ESSAY

The Curse of Cool

Joan Didion’s Elusive Los Angeles

Joshua W o lf Shenk

n the fall of 2 0 0 5 ,at the shuttle terminal I find myself thinking of this encounter when
I of New York’s LaGuardia airport, I entered
the security line and noticed, in front of me,
I take stock of my relationship to the city that
aDidion is so identified with—Los Angeles—and
slight and slightly stooped older woman. After a I’ve come to realize that Didion and L.A. discon­
couple of blinks, I recognized Joan Didion. cert me in much the same way; each has articu­
I was going to Boston, en route to Harvard lated in my life—one in urban arrangements and
Square, for the first stop of a small book tour. architecture, the other in prose and ideas—the
Didion had just published The Year of Magical eros of estrangement, the allure of alienation.
Thinking. I introduced myself and, with some I came to live in Los Angeles in a roundabout
diffidence, told her how much she had influ­ way, because of the Bricklin. This was a car
enced me, and could I give her a copy of the made in the mid-1970s in a volume of roughly
book I had just published, my first? 3,000 units by a wild-eyed entrepreneur named
Didion held a single, small leather bag in her Malcolm Bricklin. They were striking cars—
left hand. She looked at me with what seemed low-slung, with electric gull-wing doors, and a
like a mild panic. “Can you mail it to me?” she fiberglass body covered by acrylic resin. But the
asked, with some diffidence of her own, as if the Bricklin had a fatal flaw: The electric doors drew
additional weight in her bag would be more than so much power that the battery would quickly
she could bear. (She really did seem that frail.) drain and die.
That afternoon, I gave my reading at the book­ My grandfather was a wholesaler. He bought
shop. When I finished, the clerk who had tended big lots of odd products whose makers could
to me said she was off to set up for Didion herself, not sell them, and he bought the lot of Bricklins
at a Unitarian church down Massachusetts Ave­ from their bankrupt manufacturer and unloaded
nue. She saved seats for me in a front pew and, them from his warehouse in Columbus, Ohio.
after the reading, seeing the fantastic queue that One of these cars came to my dad when I was
had formed, offered to take my copy of Magical a boy. The color of a light brown M&M, it had
Thinking and get it signed for me after the rush. a long snout like a Ferrari and a big growl. It
Several days later, the book arrived in the seemed to always smell faintly of gasoline. It had
mail to my apartment in Brooklyn. Of course, a space behind the two bucket seats—not a back­
I recognized the signature. But no matter how seat, more an open hatchback, an upholstered
long I stared at it I couldn’t make out what Did­ space for a suitcase or something—where two of
ion had inscribed. It was a thin scrawl, delicate we three brothers would clamber. I remember
and inscrutable. I tried to resign myself to not the snug rush of riding in the back. I also remem­
understanding it. I put the book on my shelf, ber standing next to the Bricklin in a parking lot,
but now and then couldn’t help but pick it up hearing the impotent click of the black plastic
and try again. door switch (which the Bricklin had in lieu of

