Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  The other day, in his rented Porsche, my millionaire friend Henry Gaylord-Cohen said, “This city makes no sense!” As in, it’s not a grid. He lives in New York. We kept getting lost. Los Angeles is built in pockets, bursts, and loops. To me, that makes perfect sense. Everything makes sense here, I wrote my friend Misty, who replied, Of course. We find calm in the chaotic, sprawling, conspiratorial, the fake and natural beauty, the insanity and inanity of this place. It’s good to have your outsides reflect your insides.

  The tragedy of my love for Los Angeles is that I might not be able to stay. I’m not rich enough to live like the rich here; in hills or by water, health insured, massaged, lemon trees on my property. Nor do I have the grounded community that could ease the stress of poverty.

  It’s weird when you realize you’re living history. That you’re part of a demographic, a trend, socioeconomic fuckery. My aspirational millennial cohort is financially fucked, the reports all say, and I still can’t help but take it personally.

  I feel shame—like I’m a loser—because I can’t seem to make money, or at least not ethically. Every time I follow the means offered to me, it’s deadly. Like selling kids things they don’t need, breeding insecurity; working for mass-market magazines. Or sucking off rich men; validating their cons. My relationship to money is sickness. It’s a slow slug to the chest, pinched shoulders, shortness of breath. It’s feeling like a frightened mouse who keeps getting run over by steroid-fattened rats racing on a track I don’t even know how I got onto in the first place. Was just moving to America enough?

  My Saturn is afflicted in the second house of resources, money, and material wealth. That means that my relationship to money isn’t rational. It’s familial, anxious, dysphoric. It means that I know a lot about it, and I still don’t get it. I know who in my peer group gets what their parents call “an allowance,” and who has a trust; who paid for their own college, meaning they’re in debt; who spends more than they earn; who earns more than they spend; who invests; who owns real estate; who’s owed an inheritance; and who supports their own siblings or parents.

  I know crypto-rich art bros, kids whose parents live next to the Clintons, Yale-sprung physicians, a middle-class, middle-American former cheerleader-cum-It-Girl, and a barely legal orphaned dominatrix from Jersey who’s hyped on class mobility. Longevity, prosperity, give me the money, she captions her ’grams. But I don’t know, man. It’s like, one minute I’m pissing in Lena Dunham’s Hermès-orange luxury home bathroom, the next I’m looking at a man on the bus who only has one ear. He keeps trying to cover the open wound with his hand, only to have his arm get tired. He wears a straw bucket cap, his nails are tobacco stained like Lucien’s, there’s gauze caught in the wound, and I wish I could do something more than smile kindly and send healing energy when he looks my way, but this is just one abject reality of hundreds you’d see every day if you didn’t actively ignore them like so many of us do.

  My friend Peter suggested I’m actually obsessed with money—that that’s my problem: “It’s all you can see.” A week after he said that, in the dark, after a long workday, I drove my roommate’s car through this tight, curved archway with bright white pylons on the side of the lane. I was looking at them, to avoid hitting them, and so of course then I did. Peter’s right. You’re supposed to look where you want to go. My problem is that where I want to go—it’s a long, unknown way from here.

  When I couldn’t make rent at twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, it was like my veins were made of cold lead. I’d feel panic, stuck, dead—then I’d visualize slitting my wrists. The visual would just come, over and over again. I’d manically apply for jobs listed online that’d never call me back, create another new sugar baby profile, pace the blocks around my apartment, gather clothes to sell, and sell them for fourteen dollars. Blade to wrist to cold lead blood. Living hand-to-mouth and -landlord.

  I first ended up at Mariposa because two to a room = my budget. But what I found there was realer than real estate. I’ve always been fascinated by connection: how you can meet someone who you’d think you’d get along with, who you might even admire, maybe you’re even great pen pals—but when you get together in person, there’s nothing there. And then there’s the inverse. Why do some people stand out? When I interviewed Tilda Swinton, she called her friend-collaborators “my fellow travelers.” Doesn’t that feel true? Like you’re passing through together? Within a few minutes of meeting Nadezhda, who is far more magnetic in person than online, where she tries too hard to get attention, I recognized her as one of my life’s stars. I wanna see her play.

