Richard never knew that I didn’t fall in love with him but with the concept he and I co-created.

It all began with his arm, his right arm. I was in class and vaguely aware that a boy was sitting to my left. The hazy morning light filtered through the tall classroom windows, catching the fine golden hairs on his right arm where it rested on the little attached desk of one of those miserable wooden college chairs. Thin but very strong looking. A very alive boy’s arm.

Something in that moment shifted, a small internal tilt toward something grand and slightly dangerous. There was something almost indecent about the bones and the skin and the angle.

Then he glanced up at me.

He had huge haunted blue eyes, ringed with such dark shadows he looked either terminally ill or “literary,” which at twenty-one seemed essentially the same thing. The darkness beneath them intensified their electric blue. His head had the quality of a skull with skin stretched just tight enough over it to pass for human in passing light. Closely shaved hair, almost military. Absolutely horrible and also devastating.

I thought, again: romantic dying poet.

Our professor was lecturing enthusiastically about William Blake while The Doors played softly through speakers, creating a slightly deranged, smoke-thin atmosphere. Everyone else looked aggressively Southern Californian in flip-flops, dark tans, white teeth. Richard looked like he had wandered out of a tuberculosis ward in Prague.

At the end of class I tore a page from my notebook and wrote: I must know you.

I left it on his little desk and walked away very upright, shoulder blades back. My Russian ballet teacher Ludmilla had trained me to weaponize posture. I wanted him to notice me leaving and, more than that, to understand it. At that age I believed a girl’s back could communicate elegance, mystery, superiority.

The next class he wasn’t there.

I was furious.

Not hurt. Furious.

I had already constructed an entire mythology around him and now he had simply disappeared into it. I sat through the lecture in a kind of public humiliation while the professor compared Jim Morrison to Rimbaud.

Then Friday morning he returned.

Ninety-eight degrees outside and he arrived wearing black Levi’s, motorcycle boots with square toes, and a leather jacket. Other boys wore shorts and white T-shirts. Richard dressed like a decadent European orphan in exile. The effect was almost ridiculous. Almost.

He took off the jacket slowly and there were the arms again, entirely separate from the gothic catastrophe of his face.

Halfway through class he slid a folded note toward me.

I waited until afterward to open it.

“So you want to play?” it read.
“Be prepared for a dangerous game. Once begun there is no out. Le jeu est fait.”

It was the stupidest and sexiest thing I had ever read.

After that we stopped behaving like ordinary people.

We never spoke in class. We wrote each other constantly instead. His notes arrived folded into impossible geometric shapes, filled with Baudelaire and death rituals and symbolic murder and obscure French references he probably only half understood. Mine became increasingly performative in return. I signed them Zelda for reasons I no longer remember. He addressed me as Zelda even when other people used my real name standing directly beside us. I started eating tomato and mayo sandwiches.

By autumn, we had constructed an entire private mythology without ever having had a normal conversation.

He began leaving letters under the mat outside my apartment in Banker’s Hill. I lived in a crumbling Victorian house with three roommates who treated life as a kind of ongoing off-Broadway production. Two of them were actors, to be fair. One evening my friend Stu found me rereading a seven-page letter Richard had written in cramped, slanted handwriting about destiny, incest, and the symbolic necessity of killing me.

“You know he’s insane,” Stuart said calmly.

“I know,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Just making sure.”

The letters grew longer. So did the silences.

One afternoon I asked Richard—in writing—to meet me at the campus cafeteria, which was unfortunate because that’s where the jocks and fraternity boys held court. It smelled permanently of burnt pizza and stale beer. The least romantic place in Southern California.

Seeing him there, outside the elevated atmosphere of the literature department, startled me. He looked older somehow. The dark shadows beneath his eyes had deepened so much he looked almost cadaverous.

We sat across from each other and stared, neither of us prepared for actual speech.

Finally, he said quietly, “I cannot do this.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

Talking would ruin everything. Voices would expose what we were: two literature students performing doom and desire for each other with embarrassing sincerity.

But I wasn’t ready to give it up yet.

“My house,” I said. “Eight o’clock.”

That evening, I lit white candles all over my bedroom and smoked half a joint while waiting for him. When he arrived, I led him upstairs without speaking.

He stood at the foot of my bed looking terrified. Not frightened of me exactly. Frightened of becoming real.

“Zelda,” he said finally. “My sister.”

The line was ludicrously absurd.

Months later, after it had already begun collapsing under the weight of its own invention, I saw him standing outside the literature building in harsh daylight. No shadows. No candlelight. No folded notes like relics.

For the first time I noticed the weakness of his chin.

I realized I never fell in love with Richard. I fell in love with the story we were trying to live inside.

His name is William and he says that when you stand at the bottom of a pyramid, in the catacombs, and you look up, you see the star of David. He says every symbol has manifested from a frequency. He says that there are 17 vortexes and some of them are in Nigeria; that’s why there are so many scammers.

He believes this. I call him an alien and he seems proud of it.

These are the facts.

I’m afraid of getting the facts wrong.

He says: They changed the frequency of the universe from 432 Hz to 440 Hz and this caused all sorts of ailments, discomfort, disease, ADHD, cancer, pollution, people popping pills. 432 Hz was the standard for millennia and everything was in harmony until they changed it.

I ask: Who is they?

I don’t get an answer.

Yesterday, I left my house at 11:11 to meet him at his place. The drive there was depressing. I left my safe oasis of Los Feliz with its mature trees and abundant flowers and headed to that vague area between downtown and Koreatown. Things got uglier, dirtier. Piles of trash, homeless drifting with vacant faces, nothing green, then the shock of McArthur Park and some kind of Christian demonstration going on with “Jesus Saves” signs in Spanish.

