FRESH YARN presents: To Live and Die in LA ... by Beth Lapides

FRESH YARN presents:

To Live and Die in LA
By Beth Lapides

The first time I came to LA I almost died. And that was the best part of the trip.

I didn't come for pilot season. The first time I came to LA, I didn't even know what pilot season was. In fact I'm still not entirely clear.

The first time I came to LA, I knew nothing of first look deals or soft passes, packaging agents or call sheets. The first time I came to LA, overnights weren't numbers that Hollywood lived or died by, overnights were what I called my one night stands on the rare occasions that they lasted till morning.

Then again, the first time I came to LA, I wasn't the hardened showbiz professional I am today. The first time I came to LA I was an NEA-funded multi-media performance artist and I was on my first national tour, ready to take on the world, one obscure art space at a time.

The first time I came to LA, I came because I was invited. Someone in New York liked my work and thought that people in LA should see it. Which, according to a show I just saw on E!, is exactly what happened to Ray Ramano. However, in Ray Ramano's case, David Letterman, the world famous talk show host, was the someone, and network executives were the people. In my case Dennis Cooper, the infamous gay novelist was the someone, and the Beyond Baroque Literary Center's mailing list were the people.

Because of this, the first time I came to LA I didn't stay at The Four Seasons, the Chateau Marmont or even the Standard. I stayed at the home of Bob Flanagan. Besides being a brilliant poet, and on the board of directors of Beyond Baroque, Bob had one quality which made him the perfect host for my first trip to LA, he was a masochist. He and his girlfriend Sherrie were in fact, a very famous S&M couple. That was another thing I didn't know at the time.

They were lovely and lived in a pink house. Even without knowing about the S&M, I couldn't believe that these hipsters lived in a pink house. Where I lived, black was the new black every season. Pink wasn't a color so much as a question. Pink?! And forget the pink, I couldn't believe they lived in any house. I lived in a two room plywood-floored apartment often inundated with big hunks of black soot which drifted into the unscreened windows from an absolutely undetectable source. I lived in loft beds and jury-rigged electrical systems and junkies in the hallway. So Bob and Sherrie's little house seemed very Ozzie and Harriet to me.

One night Bob and Sherrie said that they were having a party and that I should find something else to do. That seemed awfully rude.

It's an S&M party, they explained, or of course we would invite you.

Oh, I'm into S&M, I assured them. I was thinking of some lightweight bondage I had recently enjoyed.

No, this isn't for you. It's hardcore.

No, I'm into it I insisted, thinking how hardcore could it be? These people had closets and furniture and curtains.

There will be people shitting on each other.

Ok I said, where do you think I should go?

The night of my LA premiere was fast approaching and I kept asking when will we tech my show. But the staff at Beyond Baroque was very non-committal about rehearsing. Very la dee da in a way that no one I knew in New York was. We all believed that if we worked long enough and hard enough we could bend the town, and after that -- the world -- to our will. In LA they seemed to believe that what might happen was in the hands of fate. Maybe it was the earthquakes and this sense that they might die at any moment. Or the mountains, which seemed like nature's post-its. Constant reminders of the vastness of time. Or maybe it was just the crazy warm light, which made everything pink. And I fell under their spell, and stopped worrying about rehearsals. They had, after all, been right about the S&M party.

The big day arrived. We set up the projectors and pulled down the blinds. But the room didn't get dark. So we couldn't run through the show, because they couldn't see the show. Which is the kind of problem you don't really anticipate when you are from downtown New York, where too much light is just never the problem. I died a long slow multi-media death, that night. Death by slide projector.

After the show, I was whisked off by my cousin Wendy and her misbegotten first husband who wondered what it was I was really trying to say with this piece. I stared out the window into the black night but all I could see was the very thing I was trying to get away from: my sad disappointed face. They drove me away from Bob and his pain as pleasure approach to surviving his cystic fibrosis, and towards their condo and its pleasure as pain approach. I was staying with them for a few days before the final glamorous stop on my tour, a daytime performance in a Cal Arts classroom.

I had my days free, but no car and my cousin, like most people who live in hideous who-lives-there developments, worked all day. Which is of course who lives there. People who don't have to be there very much. So, after I'd wandered around freeway underpasses and California Missions, gotten stoned and done laundry and nursed along a Satre-esque existential dread for a few days, my cousin was trying to help me come up with a plan. You have to go to Disneyland she declared. No I don't I said. I'd never even wanted to go to Disneyland as a kid. But since I'd landed at LAX everyone had told me I had to go to Disneyland. Even Bob and Sherrie. So, I finally caved. I just couldn't take another day in that fucking condo.

