But she knew how it worked, how this city
functioned, more or less anyway. She knew where the coffee was good, where to
get a pretentiously delicious breakfast and, if she wanted to, where she could
watch, with beer sparkled eyes, a boy play guitar… or a ukulele.
And that’s all she needed to know.
Right?
So why did she feel like a stranger here?
It felt like another country, and she, a
foreigner in it. This feeling had, at one stage, given familiar sites a mystery, made them ripe for further investigation. In her minds eye, she would be
equipped with a big, magnifying glass, a bloodhound and a ready-to-seek-out-truth!
attitude... in the back streets of Brunswick.
But this time, this strangeness; this listlessness
(or perhaps more pertinently, this too-many-lists-iness) was different.
Adulthood had fallen on her like a pound (or ten) of flour that was not yet
scones or profiteroles, just a weighty bag holding an abundance of something
she didn’t know what to do with. Not even the ‘creative class’ of Collingwood with
their aggressive sense of ‘cool’ gave her the little thrill it used to. She was
tired of pretending she was one of them. It was expensive and exhausting.
So she left.
She had dreamt of going to L.A. since she
was a lonely teenager. She justified being a bit shit at maths back then, with
the rationale that she would one day be a Hollywood star and had no practical
need for trigonometry or Pythagoras. A future in Hollywood stardom was also a comfort when faced with other teenage girls and
their aggressive sense of schoolyard popularity.
Alas, she did not arrive in LA with the blaze of Jon-Bon-Jovi-singing-on-a-rock-like glory she had imagined she would at 14. She was a failed TV writer,
with pair leggings and heavy backpack … No bright lights and certainly no need
for ‘shades’. The future was just a tired sense of elongated time that lay out
before her like a long, dreary paddock where north and west were vague
memories.
She was set for “true discovery”.
At least, that’s what she fucking hoped. If there wasn’t true and authentic
discovery here, this trip was going to be a compete disappointment. She was
overseas in search for herself. At 30, at the height of her Saturn Return, she
was a walking, talking, dressed up cliche. And she had nothing except a one-way
plane ticket... and a fridge in her parents’ garage. At 22, this would be
paradise. At 30, there was a niggling fear that she had in fact fucked it up,
this ‘life’ business, and potentially, irrevocably. The least she could do is
be a success at being completely lost. Dear lord, she had to be good at something.
Once the jet lag subsided, she ventured out into the wilderness of LA. After such a long time fantasising about the place (and
seeing it projected into the collective imaginations through movie screens and
television dramas), the city had a strange familiarity to it. Walking around
this city felt like walking onto a movie set where the kitchen looks real
enough but the taps won’t give you any water. A city made of plywood and stage
flats, L.A. was a town where the grimy film that dulled the windows on Melrose
Ave appeared as if it was a hot film set, not to be meddled with by burly grips
or coffee hinged First A.Ds. Even the homeless people looked as though they
were styled extras in a movie.
With a camera on her hip and a wildly pink
paisley scarf draped scandinavially around her shoulders, she, herself, was
most certainly costumed and in character. Today! she was a “traveller” (her
‘character’ however, looked more German than Australian. And she couldn’t help
but assume that those who met her were slightly disappointed that she was less
exotic, and considerably more twangy, than they had first hoped).
As she moved through this staged city as an
acted version of herself, she was suddenly hit by the sweet scent of spring
flowers. Unless this was some weird Truman show, smell-a-vision movie, these
flowers were real. Amongst the smog and the insurmountable fumes of exhaust
that were pummeled into the air by monster cars and people who had forgotten
how to walk, she would be stopped, every now and then by a waft of florally
loveliness. She was literally and metaphorically, stopping to smell the roses…
and chrysanthemums.
Everybody’s garden had flowers. Some
gardens were tangly and unkempt jungles of overgrown weeds or plants. Others,
anally clipped and retentively mown, symmetrical and terrifyingly organised. But
they all had bosomy blossoms, billowing before her – and it made her want to
illiterate… and smile. There were hibiscuses and germaniums and bougainvilleas.
Poinsettias, magnolias and jacarandas. A gentle burst of jasmine and wisteria
too. Along with the piss and the dog shit, something sweet and sincere pervaded
the streets, and the nostrils, of West Hollywood.
And where was the plastic surgery?
She wondered.
Flowers were one thing, but she had
expected the people to be ugly, vacuous, Barbie, bad-porn-like “beautiful”.
Where were the pec implants, the chin jobs,
the lipo, the nip and tucks, the puckery duck’s beak like puckered lips? Maybe everyone just had really good work. But their lazy, ruffled skin, the
mismatched, comfortable wear, the friendly Gaga-esque weirdoes (who directed me
to ‘drop my no bread’ policy for a night if I was to have dinner at the
Argentinian steakhouse because ‘the bread was to die for’ - how did she even
know I had a no bread policy!!)… suggested no such signs of ‘work’. They were
real.
And when I bought my first espresso, I
believed the hip boy behind the coffee machine when he said ‘have a good a
day’. Everyone said it, so maybe I just wanted to believe it. Maybe I needed to.
Either way, I decided it was sincere.
It
was here that the author realised she had clunkily moved from the third person
to the first. She was no longer ‘she’
but ‘I’ – in inverted commas. ‘I’, of course, suggesting a more authentic
voice. If authentic is, in fact, a gradable adjective. Fitting, don’t you
think? Meaningful? That we move from the third person, a disaffected, detached
voice (one that the author might hide behind) to the first, to ‘I’, that
assumes a more truthful (if truthful is a gradable adjective) reflection of an
experience?
Yes,
I think so. *she thought smugly*
And so, after the real coffee, I flung my
pink paisley scarf around my clichéd shoulders, called to my metaphorical
bloodhound and jumped into my literal hire car. I was headed North up HWY 1 and
if the people in L.A. were real with their crooked smiles and flowery flora...
maybe… juuuust maybe, there was hope for this trip yet…
Thanks to Jesse Cotton for the proof and the thoughts before publishing. X
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