ALSO BY STEPHANIE DANLER
Sweetbitter
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Stephanie Mannatt Danler
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Danler, Stephanie, author.
Title: Stray : a memoir / by Stephanie Danler.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055034 (print) | LCCN 2019055035 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781101875964 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101875971 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Danler, Stephanie. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography. | Children of alcoholics—California—Biography. |
Children of drug addicts—California—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3604.A5376 Z46 2020 (print) |
LCC PS3604.A5376 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055034
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055035
Ebook ISBN 9781101875971
In order to protect the privacy of those involved, certain names and locations have been changed. The Monster is a composite character.
Cover image: background by Zamurovic
Photography/Shutterstock
Cover design by Janet Hansen
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
To Matthew and Julian Wild.
The end of this story and the beginning of the next.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
—FRANK O’HARA, “Mayakovsky”
I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.
—JOAN DIDION, South and West
Contents
Cover
Also by Stephanie Danler
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map: Freeway and Artery Map of Greater Los Angeles
PART I
Mother
PART II
Father
PART III
Monster
Acknowledgments
PART I
Mother
Laurel Canyon, California
The list of things I thought I knew but did not know grew quickly during my first weeks back in Los Angeles. A hummingbird dropped dead: its wings stopped pounding, gravity took over, its body jumped when it hit the wooden deck. I didn’t know that the water in my bird feeder was moldy.
An omen? asks Eli, who is sunning himself in my yard, his tan a mark of leisure, unemployment, and depression. It’s 2015 and he’s living in San Francisco, his “start-up” circling the drain, his bank accounts depleted by a summer in Mykonos, Spain, Tel Aviv. But here he is, hopping commuter flights to Los Angeles based on his whims or mine, coming home at eight a.m. from an after-after-hours party (I thought you were at breakfast, I would say, already at my desk, and he’d laugh in my face before passing out in my bed fully clothed, cigarette smoke wafting up). He slept off entire days, weeks, months of his life. Oh to be Eli, was what we said behind his back. It seemed that no triviality of responsibility, debt, or consequence could ever latch on to him.
Is it possible it’s a good omen? I ask.
No, says Eli.
I stare at the bird and wonder why it chose me to witness its death. I’ve always been ashamed of the Southern California mysticism I’ve kept. But there it is, the belief in a divine pattern just outside my field of vision. It’s given me this seeking frame of mind that never resolves or rests but wants to move me closer to a fundamental truth. Mystics, I find, ask why before who what where when how, a tendency that leaves them bereft of practical knowledge. And this is Los Angeles, a town full of oracles, con men, real estate speculators, all high on self-delusion, self-gratification, marijuana, and a shitload of quartz.
I had just come outside from writing about my father. The writing made me physically tender: flu symptoms would flourish, and I’d sit in the sun until they passed. I moved here in the middle of fire season. A knuckle-cracking wind flies through Laurel Canyon, where I’ve found a cottage to rent while I wait for my next life to start. Every snap of static is a potential spark.
A few nights earlier I had entertained at the house, built as a hunting cottage back in the 1920s, when the Santa Monica Mountains were filled with populations of mountain lions, deer, and boar, which by the 1920s were well on their way to being killed off, in no small part due to cottages like this one. There were stone stairs carved into the hillside outside my bedroom that led to an old trail. The trail now led to the mansion above me on the hill, whose pool was resting on stilts that touched down near my house. I heard their pool parties. Once a flamingo float was thrown overboard and landed in my yard.
I was still good at dinner parties, a skill left over from my married life, though I was out of practice and now they took me all day to prepare. I swept the dust and debris off the outdoor table in the morning, only to find that by the afternoon it was covered again. The winds. I made a vinegar-braised chicken, an Alice Waters recipe. It came out more elegantly than I expected. The night was almost too cold for Chenin Blanc, and we wore sweaters. I bought small hurricane lamps at Home Depot, which glowed and bestowed upon this scene a stylishness far beyond my capabilities. The canyon rose up above us, rickety.
I have a friend, someone started, who was at a party with the fire chief of Los Angeles. He said what scares him most—more than Malibu, or anywhere else in the Santa Monica Mountains—is Laurel Canyon. He said it keeps him up at night.
We discussed how Laurel Canyon has only one way in and one way out—single ingress and egress, is what they call it—which means that not only would the road be swarmed with cars trying to evacuate, it would also be impossible for emergency vehicles to get in. Not to mention the tiny streets up the hill, someone else chimed in, I can barely get my sedan through there.