I l l ust rat i on by KELSEY DAK E 95

a handle) as my dad jammed his finger against press their hands up against a plate of glass.
it—waiting, in vain, for the muscular hum of the On the way back East after that trip, I stopped
door’s motor that was supposed to follow. to visit my dad in Colorado. My fiancee met me
The Bricklin was exotic and doomed. there and, in between long stretches at his bed­
In the meantime, my dad moved on to other side, I had a vision. It came on me like a soft-
fascinations with motion. He continued to be focus film still—a vision of myself driving the
drawn to dramatic cars—a ’50s Thunderbird, Bricklin on an L.A. freeway. It was not a vision in
a ’60s Corvette, among others—and, when the sense of an idea to guide meritorious actions.
he came into money in my teenage years, he It was a vision in the sense of a primal image, a
studied for his pilot’s license and began to fly dark desire.
small prop planes. By the time I was in middle
school, he’d stowed the Bricklin in a warehouse I n February 2011, the vision materialized in a
somewhere. surprising way because, just as my son’s mother
Then, nearly three decades later, he pulled and I split up, she suddenly left her job and
it out. An eccentric and sentimental man, he accepted an offer to work in public radio in
had the Bricklin rebuilt by an engineer from Santa Monica. I came along, to follow her, to be
the original factory. The doors were remade near my thirteen-month-old son, and because
to open and close by force of air. The body was of my vision. I had a book to write, so I felt por­
repainted yellow. When my brother David saw table. I told friends L.A. would be an adventure.
the refurbished Bricklin, he said he wanted to My son’s mother moved to a warm, modest
throw up. He saw in it my dad’s profligacy and I neighborhood of bungalows, a few blocks east of
understood. But I found the car dazzling. I felt a Lincoln Boulevard. Her place had a converted
glow in my stomach thinking about it, and I let garage, across a cozy garden sheltered by a high
the feeling of that Bricklin, and my longing for wall, that she used as the baby’s room. Because
that feeling, linger for a while. she looked at prospective homes with presence
and love, she always found good enclosures. By
I lived my twenties and thirties in cities where contrast, I rented a one-room apartment near
people and buildings lean against each other Venice Beach. It felt like a perch from which I
like deep drunks in a bar. I made a small life in would fly into a grand unknown. This chronic
letters. I made good friends. I made a mess of a absence from my experience—the psychiatric
relationship with a woman I asked to marry me diagnosis is dissociative disorder—often leaves
but never married. Three years into our warm me cold to myself and other people. In this fur­
but fraught intimacy, she became pregnant with nished studio, I eyed the single bed with some
our son, around the time that my father fell foreboding. Either it would be a problem—
seriously ill. because it left no room to share—or I would
In 2009, with my son growing in utero—and have a problem, because I would have no one
my father holding on to life only tenuously—I with whom to share it. The apartment had two
visited Los Angeles and became intoxicated by substantial closets, one large enough to fit a crib
its lightness and its cool, which I felt as keenly of the Pack ’n Play variety. This seemed reason­
as I smelled the pungent spring blooms. When able to me at the time, but when my friend Josh
I saw old friends, it struck me how much less saw the makeshift crib in the closet he asked,
pressure came down on them than on my peo­ “Should I be worried about you?”
ple in New York. I felt scared and penned-in at That was a good question. I hoped I would
the time. I came to ascribe this sensation to the find, in L.A., space to unclench and light to color
ratty subways and galley kitchens, all those peo­ up my darkness. Yet I found myself ill at ease,
ple (and other creatures) in so little space. New even though every day was sunny and in the sev­
York had come to feel like a piece by the artist enties. I thought L.A. would be a softer way to
Do Ho Suh, in which thousands of plastic figures live, but I was surprised at its hard edges.