  She can be an asshole but in a productive way. She’s catalytic. Remember when I wrote that Nadezhda “studies machinery, systems, and code,” and Morgan nutrition and fitness, and Alicia attachment and trauma? Nadezhda read that and wisely replied, “You know that’s because that’s what we each struggle with? I’ve always feared big systems. Since I was a little girl, I was terrified of bridges and the interiors of computers. Or my motorcycle, I had to learn how it worked”—she could fix it up herself, which I thought was so cool—“because it scared me. I wanted mastery over the unknown, over my fears.”

  Nadezhda noted that Morgan’s knowledge of the body was bound to source-unknown addictions, while Alicia’s emotional wisdom came from years of sociopolitical underprivilege, familial melodrama, and amorous relationship folly. Of course. What others experience as our gifts often come from our wounds. It’s Simone, the artist of solace, who secretly yearns for the soothing, judgment-free company she gives so graciously to others. It’s why I write, longingly, and can cook as elaborately—because rather than words of affirmation or touch, my parents nurtured through the mediums of books, meals, and cats. I remember when I told my friend Eric—then just a poet, now a social worker/poet—that my parents had never said “I love you,” he replied, “Oh, of course you’re a writer.”

  Words distract from my well-being, and yet I need them to counter the evil forces that keep us from well-being, like the lies of domination that organize our everyday, the myths of scarcity and competition. I wish I could stay quiet, but these pesky angels keep bullying me into advocacy. They tell me I have to tell you that in true equality, i.e., true diversity, i.e., our latent, gifted, given Reality, all competition is imaginary, as each individual is unique. How could we possibly compete?

  After I canceled our reality show deal, I resolved to live 100 percent in the Real. I needed to practice just being, I thought, so I’ll stop being subtly coerced by malevolent forces. Luckily, I was in LA, where I am happy to just be. Accepting a Franciscan vow of poverty, I walked the city for six months, talking to strangers and letting friends buy me coffee. I’d hang out with Rivington Starchild, who also didn’t work. We’d sit for hours talking about our favorite authors, like Sun Ra and Aleister Crowley, who wrote, “Every man and every woman is a star.” I wore clothes I found on the street and even canceled my phone plan, like Rivington and Lucien. I was inaccessible, like a boy, and more popular than ever. For someone who used to suffer from agoraphobic extremes of social anxiety, it stunned me how easy it was now to make friends. I’d never had a friend pick me up from an airport before then. I never thought someone I wasn’t sleeping with would go so far out of their way for me.

  I was living in what’s still my all-time favorite bedroom. On Elden Avenue in Koreatown. I moved in after Miffany reclaimed her bed at La Mariposa. Inherited from Beau, Amalia’s ex, my new room came furnished with a mattress, a low Japanese desk, bookshelves, lively plants, and a cartoon chili cheese dog—laminated art by Beau. Everything with a surface was yellow. A five-minute walk from Amalia’s place, fifteen to Mariposa, my yellow room had an en suite bathroom, a balcony, and a mirrored wall. The balcony faced out onto the street, which was lined with those impossibly thin five-story palm trees, the kind that people move their cars out from under when the Santa Anas blow hard. I watched so many delicious characters arrive and leave from that balcony. Susan shimmied up
the walkway to return a book I’d forgotten at her home. My new roommate, Dean (affable, funny, the best plus-one to any party), would bop out every afternoon, returning with sweet treats. Since I had no phone, Amalia would honk her Volvo’s horn to let me know she was there for me. I’d wave down from my balcony like fucking Juliet. “Be right there!” I’d call out.

  While Lucien was out of town for three blessed months, I dated Nadeem, the sweetest thing, a Cancer Sun skater who made his mom’s favorite Afghan dishes for me. I saved my pocket change to take him, as thanks, to my favorite restaurant, a cevichería on Pico Boulevard run by a Guatemalan couple. The husband, Julio, was hosting and, mistaking Nadeem for Central American, he started joking with us about then Republican nominee and former reality TV star Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall.