I hoped his apartment wouldn’t be one of those brick buildings with cockroaches. I used GPS to get there, made an illegal U-turn on Wilshire and parked right in front. I got out of my car, walked to the gate and stared at it. I realized I didn’t know his last name. There was a fountain in the courtyard, one thing that was alive, and I tried to focus on that. The flower beds were filled with weird white puffs. I couldn’t tell if they were organic or some packaging material.

I texted him that I had arrived and he ambled down looking a little bit like Yul Brynner and an aging club kid. Torn black jeans. A black designer top. There’s the issue that he’s bald, but his face is so beautiful, you quickly forget about it.

He opened the gate and kissed me like we’ve known each other for ages. I followed him down a drab hallway. The complex looked like an old and scary hotel, and later he told me that it was indeed a hotel in the past. I smelled his apartment before I saw it. Old and musty, like he never opens the windows.

I live like a CIA agent, he said.

I laughed to humor him. I tried to pay attention to the details of this place, someone’s home, his home, while at the same time blocking them out.

All windows closed, the shutters down, a murky twilight illuminated by some sad yellow ceiling lamps. Hardwood floors. Dark wood. A living room. A coffee table. The couch tattered and messy. On it: a laptop blaring techno music. Some peanut M&Ms, a big bottle of warm Mountain Dew, some St. Ives aloe vera body lotion, a strange little cube covered in sacred geometry symbols. A closet door open, a boogie board leaning against the wall, a guitar.

Sit down, he said.

I sat down awkwardly, tucking my hands under my thighs so they wouldn’t give me away.

Do you want some of this? he asked.

I’ve never had Mountain Dew, I said.

Try a little, he said, and poured me some.

We sat and looked at each other. I asked him several times if he could change the music. It was speeding up my heartbeat. He explained about crypto again, block chains and mining.

You are absolutely everything, he says and smiles.

When we get outside, I think I can finally breathe again but the sun is still hiding and it’s gray and humid. We take an endless walk along Wilshire Boulevard. It’s so ugly. I clasp my poncho tight. I don’t look at him. We walk in silence a lot. I have nothing to say to him. We walk forever and I’m regretting wearing really high heels.

We get to the place at long last: Tokyo Hamburg, an empty Korean restaurant with plastic tables. They serve the food on small Styrofoam plates. He wants oysters but they are out. We order a million things, a feast of sorts: prime rib, Hamachi, cheese katsu and soup, gyoza, and I forget what else. It’s all grease. I feel so uncomfortable, I could faint. I get us some chop sticks.

I just want to be home in my clean apartment, my clean bed, with my cat and the soothing scent of palo santo. I tell him I need to go home and sleep. I tell him I need a coffee. He says he has a bed and coffee.

I say: Sorry, I need to go.

We trek back along Wilshire, past Masonic temples and homeless tents, an eternity, until we are back at his apartment complex with the ambitious name “Westlake Gardens.”

He says: Can I at least walk you to your car?

It’s right there, I say, pointing at my VIP parking spot.

My perfect white car is dirty too, covered in city soil and sticky plant sap.

The pool has an abandoned, wintery feel. The blonde woman carefully cleans it with a skimmer net, removing dead leaves and bugs. The chlorinated cold will be a shock, but she is determined to do this late October swim, probably the last of the season. Her fingertips will go numb, and her toes. It will feel good to be anesthetized.

Everyone in the apartment complex has their blinds drawn. Blind eyes are facing the blue and the woman. After her swim—five laps, then ten, and finally forty—she wraps herself in a large Turkish towel and sits on the blue chaise.

She smokes while watching the tall cypress trees, like sentinels, the blameless blue sky, hoping that something will disturb its monotony, but nothing does. There is no breeze and the heat is stifling.

She decides to read her book about a French writer collecting penises, but only in the “palace” of her imagination. The men do not matter. There is no significance to their faces, their voices, their desire, their platitudes, their aggression, or their embarrassment.

The French writer has hundreds of encounters in sterile hotel rooms. But only the penises remain. The French writer describes their folds, their veins, and their glans. The woman keeps reading with disgust. She has to look up the word “glans.”

A limp, drooping ennui wraps itself around her like the towel after the swim. Her limbs feel heavy, especially her legs. Once in her bedroom, she takes off her bikini and lies on the bed naked under the ceiling fan. She is annoyed that she has shaved everything off for C. He did not even notice. Now there is ugly stubble and two ingrown hairs. She had told herself not to do this again.

The blonde woman lines up the men in front of her, her mind’s eye. The recent ones. Unlike the French writer, she does not focus on the penises but on everything else. She lines up M., Giulio, “Gru,” the Professor, C.

Some memories are unpleasant. She met M. for lunch on a lovely patio with Mexican cuisine from D.F. They talked about politics. He spoke a lot about how awful the East Side is and how sloppy women look in Los Feliz. She sipped her Paloma with growing irritation.

After lunch, he walked her to her car, parked on a side street around the corner. The day was very bright, very sunny, and very hot. He kissed her. She was surprised. She kissed him back, just a little, with lips pressed closed. Then he grabbed her left hand and put it on his hard c%$& in broad daylight, in view of moms and kids and strollers. She pulled it away in disgust.

Giulio. He had a pretty little girl. A daughter. He wanted her to call him Daddy. Then “Gru.” She never saw his penis. He was so sexy the day they met for appetizers, another hot summer day. They sat inside La Casita del Campo, in the cool air conditioning, and talked for five hours. He brought her a gift, a necklace he had made for her that said: “just let go.”