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 “The sunshine is invasive’’ my friend Lynne actual feeling of this sad, beaten car and, with
Tillman says of L.A. It took me years to grasp the car, the rising sense that my neuroticism and
the basic physics, that less moisture in the air indecision and financial worries—I had a book
means the light is refracted less, and is thus felt contract, but the years it would take to deliver it
more keenly—sharply seems a better way to put stretched ahead of me—made me ill-suited for a
it. When I go back East—at least spring to fall— life in the golden land.
the light is soft and the air is lush. This word One late afternoon, I drove that wreck, with
is onomatopoeic. I sense its meanings as I say my eighteen-month-old son in his back-facing
it, quietly. Growing luxuriantly. Providing great car seat, to a friend’s house in Laurel Canyon,
sensory pleasure. It took me years to really see which had a gate, and a narrow passage up a
how my constitution was unfit for a place as dry steep hill, and a landing on top where she and
as Los Angeles. What’s more, Los Angeles is not her husband parked a baby-blue Prius and a
a place to touch, but to see; it’s not a place for Land Rover in Hunter Green. Though atop a
lush, but for cool. hill, this house was a single-story in mid-century
“Cool” has been the subject of academic style. Through the living room, glass doors led
monographs and museum exhibitions, but it to the pool, which had the appearance of being
can’t be analyzed or even grasped. It’s not a mat­ perched over the canyon. We swam. We lounged
ter of any substance, but an erotic idea. Erotic on beanbag pool floats. I admired their style so
is what we desire that is out of reach, inducing much that I found myself wishing I could walk
greater desire. We are cats pawing at strings that around the house with my phone’s QR reader,
hang from on high. When the string dangles in extracting the e-commerce sites where I might
just the right way, when we feel the dance of it at acquire each piece of furniture, though I knew
the edge of our touch, this is what we call cool. the thing I really admired was something I
On Abbot Kinney in Venice, I found the hand­ couldn’t acquire: their cool, the effortlessness
some men’s teeth so bright as to be blinding. At with which her husband hacked off the stems of
a cultish restaurant on Larchmont, full of sleek kale stalks over their kitchen sink, with which
marble and modern glass, I learned the phrase my friend served strawberries in a modern bowl
“gourmet vegan.” I know these are cliches. I from an artisan’s kiln. I later asked them where
tasted the best guacamole of my life in a dive they would suggest I buy a good kitchen knife,
taco shop next to a motorcycle dealership. With but I never had the temerity to ask where they
women, I found myself regressing to seventh got their pottery, for not asking—not noticing,
grade, when the most I could do was sputter and certainly not im itating—this somehow
something like, “I like you.” The demurrals were seemed an essential part of the vibe.
usually very kind. That night, as I latched the belt on my son in
I can’t remember what happened to my Brick- that car, I felt like I was driving off a set I wanted
lin idea. I think my stepmother quashed it. But to act on. It was, in fact, a lot like the way you get
it’s fitting that my soaring vision would recede— disoriented after watching an engrossing film.
in the actual light of the city—to the drab ques­ You think you’re inside it for a little while, but
tion of how to get around. First I rented a car then you remember that for you, it was only two
at a monthly rate, but I dithered so thoroughly dimensions.
on what to do for a permanent solution that I
returned the expensive rental and went to a T h e s p r in g a f t e r I met Joan Didion at the air­
rent-a-wreck place on Lincoln Boulevard. port, I took my signed copy of Magical Thinking
This car, a nineties American sedan, did not, to a writing class I taught, where I had assigned
I don’t think, actually tilt to the right. And it the students to identify what I called a w rit­
did not, I don’t think, actually have one of those er’s “central preoccupation.” I got this phrase
old ashtrays with a bottom coated by tar. I am, I from my teacher Pat Hoy, to name that vein
think, making up these images to populate the of thought, or concern, that runs through all

