On the Melancholy of Los Angeles

It was the second time I'd flown into LAX.

The day was late, the sun was setting, and the plane pulled itself across the low sky over countless suburban ranch houses, each with a single, very tall palm tree in the front yard, each palm like an enormous Bob-Barker microphone.

The sky was orange and blue, the light was all-golden, and all I could think about was of the countless beautiful people who had come to Los Angeles to be movie stars, didn't, met each other, moved into homes like these, and had beautiful children. It was the most dire pronouncement on humanity, and it suddenly made me feel an undefinable emotion for this town of dreams, this town of broken dreams.

I had thought that town was New York. I know New York really is the town of broken dreams, now--they are different dreams, though, broken in different ways for different dreamers of different dreams--but then, I condescended to this other proposition, which I still, by the way, believe, entirely. "Los Angeles" just means "The Angels," it is only its proximity to English that we feel it to be the city of lost angels. Which, of course, it very much is, as well.

The capital of the 19th Century was Paris--they say (Walter Benjamin may have been the first)--and New York, the capital of the 20th. Los Angeles was foretold to be the capital of the 21st. I think we all know this optimism was misplaced. The capital of the 21st Century will be outside the United States, probably in China, or some other sleeping giant our leaders have neglected to identify correctly. It wouldn't be the first time and it certainly won't be the last. I digress.

The first time I came to LA, it was to visit two friends who lived there. I visited the same friends the second time, as well, several years later. The first time was in the late 1990s, and I stayed with an ex, sleeping on the couch, at his basement apartment in (the, to me, ironically-enough named) Manhattan Beach--he and his boyfriend had sex on the bed next to the couch on the second morning, which I slept through. The three of us went to a West Hollywood bar, so I could take in the local fauna: a place where I, quite literally, looked like no one else--long hair, beard, an old, black Ohio State tank top, chest hair. I don't think I ever felt so completely invisible in my life, so studiously I was ignored. Recounting it later, for years, I dismissively described the experience by saying I had "too much texture" for LA. I now think that assessment was completely wrong for being so correct. The only person I didn't know who engaged with me was a doctor from New Orleans on a tour of California hospitals and cities, looking for a new world after his residency. Reader, he ended up in San Francisco, but to tell you how I know that would require another paragraph I'm unwilling to write, but I will say that I never saw or had contact with him again.

After these minor mis-non-adventures, I stayed with the other friend, a lawyer from Akron I met in Chicago, who lived in Beverly Hills. It was he who told me that LA would be the capital of the 21st Century, as he drove me around his city in his Cadillac one night, a gin and tonic in his lap. He was impressed that when stopping at a gas station, I cleaned his car windows with the station squeegee, while he filled his car tank. I felt like I was on the cover of a 1960s science fiction novel: a crashed spaceship, half submerged in the tundra of a dead planet under a black, starry sky. I left Los Angeles believing it to be the loneliest place on earth.

The third time I went to LA, my brother's wife was living there, with my brother. I was there for work, staying at an ornate and old, haunted hotel, where the first Oscars were held, in the neglected downtown. I was within walking distance of an amazing indoor market that has tons of produce, sea food, and many dead animals, all perfect for eating, and all at great prices. I had an interaction with a stranger in my huge hotel room, which proved unsatisfying. 

One night, a close friend and I went to visit my brother's wife and my brother at their home in the hills surrounding a park. After a time, we decided to go for a drive to, first, a favorite taco cart off an empty supermarket parking lot. Everything we ate was delicious. I got one tongue and one intestine taco. I wouldn't have had it any other way. 

Then we drove to a strange French/French-American restaurant, which was decorated more or less in the style of my parents' ancient Toledo Tudor house, circa 1976, only with a lot more deep reds in the palette--it was positively Medieval in the best of all possible ways. The food was great--we got frites and maybe something disgusting I would love--and drinks. A sessions-musicians band played classic rock with superb style. 

But the part I'm leaving out is what happened on the way. As the four of us wound down and up and around the hills around Echo Park, a fog clung to the tarmac; shrouded the lush, dark, tree branches, clinging like another layer of ghost-leaves upon the leaves; and hung as sheets on a line at every dip or decline in the road. The car windows were open and the air was cool, damp, succulent, full of spectres, and scented with some indefinable sense of danger. It was then that I remembered that Los Angeles is the mother of film noir. And I suddenly felt a rush of love for this strange, sad, fabulous, beautiful, spooky town of dreams and broken dreams.

And now, for the song.

Screenwriter's Blues

Exits to freeways twisted like knots
on the fingers
Jewels cleaving skin between
breasts

Your Cadillac breathes four hundred horses over blue lines
You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio
Whose real name
you don't know

You spin

like the Cadillac was overturning down a cliff 

on television

And the radio is on 

And the radioman is speaking

And the radioman says 

women were a curse
So men built 

Paramount studios
And men built 

Columbia studios

And men built 

Los Angeles

It is 5 a.m. 

and you are listening 

to Los Angeles

It is 5 a.m. 

and you are listening 

to Los Angeles

And the radioman says 

it is a beautiful night out there
And the radioman says
rock and roll lives

And the radioman says 

it is a beautiful night out there 

in Los Angeles
You live
in Los Angeles 

and you are going to Reseda
We are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday 

to die

And the radioman laughs 

because the radioman 

fucks a model, too

Gone savage 

for teenagers with automatic weapons and boundless love
Gone savage 

for teenagers who are aesthetically pleasing
In other words fly 

Los Angeles beckons
The teenagers 

to come 

to her 

on buses

Los Angeles loves love

It is 5 a.m. 

and you are listening to Los Angeles

It is 5 a.m. 

and you are listening to Los Angeles

I am going to Los Angeles 

to build a screenplay about
Lovers who murder each other

I am going to Los Angeles 

to see my own name on a screen
Five-feet-long and luminous

As the radioman says
it is 5 a.m.
and the sun has charred

The other side of the world 

and come back to us
And painted the smoke over our heads 

an imperial violet

It is 5 a.m., and you are listening to Los Angeles
It is 5 a.m., and you are listening to Los Angeles

You are lissstening
You are lisssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lisssssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssstening
You are lissssssssstening
You are lisssssstening
You are lissssss-
tening

To Los Angeles

"Screenwriter's Blues" is track #7 on the album, Ruby Vroom, and track #1 on the album, Lust In Phaze: The Best Of Soul Coughing. It was written by Michael Doughty, Mark Degliantoni, Yuval Gabay, and Sebastian Steinberg. They were Soul Coughing.