Afterwards, they threw pennies in the wishing well and hugged outside in the parking lot. She felt like she loved him. He called her his “Minion.” They spent a whole weekend together where they did not touch. He slept on the couch. They napped together, apart. When he was finally ready, she did not want him anymore.

The Professor, she wanted. Even though he was so blonde and fair-skinned. His chest became very red, and it almost had what looked like hives. She did not mind. His pubic hair was reddish blond. That was a novelty. His chest hair, too, was so close to her own coloring.

He was a fantastic artist and had done some covers for the New Yorker. One day after brunch, where they laughed a lot, he said, “I cannot do this. I need to focus on my work.”

C.? They met at Café Figaro and had too many Negronis and got super high in his car afterwards, blowing smoke out the sunroof. She liked that he could effortlessly switch from French to English to German.

They discussed Houellebecq and Yorgos Lanthimos, make mushroom tea and stay up all night. But when he called her a sentimental romantic, she stopped seeing him.

Who remains? She does not want to rummage around in her past. All these men are sinking into forgetting. She has put a lot of effort into forgetting. She pets her cat. Closes her eyes. Makes a pact: no more men. Not ever. She says it like it is a spell. It sounds final when she says it. It even feels final for a moment.

Back in Los Angeles after a weekend in Palm Springs—with the foster cats, the howling Santa Ana winds, and the frozen cheesecake I’m emotionally entangled with. Not for long. In a few weeks, I’m decamping to that notorious oasis, where, in my mind, I already exist in a state of permanent late-afternoon, San Jacinto–shadowed glow.

Driving into L.A., spotting the Griffith Observatory, passing Zebulon, and finally turning onto Rowena Avenue, I felt it: a tiny tear for the city. Not the operatic unraveling I would have expected, given my latent sentimentality. Just a flicker of regret. A delicate goodbye.

Part of me has already relocated. She’s in Palm Springs, poolside, faintly indifferent, wearing something effortlessly desert-diva-esque. I, meanwhile, remain—for the time being—here in my Los Feliz apartment: underprepared, overattached to cheesecake, and entirely without a proper hotel pool-party identity. I assume these are solvable problems. A tan. A reduction in sugar. A wardrobe pivot.

I’ve begun, somewhat unnecessarily, to fictionalize this period of transition. Like a time-traveling tourist high on bennies. And yet I’ve been going to Palm Springs for ages. The first time was a road trip through the American myth with my globetrotting parents, ending in oversized margaritas at Las Casuelas Terraza. I remember the misters (very exciting to a small-town German kid) and the dubious art galleries. Many visits followed—Viceroy with its greyhound statues, the quiet luxury of the Parker—and let’s just say we were exquisitely alert, sniff-sniff.

And yet the Palm Springs I carry is less documentary than dream sequence: Liberace at the piano, Sinatra with a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, Marilyn in a one-piece in the doorway. In this version, I own a Halston gown—or at least a day dress with conviction. I order a “diet lunch” of cottage cheese and sliced tomato (a relic you used to see on menus here decades ago; I would never order it, but I always loved its existence).

Last night we watched a Dateline episode about a debonair art collector undone by a fake prince and a tech savant—a murderous group effort. He turned out to be completely broke. Naturally, I felt seen.

Because that’s precisely the energy (I thought) I brought to the Arrive Hotel pool this weekend—listening to a Bertrand Burgalat remix, deflecting questions about where I plan to buy property, embodying a certain “speculative abundance.”

I am, for now, the not-quite-broke, not-quite-queen of the desert. But I suspect I can grow into the role. The studied nonchalance, the faint suggestion of a life just out of reach, or perhaps somehow (because, who knows?) just within reach.

I will arrive. Eventually.

Factory Work

Ultra Violet
International Velvet
Candy Darling

orbiting the halo
of the finest factory there ever was
breathing amphetamines and camera light

Rusyn ringmaster
acne-scarred
making and unmaking fame whores
writing grocery lists
crank-calling God
through a switchboard of ghosts

He does not answer.
He records.

silver. surgical.

but I’m just a little person
I don’t know
I don’t know anything

I used to read the BBC first thing in the morning. Right after checking Instagram. Now I devour Substack instead. Today, before I even had my first sip of coffee, I read a post by one of my favorite writers, Ottessa Moshfegh, titled “Writing Advice #26: How to Get into Someone’s Head.”

Moshfegh is talking about answering a reader’s query for writing advice. I didn’t even finish the article because this sentence did something to me: “In reviewing your email, I noticed something about the way I was reading each sentence. I was reading more to understand you than I was to understand how I might best answer the questions you were asking.”

I thought OMG. I do this all the time. Not in writing but in real life. I had always blamed it on ADHD, that annoying habit of not being able to focus on what people are saying. But, oh Ottessa, I think it’s the writer in me, trying to figure out what makes them tick, what makes them uniquely them. I make up whole stories instead of paying attention to the story they’re telling. Like: their kitchen is probably painted yellow. They don’t like small dogs. They destroyed Barbies as kids.

There are whole chunks of life and crucial memory missing in my brain—complete years, entire cities. For instance, I lived in Munich for two years after college. But where? What was the neighborhood called? What was the subway stop? I have no idea. I remember how Munich smelled and how I felt. I remember my favorite pair of vintage round-toe heels getting stuck in cobblestones. I remember a fake black feather boa and bright red hair.

Anyways. I wouldn’t call Ottessa’s effect on me this a.m. quite an epiphany—but something close to it. So next time you’re talking to me, forgive me. I’m picking paint colors for your bedroom and picturing you riding a unicorn through Mumbai.

