When I came out to California, it was in a fit of clichés — my life in Atlanta had kind of unraveled, and I took to the open road to “reinvent” myself. I had no idea exactly where I was going or where I would live, but I packed the car up to the gills and set out.
It’s not that California was especially new to me — I’d come out to S.F., L.A., San Diego and Fresno for work numerous times before and had good friends here. But I still really did not know what I was getting myself into. One of my dearest friends back in Georgia worried that I would end up living on the street if I didn’t have a place lined up to live. Of course that did not happen, but the sentiment meant a lot to me.
California has loomed large in America’s cultural imagination for a very long time. As far as I’ve been able to tell, no one has a consensus even on where the word “California” came from or what it means, but it’s been the backdrop for many a dream and nightmare — the Beach Boys, the Gold Rush, Silicon Valley, the uprising after Rodney King’s brutal assault by police, to a significant extent also the Summer of Love. (If you’re going to San Francisco….). California is continually the dream in the distance but also perpetually about to fall into the apocalyptic cavernous seas.
One of my favorite songs by the sorely missed band Beulah said:
When I get to California
Gonna write my name in the sand
I’m gonna lay this body down
And watch the waves roll inWhen the city spreads out
Just like a cut vein
Everybody drowns, sad and lonely
Well everybody drowns, sad and lonely
Well everybody drowns, sad and lonely alright
But enough with that. There are enough ruminations on California dreams to choke an army of Didions.
Back to me. I was trying to escape the pain of the end of a long relationship, by far the most important of my life. Something had to change. My venal landlord was scheming to sell my apartment, and my classes for the Spring were going to be online, so I figured, what the fuck, I can live somewhere else for a little while. I thought of moving back to NYC, or going to Seattle, New Orleans, or the Bay Area, where I had friends. But Southern California was the choice, and here we are.
The early months were pretty bleak. I felt more alone than I’d ever been, far from family and friends, and way more lonely than I was when I moved to NYC at age 21 without knowing anyone there. It was during the Omicron wave, and it was cold by Southern California standards. Those days in Airbnbs and sad Comfort Inns were an extremely trying time; I felt like someone transported to the surface of an asteroid skating through Alpha Centauri. After a few months, I was ready to pack it in and drive back to Georgia.
I’ve always believed that if you try something and it doesn’t work, be honest with yourself and be willing to admit that you might have made a mistake. This might be a self-congratulatory justification for being a quitter, but I think there’s some value to it.
Nevertheless, I was living in Echo Park and feeling extremely sad and sorry for myself. There were so many beautiful people everywhere, and I looked like the witch from The Sword in the Stone. I decided to just go get a haircut — as Sortilege says in my favorite film of all time, “Change your hair, change your life.” Those words could never be truer.
My stingy ass just picked one of the closest salons that seemed to have marginally lower rates than the others. I walked to that place and met an older woman who was a hairstylist; at first I worried whether she would treat me well as a transwoman. Maybe she might scoff at the pictures of women’s hairstyles that I’d brought on my phone, or who knows. She turned out to be delightful and we had a great conversation. I got her insta and said I’d like to hang out some time.
Fast forward about 3 or 4 weeks, and we did actually hang out. After feeling so ugly and unwanted and too damaged for anyone to desire, it felt exhilarating to spend time with someone who seemed enchanted with me. It was the first time I felt permission to have fun for a while.
She rescued me when I was stranded in San Luis Obispo with a broken pelvis; she gave me a place to stay as I recovered from a bad car accident. Because of her I was able to find an apartment when my sublet was ending, and I was disabled at the time — I was in no condition to move more than a beachball, and then even. She helped me and saved my life in more than a few paltry ways. It turned out that we were not the greatest fit in terms of our temperaments and priorities, but she will always be a hero to me.
Living in this new house opened me up to a wide web of interesting characters, some better than others, but mostly pretty good. L.A. had felt like a hard nut to crack. It seemed very difficult to just chat someone up at a coffeeshop or bar and make friends, much harder than in Atlanta or NYC. But I knew for a fact that if you can just make one friend, you can break into a larger social network. And this proved to be extremely true.
There have been a lot of ups and downs in my recent place of residence. At first, it felt like being in my old-school college flophouse again, beer cans and bongs as far as the eye could see, where everyone was being very hedonistic. At other times, this general lifestyle wore on me, and I got cranky. My own struggles with mental health meant that I’ve not always been the best with my friends and neighbors.
But the cast of characters I’ve encountered is what I can only describe as Dickensian — like the Artful Dodger or Mrs. Crickenwood or whatever. People who kind of live on the margins of society, but not that far out — they live in Hollywood and Silver Lake, for god’s sake, but some are turning tricks; others are doing very serious drugs; some are embarking on ambitious and seemingly cosmically doomed creative projects; there are friendly and eccentric people who work at the liquor store and supermarket, but almost everyone is trying to piece together some way to pay the rent from 5,000 odd jobs. I feel like I could I write many novels based on these people, if I had remotely any talent for fiction.
To cynics, this might sound like a “problematic” romanticization of the L.A. experience, but I don’t really care. It’s mine. It’s what I’ve got. I came here at a time when I had never felt lower, and somehow good and decent people wandered into my life. I spent some time volunteering at food pantries and mutual aid groups, and made a few long-term real friends in the process. My life’s rich pageant is much richer thanks to people I obviously wouldn’t name here, but the randomness of all of it gives me a little pause — or at least a certain quizzicality.
I really don’t know what I’ve learned from all this. The deeper, underlying meaning seems elusive, but maybe that’s because there is none. It’s always a possibility that we’re trying to read things into things that mean nothing.
What I do know is that there are good people everywhere. I know that I can get through some pretty traumatic events and rely on myself, even if there’s no one there to help. I know that I can be loved again, which I had more or less given up on by the end of my time in Atlanta. I know a leap into the beyond can work — sometimes, anyway.
I’ve learned that L.A. people in general are very nice but also frequently annoying. L.A. is not the post-apocalyptic hell that Midwestern Republicans think it is, but it does hew pretty closely to a lot of the stereotypes about liberal narcissism, a la Portlandia. I have felt safe here as a transwoman for the most part, but there have also been times when I was in very serious danger. I don’t like the way people in California think about the South, but it’s really not different at all from the way New Yorkers see literally every other place in the world — it must be such a curse and a burden to not live in NYC or L.A. Others have pointed it out many times before, but “cosmopolitan” people can also be very provincial and myopic at the same time.
I hope if anyone reads this they can tolerate the long peroration on my measly years in Los Angeles. I try to learn from everywhere that I go, and L.A. has really been one. I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to here, but I have written some articles and spent a lot of time in archives at USC, Occidental, and UCLA, trying to build a new project. It hasn’t been a waste.
There was a time not long ago when I went with a dear friend to see the John Waters exhibit at the Academy Museum. It was so fucking cool. But as freaky and bizarre as Waters is, the show conveyed nothing so much as his deep love of place, his undying commitment to Baltimore. (Please read Mary Rizzo’s book.) I admire that a lot. I’ve pretty much always said that I am, in Wendell Berry’s terms, a “sticker” and not a “boomer” — I want to stay in a place and make roots and take care of it. Build something, nurture bonds with friends and neighbors.
I think part of my difficulty in L.A. is the reluctance to root down in a place I know I’m inevitably going to have to leave. I want to get back to Atlanta so I can be part of something. I’ve felt like a stranger, an apparition, a blank space as long as I’ve been here, even when people have been kind to me. But even an empty page is something to start from.