LA Tale
This is the tale of a weekend trip to Los Angeles, a mushroom trip, a hit of reality and a Rivers Cuomo appearance. I met my friend G years ago, back in high school. Sheās the kind of person where I wouldnāt know how to live without her- I think we make each other normal. Weāve lived in different cities and in the same apartment but it always feels the same. This trip we took to Los Angeles was not long after I had returned from there, after a handful of months of running around and getting into things. I was nineteen and had been living in a shack turned recording studio in Laurel Canyon with my guitar playing boyfriend, then in a glorious Echo Park Airbnb procured for me by my motherās Oscar nominated childhood neighbor. Eventually I moved into a room far away in Highland Park and my boyfriend broke up with me, so I came home. It was a fantastic time. I had āadult lifeā kicked into me by various experiences of observing others, making mistakes, taking the train, and notably tasering a guy on Eagle Rock Boulevard. In his defense, I shouldnāt have been out like that.
Gās mom had four tickets for the Green Day/Fall Out Boy/Weezer concert: for her, us, and Gās younger sister. It was perfect; Green Day was my 5th grade musical awakening and Gās always wearing this shirt that says Weezer with the W hands printed below. We met at the hotel in downtown LA, a big old one where I could picture a massive Christmas tree being erected. It was right near the jewelry district, so we decided to take a walk and find some lunch. It was a perfect shiny day like any other. The buildings were tall, the sun was strong, the American Dream was in full effect. We drifted around, taking photos of bongs shaped like AK-47s in shop windows and being told off for lighting cigarettes in the plaza, eventually taking refuge in a shady alley lined with cafes. Looks were being thrown around by the men sat outside, but they tend to do that. I was only a few degrees more worried than I am usually. G though, she saw something I didnāt, or something I do see but tune out. She ushered me back out of the alley and we crouched against a wall, where I saw tears in her eyes. āI didnāt know it was like thisā, she said. It beingā¦ dead meat I guess.
We kept walking and came upon a woman sprawled out on the sidewalk, burning up in the blazing sun, with a piece of cardboard protecting only a small fraction of her body from the hot ground. The woman looked older but could have been practically any age, the way life had treated her. We stood there for a while at a loss, wondering if she was even alive. Iām ashamed to say we left her there without doing anything.
Gās mom surprised us with a gift back at the hotel: a bar of chocolate infused with psychedelic mushrooms. We each took a piece, with the exception of the youngest among us of course. The Uber ride was uncomfortable, and by the time we arrived, things were moving. The effort it took to find out seats was enormous. I had never been to Dodger Stadium and would have been overwhelmed even without the mushrooms. Somehow the task of finding the seats fell onto my shoulders as I realized that we had a little girl here with three tripping adults. Through the drugs I considered the situation and did what I could to gather us up and analyze the map. Up many stairs, across a long way past many hotdog stands and merch tables. Eventually we were separated by the crowd and it was just me and G. The letter we were looking for appeared on a cement column, and we turned down the stairs to look for our seats. The mushrooms were hitting and I looked around bewildered, focused more on standing than on reading the numbers on the corners of the seats. A man asked me, what seat are you? I showed him my ticket. Youāre right here! he told me. He motioned for me to sit down with his two friends. Just our luck! In my daze I felt a strange hand on my leg and I glimpsed Gās face from the stairs. She appeared and grabbed my hand, pulling me away to where her mom and sister were sitting. We plopped into our seats, holding onto the armrests for dear life. As the giant W flashed on and the band trekked out, we began to sob. I remember holding hands as Rivers Cuomo sang about someone destroying some sweater and howling into our elbows. We retreated to the hotel not long after.
The moral of the story, now that Iām writing it, is that we look out for and need each other very much. This is a story of G protecting me, or trying to, multiple times in one memorable day. I like to think Iām smarter now but I still get caught up sometimes. The world can be a dangerous place, and I donāt necessarily mean physical harm. Experiences build up and shape who you are. They stick in your nervous system until it all feels normal but it isnāt really, and you know that if things were different maybe you wouldnāt be the person you are now. I try to imagine who I would be, but I canāt. There is no world where people donāt feel like prey, where I would be me without being in situations where I become flat, like an animal in a National Geographic or a girl getting fucked in a porn video.
One of my favorite opposing concepts is freedom vs security. I want to say that freedom makes us human, that choice in expression and action is core to āwho we areā. Then I imagine a person in a far off prison, who has been turned into an animal in the eyes of their captors. Are they any less human? I believe they are not. In my darkest times I feel the most human and the most animalistic at once. Sometimes I imagine myself as a maniacal rat clawing through a wooden box or a rabbit running freely as it was designed to do, with a predator not far behind but a sense of rightness coursing through its system. Things can be made sense of through grand scenes complete with a soundtrack and many camera angles, imaginary of course. Something about these animal visions help me cope and make me feel like a person. Breaking experience down to its building blocks, like fear, pleasure seeking, self preservation, unites you with others and exposes the truth behind our actions.
Security is balanced against freedom like a magnetic contradiction. Who cares for security? I believe I must. Imagining the future, I see something relatively modest and white picket fence-like. I am working to set myself up for this life; long term gratification is a concept Iām thankful to have the ability to embrace. I want to pick my kids up from school and take them to the farmers market on the weekends. But before they arrive on this earth, there is work to be done. For now I am too young and too crazy to provide this life for a child. I am still too full of energy for fighting and running and messing around. This is the balance; how long do I have left?
I need to return to Los Angeles. Many of my visions these days take place there; it is where I am an animal tearing down the Boulevard and flying high, watching myself run. I think about it and I scream internally as the music hits a crescendo and the colors twist frantically around each other. I am so full of life that I think I could be driven into a suicidal depression by the wrong environment. Feelings and logic push me to it. I will call G today, we must go on another trip there for soul searching purposes. There are places to be, observations to be made, and wrongs to right.