Hard Times

In the foolish throes of love—the part that’s all-encompassing, clammy with flushed disbelief. It comes on fast, maybe while you’re sitting down to brunch in Mar Vista with your father and godmother and suddenly she’s all you can think about. No, not your godmother, who is 82 and telling you that a tsunami will wipe out the beach cities by the year 2035, water will push inland and only those in Pasadena and Glendale will really be exempt from the looting and riots. What about Highland Park, you wonder. 

But it’s a passing question, fleeting mental faculty, like trying to shoot off an email calling in sick before the fever really spikes. You are on the side of the coin now where she’s infecting every cell, tamping down every practical thought. You have to walk it off, so you look for some place to move your limbs as freely as you can; reckless abandon, rolling with the sweet disease of sudden infatuation. 

You hop in the car and drive to Westside Pavilion, park in the cool, dark garage under the constellation of available space LEDs (all green these days) and stalk toward the elevators. A lost adult, staggering through the grimy glass doors half-asleep, oblivious. Consumed, burning, gnashing. 

She’s at her desk in Century City, not so far away, you think. You wonder about the clothes she wore to work, what she says to her colleagues in the kitchenette. You remember the pillow talk two nights before, her phone buzzing quietly on the nightstand. Trying to listen as she tells you how the rest of her week will look but eyeing that small vibrating rectangle of plastic and glass. Who is it exactly, setting this device abuzz and under what pretense? Who must you fend off to claim her as yours, what should be yours, what can only be yours now that her spell is upon you? 

On the escalator to the cinema level, you remember she mentioned an appointment at the DMV to get her license renewed. She’s taking a number, standing in line or sitting on a formed plastic chair, something made in the 1970s, fanning herself with a California government form. Or maybe she’s battling off the advances of some gangbanger from Boyle Heights, triggered into primordial pursuit mentality by her undeniable beauty. Or worse, some Culver City advertising asshole with AirPods, there to get plates for his new Tesla. Colgate brilliance beaming like beckoning runway lights. 

Up another escalator only to find walls of plywood and you remember that this mall ceased to exist a long time ago. No more laps under the skylights for aged power-walkers and love-struck La Manchans like yourself. But it doesn’t register, this clumsy lapse in memory, because now you’re convinced that your one shot at bliss is over there at the DMV being expertly engaged—picked up—subjected to tactics seen in YouTube videos for incels, crash courses where women are all lumped into one stratum of superficial defiance surrounding a molten core of submission. The kind of bullshit that bothers you because there’s just a grain of inconvenient fucking truth in it. Ultimately we’re all just fragile shells and when the real hucksters—the pros, the con artists—come calling, either for sex or to sell us on a cable subscription, eventually most of us cave. 

So you skulk back down to the garage. You’re in the chills, the fever has flipped. It’s fear and remorse and unfounded agony now. Hugging the invisible pillow of her past texts and voicemails, swaddling yourself in photos from your camera roll. Trying to remember her smile, what jokes she laughed at the most, the exact way she takes her coffee. Memories and hopes spinning out of control like atoms in a frenzy. 

You drive in a trance, primitive navigation borne of heart and gut and cock. Automatic turns toward her tall office tower, a beacon on the horizon. But you stop. You tell yourself to play it cool. You sit behind a red pickup with a “Proud Owner Of A GLOCK Pistol” bumper sticker and you wonder who the fuck loves that guy, who does he love, has he ever sat in mid-day traffic lost in thoughts of another, does he have grandiose dreams and intricate aspirations, brittle and fragile and sweet?

Brake lights in your gaze. You know it’s going to be a while before you’re well again, before it all settles somehow. You crack the window and the swish of cars in the oncoming lanes reminds you of a night early on, shortly after you’d met, when the sound of the waves breaking off the pier at Redondo filled the silences between you. When you knew something was happening, something was brewing in both souls, as the sea sloshed its foamy indifference below. 

Everything reminds you, you think. And your phone buzzes in the center console. 

It’s her and she’s bored, baking in a distant DMV, thinking of you. You smile. A brief reprieve until it all begins again. The fever has settled but it will return, molecules working away, ready to surge, to reach the surface and break into a roiling boil. 

Something elemental, undefinable. Agony and ecstasy emulsifying. Something you can’t control, which baffles, torments, terrifies and excites. The feeling of being alive. 

You let off the brake pedal and coast a few more feet. Everything here just moves so slowly.