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 of an artist’s work. If mined, Hoy suggests, it Woody Allen movie, and had therefore really
can yield the pure ore of sensibility. He thought arrived in town. A few months after moving to
this exercise in reading would improve writing, L.A., I had the peculiar experience one day of
which proceeds from opening those same veins attending a twelve-step meeting in a mansion
in ourselves. just off Franklin Avenue, thus entering the archi­
After a long discussion with my class, what tecture of Didion’s home in “The White Album,”
emerged, with Didion, was her preoccupa­ in a neighborhood, she said, where the decrepit
tion with place, with site, with a repetition— mansions were being rented monthly, and
bordering on perseveration—of specific locales. were, therefore, popular among therapy groups
In Didion, it’s not the house but the house on and rock bands. Thinking about this gave me
Franklin Avenue and not Richard Carroll but that glowing feeling in my stomach again, that
Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills and not a hospi­ Bricklin feeling. I imagined a life in L.A. where I
tal but the “Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer watched in the studio as a modern Jim Morrison
Division, at that time a hospital on East End played with matches in his black vinyl pants. I
Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more com­ had moved to town but I still hoped to arrive.
monly known as ‘Beth Israel North’ or ‘the old When I think of what my life was actually
Doctors’ Hospital.’” like in those days, though, I just remember the
Of course, all writing depends on specificity. U-turns. I was constantly trying to read the lines
But my class agreed that, with Didion, this spec­ on the small screen of my phone against the city
ificity felt psychologically critical—like a plant streets—and to correlate the red pin on the map
reaching its roots in thin soil in a bitter wind. against a mass of undifferentiated parking lots
Something about Didion seemed attenuated, in L-shaped strip malls. I did not do this well. It
dislocated, and, yes, alienated. wasn’t unusual for me to turn around because I
I loved this conversation. I loved how my missed a place, only to miss it again. This was
students had found something hidden in plain certainly not the bend in the river where the
sight—at once clear and beguiling. As the cottonwoods grow. Though occasionally I would
conversation peaked, I looked again—it had catch a glimpse of the cool: on the escalator, say,
become a habit—at the title page of my book. of the Hollywood Bowl (with escalators outside!
And I swear, right then, the shape from her hand lifting you up a mountain!) or in the public pool
finally emerged into words: of Santa Monica, where for a few bucks you can
swim long laps in pure sunshine. It was after ris­
(for Josh) ing from that pool one day that I talked with my
Joan Didion son’s mom and told her we could stay, because I
From the shuttle! felt, in that moment, that I could find a life like
the look of the water in that pool, translucent
I n college, I fell in love with “The White and shimmering.
Album.” Didion wrote a lot of essays, just like Then, Didion’s 2011 book, Blue Nights, came
Kurt Cobain wrote a lot of songs, but when it to me in galleys. In this book, a sort of sequel to
came time to play something at a party, it was Magical Thinking, Didion reflects on the life and
“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and when it came time death of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. Yet
to remember what an essay can do, when it’s the read subject is not her daughter, or her expe­
unleashed from any expectation, it was “The rience of parenthood, or even a tragic death. The
White Album.” She spoke her own voice, made real subject, as is always the case with Didion,
her own form. is her alienation from these things. “When I
A year or so after I moved to New York, in began writing these pages,” she says, “I believed
the late 1990s, I walked up Sixth Avenue in their subject to be children.” But as the pages
the fading light of a winter day, on a date, after progressed “it occurred to me that their actual
a movie at Film Forum. I felt I had entered a subject was not children after all, at least not

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children per se, at least not children qua chil­ D ic tio n 's a r o c k s t a r , o f c o u r s e , w h a t
dren: their actual subject was this refusal even w i t h t h e ic o n ic i m a g e o f h e r a g a i n s t h e r
to engage in such contemplation.” In the book,
y e l l o w S t i n g r a y C o r v e t t e , b u t s h e 's a ls o
she flays herself for how she has gone missing
a r o c k s t a r in t h a t h e r s o u n d a n d s t y le
from her own experience, but in that mesmer­
izing voice that has been the key for her escapes h a v e s e rv e d to m a s k fo r m u c h o f h e r

all along. I came away from Blue Nights with the a u d ie n c e w h a t s h e is r e a l l y a b o u t .

distinct sense of someone in a constrictor knot,
and the more she pulls at her experience with
her writing, the tighter it gets.
I had been in Los Angeles for three years or
so when I heard something that felt like a revela­
tion about why I could not fit in the place, why I
felt so attenuated, why I could not get the thing that she’s a legend indeed: a popular story that
that I wanted, which is another way of talking is unauthenticated, an object of secular wor­
about how my shadow desire—my desire to keep ship in modern letters who—with Barbara
myself in a shadow—is so copiously fed there. Harrison’s excoriating 1980 essay as the rare
What I heard was a small story told by a exception—has been practically venerated as
famous writer and director. She was talking, literature’s “St. Joan.”
casually, about a time she had worked with the To criticize her feels, beyond poor taste, a
writing staff for an award show—the Emmys, or kind of sacrilege, especially after The Year of
the Grammys, or something like that. She went Magical Thinking, which seems to embody the
there to write bits and sketches, and she brought most vulnerable experience of grief. But peo­
on an old colleague, and she was embarrassed, ple misread Magical Thinking. Even discerning
she told me and some others at brunch in her bookstores shelve it as memoir. It is not a mem­
casual, stylish house, when this colleague got oir of grief. It is, quite explicitly, an essay about
upset on the set one day. alienation from grief—or, I suppose you could
The trouble was not that my friends col­ say, the alienation often bound up in grief.
league was upset, but that she showed she was This alienation, in all forms, has long been
upset. My friend was horrified, she said, though Didion’s true subject. “As a writer,” Didion writes
she recounted this story over brunch with a calm in Magical Thinking, “even as a child, long before
so thorough that, I, myself, would need to be what I wrote began to be published, I developed
medicated to replicate it. “Everyone knows,” a sense that meaning itself was resident in the
she said, “that the only person on a set who is rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs,
allowed to have emotions is the star.” a technique for withholding whatever it was I
I remember a plastic tray with fruit and lox thought or believed behind an increasingly
and bagels. I remember a drum set in the liv­ impenetrable polish.”
ing room. I remember being struck that I had You could call this polish “cool.” Describing
just received the tiny silver key that would turn an exchange at the hospital where her husband
the mechanism in the intricate silver lock that has been rushed after his heart attack, when the
would explain my experience of Los Angeles, social worker approaches with a doctor, Didion
that large swaths of the creative class go to work writes: “‘He’s dead, isn’t he,’ I heard myself say
every day in an environment where emotion to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social
itself is taboo. worker. ‘It’s okay,’ the social worker said. ‘She’s
a pretty cool customer.’”
T here a considerable literature against
is now On the page, Didion exhibits the epitome
Joan Didion—“a standard critique of the legend,” of control, mastery, and clarity. Naturally,
writes Constance Grady, in Vox. The critique is this order proceeds from a chronic sense of

