I used to buy my 24-packs of Tecate at Oligarc Liquors on Sunset and Gower in Hollywood. One hot night, many years ago now, my friend and I had a plan to haul our room-temperature beer up the hill to my apartment, where my husband and another friend had been drinking for a few hours. We’d been to a concert, so I carried no bag, just a credit card tucked into my bra. I pulled it out and handed it to the guy behind the counter. “Ooh, it’s still warm,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at me.
Before I could tell him off, his face fell. “I’m sorry,” he said, in a low, penitent voice.
Outside with our beer, I asked my friend, “Why did he apologize?”
“You didn’t hear?” She was laughing. “Right after he said that pervy thing to you, he farted real loud.”
Naomi Shihab Nye writes in her poem “Famous”: “The idea you carry close to your bosom / is famous to your bosom.”
Hollywood is an adjective and an idea and also a place, urban and baked hot in pale yellow sun, glittery with missed connections. Out of all the places I could spend my Los Angeles life, of course I’ve ended up here, where tourists are constantly disappointed and perspective is available to anyone who walks up into the hills. When I first arrived, I loved the sprawl of Hollywood because it reminded me of my childhood in the Chicago suburbs. Now, the area seems reducible to only itself, a grimy luxury few get to enjoy. A couple of months ago, driving around, I thought, If I die here, that will be a victory.
Hollywood is where I learned to be an adjunct professor of creative writing, where I learned to be married. Hollywood is where I have written my novels, and Hollywood is a place where it has seemed, a few times, I might write for the screen. But mostly, Hollywood has been where I teach and then try to remember what I said about writing to apply it to my own work, sitting in front of my computer in my pajamas. Hollywood is where I am proudly unwashed.
My Hollywood life, it turns out, is my adult life: the one in which I am cast as a transplant striver who loves Californian surprises, chances taken, chances dodged. Hollywood is where I am always on the verge of meeting the people who will change my life.
I initially moved here from Los Feliz after my first L.A. housing situation fell apart. Following my sudden engagement to a foreigner I’d known for a few weeks, my roommate posted on Craigslist in her version of my voice, which I discovered while on an unrelated scroll: “Hi! I’m working on my PhD at USC and looking for a new roommate!” Her ad included pictures of my bedroom. My family moved me into a one-bedroom on Carmen Avenue, a short street just west of the intersection of Franklin and Gower. It would be the location of my first marital home.
My new neighborhood contained both the entrancing will to degeneracy of the Blue Palm Lounge and Frolic Room, where I became a regular who stayed out alone, too late and too drunk, and the questionably tasteful castles near the teeny Beachwood Market, where I bought overpriced steak and cookies to beg my husband’s begrudging forgiveness.
Our landlord, a Romanian man in his 60s, eventually told us that watching me leave the apartment early in the morning to buy coffees had convinced him that we should become the building’s new managers. (Most of the tenants didn’t get up until the afternoon.) He invited us to his apartment for a dinner of “skinless sausage”—fistfuls of raw ground pork dropped on a grill, where they did not cook through—and goblets of Yellow Tail white wine cut with Sprite. We picked at our plates as he explained that he had earned the money to buy our building by remodeling an entire condo tower in Century City, assisted by “just one Mexican.” A week later, he left the country, and we received instructions to deposit rents in his account. The City of Los Angeles announced a surprise inspection. I taught myself how to repair chips in ceramic sinks and bathtubs from videos on YouTube.
Six months later, we moved two buildings up the street. Our new landlords were a Taiwanese couple, who called our unit the nicest in the building. Two baths, two bedrooms, a balcony: one bedroom in which my husband and I were unhappy together and one that became my office, where I began to do tarot spreads for hours every day.
Concerned about my husband’s drinking, I proposed that we take up smoking. We bought our marijuana at an all-night dispensary a few blocks down Gower. He was the one with the green card, so I was the one with the medical card from a strip mall doctor in whose waiting room I had glimpsed Gavin Rossdale. I waited in a small antechamber to be let into the windowless room where a genial young woman in cutoffs made kind small talk—I entertained a private, humiliating fantasy that we would become friends—and I requested an eighth of their heaviest sativa.
When a Pilates studio opened nearby, I began walking to class before sunrise. On the way back from Pilates, I’d buy a doughnut and a black coffee at Kettle Glazed and sit on my balcony in the bright sunlight, smoking a clandestine Camel Light, feeling like a god with a secret. I saw the same striking man every morning, skinny and incoherent, with a thick head of dark hair, wearing a dusty black blazer open over his bare chest. One day, he assaulted an actress famous for her role on a crime procedural. In this way, he was found by his family, who had been searching for him for years.
Another man came to our neighborhood often. He wore a white denim jacket and a low red ponytail and gave us a halting, shy smile, as if he hoped we could be friends. I would have liked that. I wanted a friend badly. Later, he—the actor Caleb Landry Jones, it turned out—appeared in a movie we watched, playing the same affect from the walks.
Every evening, I explored the hills above my apartment. In the early 20th century, a colony of Theosophists had built houses with Moorish architectural flourishes there—onion domes, peaked arches—before fleeing to bucolic Ojai. Movie stars have been partial to those mansions ever since; one now belongs to millennial prom king and queen Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom. On my way to the Hollywood Reservoir, where I’d wander alone until nightfall, I’d repeat my mantras She walks in beauty and God is with me into the orange and pink sunsets to steady me before I had to go back into my airless apartment, where my husband kept all the windows sealed all the time.
The week I moved out, the Armenian family downstairs surprised me by inviting me over. Their coffee table was laid out with platters of shelled walnuts, almonds, and pecans and perfectly cut strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, and melon. It was the kind of thing my ex and I might have put together for a particularly fancy party. But there was no party. Just me.
I moved to Connecticut and got a divorce. All I wanted was to come back to California, and eventually, I did, landing in the post-Soviet part of West Hollywood. The next time I walked in my Theosophist hills, I was remarried and pregnant for the third time, after two miscarriages.
When that last pregnancy took hold, a friend of my mother-in-law’s told my partner and me that we should bury an offering at the base of a tree in our neighborhood, to root our child to us. We immediately knew we would choose a huge Chinese banyan tree half a block south of our apartment with a lush bougainvillea wrapped around its trunk—we’d nicknamed the tree Mr. Pants.
We approached the tree one night in my first trimester. I used a large soup spoon to hack an indentation into the dusty ground and filled it with rose petals saved from a condolence bouquet. I am no stranger to magic spells, but this felt bold. Like Hollywood, Mr. Pants does not belong to us. As renters, we own nothing. We have no deed or assets to bind us to the place we love, only our will and our relationships with our Bashkir and Kazakh neighbors. The offering to Mr. Pants was a commitment: here we are, and here we’ll stay. A year later, a photographer captured us under Mr. Pants, our son in our arms.•
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