#10 points on the wall
I. Golders Green
A director friend goes viral. I’m sitting by his pool, and he’s so upset, not about going viral, but about dinner with his childhood best friends.
“They were so rude, taking the piss out of me,” he says. He’s English. “I got up and I just left.”
Did you really?
“Well, no, I went outside and had a smoke,” he smiles, slightly. “Didn’t want to seem too dramatic.”
He wraps his arms around my waist.
“It isn’t friendship, it’s bullying,” he says.
2. 1:30pm
I sign up for a dance class on Sundays. It’s been six years since I took a class, and the teacher is telling me to find my point on the wall, and focus on it.
“You can do whatever you want, get as crazy as you want,” she says. “Just always remember to return to your point on the wall.”
3. Florence Welch
The morning I ruined my best friend’s birthday, I found a note from Florence Welch that said I’m sorry I ruined your birthday. It was in a book of her poetry, scribbled across a notepad from the Chateau Marmont. I read it, photographed it, posted it to Instagram, and then ten hours later I drove to the birthday and I ruined it.
4. Big Party
I stop drinking and go to a party where a Swedish girl tells me about a twink she found to piss on. The next weekend, a doctor tells me how he got his mug shot off the internet. The weekend after that, a newlywed tells me how she got so bored in Pasadena she picked up beading.
They ask me, for mine. And all I can say is, I’m fine.
5. Whatsapp
I’m sitting in a Glendale parking lot when I get a call from a friend in London. All those years she spent in her gran’s attic are paying off. The winter she spent sleeping so far from us, surviving on potatoes and leeks. I open Instagram, and her paintings are everywhere.
“I have something to ask you,” she says, cycling home from her studio. “It’s just. All of the female artists I know who are doing well… they’re also really bad at being friends?”
I ask her who, and she lists our Successful Artist Friends.
I stop my car. I can’t remember if we’re still friends.
6. Caring
I’m at dinner in San Francisco with two boys I went to middle school with. We’re eating 30-dollar steaks, and they’re comparing what time they like to wake up. One is 9:30am, the other is 10.
I tell them I wake up at six.
They order another round of 20-dollar martinis, and they tell me it’s embarrassing to care that much about what you do.
7. Chance
I am feeling nostalgic for college. I write in my journal that I will go to New York before the end of the year.
I will go to New York before the end of the year.
The next morning, I get a call from a man I once sublet a flat from. He asks if I want to go to New York tomorrow.
8. No
I list all of the reasons why I should not get on a private plane.
I call my friend in Winchester, and she says to go.
I call my friend in Bed Stuy, and he says to go.
I call my sister, and she asks how much money I have in my bank account.
I really shouldn’t go.
9. Treadmills
On the plane, I sit across from a franchise actress in her 60s who is addicted to walking. It started in the pandemic. She bought a treadmill and started walking, and then she couldn’t stop. She says it got so bad that she gave a eulogy at a Zoom funeral and, halfway through, realized that she was still walking.
She looks at me with such urgency, like I might get her to stop.
10. Four hours
There are two magazines on the plane. One is “Jet Life,” with David Beckham drinking a martini. The other is a basketball player standing underneath a ceiling of mirrors.
I remember that I worked for the basketball player in lockdown. I pick it up, thinking I should read it.
I can’t.
11. Cheetah coats
By hour three, the franchise actress is asking about my family. She asks if I have any family in the industry. I say no. She says, really, no? Not even grandparents? Nobody. An uncle? She wants to know where my dad is, where my mom is, and where the money is. I tell her.
“I’m sorry,” she laughs. “It’s just so insane. And you say it so calmly.”
The woman who owns the plane leans over and tells me I am so much more interesting than she originally thought.
12. Landing
I worry LA is making me soft. I don’t drink, I don’t get on buses, I don’t know where the L train is. I smile at everyone at the MOMA and tell the woman at the coffee shop that I appreciate her.
I know what I am healing from. But what am I healing for?
13. 2am
I drink in New York and tell a girl that she is the most beautiful woman. She’s engaged to a boy I went to college with, so I say the same to him. You should have seen him in college, I tell her. He was always gorgeous.
He tells her that in college I was like Lady Whistledown, I knew everything about everyone.
I say ha, that is not who I am now.
He tells me who I am now.
I say no, that is not who I am now.
14. Roasted
I go to dinner at the same restaurant we went to the night before the world shut down. I remember artists, and hotel heirs, that sommelier with the floppy hair and the most famous supermodel in the world. It was martinis and high heels, and now two years later, we walk in, and an older couple is screaming at each other in a corner booth. Tables are empty. A young man comes in, asking for shots. “Come on, come on!” he yells.
After dinner, I think about who I could text, but I don’t want to go anywhere and a third of my friends have already left.
15. Airports
I’m standing in line at JFK when I see an English actor who used to date a girl I used to know. Last time I saw him was in July of 2020. Plastic cups of gin-and-tonics in Primrose Hill. No jobs. Government hand-outs. Everything was dying.
He asks me why I’m here. And then he asks me if I’m happy.
16. Over
I open my notebook the second I get on my flight.
We know that cities change, I write. But what about people?