My cousin dropped me off at the Granada Hills Ramada Inn at 7 am. See you at 7 she said. Meaning PM. That would be 12 hours later. I tried to be open to having a good experience, I really did. But the dread, the early morning hour and the busload of festive straw hats were getting in my way.

I've never felt like such an outsider as I did that morning walking into the happiest place on earth. It wasn't just the black jeans, the black high tops and the black eyeliner I wore. It was the fact that I was alone. No one goes to Disneyland alone. The entire day I only saw one other person who was alone and he had half a dozen cameras he was using to distance himself, framing and distorting his way out of the picture.

I went on the few rides even though I hate rides. But then the lines became even more treacherous than the rides themselves. I would reach the front, the little pod would arrive, the pod that held four. Are you alone, the Disneyland minion would ask. Yes. Then the Disneyland minion would put me in with three strangers or worse, sometimes by myself. For everyone else to see.

The only ride I remember was "It's a Small World." Which was so wrong I couldn't believe that everyone wasn't screaming in horror. All the little robots were exactly the same except they had one little different movement and some little ethnically diverse detail on their costume. As if what was different about people was very very slight. As if we really all were the same, condo-hell dwellers and New York performance artists and S&M enthusiasts. And that the same that we were, was robotic and boring. And that that was good.

I dealt with the pain by eating my way through Disneyland. A tactic perhaps more masochistic than anything Bob and Sherrie had drummed up. I ate fried greasy things and chocolaty sugary things. At one point I thought: I have to balance all this out by eating something healthy. Yes it's always good to fight overeating with more eating. So I was pushing a cafeteria tray with some faux healthy salad thingy on it, when a guy standing behind me struck up a lovely conversation. No one had spoken to me all day and I was grateful. He was telling me about the group of kids he was supervising when we got to the register. The cashier at this register in the happiest place on earth looked at me and then looked at him. He was black by the way. And so were the kids. And then she looked back at me. Concerned. There were two options. One was that a white girl was with this big group of black kids, and the other was that she wasn't. Finally she asked. Are you alone? Horrified. And I said yes, yes I am.

The next day my cousin and her tobacco-selling husband took me to Vasquez rocks where, apparently a lot of Star Trek was shot. The place was beautiful, in a very moonscapey, deserty, in the middle of nowhere kind of way, more scenic than wilderness. Not the kind of place you have to stick together to survive in. So I wandered away from my hosts. I wasn't used to enjoying nature but I was certainly glad not to be in Disneyland, to be somewhere real.

So I went off alone, and climbed up one of the rocks. And then, since nothing extraordinary had happened the way I had come, I decided to go back a different way. And then I lost my footing and was face down on the earth, sliding down to a big drop off and certain death on the rocks below.

I grabbed onto some growing thing. Weeds I think. Clumps not much bigger than my fists. But their roots held. I grabbed on and dug my high tops into the dirt and I clawed my way back up the mountain.

When I got back to solid ground my heart was pounding, my mind racing. Even a New Yorker knows that there has to be some message from the universe in a near-death experience. But what was it? Was it that no matter what became of me, in my moments of truth, it would be my roots that would save me? Did it mean it was dangerous to wander off alone? And if it did mean that, wasn't that the very same message that I should have gotten from Disneyland? But that I had scorned? Because I was too cool to hear a message delivered by grownups in giant cartoon heads? And if choosing to be alone was death-defying what about me and my whole boho chic life, and what about how I knew I would never be like my parents and buckle and fall in love. In that way. What about the fact that you were always alone, no matter what?

And I looked up at the clear blue sky, smelled the dirt still under my fingernails. I longed to tell someone who loved me, in a not-cousin way, that I was alive. That I had survived. Partly through my own will, but partly through the grace of the damp earth and the feisty roots of the well-placed weeds. I stood there more scared than I had been on the ledge. I opened my heart and accepted the fact that I was not in control.

The first morning that I woke up back in my Mulberry St. loft bed, I had the word Sepulveda in my head. Sepulveda, Sepulveda I kept repeating. Like a magic spell I was casting on myself. Or trying to break.

I didn't understand what had happened to me in Los Angeles. If I'd just seen the real world for the first time or if I'd been infected by a treacherous fantasy.

Sepulveda. Sepulveda. I'd been bewitched by the mystery of a city so unknowable that even full sunshine could not illuminate the shadowy noirness lurking in the spaces between palm trees. Between cars in the asphalt parking lots in Anaheim. Between people.

And then I met Greg and we fell in love and we moved to LA and then we moved back to New York and then we moved to LA again. And now I love it. But I have never been back to Disneyland. Or to Vasquez rocks, where I almost died. But was re-born instead.