by Anna Dorn
Jake’s taste in music isn’t exactly “on trend.” It isn’t bad, I mean, we’re friends, after all. But it’s not really party music, more like the type of thing you would hear in an ‘80s horror movie, synthy and ominous and all that. It’s fun for writing and feeling terrified, less for drinking. But Dead Stars is bizarre enough that there might be some overlap.
“They use a Buchla,” I say.
“Huh?” Jake asks.
I grin a little. “It was one of the first synths. It was created in Berkeley in the sixties, around the same time the Moog was invented in New York.”
“Oh yeah,” says Jake, “the Moog.”
I knew this would get him because Jake is pretentious and he hates when I know things he doesn’t.
“I think I had a class with Buchla’s son my freshman year.”
I’m pretty sure he’s lying to overcompensate for his ignorance, which I love. “They’re blowing up,” I say.
“You say that about everyone,” Jake says as he kicks a beige rock. I watch the rock skip, thinking its color reminds me of Kanye’s forays into fashion.
“No, I don’t.” I peer back at the city below us. Various clusters of nondescript buildings, the ocean sparkling in the distance. “Our city is perfect,” I say.
“Are you serious?” Jake says. “Don’t you see all that nasty smog?”
“It’s pretty,” I say. I gaze into the gooey band between the buildings and the clouds. “The way the colors get caught in it.”
“Prue,” Jake Perez says, getting all in my face. “It’s killing you.”
The sky is turning neon pink outside my window as Ellie cuts lines on a photo of Mary-Kate’s face from the Olsen coffee table book, Influence. My angel is no cokehead, okay, but she indulges on special occasions, and Dead Stars at the Mirror Box is one. I’m not really a cocaine enthusiast myself—I’m too old for street drugs—but I enjoy the ritual.
My one-bedroom apartment holds the usual suspects: Jake Perez, Ellie, my two perfect black cats, Missy and Ennui (confession: I can’t tell them apart), and a twenty-four-year-old PR girl whose name I can’t recall. Chantal? Ashton? Mackenzie? Suddenly it’s dark. I stand up and flick on my neon sign of a palm tree, which casts the room in a turquoise glow—Vagablonde Blue— and makes the sky out the windows appear reddish pink.
“You look… amazing,” Jake Perez says, eyeing me up and down. He tells this to everyone after a glass of wine. Literally everyone.
“Thank you,” I say while looking at my dusty black Timber-lands. LA is covered in dust. “I think my eyeliner looks decent tonight.” I’m bad at drawing straight lines. But today I watched a YouTube tutorial that prompted me to put Scotch tape on my face, and I think it worked.
Jake Perez raises a thick black eyebrow at me. It’s all eyebrow talk in this town, I swear.
Chantal(?) sits on the carpet chipping at her black nailpolish. One of the cats seemingly notices her boredom and circles her theatrically, like, Look at me.
“Who is this little guy?” she asks, stroking Missy or Ennui. The other cat hops out from under the couch. Thank god. I prefer to introduce them in tandem as to not reveal my ignorance as to which is which. One cat paws the other in the face.
“These girls,” I say, “or women, are Missy and Ennui.”
Chantal(?) scrunches up her face. “Ennui?”
“It’s French,” I say.
“Je sais,” she says. “But ‘ennui’ means ‘boredom.’ Why would you name your cat ‘boredom’?”
I roll my eyes. Twenty-four-year-olds understand nothing. Except for Wyatt Walcott, of course. But she’s been prematurely aged by superstardom.
“Cigarette?” she asks. I follow the boring pretty girl to my tree-lined balcony and flick on the periwinkle string lights. A warm Santa Ana wind hits and the moon peeks through the leaves. Through the trees boasts a stunning view of the Chevron station.
“It’s so nice out here,” says Chantal. She’s wearing a sheer white shirt that parades her obnoxious twenty-four-year-old nipples.
“I’ll be right back,” I say. I go into my room and take off my bra.
“Cig for moi?” I ask—again, rhetorically—when I return. I remember that we’re about to see Wyatt Walcott with a microphone onstage and my blood starts swimming freestyle through my veins.
A cigarette emerges, as if by magic, from its carton. I position it in my lips in a way that begs a light. Chantal(?) giggles, then lights. Her laugh is high-pitched and breathy, a noise that exudes insecurity.