All this became clear in the 1950s when the canyon was ravaged by fire and it was impossible to defend. There was the tinder-dry vegetation to contend with, in addition to the density of housing, prolific and vertical, which adds to its vulnerability, as fire is driven upward when it burns. Cyclonic, some call those fires. Yet the fires of the 1950s, the 1970s, the early aughts, did not impede building. Quite the opposite. Look at Malibu. Real estate companies were given tax breaks to rebuild, homeowners advised to take out insurance, and a cheerful amnesia was prescribed to anyone living near the Santa Monica Mountains, or really anywhere in this disaster-prone city.
The mountains have always been on fire, since Spanish sailors spied this land in the 1500s, calling San Pedro the Bay of Smoke. The Chumash and Tongva Native Ameri
cans practiced controlled burns of the hills to avoid the kind of cyclonic infernos we have today. These fires seem to be the result of our ceaseless development as well as our failure to fund fire prevention. The prevention itself means there’s more chaparral, more sage scrub, more dried-out grasses that light up when the fires and winds do come. And they always come. Yet Californians build, pick through the ashes of their houses, build again. This I understand: People often act against common sense when they’ve fallen in love with a fantasy.
And isn’t this Laurel Canyon cottage a fantasy I had? As the landlord toured me through it and I noticed the lack of any updates since the seventies, he said, Yeah, that’s about when Fleetwood Mac lived here. I signed the check immediately even though I knew I was about to run out of money.
Toward the end of dinner, the winds came like a hot exhale and blew the napkins off the table. Some people made excuses, checked traffic on their phones. The remaining guests voted to move inside. In that foreboding omniscient wind, I felt like a child again.
Why did I come back here?
* * *
I made up stories from the minute I could speak. A natural escapist, I was always looking for the hidden, real world. I believed—at points—that it existed underwater, or in tide pools. In the roots of trees, or in their branches. In outer space, under beds, in forts of blankets. In the house next door.
I told my elementary school classmates that my father was an astronaut and therefore had to be away from home. I told my younger sister that we were exiled aristocracy, descendants of the Romanovs, and that she must always behave like a princess. I told my kindergarten friends that I was a mermaid—that I snuck out of my house each evening after putting my mother to bed. I ran to the ocean and spent nights racing in the black water with my real family. This is what children do—they investigate reality by contrasting it with fantasy. The problem, as is so often the case, was that I invested authority in the latter, preferring it to the former. Too much unsupervised time and a teeming imagination, too much relentless hope that I could make the invented real.
Children believed me. It took a parent or a teacher to convince my peers I was lying. I remember barreling through people’s disbelief with the sheer force of my personality. I refused to relent when caught.
My younger sister, Christina, was and continues to be instinctively loyal to me. When we were little, she corroborated my stories, telling the other kindergarteners that I was indeed a mermaid, even if she didn’t quite trust my version of events. I woke up before my sister and my mother and used Crayola markers to color my hair, proof that I had just journeyed from another world. Christina stared at my hair with her mouth open. Many nights she came into my bed and begged me to take her swimming, to make her a mermaid too.
But she couldn’t go with me. Not when I dreamed of those night swims, not when I ran away at age ten to go live under the Seal Beach pier, not when I left my house on countless nights to skateboard through empty suburban streets, and not when my mother sent me away to Colorado at sixteen. I don’t think my sister saw that it was a gift to be at home, that it was her special power, getting to stay. I think now that I understood exile. I was born a stray.
* * *
A lot of murders in the canyons, my aunt informs me as we sit down at an outdoor café with good iced tea and niçoise salads. A lot. Were you alive for that one up on Wonderland?
That was the seventies, I say. She blinks. No, I was not alive.
It was the early eighties, actually. Forgive me, I forget how old you are.
We order the essential iced teas and niçoise salads. The café is full. People drink rosé. It’s two p.m., and no one is going anywhere. The wrinkled insignia of overproductivity, the patina of stress, these people are glistening with the lack of it. It leaves me in a bit of a freefall, of not being pinned down, or knowing how to define my time. A friend living out here said, It’s a different pace. If you accomplish one thing a day—you know, one meeting, one lunch, one workout, just one of those things—then you’re good. I sip my iced tea and watch people accomplishing their one thing.
That was a really dirty job, my aunt continues. Those people: bludgeoned so badly. And that man, the porn star, oh God, I forgot his real name, how awful, Johnny Wadd though, that was his—ahem—stage name.
This is my mother’s sister, formerly a district attorney of some note. She secured a few convictions in high-profile criminal cases, those successes leading to her being appointed prosecutor to a very publicized murder trial in the nineties. The trial ended with a hung jury. She had a nervous breakdown. She recovered, then retired. She retained her encyclopedic knowledge of crime in Los Angeles, stories that have been told and retold at the dinner tables of my childhood, the city inexhaustible in that respect.