A small sequence on dating in Lalaland.

These poems are not meant to be taken as biography, only as observations under slightly unstable lighting.

Thanks for reading.

—S

Up, Up, and Away

Your Diet Coke tears,
Joe Rogan small-dick energy,
Paulo Coelho memes.

You talk
and talk.

I ponder
 three flawless olives
 in my filthy martini.

I sip—
try not to choke—
measure the distance
between your gibberish
and the time left
to drop you at LAX.

Bondage Ducky

His name is preposterous:
the number Seven.

But I don’t mind—
not with his long black hair,
delicate yoga limbs.

He feeds me dark chocolate
at the edge of a waterfall,
spanks me a little.

He tries to make me cry.
I laugh.

He mails me a rubber ducky—
in bondage gear.

I keep it.

I Cut and Cut

Let me be brutally honest
My lungs don’t work
because I am fat and idle—
not too fat and idle to be
the Silver Lake Girl
you fuck
in secret.

My blade is always sharp—
I cut myself out
like it’s nothing.
I cut you out
like it’s nothing.

I cut your poor school French,
your old man repetition
repetition
repetition
repetition
rep…

People in L.A.—and maybe I just mean myself—have this delusion that everyone else in the world knows what we’re talking about when we mention the Chateau Marmont, Mulholland Drive or Laurel Canyon.

Like the rest of the world is just casually fluent in Hollywood mythology. As if everyone has seen all the movies, memorized all the scandals, and is quietly nodding along whenever we drop a street name or landmark.

But when I go to Europe, or literally anywhere that is not Los Angeles, I remember: no one gives a fuck about L.A. They have their own celebrities. Their own streets with reputations. Their own dramas.

So I started wondering if my poetry book, Take Fountain—which is basically a long love letter to L.A.—needs a big, friendly disclaimer. A little map at the front that says: Here be slightly unhinged references. Good luck. Because I mention places like The Grove, Figueroa Street, Cahuenga, Glendale, as if they are universally legible emotional shorthand. They are not.

Let’s start with Mulholland Drive.

It is, of course, made famous by David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece of the same name, which means half the world already thinks it’s a dream sequence you can drive through while dissociating.

Mulholland Drive is one of Los Angeles’ most iconic roads—part scenic overlook, part engineering feat, part identity crisis.

It’s named after William Mulholland, the engineer behind L.A.’s water system. The man who helped turn a desert into a city.

Now it mostly serves a different function: cinematic elevation. On one side, the mess that’s Los Angeles sprawls endlessly—Hollywood, downtown, the ocean and Catalina Island if the air is clear. On the other, delicious darkness and cozy canyon.

Then there’s the Chateau Marmont.

One of those places where history and fiction stop pretending to stay separate. Designed to look like a French castle in the 1920s—it’s based loosely on Château d’Amboise—it sits just off Sunset Boulevard. Originally apartments. Then a hotel. Then a storage unit for American celebrity collapse.

John Belushi died here in 1982. Jim Morrison allegedly fell off a balcony and walked it off like it’s nothing. Whole decades of careers have started, imploded, or been quietly negotiated in its rooms. The unofficial motto is basically: if you’re going to ruin your life, at least do it somewhere that’s glamorous.

Then there’s Laurel Canyon.

Tucked into the Hollywood Hills, it feels like LA forgot to be a city and decided to become a magical myth. Winding roads. Hidden houses. Lots of lush trees. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was an artistic enclave for musicians who would go on to define an entire era of sound; Jim Morrison. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Frank Zappa. Joni Mitchell.

They lived close enough to walk to each other’s houses, which sounds so romantic until you remember this is also a group of extremely talented, chemically unregulated people with access to recording studios and each other’s worst impulses. It wasn’t just hippies in the woods. It was hippies in the woods with record deals, psychedelic drugs, and expensive acoustics. According to Vanity Fair, “Peter Tork of the Monkees once told Rolling Stone that kilos of weed were often casually dropped off in suitcases.”

And then there’s Glendale. LOL.

It’s where I go to do decidedly unglamorous things like grocery shopping, CVS pharmacy runs, oil changes, and occasionally treating myself to something fancy on sale for “emotional regulation.” I have a love-hate relationship with this place, as you will be able to see in my book once it’s out.

Glendale is vanilla. It’s orderly. It’s also grumpy side eyes by botoxed bottle-blondes with designer purses, perfect manis, and duck lips. It’s speeding teenagers in expensive cars and old men in polyester trousers playing chess in the parks. I oscillate between finding it comforting and mildly insulting. Which is probably more about me than it is about Glendale.

So yeah. That’s a small sampling of Los Angeles. A city where many a street either has a mythology attached to it or is quietly doing the unglamorous work of keeping the mythology from collapsing entirely.

And as for whether Take Fountain needs an intro?

Probably not.

Perhaps the real arrogance isn’t assuming people know these places.

It’s assuming they need to.

Maybe I’ll just let people Google everything and enjoy the fact that no one is fully in on it.

Including me.

AI is full of shit, and it says everything with perfect punctuation.

Don’t trust a word.

In the hallucinatory wee hours last night, in an insomniac epiphany, I decided to change the rather insipid title of my upcoming poetry collection from Ode to LA to Take Fountain. Both are overcooked and not terribly exciting, but that’s sort of the point.

I asked Claude for a bit of Hollywood lore around around the phrase. It confidently informed me I was thinking of the famous Bette Davis line: “Take a Valium,” allegedly said to Johnny Carson on his show.

Had I been wrong all these years? Quel horreur.

