Raya and Stacey Take the Town

Stacey and I felt a little out of our depth, faced with this masterpiece of dank in the ashtray on the windowsill. It had been a while since either of us had smoked the herb. We cracked up in a moment of perspective, remembering how we’d met each other at the local baby park, before our children could even stand up by themselves.

Stacey and I had been through a lot to get to that night. Toddler night terrors, tantrums at earplug levels, careers delayed by family needs, chronic illness for me, a marriage lost for her… All amounting to an evaporation and incremental reconstruction of ourselves. 

Since having our daughters, it had been a struggle adjusting to the way society reflected us back to ourselves. We were no longer just human beings finding our ways in the world, we had become “mothers.” Women set against a world which essentially accepts us as one of two things: a childless ass-kicker, or a selfless, pillow-like, maternal caricature. Anything but a whole person.

You can lose your entire mind in a minute when you realize the delicacy of your constructed persona. Somewhere you’d known that you’d always been that close to dropping out of the world, but your fear kept you in it. Your fear, and youth, and selfish drive kept you at the gym, or out to hike, or hustling gigs, or working overtime. 

Then you made a person, and it leveled the world. And the whiplash of that love flattened everything you’d built. 

You birthed your child, and you woke into the dream time. More in love and more in limbo than you’d ever been. A chaos of whispers, with no place for the self you’d polished and rehearsed. And the world kept going.

So, we stood on Stacey’s back balcony, overlooking a dilapidated playhouse, ripe oranges, and her daughter’s tricycle.

“You ready?”

“Yep.”

We took one hit each.

We took in the simple victory of continued existence and locked our auras with the unseen clank and boom of Los Angeles at dusk. We had the whole night ahead of us.

***

The hit from the joint was effective, because I don’t remember waiting for the Lyft or getting into it, but there we were, folded into a small, cockamamie sedan, motoring towards the highway. The Lyft was some kind of econo-car, jury-rigged in the front with wires plugged into a cell-phone holder suction-cupped to the windshield. The body of the vehicle was a space with too many lights on the front dash, too little light in the back, and no detectable shock absorbers below. And for some reason, despite the wires and the screen paraphernalia, our driver preferred to keep his iPhone map on his thigh—looking down at it, attention completely off the road, for every new turn. 

Stacey and I shared the paranoid side-eye exhibited by prey animals on the savannah in the abyss of the back seat: flicks of the iris between our faces every time he swerved. No blinkers. We audibly gasped as a hubcap sideswiped the median on the 10/110 interchange. Our dear driver was unfazed.

He dropped us off on Sunset Boulevard somewhere between Rosemont and Mohawk Street, because Stacey was done with this ride and asked him to pull over. When we arrived at Elf (fab little gourmet vegan spot, sadly closed now), our table was not quite ready, so Stacey suggested we finish the joint.

Like nervous, giddy high schoolers, she and I smuggled ourselves up the nearby hill. We felt like we had to hide, because weed had only been legal in LA for a short time, and it still felt naughty. We looked for a place where we would be concealed. We placed ourselves next to a garbage can, and slightly behind a pole. The pole did not effectively change our visibility. It was the notion that mattered. 

We lit the formidable roll. We shared a moment for silence and smoke. We took another hit, and both choked. We laughed at our ineptitude. Talked about how we were never gonna be the cool kids. 

It was a groovy walk after that. What a joy to discover, in this floating vibration, the mini-cliffs and craters of the East LA sidewalks. Ficus roots detest an even path, so they push cracks into the cement, creating islands of shards instead of squares. This haphazard architecture creates stone cathedrals for dandelion flowers. Such were the tiny temples beneath our wavy steps on our descent.

I want to tell you about our dinner, but unfortunately, I can’t. I don’t remember it. I have a mental GIF of the moment when I turned to Stacey and said, “Wooooow, this just hit me HARD.”

And her flushed face laughing in agreement.

***

The thickest fog of the marine layer in our heads had burned off by the end of dinner, so we walked. We had no plan, which was truly the soul of our intentions. When you become responsible for another human being, physically, mentally, and emotionally, you construct a life of timetables—other people’s timetables. Your own plans depend on how you maneuver around others. Abandoning the plan and taking up space in the moment of your choosing is a rare gift. So, we walked. 