My aunt is disarmingly, harshly honest. She has been since I was a child. She has the posture of a ballerina and had an East Coast education that manifested in that rarest of all qualities: discipline. She taught me the word atheist (when I was in kindergarten, at a Catholic school), told me that she wouldn’t condescend to me and pretend there was a God. When I was eight, she and I were out to dinner at the Katella Deli. I had an open-faced turkey sandwich in front of me and she said that my father had left us all those years ago because he was a cocaine addict.
What’s cocaine? I asked.
Cocaine is a drug. I would lock him up if I could.
It was the same tone in which she had told me, perhaps the same year, perhaps a year later, while we were baking poolside at her house in Palm Desert, that the problem with sex is that it feels too good and makes you crazy.
She gave me Catcher in the Rye at ten years old. Justine by Lawrence Durrell at thirteen. Before she adopted in her forties, she seemed (to me) childless by choice, and deliciously free because of it. She made all her own money and drove a Mercedes, too fast. Obviously, I worshipped her. She was the only adult I knew who didn’t drink, which led me to believe early on that she was the only adult I knew.
Yeah, they made a movie out of this murder. Starring Val Kilmer. My aunt dislikes media depictions of crimes that were—to our family—personal. They never got the facts right. The actors were either too pretty or too ugly. Do you mind if I have some wine?
You drink at lunch now? Is that considered sophisticated where you live?
I shrug, gesture around me. The line between her eyebrows is disappointed, watchful. She minds. Never mind, I don’t need it.
Didn’t Val Kilmer get fat? Anyway, I knew the DA that tried that case. He came up to me in an elevator once and said, ‘I’ve never lost a case.’ I looked at him and said, ‘What about Wonderland?’ He was a real idiot.
Did you watch that one about Bob Durst?
Watch it? No thank you, I lived it. The police on that one—morons. That was Benedict Canyon.
Stevie Nicks lived in my house, I say defensively. Or someone from Fleetwood Mac. At least that’s what they told me. How many landlords in the canyon could correctly identify a former New Yorker who cannot resist the allure of that fairy-tale bohemia. That’s one LA story. My aunt will not be deterred from hers.
They were all drug addicts, that whole music scene up there. She takes a bite. A lot of mental illness. It’s actually quite sad. And of course, Cielo Drive. Did you know your uncle watched the Manson trials? He was an assistant, still a law student and he sat every day, thinking, what a mess. These people are evil. And they were. Just evil. That was also Benedict, that way. She gestures west toward Beverly Hills. Far. But not that far. She signals the waiter for a refill. You should invest in some curtains. How’s the writing going?
All these years she’s been asking me to move back, and this is the shit she talks about at lunch.
Los Angeles, California
The Monster is what I’m calling the man I love. He loves anonymity, being lost, and privilege, which flying, even with al
l its misery, undoubtedly affords. The mixture of the three is a state he equates with being free.
I was emulating him when I flew into Los Angeles. The Monster is who I would be if I were a man and had better control over my feelings: loving when I felt like it, ruthlessly irreverent and impolite, ease greasing up all the gears of my life. Maybe I would even learn to love flying.
I was hungover and medicated, coming from what started as a wedding weekend in Mexico and turned into a few weeks of writing and not writing. On this flight there were a thousand things I couldn’t say out loud; one was that I was moving back to Los Angeles. I’m only comfortable when I believe I don’t live anywhere. But the New York City storage unit constituting my home for the past four years was closed up, the boxes all on a truck, probably stalled on an expressionless highway in the middle of the country.
My things are coming for me, I thought. So was the Monster. I stared out the window, self-satisfied with the dosage of Xanax and box wine I’d landed on. I have a rigorous fear of flying, but on this flight I had a feeling of being too close to something too big to die. The Monster was probably at In-N-Out that very moment, I guessed, planning to surprise me. Thinking I’d be impressed by some generic Southern California thoughtfulness. I would be.
I want a real life, I’d said to him. I want to unpack these boxes and put things away. He knew exactly what I meant. Countless times we’d ended it and restarted it. How long had I been in this state of kerosene in the veins, of constant ignition? Casualty of a lust, a rabidity, a purity that burned through all the detritus?
The rest of our lives were the detritus. It didn’t matter where I went during this year, and I’d been so many places. He came to me in Brooklyn, in London, in Rome, in Athens. He found me, the way he’d find me in the airport (don’t tell me what time you land, I’ll find you), the way he always found me, intruding on any relative peace I’d scraped together, forcing that joyful explosion every time I returned to him.
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