But also: How perfect! Like a childhood game of telephone where the original sentence gets passed through too many sticky ears and returns utterly unrecognizable.

“Take a Valium” felt entirely plausible for that pill-slick Hollywood era.

Or maybe I just wanted it to be.

I asked Claude to tell me more and to kindly locate a source for this very elegant elucidation.

Claude responded (I’m paraphrasing):

No. That never happened. What are you talking about? She said “Take Fountain.”

Me: What the actual fuck—you just told me she said “Take a Valium” to Johnny Carson.

Claude: No. Oops. You’re right to question that.

It proceeded to unravel its own certainty, suggesting that Davis might not have said “Take Fountain” either. Ever. Which felt less like clarification and more like psychological escalation.

At that point, I switched platforms. ChatGPT informed me:

The famous LA phrase “Take Fountain” is most certainly attributed to filmmaker Billy Wilder. The story goes that when someone asked him for directions in Hollywood, he didn’t elaborate—he simply said: “Take Fountain.” Meaning: avoid the clogged arteries of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard and reroute through Fountain Avenue instead.

I pushed back immediately: Not, maybe, Elizabeth Taylor?

ChatGPT, with robotic calm: Nope.

• Most credible attribution: Billy Wilder
• Bette Davis: stylistically plausible, but not historically supported
• Elizabeth Taylor: similarly circulated, but not origin

At this point I escalated the issue to Gemini, which, with great confidence and no discernible shame, insisted the phrase is attributed to Bette Davis—often framed as advice to aspiring ingénues navigating Hollywood.

Gemini added that there is no definitive proof she ever said it, but that it sounds like her, which apparently counts as evidence in certain cosmologies.

Gemini also mentioned that Davis lived off Fountain Avenue and named her car “Black Beauty,” which feels less like verification and more like atmosphere—like LA itself: vibes pretending to be facts.

I give up.

But I’m sticking with the title.

Take Fountain it is.

Because in Los Angeles, even direction is a form of fiction—and everyone is still lost, just differently.

Let’s start with the “facts.”

One of my annoying tics is that I think in song lyrics and clichés. So I’m a literal space cowboy. A joker and a sometimes smoker. A walrus. I am [s]he, as you are he, as you are me.

I am a woman. I don’t want to say a white woman—not out of guilt. I think that’s more of an American framework. We Germans are plenty shamefaced about other matters. It’s a national sport. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I really came into being a woman. I always identified first and foremost as a human.

I had a long phase in college when I tried to look androgynous, inspired by David Bowie’s Thin White Duke and Patti Smith. I can’t pull that off anymore. If anything, I’m too much woman, slouching towards some kind of Bethlehem, walking on my knees “for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

I’m a mother. A wolf mother, feeding the pup, feasting on the kill. A bad cook. Sometimes an excellent one. I get eczema so I cannot cut vegetables. Allergic to nightshades and pollen and bees and penicillin. I’m a neurotic, psychedelic, infinitely jesting kind of mother. A good enough mother, as Winnicott would say.

I’m a liar liar pants on fire, hiding behind big ideas. A writer, for sure. But oh, what kind of writer? A poet, you know it. A muse. A menopausal overripe mango of a muse. I am all the women I admire—though most elude me right now: Nico, Anne Sexton, Anais Nin, Debbie Harry, Edna St Vincent Millay, Mary Magdalene, the whore of Babylon, Salome and the seven veils, the siren that sinks ships and the stone-turning Medusa.

I am bold yet often scared.
I am scandalously hermetic.
I glow sometimes. Or so they say.
I wish I were skinny. Not young. Just skinny.
I get bored very easily, even with myself.
I was born with Weltschmerz.
I like beauty and lush, sexy shiny things.
I like ruin and decay.
I am a seeker. God help me.
I’m a sprite. A puck. A player. A sashayer.
I am smellin’ like the rose that somebody gave me on my birthday deathbed.

I think, therefore I am. Supposedly.
I wasn’t bottle-fed on Descartes, but I kind of was.

Inspired by @enlightenedhedonistdo, based on an “unintended prompt” from @ellieanderphd

I was in my poetry class today, where we share work and give feedback. I arrived a bit late and slipped in medias res. A woman was reading a gorgeous poem about peonies. After that came more carefully crafted poésie and I felt myself shrinking inward.

These people, I thought, know how to write poems—villanelles, sestinas, iambic pentameter—with real panache.

Me? I talk about small, vitriolic grievances, the way the blinds move in my bedroom, or how a date went sideways. In free verse. I wouldn’t even call it prose—so I learned today.

So, in an effort to reach the elevated echelons of the group, I decided to share a poem in a style I don’t usually do. A bit slower, a bit more literary, or so I thought.

It got a communal eh.

I had been too afraid to read my piece about Joe Rogan and small dicks. So when my turn came around again, I thought "fuck it" and shared that one instead.

People were delighted. This one bloke I adore—a Brit—was shouting, "More, more. Give us more. More of this!"

And I crawled a little back out of myself. Sat up taller. Felt, well—seen. Really seen. The real me who cannot rhyme and sometimes cannot even reason.

Later, sitting in traffic on the way to the pharmacy, I thought: it’s OK.

It’s OK that I’m not poetic.

It’s OK that I cannot—or will not—write about snowdrops and sunsets.

It’s OK that I accidentally called Fellini’s masterpiece 9 ½.

My life is not sepia. It’s not Garamond, even though that’s my favorite font at the moment. It’s not about enjambment and caesuras. It’s about dirty martinis and aging with disgrace—and oh, also adynation. The more ridiculous, the better. Look it up. It’s worth it.

