hotel bar—saying whatever we were saying as the prelude to saying goodbye when my attention was caught by a group of young people on their way to the nightclub next door.

They were glowing. The group, all wearing black, moved like a flock of birds, a murmuration of friends and lovers, shifting and morphing without losing shape or cohesion, they were holding hands and reaching for one another, they were laughing, turning and calling, falling back and surging ahead. They were so beautiful I gasped aloud.

My friend turned to see, then looked at me quizzically.

I said, Look how beautiful they are!

He smiled, bemused, and said something kind. I looked up at the glittering streetlights beyond him. I was about to say something more, but it was getting late, and I couldn't explain.

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