Echo Park has its own texture of night. The lit-up signage on restaurants, bars, and shops becomes the interior of a giant, slow pinball machine. The old neon signs and the new—backlit, minimalist titles on gastro-pubs—catch you at low volume, like tones looping and fazing on the other side of a plaster wall. We took a bridge over the asphalt of the broad boulevard, pools of black and reflection, a winking palette evocative of smudged pigment from kissing, or falling asleep still wearing your night-life eyes.  

We came to an open door. We followed the book-jacket colors through the portal into the shop. My memories here are threadbare, but tactile: a basket of clicky button-pins with snarky slogans, pocket poetry books bound with faux leather, red and black book covers, sequels to series I’d not heard of but probably would’ve if I wore more black. Stacey found a coloring book for her daughter. 

Then we heard a commotion. We walked toward the back of the store and listened through the wall. It was laughter. With our bleary mental equipment, this was some X-files shit. We had to know how to get to where those people were.

The back wall seemed solid, but in our state we accepted that all solidity was an illusion, and the man who worked in the store showed us to a door. Around the corner should have been a bathroom, but instead there was a hallway with posters for bands and DJs, and then another door. Holy shit, dude. The sound of scattered laughter became closer. One more short, dark hall, and one more door, and the world opened into a backspace, lit with strung bulbs, over a large crowd of standing hipsters. 

I use the term “hipster” in a specific, socio-anthropological sense. I am not assigning this crowd a “group caricature,” I am describing a mode of post-gothic, semi-mod, expensive/thrift-shop/local high-end consignment, sartorial conformity. A lot of black, and gray, and muted retro prints. Asymmetrical haircuts. High intention, low maintenance.

And they were all focused upward, towards a small but tall stage, supporting a comedian. She was thin, long-ish brown hair, deadpan. She was funny in a distant way. Like the jokes were a reference to other jokes which everyone already knew. She was funny like sampled, retro bossa nova is beautiful—an echo of beauty, meant to suggest love rather than declare it. OK, so she was a software version of a vintage synthesizer. Pretty good at times but missing some of the edge. Nobody cared. Their laughter was as tepid as her delivery, but it seemed like everyone was getting what they’d come for.

Unfortunately, some design genius had worked it out so that the entrance to the area was behind and to the right (audience right) of the stage. So, in the midst of this desaturated huddle of humanity, these two strange women lost themselves through the entrance door, and stood there. Slowly, we gauged our position in the universe. Randomly distributed sets of eyeballs watched us, as we deftly and unobtrusively tiptoed to the back of the crowd.  

They continued to watch us, because, contrary to our experience of the moment, we were neither deft nor unobtrusive. We created a pocket of space and became still in the thick of people, hoping that the passage of time would erase our entrance from the hipster collective unconscious. 

We listened to several jokes. 

I think we laughed.

The only way out was through the back gate and into the alley behind. Stacey thought this was a good place to polish off the joint, and I agreed. We dribbled out the back fence, between some other people in their lost hours, and walked to the other side of the drain divot. We lit it up and took it in, strolling between a block of low-key nightlife, a parking lot, and a discarded white couch. 

We rounded the corner, and by then we had become hungry people. 

“Hey, look! Another vegan restaurant right here!” 

Perfect, it was Sage, a local chain. We got sat at a table by the window and ordered a banana split and two glasses of wine. 

You know, we laughed and bitched and philosophized about relationships, and children, and sex, and reincarnation, and all the things we could talk about any time—but new surroundings bring an extra burst of life. The restaurant had some music going, and I watched Stacey catch the drift of a Bruce Springsteen song. I watched her whole body open up in recollection and crush down to the table in the bliss of the weight of the emotion. She closed her eyes and felt another decade of herself revive, and cry, and sing. She was so free in the memory, she could hardly tell me what it was. This was our purpose tonight. To feel the things we’re in the middle of feeling, when usually we have to stop, and take care of everything, and everyone else.

And so the film would end like this: The camera slowly pulls back from the window table at Sage Vegan Bistro on Sunset Boulevard. Within the shrinking frame, two women are laughing and listening and crying about things they can’t describe anymore. A few hipsters pass by. The camera pulls back. Subwoofers pump and pass by out of frame. The camera pulls back. A Lyft passes, but not theirs—the ladies are going to stay out a little while longer. And the camera rises up above East LA, and the lives of the city flicker. And the neon blood flows in the geometric veins. And the fireflies of the commute wander forever, through this radiant crack in the Earth.