J O S H U A WOL F SHENK 99
 meaninglessness, detachm ent, and distress, distance. She is not a penitent in confession,
which always, with Didion, swallows up any or a lover ready for embrace. She is not even a
longing for respite. In readers, this excites a wild burlesque dancer—God, no. She is a boxer. She
desire, one that is, by definition, insatiable, and sticks and moves.
I think this accounts for her popularity, and for The publisher’s page for Blue Nights adver­
the fundamental inability of the critical class to tises it as “a work of stunning frankness about
read her accurately, despite her ongoing protes­ losing a daughter,” in which Didion “asks the
tations. In the preface to Slouching Toward Beth­ candid questions any parent might about how
lehem, Didion notes that a lot of people liked the she feels she failed.” God, this effort to domes­
title essay, but it’s too bad they missed the point. ticate Didion! She’s a rock star, of course, what
In the documentary about her made recently with the iconic image of her against her yellow
by GrifEn Dunne, the playwright David Hare Stingray Corvette, but she’s also a rock star in
recalls Didion saying no one would understand that her sound and style have served to mask for
Blue Nights but him. much of her audience what she is really about.
He replied that of course people will under­ And Los Angeles is her place. In Blue Nights,
stand it, which is so deeply, deeply sad, since she relates the pain she felt, years after moving
he missed her point, and therefore, perhaps, to New York, at giving up her California driver’s
reduced the num ber of people who would license. Her most recent publication includes
understand it, in Didion’s mind, to zero. I think raw notebooks from California. On the surface,
Didion is right that no one really understands, it may seem that Los Angeles is the locale to
because the first step to understanding would which she mentally returns from her alienation,
be to acknowledge that she is opaque. She is an but I rather think that Los Angeles is the place
enigma wrapped in a riddle, and so on. whose innate propensity toward alienation
Not long ago, I talked over dinner with an matches Didion’s own. In an interview with
L.A. poet who meditates several hours a day and L.A.’s KPFK in 1972, she said her character Maria
whose descriptions of her psychological state in in Play It as It Lays “is coming to terms with the
these sessions made me think of the effect in meaninglessness of experience, and that’s what
Star Trek where a body moves from presence to everybody who lives in Los Angeles essentially
ether. She was going on about how “courageous” has to come to terms with because none of it
Didion is, about how much she reveals. seems to mean anything.”
Of course, I recognized her data points. It is There was a time when this read as honesty,
startling, indeed, to see portions of an author’s when Didion’s high style matched to reportage,
psychiatric record, as in “The White Album,” or her weighing the material of the self against the
to read, in the famous line from Didion’s first material of culture or politics, made her essen­
LIFE column, in 1969, “We are here on this tial. But this is no longer the age when the bland,
island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of fil­ egoless text is the problem to be arrayed against.
ing for divorce.” The problem today is one of rampant narcissism,
These are bold declarations, but they are not and here I think Didion as a model is much more
revelations, and they are certainly not confes­ problematic than we’ve agreed to admit. This is
sions. A confession is when someone breaks a woman who recalls the assessment her child
down and tells you everything on a particular made of her—“You were okay, but you were a lit­
subject, and that’s not the Didion way. She is tle remote”—by replying: “I didn’t think this at
not one to collapse on the stage. She darts onto the time. I didn’t see how it was possible because
it, says the most remarkable thing, then darts her father and I so clearly needed her.”
off. It is not the weight of her disclosures that
beguiles the audience but the lightness of atten­ W hat had beguiled me about Los Angeles was
tion as it hovers between there and not there, the prospect of finding a home. I stared with
between her enticing proximity and her blunt longing at the photographs of staged living

