Los Angeles, Under the Hollywood Sign, Right Exactly Now, No Really, Right Now.

Arden and I want to go see the pick-up artists. The are mostly in LA, and Arden already knows them. She says they’ll be happy to see us. It will be an adventure. She plots and narrates. I lift my hand to open a new tab on the computer. The jetblue website is a promise that words can be hands and feet, too.  I make mild crazy eyes at her and say “Let’s go to LA right now.”

For a second she doesn’t answer. My heart gets high and scared in my chest, throwing a party, breaking vases and then apologizing nervously for the mess. We actually could, we could put shoes and bras in bags and put our jeans on and go hail a cab to the airport. The world really is that porous, that soft-skinned, and going somewhere else is just as deep-breath easy as starting a conversation with a beautiful woman.

The plane would exhale off the runway to the promises of blue murmuring sky-and-wing, and then Los Angeles would slink into view below, coming up along the underside of the plane like a sneak attack, low bungalows in diner colors. Los Angeles makes me think always and immediately of a diner, of sticky formica counters, of not-quite-clean windows in the flat, overheated, sand-grit useless part of the afternoon.

I haven’t been there, excepting the airport, since I was 16. People who love LA always say that you have to know it, and I’ve recently warmed to its idea, created a kinder and brighter-calling fiction. I imagine a place slick with secrets, a town of trapdoors and hotel rooms like the grainy movies and the lowbrow paperbacks that slide ever closer on the shelf to the good fiction. LA has become a good story, a long night and a fast drive and a roadside-stand with french fries and guns and rhinestones and kissing, and slow evening symphony halls climbing up into low mountains, and the freeway rushing everywhere and trying to force the cars to kill you, and little stores of out walls of low buildings in dirty streets selling burritos and clear plastic shoes and dirty words.

Arden and I, I decide in the pause in her face after my too-loud question, will reel off the plane, all legs and sunglasses, and find a car some kindergarten-finger-paint color. We’ll sleep in a second-story motel room with an untrustworthy concrete balcony and a sliding door that looks at a parking lot and a half-hearted palm tree, a sleazy chlorine pool, a dusty immediate freeway and low, raucous city cluster and beyond that, as the lights slide home and drink too much and then eat too many fried things and so decide it’s a good idea just maybe to lie down right here, and eventually mutter out to darkness, on the horizon the promise of the desert and its good, answering nothingness, the purple shot sky and the catcuses with their old-man truths. LA feels safe because the desert is right there just beyond the edges, keeping everyone honest and promising easy escapes route from every high-stakes, fast-round game of dress-up.

So we’ll go to LA, right now out from our carpeted living room into a cab to a plane to a car, and hang out with the pick-up artists. We’ll all sit at bars with high seats and hooks for shoes, we’ll be fast-talking and sharp-hearted. LA will whisper at its hidden doors and take off the locks and the chains and let us in. We’ll walk around the evening that fails to make it to any real darkness, from one bright, crouching place to another, laughing too much and trying not to think of going home, from sirens to lotus eaters sleeping late the next day into the sandy sunlight. I’ll sit on the balcony in the afternoon half-awake and think about dying my hair badly on purpose, and let my shoulders freckle and think that it has something to do with being touched like an easy second language.

An ex called me once while he was in LA and said he was driving along the highway by the ocean (he probably shouldn’t have been calling me while driving, it’s true). I said the highway almost made me wish I was there. He was driving a vintage convertible the color of grown-up nail polish and good wine. My disdain for LA and for driving and for him was purely fake, I wanted, with a straight-pouring focus, to be in the passenger seat with my head back against sure-wristed beige leather and the ocean playing my hair long out the side window, legs and glove compartment, the long road and the easy speeding drive, the winding hills and the dropping ocean view where the world streamed out to everywhere else, invisible, the car the same as talking, the need for conversation slowed and erased to something better, softer and more certain. The decembrists have a song about California’s Highway One that gets it, the happy-eyed and slow-day-beach-stoned, and Arden and I and the pick-up artists could all drive the forgiving curves of the last road in the country and fall almost alseep in the pasenger seat, in the curve of the day’s shoulder. I will never quite get over a weird longing for california’s slowness and sleepiness, the end of a long day at the beach.

And then Arden says she has to work and I admit we can’t afford it anyway, and we go back to typing on our computers on our separate couches, and then later collin comes over and we order a lot of late-night food and make evil genius plans and laugh until I’m worried I’ll choke to death, and so it’s just like always and it’s an adventure, too, in its weird every-night held-hand-home, but I keep thinking of a plane changing the weather by just a six hour eye-blink. We’ll go see the pick-up artists soon, we say, and say it like we’re leaving it there.

The motels and the highway and the pick-up artists purr across the continent, waiting for two girls to finally get irresponsible and impatient enough for a good story.