After listening to Chantal(?) complain about her non-relationship with some philosophy major barista fuccboi, I pull out the power move I tend to use around younger and more attractive women. “Oh, but you haven’t even had your Saturn’s Return!”
“Huh?”
The girl eyes me with concern while I explain that the universe is about to beat the shit out of her. In my return, I explain, I fell in love with a straight woman who strung me along like a fish on a hook. I also got poison oak all over my body. Twice. But I emerged wiser and more elegant—just look at me! I flip my bright blonde hair.
“Smoking without me?” Ellie emerges from inside. For the first time I realize her hair is tied back in two French braids.
“Celeste did them,” she says, clocking my gaze. Ah, Celeste. I was close!
“Nice.” I drop my cigarette in the ashtray, flip my hair again, and return inside.
Jake Perez is sitting on an armchair with crossed legs and a full glass of bloodred wine, refreshing Tumblr on his phone. He’s dressed like a vampire. Jake’s a Scorpio, so he’s very morbid.
Ellie tilts her head toward the ceiling and sucks air into her nostrils with the grace of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Turquoise light bounces off her blonde curls. (Yes, I’m a blonde girl dating a blonde girl—imagine what Kanye would think!). No one seems to notice as I head into my bathroom, remembering it’s time to take my medication.
I return to the room with a salmon-colored forty-milligram pill in my palm. For the sake of dramatic gesture, I lay it on Mary-Kate’s eyelash, beside the white powdery vestige of a line. I take Ellie’s AmEx and chop the pill in half.
“I just cut my SSRI dosage in half,” I announce proudly, then place the pill on my tongue. Celeste is back, eyeing me with a blank expression. She probably doesn’t even know what an SSRI is; she’s on something newer and hipper.
I chug down the pill with my Lagunitas IPA, wondering what Dr. Kim would think.
“Mazel,” says Celeste. “I love you,” says Ellie.
“Prue,” says Jake Perez, finally looking up from his phone. “I cannot emphasize my disapproval enough.”
Often when I see a show, I’m overcome with envy. I stand frustrated and fuming, chugging Bud Light and thinking about how I could have done a better job. But with Dead Stars, I’m just… happy. Wyatt and Agnes deserve to be there, glowing under soft neon pinks and oozing charm. Sitting at a small table toward the front and surrounded by mirrors, I’m shocked to find I’m not even tempted to look at my reflection.
The girls are wearing outfits that evoke lingerie, I suppose to cater to the fact that we’re at a strip club. Agnes wears neon-pink lace; Wyatt, a black silk robe. Wyatt flips her flowing dirty-blonde hair from side to side as she croons about millennial malaise. The girls take turns slinking around the gold pole in the stage’s center, less in the manner of strippers and more like eleven-year-olds at recess.
But the main star is the Buchla, this huge machine with primary-colored wires sticking out in all different directions. I can tell Jake Perez is mesmerized by the machine, which is reflected in the mirrors surrounding the stage. For a second I become panicked looking at all the wires, become afraid that the singularity is here, that the robots are taking over. But then I see Agnes manipulate them around with such confidence and grace, creating soothing sounds from the chaos. Agnes can conquer the machines. She will protect us. She went to MIT, and I read online that she’s a Mensan.
Afterward, Ellie gets us backstage, where she immediately dives into the fray, floating around and chatting with other industry people in her typical self-assured manner. Celeste does the same, but it seems less sexy and more sycophantic. Jake and I plop awkwardly on a black leather couch in the corner of the room and watch Agnes and Wyatt entertain a revolving circle of admirers. Ellie keeps coming over and urging me to go talk to Wyatt, but I’m too scared. I don’t want to seem like a crazed fan. But standing fifteen feet away clutching a Bud Light and staring at her probably doesn’t look any better.
“Can we head?” I ask Ellie the next time she comes over to me. I can only spend so long ogling the life of someone more successful before I need to peace out. Jake’s already left. He hates people even more than I do.
“Already?!” she exclaims. She always likes to stay out longer than I do. A real extrovert. I wonder what that’s like.
“I’m depressed,” I say, trying to make my face cute.
“Hold on,” she says. “I just need to introduce you to someone real quick.”
