Los Angeles Notebook

Los Angeles Notebook

There are places in the world where people go to disappear, and there are others where people go to be seen. Edward had arrived in the latter, though he would later find the distinction to be less absolute than he’d imagined. The King’s Motel was not near the Hollywood Bowl, despite what the grainy TripAdvisor photo had suggested. It was near a freeway offramp, across from a liquor store and a billboard for a teeth-whitening influencer he’d never heard of.

Inside the motel, the freezer had thawed sometime before his arrival, and his TV dinners—Salisbury steak and turkey with peas—lay damp and sagging in their plastic trays. He drew until his hand cramped. A face, a dog, a staircase that led nowhere. He fell asleep without brushing his teeth.

The day of the concert arrived with the same anticlimax as any other day. Edward took the metro, which trembled under the city like a bad promise. Hollywood Boulevard was still there. The stars were still there. Some were blank, which he liked best. He took photographs of them, zoomed in, imagined his own name burned into terrazzo and brass. He stopped at a star that had been tagged with the word Mercy in red spray paint. Later, this photo would become the centerpiece of his show—though whether it was art or accident was a question he couldn’t yet answer.

The walk to the Bowl was long, uphill, and lined with human wreckage. The tents came in blues and grays, arranged like makeshift tombs, and the smell of human sweat mixed with rot clung to the air in a way that no one acknowledged. He arrived midway through Courtney Love’s opening set, managing to con his way closer to the front by singing “Violet” so loudly the ushers didn’t stop him. There was something about people who perform conviction that earns them small permissions.

“And the sky was all violet.

I want it again, but violent, more violent...”

He shouted the lyrics like incantations, like a spell that might transmute his loneliness into presence. He wore a dark blue sweater. He always wore it on days he wanted to be remembered.

Patrick gave him acid. Edward took acid, all the while photographers stood on the hills aiming their long lenses down like soldiers, waiting for something beautiful to fracture.

When Lana Del Rey took the stage, Edward was already adrift. He met two girls hopping seats, both of whom said they were from Reseda, both of whom had glitter on their cheekbones that seemed less festive than desperate.

She sang “Born To Die” like it was a lullaby for the disenchanted. When she reached the line—

“Choose your last words, this is the last time…”

—Edward screamed it back:

“WE WERE BORN TO DIE!”

People turned. Some laughed. Lana brought her hand to her mouth and smiled, and in that moment—whether she was laughing at him or with him or at something else entirely—he felt seen.

Later he would think about this moment the way people think about car crashes: in still frames, with exaggerated meaning. He would think about the album she released months later, Honeymoon, and the song that referenced a man called “Dark Blue.” He would remember the color of his sweater. He would remember the moon, unusually low and tinted like cheap honey. He would tell people about it, and they would nod and smile the way people do when you tell them a dream.

Was he “Mr. Dark Blue”? Had she noticed? Did it matter?

The next morning he booked a tour of celebrity homes, a voyeuristic ritual disguised as culture. He stared out the window of the van while the guide explained who lived where and what scandals had happened behind which hedges. The houses looked sterile. Like zoo enclosures for the emotionally endangered.

That night he ended up at Saddle Ranch, riding a mechanical bull. It bucked him once, twice, threw him down on his second try. His drink spilled. A group of dental hygienists from San Bernardino cheered. He smiled for the first time all day.

Tomorrow he’d move to a hostel. He’d meet his cousin Kyle. He would be closer to the Boulevard, closer to where he thought things happened.

But that night, as he closed the motel door behind him and sat on the edge of his unmade bed, he let the thought take him—perhaps I dreamed it, perhaps I’m dreaming.