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rooms and, lured by these images, drove to Mar an extreme. For, after Shulman’s photograph
Vista, Laurel Canyon, Studio City, Silver Lake, became such a sensation, the Stahl family
and South Pasadena. I guess I thought that the began to rent out their house for film shoots
right physical space—the weight of being held and to commercial photographers—so much
on a plot, under beams, behind glass, within so that it became their sole income. An image
a walled garden—would open me into some­ made a reality, which was later claimed again
thing I couldn’t then (and still can’t) name, and by the image. Faced with such a surface—one
which I ineptly allude to only when I call it that of “impenetrable polish”—how does one enter?
elusive cool. I’m not one to answer, for my experience of L.A.
Then, when I was living in a small two- is that it is hard, as it is with Didion’s prose, to
bedroom apartment, near Pico and Lincoln— get underneath the image to the inside. For me,
certainly one of the ugliest, if not the ugliest, this city has just been one ongoing experience
intersections in America—my father died. It of the simulacra.
was not a surprise, because of his long illnesses, In the Shulman photograph, the glass box
but it was a shock. I was also shocked by a new of the house designed by the architect Pierre
financial reality. I had been looking at small Koenig extends into the cavernous sky, beyond
bungalows and beaters, and could now con­ which lies the glow of the evening lights of Los
sider more dramatic options. And so I bought Angeles. Shulman used a seven-minute expo­
this impressive house, a block from the Silver sure to make those lights pop, and he laid over
Lake Reservoir, and I learned that living within it a second exposure he made to capture two
the awed stillness of a masterpiece of residential women facing each other, as though at a cocktail
architecture did nothing to alleviate my distinct party. At least, I used to read them as women at a
mental alienation. party—amid a bustling, elegant, and connected
It was not until later that it occurred to me life inside this well-appointed, startling home.
to think of the relationship between architec­ The women in the photograph, it turns out,
tural photography and porn. You can get aroused were extras recruited for the shoot. (One was
looking at a photograph, and then imagine a engaged to the architect’s assistant.) The house
relationship with the subject—or object—of the was unfinished, dusty with construction, the
photograph. This does evoke an actual physio­ furniture staged for the shoot.
logical experience. And you can act on it. But it But these details of image-making are less
will then declare itself a fantasy. It’s warmth like interesting than the declarations of the image
from an electric shock, as opposed to warmth itself. Like Didion, the inability to enter Shul­
from baseboard heat. man’s photograph is its erotic core. It tells you, as
Consider the iconic image of the Stahl House she does, that you can’t come in, and yet legions
in the Hollywood Hills. This photograph, taken by of us, like birds against glass, still keep trying.
Julius Shulman, with the help of two assistants, in Within Shulman’s shot, there is no sight line
May i960, is regarded as the most famous archi­ that shows you how you might enter the house.
tectural photograph of all time, and is a central The more I looked at it, the more the question
image to the iconography of modern L.A. arose in me: How would one get in? When I
One recent morning, I spent a long time shared this image with my friend Erica, who is
looking at this photograph and reading about more empathetic than I, she said she always had
how it was made. The house arose in the first the same feeling—but focused on the women in
place out of a quest for good images. The Case this image, who seem trapped in a glass box they
Study houses, of which this was No. 22, were cannot leave.
commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine, When I looked at the photograph, I looked
which facilitated these experiments in modern­ and looked, because I could not, for the life of
ism in exchange for exclusive photographs of the me, find an elegant way to describe the feeling.
results. The Stahl House took this imagism to I felt the desire well up in me, and the longing,