So—ergo—I’m OK.

I’m a tiger and I do not have to change my stripes to fit. I don’t have to match this idea of what it means to be a writerly writer. It’s OK to trigger people. Shock and awe. Be a bit dirty.

I don’t have to clean up my act.

I felt happy.

Funny thing is, toward the end of class, our group leader said he was going to show a funny video of a girl in a bikini. The two other women in class excused themselves. I stayed to watch. She had big boobs and a tiny string bikini and she was talking about poetry.

And again, I thought: maybe I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And yes, it’s—marginally—about women’s bodies, so if that already feels like too much—stuff like tampons, cramps, menopause—you are free to excuse yourself. I’ll write about the absurdity of LA or dating clowns next time.

So…a few years ago, I was seeing this guy when the hot flashes started.
He said, very plainly: I cannot date a girl in menopause.

Noted. And still noting. And still furious.

Fast forward to today. I’m lying on my back with a sheet of gauzy paper draped over me like it has been personally wronged. My feet are in stirrups. There is a conversation happening about my cervix.

Apparently, at my age, it shrinks.
Good to know.

The doctor says to the nurse: Get out the lollipops.

And for a brief, shining moment, I think—yay. Finally, a system that understands incentives. A small reward for participation. Something to take the edge off.

No.

It is, of course, a mystery medical device.

There is no reward. There is just the part where it hurts more than anyone suggested it would, followed by the part where everyone acts like that’s normal.

Which, apparently, it is.

Women are very good at this—absorbing impact, adjusting our expectations downward, calling it manageable.

I read somewhere that clinicians are supposed to offer local anesthetic for IUD procedures now.

“Offer” is doing a lot of work there.

Also: the paper sheet. What is that for? It’s just…there. A gesture toward arts and crafts style modesty that convinces no one involved.

In Germany, they skip it entirely. You’re just naked. It’s less weird, somehow. More honest. Less…theatrical.

Here, we get the full production: paper, positioning, polite language for impolite sensations.

Anyway. There has to be a better way to do this. Different angles. Different tools. A redesign that acknowledges that a person is attached to the cervix in question.

I don’t have the answer. I’m just the one lying there, trying not to flinch.

But I will say this—

if we’re going to keep doing it like this,

a lollipop would not be unreasonable.

My version of LA is as deluded as anyone else’s. There are damsels in distress and detectives with a crooked smile and a beige trench. There are days of locusts and drunk writers losing money at the racetrack. As I write this, I can see tall palm trees and hear a cacophony of helicopters— and that darn leaf blower blasting debris god knows where.

It’s not very glamorous but I love it, the real LA and the one I created in my head when all we had was a TV with three German government stations. I love the absence of a heart — so you can really feel your own pulse. I love the neighborhoods. Some are perfect, like something out of a magazine, complete with a Hockney pool. Others have beat-up cars rusting on dead lawns and basketball hoops rotting on their sides.

We even have accents and I don’t mean valley talk. Depending on where you land, someone might call you a putz—or, if you’re lucky, a mensch—and elsewhere a cabrón. When I first moved to Echo Park, before it was gentrified, they called me flaca. But in a nice way. The dad said I reminded him of his first love in Guadalajara. She was blonde with blue eyes, too. He mowed my lawn and during the holidays, he brought over tamales. He wasn’t what I’d call a character. He was a person. A very good person.

But of course, there are the characters. Today the madam popped into my head. I met her in a writing class at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore on Melrose when that was still a thing. She was this little red-haired lady, petite and birdlike, with stories that stopped the room. She wasn’t just a writer; she was a bonafide whoremistress. She told her tales in a languid, lascivious voice, and I lapped them up. Sometimes I wanted to be her—taller, still blonde—but oh, what a life to live and tell. Glamour, mischief, and absolute control all wrapped into one magnetic package. I wonder what happened to her?

What happens to any of us? What happened to the Persian real estate agent who had sort of adopted me around the same time? I met him at a party where I was costumed as a pregnant nun and he was just being himself, trying his Neil Strauss pickup artist lines on me. I think it involved a box in the desert.

Clearly, it worked out for him, because I started tagging along on his “errands.” He had a fake casting couch. He also somehow managed to get women to do jumping jacks nude in vacant show homes. I was stupid enough to be impressed. I tried to write about him later, but I could never pull it off. I think he moved to Ukraine because “the girls are hotter there”— but that was long before the war.

I didn’t learn much else in that writing class besides wanting to be fabulous, starved for glamour and debauchery that I was. Not to be confused with fame—I never wanted that. One day, lost and a little lonely, I wandered across the street and talked to a psychic. She told me that my “birds” had no place to nest in my heart because they didn’t feel safe. After that, I stopped going to class and never saw the psychic again.

So, what does any of this have to do with LA? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And maybe that’s the point. My life here meanders like Figueroa, from Highland Park down to the port, touching neighborhoods, memories, and characters that make no narrative sense together. Most of it is decidedly unglamorous. Like the skinny mom dragging her child to the fancy preschool, waiting in line for a lavender matcha before schlepping around the reservoir. Or the fruit vendor with the ripe mangos at the corner on Rowena and Griffith Park Boulevard.

The thing is, the older I get, the less excitement I crave. I prefer predictability over thrills. My chickens have come home to roost. And somehow, in the chaos, absurdity, and small triumphs of the city, I finally understand that LA has no story—only the stories we make up as we go along.

He came to pick up some vintage glasses I had posted on Facebook, and we ended up name-dropping in the noon heat. I don’t know why I mentioned Mothersbaugh, which he countered with Neil Young. Which led to Kim Gordon. A typical LA conversation of puffing each other up—the music edition.

