Heather said her apartment in East Hollywood is in the hood, but I was so excited to be in LA, it might as well have been a penthouse. You could see the Hollywood sign out her kitchen window.
I threw down my bags in her living room and sat on her futon to decompress from the drive for a few minutes and learn about her life over the past 15 years. We’d met each other while working at our college library, and, it turns out, she went on to become a librarian. Tourist that I am, I got so caught up in the Hollywood hype, I forgot that there’s a whole city of people living here who actually run the city.
She sat on her bed and smoked a bowl.
“I saw so many billboards and signs about weed, driving here,” I said, chuckling under my breath. “‘Cannabis delivers!’ It’s funny to see that when you’re coming from a state where it’s not legal. You just forget that it’s legal in other places.”
“Super legal,” she said, exhaling. “So what do you want to do? You wanna go out?”
Once I’d sufficiently rested—i.e., not really, but probably 15 minutes later—we went out. We walked through East Hollywood streets, stopping at a food truck to get pork tacos from a guy who had been carving a roasting pig all day long for lines of customers. Then we jumped on the metro to get to West Hollywood tourism country, where the streets are all lit up down the Avenue of the Stars. I saw the grand entrance of the Academy Awards building and, out front, people setting up for a Quentin Tarantino film premiere the next day, coincidentally titled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” We walked for hours, until our feet hurt and we both had to piss (it’s surprisingly impossible to find a public bathroom in LA).
That night, I climbed up to the roof of her apartment building to smoke a rolled cigarette of tobacco and mugwort and took in the view of the city skyline, watching lines of headlights flow down I-10.
The next morning, she left for work, and I left to venture out to see the city in the daylight. I drove up the winding Mulholland Drive, thinking of the David Lynch film and film in general (it’s hard not to in LA), and took a hike at Runyon Canyon, where you’re likely to run into movie stars. This is what people had told me, but I didn’t recognize anyone famous walking dogs or jogging. I did, however, see the iconic Hollywood sign across the way in Hollywood Hills and later drove toward it, checking out the houses there. I visited coffee shops and vintage shops, soaked in all the buzzing creativity, sat in LA traffic, and finally landed at the beach—the Pacific Ocean. It felt good.
I changed into a bathing suit in a tight bathroom on the beach (tricky, but not impossible) and then headed toward the water, putting down my towel and bag and getting in. The water was colder than the Atlantic but refreshing. The waves were rough—too rough to swim. A few people were surfing. The surf was green and brown with seaweed. I came back to lie on my towel, occasionally looking to my right to see Santa Monica Pier, loud with fun with movement and life—a ferris wheel and rollercoaster and games and food, crowds of people. Behind me, the city. Ahead, the endless sea. I did it. I made it. Not that there was any goal in mind, but there was certainly something satisfying about having swam in the Atlantic just a month prior.
I stayed there for hours, getting in and out of the water, calling a friend from back home who lived there one summer when he was younger, and eventually, I packed up my bag and took a walk along the pier as the sun sank lower in the sky. The beach was closing. My parking spot was expiring. As I headed back to Heather’s apartment, all I could think was, LA is the greatest city in America.