She disappears for a second and I tap my boot on the floor.
“Cigarette?” Celeste asks. I’m not sure whether she’s just now appearing or if she was standing there the whole time and I just didn’t notice. I’m socially tapped.
“Sure,” I say. She grabs my hand and we weave through the crowd of sweaty bodies. The air in the parking lot is cool and dry. Cars fly by on Hollywood Boulevard. As Celeste hands me a cigarette from her pack, I notice a body I don’t want to see.
“Sorry, girl,” I say. “Bad ex at six o’clock. Must escape.”
I’m sort of lying. “Ex” is a stretch. It’s a Tinder date from a few years ago. Hot, but certifiable.
“Why are crazy people always so good in bed?” I’m talking about my Tinder date, but I’m also talking about myself.
Celeste just shrugs.
Inside, I approach Ellie standing with a man wearing a dress. Maybe not a dress, but more of a tunic or a muumuu. It’s tribal patterned and mesh. A large crystal pendant suspended on a gold chain hangs around his neck. He has large hazel eyes, wide and aggressive in the manner of someone who has been doing cocaine all night. He scares me a little, but there is also something intriguing about him. A Scorpio? I wonder. Guessing people’s astrological signs always makes socializing a bit more tolerable. It gives me a concrete task, a system of organization. And as a Virgo, I live to organize.
“This is Jax Jameson,” Ellie says, “the producer I was telling you about.”
I don’t recall Ellie telling me about this person. But she’s loquacious. I don’t catch everything she says.
“Nice shoes,” he says. I look down and see we’re wearing the same Timberlands.
I smile, and then he hands me a tiny plastic bag of white powder.
TWO
I wake up feeling like a foot: sweaty, hot, swollen. One of the cats paws at my face and I shove her off. I’m pretty rough with my cats but I think they can handle it. I mean, they’re descended from lions! I roll over and reach for Ellie, but she’s gone. Career girls wake up early. I grab my phone: 7:30 A.M. Time to start typing.
I go to the kitchen and put on water for coffee. While it heats, I look out onto the balcony and a tree shifts and a blade of sun hits me in the eyeball. The night starts coming back.
I broke my no-cocaine rule, which explains the sniffles. Fucking cocaine. It’s fun for, like, a second and then I’m no longer producing memories.
What I remember: Jax and I got along like a house on fire. We discussed Kanye’s Yeezus as an academic text over Marlboro Reds, a cigarette I told him I respect because Mary-Kate Olsen smokes them. He unleashed a hearty laugh and responded, “Hashtag same.”
Oh god, I think, I spoke too much. I always get paranoid like this after a morning of uppers, but right now it feels especially justified (it always does). I told Jax about going to my dad’s house in Montana just after Kanye started recording there. My dad’s house is near Yellowstone, and I’d never been because I’m never trying to interact too much with nature. But when I heard Ye was recording in Jackson Hole, I told my dad I wanted to go on a father-daughter trip. He was super excited and started talking about all the things we could do outside.
“There are, like, cute cowgirl bars there, right?” I’d asked.
He hung up.
I flew into Bozeman a few weeks later. My dad picked me up in a matte-black Chevy Tahoe. He had on a classic rock station and was wearing a cowboy hat, both of which I typically find embarrassing, but neither bothered me at the moment. I think it was the mountain air. In LA, we’re breathing polluted air 24/7, which probably fucks with our serotonin receptors or something. But the mountain air made me feel high. Maybe this is how Kanye got manic, I thought.
The radio played Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones—not that obnoxious honky-tonk shit but the dreamy ballads. The roads were open and people smiled at you. We drove a hundred miles per hour through these lush mountains. The landscape was dramatic and grand; snow-capped peaks pointed toward the heavens. It looked like Switzerland, but also most people drove pickup trucks and smoked cigarettes out their windows in a way that felt uniquely American Trash.
“I can see why Kanye loves it so much,” I told Jax on the street.
Jax laughed really hard. He laughed super hard at all my jokes. I’ve always thought I’m funnier than people give me credit for. The cocaine gave me the confidence to perform a few bars for him, prewritten, of course. (I do not and will not ever freestyle, for the same reason I’m an appellate and not a trial lawyer: I need time to think.) Jax told me I’m brilliant and beautiful and he wanted to work with me, something I’ve been waiting to hear my whole life from a producer who shares a last name with a liquor company. We exchanged numbers to plan a recording session (he has an in-home studio, a setup that I’m confident beats GarageBand on my laptop).