He asked if I like the VU, and my dyslexic mind turned it into ultraviolet. I said, Well, like sunbathing? I had never heard of anyone refer to the Velvet Underground as UV. That definitely counted against him—too casual, trying too hard to be nonchalant. Like calling San Francisco “Frisco” or Southern California “Cali.” It annoys me to no end.

Also, I don’t date. I’m done with all that. Done with men, their stunts, and silly shenanigans. But when I went back inside after he left, I thought about it:

Dating.
Famous people.
Dating famous people.
Famous people I dated.

Yes, I know, talking about it is dégoûtant. Like telling people how much money you make. So I never do—talk about famous people I dated, that is. And yet… I did mingle with a few semi-illustrious individuals.

There’s the actor who was a big somebody in the Culver City Masonic Temple and had a very specific fetish. He also collected wizard paraphernalia. The seemingly normal producer—ten types of cereal and his kids’ bicycles in the yard at his Hollywood Hills mansion—who went to jail for, dare I say it, multiple counts of SA. And the English ‘80s songster who hung up on me in a tizzy, saying, I don’t need another wife.

Because my mind is usually all over the place, the latter got stuck in my head today. He actually gets stuck in my head a lot. One of his two “hit songs” often assaults my ears when I shop at Trader Joe’s. This immediately catapults me back to the top floor of a certain posh boutique hotel, ordering oysters and Champagne while he plays guitar naked in bed.

Here’s another non sequitur.

When I first dabbled on Tinder eons ago, I met a guy—let’s call him Voltaire (that’s actually his real name)—and regaled him with the story about the ‘80s has-been without saying his name. I told him he was British and that we communicated in Beatles lyrics. I told him he still tours to sold-out shows, and that middle-aged ladies throw their panties onto the stage. I also told him his voice sounded a lot like Bowie’s. I guess I was bragging. Voltaire didn’t believe me anyway. No one sounds like Bowie, except for Bowie.

But because I wouldn’t cough up the English dude’s name, Voltaire started calling me Huey, after Huey Lewis. I don’t really know anything about Huey Lewis, other than that I probably hate his music—but the name stuck. We were Huey and Voltaire. That’s a whole other story.

I digress.

Anyway, this Facebook Marketplace guy asked me to go to a punk show tonight. When I didn’t immediately bite, he also invited me to the local breakfast club next week. He said it meets at 7 a.m. on Wednesdays, but we could go back to bed afterward. I ignored the innuendo and—I cringe—gave him my real number. Why, oh why? Was it because he—supposedly—knows Neil Young? Or am I so starved for the male gaze that I turned into an inane flirt?

Truth is, I never meet guys out in the wild these days. Certainly not in the wild of Los Feliz, where the average male rocks a mustache, loafers with white socks, and an Erewhon tote. And lusts after skinny chicks hopped up on matcha lattes. Chicks usually twenty years younger.

Not some unshowered, unshaven, menopausal missus who’s a good fifty pounds past her prime. But he did. Was it the yellow butt-grazing shorts I had slept in? My German accent promising… sadistic pleasures? The Mark Mothersbaugh story? I’ll never know.

Like I said, I don’t date. And that’s fine. I’m happier off solo, here in my apartment, watching the cats curl up in a sunspot, listening to Devo, and letting the wild of Los Feliz continue without me. Some days, just being seen is enough.

I have a folder called Weak Poems.
My chapbook said no.
The trash said yes.

But they are not awful.
Adult content ahead!

Bed, Bath & Beyond

He wants to stack his girls
into a F$^# sandwich—

at least two,
ideally three,
on top of each other,
ready for assault,
tied tight
with shiny ropes.

On my cocktail napkin
he doodles the scene
to show me
how it’s done.

I ask,
What do you want from life?

He says:
I want to shop
at Bed, Bath & Beyond
with you.

Two Little Bitches

You laugh
when your lapdog humps my leg.
You are both in heat, you say—
two little bitches.

I get up from bed
to meet you standing there.

I am so tall,
I could spit on your head,
 crush your house
  with the flicker
   of an eyelash.

Taller yet—
I can see your drum set
from space

You go hmm and kiss me,
while I wonder how to shrink back
to something you can manage.

Up, Up, and Away

Your Diet Coke tears,
Joe Rogan small-dick energy,
Paulo Coelho memes.

You talk
and talk.

I ponder
 three flawless olives
 in my filthy martini.

What was that?
Come again?

I sip—
try not to choke—
measure the distance
between your gibberish
and the time left
to drop you at LAX.

The Photo Comes With Me
Banana cream pies, fake Chanel, and the life I made in Los Angeles

As I’m packing up my life in Los Angeles after 28 years, I came across an old photo of Eve Babitz playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp. I’ve had it forever and used to display it prominently. I think I cut it out of Esquire and framed it. Hilariously, a visiting acquaintance once asked, Oh, are these your parents? I told him yup, sure are. Babitz looks nothing like my mother, but my dad is indeed a chess fanatic. He used to run tournaments in Europe and taught me how to play when I was four. I no longer have the patience.

Babitz is my favorite LA writer—more than Chandler and Fante, far more than Didion. I related as much to her flavor of glamour as to her stories and prose. She is a forever muse, and now that I’m leaving the city, I’m taking her with me.

Unlike hers, my life in LA was never about Hollywood. I avoided the Biz and anyone orbiting it. My LA was debauched nights at Spaceland, breaking into hotels like the Figueroa and the Roosevelt for a swim. I hung out with musicians and artists.