J OSHUA WOL F SHENK 101

and the impotence, until I finally wrote some­ is to New Yorkers—is the most earnest place I
thing dumb and blunt and awkward. I wrote have ever long laid my head.
something not at all cool. I wrote, “I want to But this is not goodbye to all that. While I
fuck this photograph.” spend large portions of time in Las Vegas, my
son still lives in L.A. (His mom settled in Bur­
A fter four years in L.A., I did something that bank, in another warm enclosure.) And my life
seems so absurd, given my struggle with the with him means a sort of ongoing half-life with
brightness of the sunshine, and the dryness of the city. I own my dream home still, and I drive
the air, and the loneliness of driving so much. I in Friday afternoons to fetch my son from school
picked up and took a job in Las Vegas. for a weekend of his playdates.
The applicable cliche, of course, is out of the I would say that moving between Vegas and
frying pan into the fire. I moved from a semiarid L.A. has induced a dislocation, but clearly it’s
climate to a properly austere desert. In Las Vegas made an old dislocation more salient. Perhaps
I keep two humidifiers running in my one-bed- that was what my shadow wanted all along.
room apartment, and I fill those vessels fastidi­ My life in my house now runs over this schism
ously. (I am not a desert amphibian, I have come too. I rent it out on Airbnb so often, and I mind
to reckon. I am a swamp frog.) this business assiduously. So as much as the
But while Las Vegas in many ways represents house is personal to m e—there is, for instance,
Los Angeles taken to its absurd extremes, it is also a whole wall of magnetic paint on which hover
its perfect inverse. L.A., for all its immigration, my son’s third-grade class portrait and the prom
is still an exclusive city. The iconic architectural picture of me with the first woman I loved—it is
detail in L.A. is the gate, or the thick hedge, or also a kind of set. Airbnb has sent professional
the wall separating dominant local institution— photographers twice.
film studios—from people who are not on the One time, not long ago, my renters were due
list. The rest of the city is built like a film set— at about 6:oo p .m . and I had a late-night flight.
long, ugly stretches that resolve in spectacular I went to dinner in the neighborhood, and then
spaces that, typically, are quite private. “We don’t I drove back to my street, because I was going
go for strangers in Hollywood,” says a character to leave my car in front of the house and take a
in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Lyft to LAX. So I decided to sit and work in my
Las Vegas, by contrast, is all strangers. Some­ car for a half hour. It was fine, it was comfort­
times it feels like Ellis Island in the Mojave. In able, I tilted the seat back. Also, from behind
one of the casinos, the workers wear name tags the hedge in front of the house, I could not see
that identify their hometown. The place you’re in, nor could they see me. But as the Lyft came
from gives you identity here, and with that fresh­ about 7:30 p .m ., I got my suitcase from the trunk,
ness comes a sense of the future as something and I rolled it to the Lyft, past a sight line on the
that will be collectively made. small driveway. There I caught a glimpse into
Climate aside, Las Vegas is obviously the the house. From the darkness on the street, I
opposite of cool. David Foster Wallace called saw my foyer and, standing there, the folks I
it “the least pretentious city in America.” In had rented the house to—a stylish couple from
his foundational essay about the city, “A Home Seoul, in town for a fashion show.
in the Neon,” Dave Hickey celebrates even its The foyer. Where I lace my son’s shoes.
venality as a virtue, for “what is hidden else­ Where I take coats from friends. Where I hang
where,” he writes, “exists here in quotidian visi­ tote bags and baseball hats. Through the glass
bility.” In Las Vegas, access is flattened; the city next to the front door, I could clearly see these
tends to suppress social differences, rather than unfamiliar and elegant people standing there. It
heighten them; the iconic image is not the wall, was as if this primal space in my life had become
but the sign. All in all, the city itself—not the the set for one of their scenes, and I certainly
Strip, which is to Las Vegans what Times Square could not enter. □

102 VQR I SPRING 2020

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