Before I knew it, we were back in the main room of the Mirror Box, where Agnes and Wyatt were DJing the perfect combination of late ‘90s slow jams and timeless freak pop. Oh, and Kanye. Jax and I shrieked when the horns dropped on “Blood on the Leaves,” and I remembered blasting it on the open Wyoming roads, smoking a cigarette out the window and pondering the existence of a higher power for the first time. Jax and I had great dance chemistry—he made me feel like a video girl, something I’ve always wanted to feel like. “I knew you all would hit it off,” Ellie shouted at us from a few feet away.
Soon Jax and I were throwing ones at Wyatt while she slid down the pole to the beat of Lil’ Kim’s “Drugs.” It was the first time I’ve thrown money at a woman, which made me feel alienated from previous versions of myself.
I suppose that’s what they call “growing up.”
I open up the thick brown envelope that contains the record in my new case. I always get anxious when opening a new record: all this information I must learn and synthesize. First I read the memo from my supervisor. My supervisors work in offices throughout California and I know them only via email or sometimes the phone, only when they make me. I don’t love to speak, unless I’m in therapy or drinking. Otherwise I much prefer to type.
My new client is named Rachel Taften, but she’s “known on the streets” as “Yumiko Houndstooth.” Many of my clients have aliases, but this is by far the best I’ve heard. She was charged with carrying a loaded gun in a public place. My supervisor suggests we challenge the search under the Fourth Amendment, which is what I do in most of my cases. My clients are pretty much always guilty, and the cops pretty much always violated their Fourth Amendment rights in discovering that. Yumiko was leaving a liquor store with bare feet, her shoes in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. A cop thought this looked suspicious and went up and grabbed her. She whipped around and struck him in the face with her shoes. The cop arrested her for assault on a police officer, during which he found a gun in her parka. The DA dropped the assault charge pursuant to her plea.
> I hunch over my laptop typing for hours, composing arguments and listening to ambient music from Berlin. My fingers find a rhythm and my brain starts to quiet and I lose track of time. I stop when my eyes start to burn and it’s dark out.
I check my phone, hoping no one died while I was in my writing hole. Lots of missed calls, lots of texts. Jake Perez. Ellie. Jax. Nothing from my parents, who really contact me only when something horrible has happened. I ring up Ellie.
“Hi, stranger,” she says, voice all sexy and wine-soothed.
“Hi, babygirl.”
“I thought you’d forgotten about me.” “I was working.”
“I admire your discipline.” Ellie is so supportive. How did I get so lucky?
“Where are you drinking?” I ask.
“Just leaving a work happy hour… Dinner?”
“I thought you’d never ask. Nora’s?” It’s our spot. Ellie and I are the only couple in LA that lives within walking distance of each other; Nora’s is equidistant between us.
“See you there.”
On the walk to Nora’s, I remember the twenty milligrams. The nice thing about the new dosage is that it’ll last twice as long, meaning half the trips to Walgreens. I text Ellie, Gotta drop off a script real quick, order me an IPA?
No worries, see you soon!!!
Soon I’m back under the fluorescent lights, feeling ugly as hell. I book it to the pharmacy section, not even stopping to gaze idly at the shampoos as I’m so often tempted. When I catch my reflection in those terrible mirrors, I feel hideous—haggard, puffy, mannish. Horrified, I look away quickly.
At least there isn’t much of a line this time, praise be.
I check my texts as I wait.
Jake Perez: You were faded af last night. You alive?
Jax: Last night was perfection. I can’t wait to get in the studio. I’ll text you soon with a time.
I smile and think of that smaltzy line from Almost Famous— “It’s all happening”—then open Wyatt Walcott’s Instagram. I scroll through at least thirty photos I’ve already seen before, ogling her mermaid waves and nonplussed expression, until the pharmacist lady calls, “Next.” I hand her the script. “Anything else?” she asks, and I say, “God no,” and jet. Pharmacists are always trying to drag you into their sick, sad world.