Hollywood Trembles on the Verge of Tears

In Los Angeles I was a Penguin

Because they’re cute and can’t fly and look a little out of place even in the place where they belong. And because, “Penguins require extraordinary effort to accomplish the simplest tasks,” says Abby.

The second day I was back in that city I woke up to the sound of a helicopter doing circles in the sky above Los Feliz. I’d forgotten that feeling. Perfect weather, palm frond cutouts against the sky and a helicopter hovering above as a reminder that any sense of calm is an illusion. All the way to Porter Ranch so early in the morning I wondered where the fire was. It turned out there was no fire, just haze as thick as smoke. The comforting thought that follows is that any sense of alarm is also an illusion, although probably a more pervasive one.

It may seem simple enough to most people: in the morning, you open your eyes to the room that was there the night before and begin performing a sequence of tasks that reveals immediately to an anonymous and omnipresent observer (the writer, the director, the composer, the painter) who you are. Your identity is pinned to the particular details that come into focus as the fog lifts, a cigarette smoked before or after coffee, coffee that is a day old and a quarter inch below its initial meniscus or rich and fresh out of a single-serve Bialetti. You take vitamins in liquid form. And something to improve liver function. And calcium, because you are the kind of woman who is doing something about osteoporosis, now. Or you would be, if you weren’t also the kind of woman who rarely remembers to brush her teeth before putting on lipstick. Actually. You don’t smoke. Because you run up to Griffith Park every morning. Unless you’re walking, grabbing your once-a-day snapshot of your neighborhood, finding hidden parties in ordinary things. That is, after doing your “morning pages.” Forget that. Haven’t you wanted to try surfing? What is it about palm trees that makes you melancholic? Because they bend so awkwardly, but, unlike birches, their tops could never touch the ground without snapping the trunks. Because the colors of palm trees against the sky always look like Polaroids, which are inevitably nostalgic. Because you can’t help thinking of Walker Evans standing on a beach in the Caribbean with his back to an unidentified photographer, completely naked and white as whitewash from the waist down.

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