The Silverlake Era: Part
Two—Laura
Laura was the best thing to happen to me in L.A. Ashleigh would have been the best thing, but
we never saw each other outside of that office.
Laura and I only saw each other outside of a professional environment,
but we were only meant to be friends, and I did not want to be like every other
guy in the world, who begin intimating their sexual desires the second they
meet an attractive and interesting girl that they would like to date. I am never good at doing that sort of
thing. It is a curse. But this is not the place for complaining—this
is a place for praising. And Laura
deserves heavy praise.
She was a friend of my friend Liz in New York. She had gone to UMASS-Amherst. I had known one other person from that school
many years before, and that person had left a sour taste in my mouth, but Laura
resurrected the reputation of that school through her magnanimous
behavior. Liz had e-mailed the both of
us one day with the subject heading “Be Friends!” and so Laura and I had begun
e-mailing each other, planning a first activity in which we would meet. She added me as a friend on Facebook. We finally settled on seeing the Fiery
Furnaces play a show at Spaceland, a music venue roughly one mile from my
apartment. I had stopped at the venue
the night before and asked a guy at the door what time I should show up if we
wanted to get tickets. He said to come
at 8:00. He said it was going to be a
very popular show. So I e-mailed her and
intimated these details, and the next night, I waited outside the venue around
8:00 for her to show up. No one else was
there.
I received a phone call from Alberto, the maintenance
man from my apartment management company, who was going to come to my apartment
to install a combination countertop and refrigerator cover. If that sounds like a weird piece of kitchen
accessory, that’s because it is. That
little countertop was the only surface I had in my “kitchenette.” In any case, as I was talking to Alberto, a
girl came up to me, and I immediately saw she was quite beautiful. I hung up, apologized to her, and was
introduced to Laura. It very much had
the feel of a blind date. We decided to
go back to my apartment to have a drink since no one else was at the show
yet. We walked there, learned a few
things about each other, and had a drink of whiskey and coke each. We may have even had a second. I think I played some Fiery Furnaces on my
iPod. Then I took out one of the
pre-rolled joints I had gotten from a dispensary just off where Sunset and
Hollywood Blvd split into two separate avenues, just pass the Sunset/Silverlake
Junction. Oh! Just mentioning the name makes me nostalgic,
and makes me wish I were there now, as I look out my window and see the worst
blizzard of the 2008-2009 winter season in Chicago. Just so you know, this is now January 10, and
it has been quite a while since I have attempted to close out my NaNoWriMo
project. This will be my 4th
book once completed. After Daylight Savings, the collection of
short stories that I made for Ashleigh, and Self-Mutilation. All three are better than that first one, but
it is hard for me to say which is best.
I have an idea for my next project, book #5, but people always tell me I
should revise what I truly care about and get that published, rather than push
forward with new work. As I begin to
prepare for the law school application season once more, these anxieties in
regards to publishing and giving up my writing life entirely begin to weigh
heavily on my brain.
We smoked that pre-rolled joint and Laura told me
that she used to smoke quite a bit. She
told me a story about how she used to smoke by herself, at her apartment at 7th
St. and Ave C. When she mentioned that
corner I told her I had another friend that lived at that same one and was
struck by the coincidence. She said she
used to be able to see a guy across the street, and so if she could see him he must
be able to see her, and that he must have seen she was smoking, and so she
would get very paranoid whenever she would smoke by herself, and she had not
done it as much after that experience.
But she still did it every once and a while, which ended up being about
half the time we would hang out. That
night, she had to stretch afterwards, before we walked back to the venue. She had described herself as feeling like she
was melting inside of her body, or that her bones were dissolving. I found it very funny. I remember walking down Sunset, taking the
turn at Silverlake Blvd to head towards the venue, and seeing her face
illuminated by a streetlight, and realizing that she was one of the most
beautiful girls I had ever been fortunate enough to be with alone. I always feel like I get a bad rap with girls
and so I don’t even get the opportunity to be with them alone. If only they knew, and now Laura would know,
and I felt very happy at the moment that I had met someone who might be able to
regard me on my own terms.
Though there was nothing for me to proud of at that
moment. I was unemployed. I had thrown a party a week earlier in which
no one had showed up, in which two people had showed up out of pity for me—though
I was assured that it had to do with L.A. and the negative effects of rain more
than my personal shortcomings. I had
very little money left. Or I still had
money, but I could see the end of my bank account coming. My prospects were dim. It was hard for me to appear confident and
attractive. This is still my problem
some six or seven months later, now as I barely begin to scrape together a
negligible amount of savings again, and always growing older, always stretching
further away from periods of personal and romantic luck.
We watched the opening bands, had a drink, went into
the “fishbowl” with another bar where you were allowed to smoke, where we spent
the interim after the first opening band and the first half of the second
band’s opening set. Laura had very good
taste in music and spoke very well about her passions. She smoked cigarettes as frequently as me, if
not more so, and this gave me great comfort.
While it is an unhealthy practice, when you meet someone that shares one
of your illogical foibles, there is an even greater feeling of oneness and
destiny. She smoked in her car as much
as I did. She was very healthy in all
other regards besides this. She was very
intelligent and reasonable in every other respect. We watched the Fiery Furnaces set and she
enjoyed it enough. We walked back to her
car and said good-bye and that we would make plans again soon in the future.
