There’s No Such Thing as an LA Story

Red-haired madams, nude jumping jacks, and everything in between

What makes a good LA story, or a story that could only happen here? Frankly, I have no idea. Los Angeles is a cacophony of clichés, a miasma of misguided ideas. Most people aren’t in the movie matrix — they do regular-people things like shop at IKEA or fight for parking at the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s. Some are egocentric, sure, but mostly they’re rather nice; and they rally when it matters, like after the fires.

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.