  “What’s a wall going to do?” Julio quipped. “Doesn’t he know we’re building an army? I go up and down Pico Boulevard every day. You know how many brown baptisms I see? Tens, hundreds. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican. Go to a white church, how many babies are being christened? One a week, maybe? We’ll be fine.”

  The less I expected from life, the richer my experience of it became. Wanting little, I recognized how much I’d always had. I came to understand—the only way you can, by living them—paradoxes that are so obnoxious when relayed to you as verbal counsel, like: When you’re grateful, you’re given more. It’s in letting go that you change the most.

  During this phase, to make the minimum I needed for rent, rice, greens, and beans, I returned to working as a celebrity journalist. This work, in years before, had pained me, because I was proud, and it was too close to what I really wanted to do: “write freely.” Bound to systems of power and authority, I was bullied by editors into the kinds of ready-made forms and clichés that programmed me to be a phony, believing in the subliminal messaging of mass-market magazines as I had since I first started reading them at the age of ten: Beauty is a skinny white girl. Money buys happiness. Freedom is the freedom to fashion oneself, to curate how you appear. Success is destiny, meritocracy. You can be whatever you want to be. Because you’re worth it. Bullshit.

  It used to make me sick—how editors at top glossies only cared to cover what was “in,” and how they were told what that was by the industries they serviced. Hollywood management, for instance, only allows “journalists” access to their “talent” when they have a “project” to promote. The talent is coached on what to say, and what not is in their contract. The easiest way to not fuck up is to say nothing of substance. Now I practiced not taking any of this personally, thanks to Dean, who also did this line of work. He said, “I just give my editors what they want: The celebrity walked into the room . . .”

  Before, I’d try to innovate form, spending hours writing far-out profiles and essays that’d inevitably get cut up in the name of style guides. Now I accepted the assignments as ways to survive and educate myself, a means to study success and corruption, and to practice my presence and humility. It was also an easy way to re-up on toilet paper. Most celebrity interviews take place in fancy hotels. I’d sit with a waning-in-fame pop star or an emerging It Girl for an hour, pick her brain, then I’d order a lavish lunch on the magazine’s account, pretending it was for her, and before I left, I’d stuff my tote with shampoo, body lotion, rolls of toilet paper, and floral bouquets, and go back to where I finally felt at home.

  That yellow room. I liked to sit on my yellow bed, on a milky crystal dildo, facing my wall of mirrors, meditating, with my eyes wide open behind closed lids. My spine would undulate without my trying. Kundalini. My being was orgasmic. I’d meditate on colors, or Lucien; sometimes I pictured hundreds of gender-free bodies jerking off with me. The best was when I could forget all earthly forms. I was just energy. It cycled through my body, radiating out, I’d contract to the infinite and back. Then I’d open my eyes and see how absurd I looked and laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Once in that room, Lucien, back from one of his many trips, and very stoned, was riffing on Sun Ra and Arthur Russell. He’d YouTube DJ, layering songs and lectures, sometimes reading aloud to me. I had a hard time keeping up with his consumption. He was always either rolling or smoking a joint or cigarette, often both. This afternoon, Lucien tripped farther out than I’d seen him. He started moving around my room, trying on hats, jewelry, and sunglasses. In a particularly graceful ensemble—I think he was wearing plush tiger ears and a leather halter top—Lucien looked in my mirror and started talking to himself.

  “Who’s this guy?” He laughed, pointing at himself.

  “Hello,” he intoned. Then deeper: “Hello. Hell. Oh. Oh.” He cracked up.

  The room had gone sideways. Man was crazy as me! Lucien got it, the play of Maya, how illusive our avatars are. I’m always gawking at my reflection like, Who the fuck is that? That’s the thing about vanity, it can actually be an embrace of the Great Mystery. It’s so funny that we’re in these skin suits, that I have a single thick hair I have to pluck from my chin every two weeks, that we walk around in clothes, as if we’re not naked underneath, and that under that—I give blood to know I’m full of it, but doesn’t it feel more like we’re full of chasms and memories, of wind, charm, rhythms, weight, and divinity? And not only when we’re on something. Sober reality—trust me—is the most psychedelic.

