Winter Madness, Fragments: Los Angeles
My sleep has been disrupted lately by bouts of anxiety accompanied by flashbacks from Los Angeles, memories from a couple of years ago. It isn’t the artificial, plastic Hollywood of the movies, nor the gritty, boisterous L.A. of the tabloids, but something much more immediate and sensual, a flurry of fragmented memories that seem infinitely far removed from the present. I’m not used to being afraid, especially not of the future. Fear is a fruitless waste of time, and time is our most precious asset. But the onset of sleep strips me of my armor. When I wake up at night, my heart stuttering, I reach for the past. This is what I remember.
I see a hill in Echo Park. Pepper trees grow there, and a crumbling wooden house at the top hosts an outrageous commune of burlesque dancers. Jasmine, a woman with almond-shaped eyes and a glorious, blonde fauxhawk, with whom I share a birthday, lives there. Beaded curtains, wooden floors. Black and white tiles, checkered. An indispensable bicycle next to the bed. On the patio, a bright pink flower feeds a hummingbird, the first I’ve ever seen in real life. A coyote passes by. (Jasmine insists the Echo Park coyotes are “gay.” Personally, I wouldn’t know the difference, since all we have in Helsinki are bunny-rabbits and the odd city fox, the latter of which are more the stuff of urban legend than anything I’d have been in tangible contact with. Gay coyote, macho coyote. It’s all the same to me.) I’m wearing screaming-red, fake patent leather cowboy boots bought from a thrift store on Sunset Boulevard. June Gloom. Scarlett Johansson in shades at The Casbah. Brilliant turquoise walls. Oatmeal honey muffin. Mint tea. The observatory. The promise of a bright future under the stars. Abandoned head-shots. Discarded finery worn to tatters, in heaps, dirt cheap. A feather-printed 50s dress. Last name like a city in New Mexico.
The sea on my left. Topanga Canyon on my right. Prickly, brown underbrush. Jasmine’s sister, Isabelle, is at the wheel. The road snakes around another hill. She tells me the story of the man that fell into the ocean in a small airplane and drowned, and the frantic whoops of the porpoises that tried to rescue him. Everything glitters in the sunshine. We pass Cher’s fake Italian Renaissance mansion. Again, bright pink.
Lita, mother of Iz and Jazz, also lives on a hill, one of two that lie side by side. The hill is crawling with silky, black cats and dogs. Her house overlooks the Malibu sea. Lita creates celestial maps as environmental installations that she builds at the North Pole, the South Pole, in African deserts. Acupressure for the globe. Up here, she is queen. A rickety shack houses a studio. Scrap metal, rusty and pregnant with potential. Driving back down the hill in a tiny sports car, her black, curly hair blowing in the wind, Lita asks me with pointed, motherly concern where I want to be in five years. There is no condescension in her voice. It’s a call to action.
That spring, I took a leave of absence from film school. The next time I found myself in Los Angeles was during my tour with Fever Ray, a year later. I woke up on the bus as we came to the hills again, orange under an overcast sky. The following day, we played the last show of the tour at a sold out Henry Fonda Theater. I cried when it was over, and told myself it wasn’t the end, it was just the beginning. Full circle.
In the pit of winter darkness that consumes Finland at this time, the one place I would like to be more than anywhere in the world would be in the passenger’s seat of Lita’s car, the wind in my hair, the salt of the sea on the air, drunk on nature, the sunlight shimmering, prickly clusters shed from the pepper trees crackling under my feet, the coyotes, the flowers everywhere, the hummingbird, the beautiful faces of my friends, the sprawling pine, the slight pinch of apprehension in walking for miles at dusk in a city ruled by cars and thugs, a stranger in Los Angeles, the fragile sound of my harmonium echoing off the theater walls.
Waking from a troubled dream, I fear I will never be there again. Never, at least, as the person I am now. All may have changed. Time runs out. We grow older, we grow apart. We rein ourselves in, we are numbed. It breaks my heart. I miss my loved-ones. I miss the sun.
By morning, the fear is asleep.
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