“You shouldn’t drink the tap in L.A” I am urged by many since my arrival in August, although when I ask why, the opinionated grow quiet.
They can’t recall, specifically but it was...or has something to do with the Sierras, aluminum contamination and century old piping running through the valley. This conversation is had and passed on by Angelenos to each transplant. This is the initiation advice they received at some past point and offer to me, the newcomer to their high-functioning urban tribe. It is an unwritten rule that is obeyed religiously by the suntanned masses.
L.A feels post-apocalyptic, drought an ever present character in its industry-backed feature script.
Water, rather the lack of it is on everyone’s mind. Billboards of industrial-sized pipes bursting with water are put up on Sunset, replacing luxury handbag ads and stressing conservation efforts. The symptoms are in the colorless grass, withered gardens, drained swimming pools, abandoned water parks and run down fountains.
But if you drive just a few minutes north you will inevitably be greeted with the lush manicured hedges of Beverly Hills suburbia. A place that orbits a different star and presumes itself untouchable to the harsh reality of water restrictions others must comply with or be fined heavily.
Like everything else, mistakes are expensive here. Overrun parking meters and declined dinner invitations will cost you opportunities to elevate your standing with the buzzing hive and brush wings with the ladder climbing worker bees. Each encounter is a chance to elevator pitch yourself, so you better be ready. LA can often be the members-only dinner club of clandestine rare-breed social circles. The network is elusive and tight-knit. A fabricated, intimidating, seductive group that is always out of reach yet still alluring. If you are fortunate, the engagement offers up instant gratification via invitations to exclusive parties where long-legged vixens and industry buffs become momentary acquaintances that will add fruitful amounts of glamour and jealousy to any instagram feed.
These are the precious courts whose acceptance you rush for like an over-eager college freshman. Even as you become exhausted with the endless stream of social engagements you must entertain significant influence, beauty or talent to articulate your value and remain current. You stay driven by curiousity, a desire to experience the lives of those in the glass castles perched on the edge of the Hollywood hills where even the notorious pollution cannot touch them.
The smog is invisible like radiation in the city, but upon reaching higher ground, where those who can afford clean air reside it becomes a lush golden mist somewhere in the distance, the trace metals casting the sky an unnatural pink, slithering between the silver scale skyscrapers, flattering their structures in pools of liquid sunlight.
If you cannot sleep it is not because of the ambulance’s piercing sirens in the night, or the helicopters hovering in the dark ink of the sky, white washing the walls of your rented room in violet light. It is something else that paints you restless.
my budding anxiety finally burst open with the last heat wave of summer, blooming sleeplessness as vividly as an oleander against the starkness of dehydrated plants and concrete.
Insomnia from here on became my unofficial guide to Los Angeles. It is now November and the Santa Anas’ bone-dry gusts from the calloused mountains keep me awake. I can’t rub the dust out of my eyes fast enough to see the dissipating clarity of the future. I choose to stop looking for it, focusing instead on the trade wind. In bouts of sleeplessness the need to occupy my restless mind carries me out of bed and onto the roof, journal in hand.
When I am able to dream, it is of home, of waking up to the warmth of the ocean, picking ripe mango barefoot in the yard, and thunderstorms that leave the humid air charged and volatile, and the giant puddles in the streets reflecting pieces of the faded turquoise sky.
Rain is a myth Los Angeles gossips about like an unrequited love, a burning thirst. When it finally arrives in late December, it leaves the city unhinged, wallowing in the rawness of its own heartbreak over the palpable longing for something to feel as real and miraculous as rainfall in the desert.