The next time, I invited her over to Sycamore and
Molly’s apartment to go swimming on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. She picked me up in her car, which smelled of
smoke, which she apologized for, but which I was very leisurely allowed to
smoke in myself, and we made it to the Hollywood Hills, and we went by the
poolside and I introduced her to Sycamore and Molly, and then to Erin and
Nathaniel as they arrived later. We sat
beside each other on lounge chairs and I hoped that I struck her as attractive
in my half-naked state. But she was not
very talkative and I was not very talkative.
I was not sure how to present her in this scenario to these four
friends, probably my only real four friends in L.A., as another friend or as a
romantic interest. Erin had talked to
her for a while and it carried with it a sense of encouragement and
friendliness conducive towards converting friends from other circles into one’s
own circle. Oddly enough, it was the first
time in my life I felt like I was witnessing that process before my very
eyes. Laura and I left after not too
long—she had things she needed to do—and she drove me home, and we passed a
park that was staging some classic theater, and were planning to do Doctor Faustus and I asked her if she
might be interested in going, and she said yes.
I told her about how I had never read the original Christopher Marlowe,
or the Goethe, but I had read the Thomas Mann version and found it excellent. At this point she swooned, saying she loved
Thomas Mann, loved Death in Venice,
and so became the first person I met to share my same affection for that
masterpiece, and thus became even more deeply confirmed in my heart. She told me the film version was excellent.
Another time, we went to go see These New Puritans, a
band whose debut album I had just bought.
I was interested in them at first because their name appeared to be a
reference to a Fall song. I wasn’t sure
if Laura would go for them, but we saw the show at Echoplex, and that is a very
cool venue. We went outside to have a
smoke, and as we sat together I was once again struck by the notion that she
seemed like a girlfriend to me. How many
guys were there at the show with one girl who was not their girlfriend? This was also the night that I mentioned the
situation with Ashleigh to her, and she became interested in the way girls
always become piqued whenever I start talking about other girls. After the show, she told me how much she had
enjoyed it, which made me really happy that I hadn’t wasted her time. Their singer had worn a chain mail type of
vest onstage and she had told me that I should get something like that. It was very funny. At the end of the night we hugged in a
way. We had hugged every night, and it
was always awkward in vaguely the same way, though after the routine of it
became slightly less awkward. But it had
still carried a sense of awkwardness, as if she did not want to lead me on in
any way, or as if she were afraid that I might try to kiss her and she would
have to find the proper way to respond to that.
At this point, there was no question I was smitten, but I don’t know if
she could tell or not.
One other time, I went over to her house to play
Yahtzee, which she taught me how to play.
I met her roommate Laela, who was very nice and smoked roughly the same
amount of pot I did. We played Yahtzee
for a couple hours on their front porch in Los Feliz. It was my first time going to her
apartment and I was struck by how close
she lived to me. She lived not far from
the Vista Theater, which was not far from the Sunset/Silverlake Junction. I had many arguments with her where I told
her she really lived in Silverlake, not Los Feliz, and she claimed that I was
the wrong one. We played, and we had
some experimentally concocted mojitos.
Laela had brought her bong out on the porch and we had smoke a few
bowls. I took out another free
pre-rolled joint I had received from that same dispensary, and we also had
that. We listened to music, and I was
struck by the fact that Laura like Panda Bear.
Everybody liked that Panda Bear album anyways, but it was comforting to
have yet one more thing in common. She
also loved New Order, perhaps more than me.
And she also played this experimental bit of music by this performance
artist who screamed. And not in the way
Yoko Ono would scream on record, but in a way like it sounded like one of your
Latino neighbors in L.A. down the street was yelling at her children for
something. It was hilarious as at first
I couldn’t tell if it was from the record or was really on the street. We had a good laugh, and I left her with a
bunch of CDs she could burn from me.
She
came to my apartment to return the CDs the night of the All-Star game, and that
was the last time I saw her. She came
for just a few minutes. She had stayed
very late at work that day, until 9:00 or so.
I was astounded. She was in
fashion and described herself as a workaholic.
I asked her if she wanted to come in, and she said she would just have a
smoke on my porch. So she did that, and
I don’t even know if I smoked, but at that point I looked at her with
amazement, totally impressed. She told
me she was going to New York for business, and I told her that if she saw Liz,
she should say hi for me. She said she
would and again we said goodbye. At this
point, I was very close to starting my next job, and very close to realizing
that I wouldn’t be able to make it on my own there anymore, and so would become
increasingly less confident about my appearance in the real world.
At the end of it all, I sent her an e-mail telling
her I had to leave L.A. and she wrote back something very touching. I said I wanted to see her one last time, but
she said she was in Las Vegas for a fashion convention. This was around August 26, 2008 or so. I would be going through Las Vegas on my
first day of driving en route to Cedar City, UT, and I thought briefly of
calling her and asking her if I could stay overnight in Vegas with her, at her
hotel room. At the end I thought it
presumptuous, but as I drove through Vegas, in a very bad traffic jam due to an
overturned semi-truck that had blocked all lanes of traffic except for one, I
wanted to cry for feeling like I would never see her again. I could have called her, but I didn’t, and it
is little things like that make me hate myself more than I already do.
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