woman on the morning of the war
an excerpt

He hated Los Angeles. No, no, that wasn’t right. He loathed Los Angeles. He hated it so much that he would have dreams every night that the wildfires just plowed right through Hollywood, took down the Chinese theater, obliterated the sign in the hills, cruised straight to Burbank and set all the studios ablaze. “The whole damn city,” he would say, stretched out on my bed, his legs almost too long to fit. “Burn the whole damn city to the ground, you know, while the Dodgers are out of town, and I guess the Kings too, for your sake, but burn it down and make everyone rebuild it, you know? Rebuild it without all the shit that’s here now, try it again.”

I was always pacing when this conversation started. He’d start with the simple, “I hate LA,” and before the final word was even out of his mouth, I was up and pacing. Straightening the picture frames on the walls. Opening the closet to rearrange shirts: all of the black hangers go next to black hangers, all of the blue hangers go next to blue hangers. “As soon as I can get my break, get us out of here…” I wasn’t even listening anymore. Pacing, picking the dirty socks off the floor and putting them in the hamper. “Right back to Jacksonville,” (he was the one from North Carolina) “in no time, you can bet on that.”

“I’m going out,” I would always exclaim at this point, truly an exclamation, complete with a little hop, as if hearing my own voice suddenly knocked me out of a daze and surprised me.

And he never argued, and that was maybe what upset me the most: I wanted him to argue, I wanted him to beg me to stay, to know what was going to happen, to try to stop it in its tracks before it actually did, but he never did. “Okay,” he’d say, stretching and yawning probably at this point, “be careful,” as he stood up and ambled toward the kitchen, “I’m just going to have a beer, work on the new script a little, okay? I’ll see you when you get back.”

I would sigh, every time, in the same way, in the way that only we women know how, that ‘please, this is your last chance to show me you actually give a shit’ way, and he would not even hear it, he’d be buried in the fridge, digging around for a Yuengling, so I’d put on some clothes, grab my car keys, and head for the car.

I don’t think I ever heard him say goodbye, and in fact, I never knew if he really did say it anyway, or if he was so wrapped up in himself, in that stupid West Coast dream, that he failed to even really notice I was leaving. “Yeah, baby, I’m going to get you out of this place, we’re going to go back east, just a little longer, I’m gonna make a lot of money and then I swear, I promise, we can quit this scene.”

It was the same line I’d been hearing for years. Day after day, year after year, “we’re going to get out of this place and really live,” and day after day, year after year, I found myself on the same road, flying down the 405 at night, the windows down and the Eagles on the stereo, and getting off in Santa Monica, driving straight past Malibu, up to the parts of the coast where there wasn’t anyone at night to harass you, parking my car in a zone where it was legal and you wouldn’t get towed, and then walking straight out into the ocean standing there under the wide open sky with my arms stretched out, laughing because I knew that if I didn’t, I would cry…

I had convinced myself, over the years of doing this, that it was either what every self-respecting Southern Californian did as an alternative to suicide, or that I was somehow a reincarnated form of one or many of the beat poets, and as such, it was just my destiny, and my god-given entitlement, to get plastered on the beach in the middle of the night.

And every morning, I’d wake up in a fog, sand in my hair, stumble back to my car, try to shake myself off, put the windows up, and drive back to my place before the LA rush hour started. Without fail, he’d still be there, hungover himself, and that self-destructive link between both of us would somehow come to life. Half-guilty, I’d crawl onto the couch, wriggle under his arm, and he’d wake up just long enough to realize I was there and squeeze me closer to him. Neither of us ever had to be at work before 10; it was enough time to sleep it all off.