My first friend, the kid next door, was a junkie obsessed with Elliott Smith and My Bloody Valentine. We bonded over music in the pool at my first apartment across from the House of Pies on Franklin. After nights of partying, we’d buy a whole banana cream pie and devour most of it. Otherwise, we barely ate. Another neighbor ran a live cam porn business out of his living room and worked security for a pimp.

I had just lost my gig with a German film website after refusing to cover the Oscars—I was too scared. Needing a job, I checked the LA Times ads and found a strange listing: a woman looking for a pretty girl to be her assistant. We met at her pink-and-gold condo in Beverly Hills. She ran a plastic surgery aftercare facility and hired me on the spot. Much of my job involved running errands for bandaged celebs or driving a black town car to meet patient consultants for the country’s top surgeons.

The stories could fill a book, but I signed an NDA—rock stars getting tummy tucks, Hollywood greats recovering from liposuction, princesses from the Middle East with vast entourages. By day I wore a fake Chanel suit; by night I did unspeakable things at the Dresden, the Silver Lake Lounge, the Standard, or Canter’s.

Celebrities were everywhere then. You’d have dinner next to Beck or buy vegetables next to Gwen Stefani at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Angelyne cruised around in her pink Corvette, and if you were lucky, you’d spot Suzan Strauss—the Lava Lady—walking the streets.

When I wasn’t working or out with girls who sold their eggs for coke and breast implants, I sat in coffee shops and read and wrote. Or I’d visit a friend bartending at La Poubelle in the late afternoon and end up sharing the counter with Vince Vaughn, who called me sweetheart and let me sit on his lap—though he didn’t have much say in it.

Almost 30 years later, I’m a very different person—not just physically, but internally. I stay home with my cats and read and write in bed, which I call my office. I don’t drink much and certainly don’t do lines of blow off random keys in random bathrooms. I start my days with a big glass of water and floss my teeth. My kid is in college, my ex-husband found bliss as a woman, and everything is, for the most part, sedate.

My time in LA is coming to an end. Fittingly, I started in Los Feliz and will end in Los Feliz, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city. I’ll miss this messy, weird, magical town.

1. To Sylvia Plath, for teaching me to accept my own bell jar.

2. To Baudelaire, because one should always be drunk — with wine or poetry!

3. To Rainer Maria Rilke, my Teutonic teenage idol.

4. To Oscar Wilde, because I cannot resist temptation.

5. To Bukowski, you charming old lush.

6. To Edna St. Vincent Millay, because my candle still burns at both ends.

7. To Anne Sexton, for showing that loneliness can be unspeakably beautiful.

8. To Dorothea Lasky; sorry it took me this long to find you.

9. To Emily Dickinson: endlessly brilliant.

10. To Mary Oliver, for reminding me of my one and precious life.

11. To Arthur Rimbaud: And again: No more gods! No more gods!

12. To Maggie Nelson, because I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters.

PS: Sorry to be so spammy today. I’m procrastinating.

I dumped my wedding dress yesterday.

I didn’t realize it would hurt this much.

I moved to LA almost 30 years ago with one suitcase, stuffed with cute clothes for going out. Minimalist. Proud. Ingenue with an attitude. Inspired by Henry Miller, who was one of my literary idols, I loved the idea of carrying only what is essential for living and writing.

When my ex and I moved in together, I made them sign an anti-clutter pact. It lasted about as long as our Las Vegas champagne buzz.

Stuff piled up over the years: the first restaurant guidebook I published (my parents were so proud), keepsakes from my great-grandmother, discarded kids’ toys, karate weapons … and that dress.

Sleek. Fitted. Tiny pearls around the collar. A vintage Hollywood find from the ‘40s. Size XS.

I held it once more. Traced the delicate pearls with my fingertips. Smelled the faint perfume—Mami’s Shalimar, nicked from her bathroom—trapped in the seams. And then: dumpster. Gone.

I’m no longer a size XS.
No strawberry-blonde bob.
No longer married.

Leaving the City of Angels feels like leaving a best friend.
Almost everything I own will stay behind.

And maybe that’s how it always is.
One suitcase.
One life.
One self.

“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
— Henry Miller

Dear Sylvie,

We regret to inform you that your poems… are catastrophic. You seem to think you’re really clever, but frankly, this is just a series of literary trainwrecks. You are no Dorothea Lasky, no Anne Sexton, no Eve Babitz.

Frankly, you’re like a Bukowski who gave up halfway through the first beer. Maybe you need more Pabst Blue Ribbon—or less ambition.

Please, for the love of all that is poetic, stop submitting to our publication. We only feature writers who don’t make us question our life choices while reading.

You earn a B for effort, a solid participation ribbon in the Olympics of mediocrity.

We strongly suggest a more achievable hobby: Pilates, interpretive knitting, or ant farming.

Sincerely,

The Editors

When his world spun,
we stopped being lovers.
Our perfect Venn diagram shredded.

No more lazy afternoons
where he said: This is how the Earth was made.

I miss his spartan lair.
Shibari ropes.
Helmut Newton coffee table books.
The gecko jungle.
Rice cooker.
Skateboards sprawled across the floor.
His narrow hips.
His perfect face.

Best Westerns. Days Inns.
Bedspreads that screamed stay away.
Art screwed crooked on walls.
Hotel guests giving side-eye.

We were so clean.
Calcatta marble clean.

Today he said:
It’s been years since I’ve been myself.
Spinning at work until dizzy.
Always lurking.

No houseboat in Southeast Asia.

I’m not myself either.
Rubbing eyes raw,
picking at scabs from summer bug bites.

A long blonde hair caught under my left breast.
Mine.