  Episode 10—“Noogenesis”

  “I’M GOING TO WRITE A book to save us,” I told Morgan. “It’s going to save all the girls and change the world.”

  Morgan was getting better, as I was getting worse—worse because I was judging my progress according to better or worse. I had had to move out of the yellow room, having accidentally given it to my friend Clara. It was a sublet situation, a miscommunication. While I had been in Mexico, Clara had assumed the room as hers, and she loved it. Clara loved living with Dean, just as he seemed to dig her, so when I returned, I figured it better that she stay—I’d go. A room had opened up in La Mariposa again, so I moved back in.

  I was now 29.15, and that move, like almost everything I was doing, felt like a mistake. I’m too old for this, I thought. Nadezhda didn’t do the dishes. There were cockroaches. Police choppers monitored the neighborhood. It was loud, and I was increasingly sensitive to sound. To everything. I wanted a baby. My body was getting all ready. This biological imperative, which had been creeping in since twenty-seven, when I first started lactating during ovulation, was now, thanks to Lucien, whose cum I fantasized about dousing my insides with, overwhelming my consciousness. Thick cock tick tock thick cock tick tock this is the sound of your biological clock. My PMS raged like, Get seeded, you bitch! My periods became mourning periods. I’d failed, again. You can’t have a baby, reason taunted me. You’re broke with no prospects of Ever Making Money.

  Morgan, who was known to bike fifty miles to escape herself and who counted calories down to dried seaweed, had taken up yoga. “It’s training my mind,” she said, in awe of the practice. A new kind of discipline, new neural pathways, or whatever—it was working. Morgan said she felt more in control, and more important, more comfortable with not being.

  Meanwhile, I was back to self-bullying.

  Committing to the Real, I’d committed to the unknown, accepting my lowly station. But now I wanted something, and desire is dangerous. It’ll keep you from the Real. I didn’t just want, I needed, I thought, and stat: an adult means to money, a healthy home, and a baby, with Lucien. Poor kid.

  29.15, 29.25, 29.33: I kept thinking, I wanna die. Then Clara would write to say, “That’s ’cause a part of you is!” We exchanged texts like:

  Wild how humans still judge what we don’t understand

  Wild how a fingernail can cover the sun!!

  “I forgot the cosmic joke!” was my gag line at the time.

  I was taking everything so seriously. Mainly my lack of money. Whereas in younger years I was convinced everything that was wrong with my life had to do with my not being pretty, thin, or fun enough, now my obsessional lack was mo
ney. It’s the same: The psychology of scarcity. Confusing your being with being of popular social value. As a young, girl-identified thing, your pop value is suppleness, nubility, maybe precocity, though clever is the smartest you should be. There was a time when I wanted to be a girl in a magazine. Airbrushed, contained. I know I’m not alone in having wanted this because the latest real-life beauty trend is HD pore-free perfection. Contouring the face and bust as image, cast in shadow and light. And preventative Botox: “Do you want a static look?” they ask. I wanted to be so beautiful, I wouldn’t have to do anything but be beautiful. I wanted to just be. Pouty, languid. Touch me! Immediacy. Hot and cool and empty. Contemporary advertising is so insidious because it conflates genuine human drives (emptiness is grace) with an image and a product promising to deliver such inspired states of being.

  Money money money money!

  Someone once told me the reason songs get stuck in our head is because the mind wants to hear them to completion. Remembering only a refrain, it’ll repeat. The best way, then, to get a song out of your head is to listen to the whole thing.

  But no one would talk with me about money. The last taboo. I’d try bringing it up, this thing I was genuinely struggling with, and people would default to platitudes or change the topic.

  It’s possible that no one wanted to talk about money because they could tell how hot a topic it was for me. I was easily spun into spells of anxiety. They didn’t want to be responsible for that; I wasn’t response-able. Or maybe God, the Universe, or I, or whatever wanted me to figure it out for myself. UGHRRGH!