Only Lovers Left Alive

A Farewell to the Men of Los Angeles (consider yourself lucky if you were included)

I don’t think about men much these days. When I do, it’s usually with irritation, boredom, or mild anthropological detachment. Which is why it feels faintly humiliating to wander through the debris field during my final week in Los Angeles.

So many streets have a man attached to them. So many neighborhoods contain someone who once mattered enormously.

If I aired my dirty laundry properly, I’d sound like a bona fide nympho. Hideous word. Nymph, however, is lovely: bride, woodland spirit, young woman. The 19th century turned female desire into pathology. Call me what you want.

So yes, I’ve been thinking about the lovers left alive.

They are beginning to blur together now, which feels both sad and appropriate. Men I once believed to be singular have started dissolving into archetypes: the cinematographer, the composer, the crypto crook, the sick photographer, the father of my child. Maybe LA attracts clichés. Maybe it turns everyone into a genre eventually. Maybe I kept falling in love with whoever briefly made life feel cinematic.

What I really want to do is thank them. Like a farewell speech at the end of a very long and deeply inappropriate awards ceremony.

Here we go.

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Frogtown is a cinematographer who lies about his age, his height, and his wife.

Thank you for introducing me to the hookers of Koreatown, English Sunday roasts, Little Britain, the word “peckish,” the beautiful vintage Nikon, the painting of the nude in the window from that gallery in 29 Palms. Thank you for calling me a shite girlfriend and dumping me over Facebook Messenger. It built character.

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Glassell Park is a photographer who never had to lie about anything.

Thank you for budget hotel afternoons, stoned giggles at the popcorn ceiling, Nobuyoshi Araki, stories of your childhood in a cult, and the enormous black-and-white archive of erotica still buried somewhere in my phone. I’m sorry your body betrayed you so completely.

I would have done anything for you. Grocery stores. Venice Beach. Making sure you didn’t bite off your tongue in the frozen aisle at Super A. But you were too proud to be loved properly. I understand now.

Nobuyoshi Araki

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Sherman Oaks is the closest thing to a real and brutal heartbreak. A fragile little prodigy. A Sarah Lawrence imp. A tender genius who thinks entirely in music.

Thank you for picnics with Cheez-Its in the park beneath tired jacarandas, Béla Bartók on vinyl, Robert Fripp as our imaginary intern, the language we invented where grapefruits talked and foxes committed tiny crimes.

Thank you for love. Real love. Perhaps the great one.

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Echo Park is another cinematographer. He had issues. The obsession with Houellebecq. His terror of sincerity. His fear of kitsch. But God—we had fun.

Thank you for mushroom tea and Hunter Biden screenplays and every moment arranged like a film still: a French woman smoking in a nightgown, ash trembling but never falling, a white bird released into the silver morning light, snacks in bed while helicopters circled somewhere above the Reservoir.

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MacArthur Park is almost too embarrassing to include. A music manager for demented techno boys. Crypto crook. Deranged. Delusional. Brilliant. Broke. Beautiful.

Thank you for the night at the Spa Palace, sharing crème brûlée above the art deco rooftops at Perch, homemade chicken soup, healing frequencies hummed softly while I sweated through another nervous breakdown. Thank you for loving me when I felt ugly and chemically ruined. Thank you for your gentle face.

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And then there’s Highland Park / Mt. Washington / Los Feliz.

Thank you for 20 years. Thank for our child. Thank you for the house on the hill with the white picket fence. Thank you for cozy repeats of Twin Peaks and apple pie and ruining my ears with My Bloody Valentine. Thank you for both the happiest day of my life and the second happiest day of my life. The white Vegas Elvis wedding and the full-moon Scorpio night our wild little horse entered the world.

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There are more. Laurel Canyon. Beverly Hills. Malibu. Marina del Rey. Whole districts of the city flickering with former versions of myself.

But I’m tired now.

The cats are waiting to be fed. There’s cheesecake in the fridge. Pills lined up on the nightstand.

Other gratitude lists need tending.