Good Pie To All That
My first real memory of Los Angeles is moving here. It was 105 degrees in August and my brother and I got stuck on the 5 so long he had to abandon the car to pee in a bush near Lost Hills. We moved into my apartment at 2 in the morning. It was still 100. This city was never going to be easy on me.
No, wait my first memory is a year earlier, at a big shindig called the Pasadena Showcase, where very rich interior designers make over an already extravagant mansion to be even more extravagant. My then-fiance’s mother was in charge, I was just meeting her, and she hated me. I sat at a table with Gale Anne Hurd, eating lavender ice cream I was allergic to, but eating anyway because it was also delicious. The city had its arm around me, with just a little too much pressure, thanks to its many hours at the gym. So what if my throat itched and my eyes were watering: here I was, overwhelmed and already despised, mouth full of poison heaven. Just grateful to be here.
And now I won’t be.
Moving home has something of a stigma in LA, but not just LA. Shakespeare moved home just to die, after all; he probably should’ve stayed in the city. If you leave LA without a star on Hollywood Boulevard, you’ve failed miserably, we all know it. No matter the friends or the movies you have made, no matter the celebrities you saw at brunch or the days you stepped on the hallowed grounds of the studios. LA is the opposite of New York. It’s not “if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere“ but, ”“if you can’t make it there, no one will really care.” It’s a city of strivers and dreamers, and there’s nothing those people hate more than a flake. Leaving is undoubtedly flaking. But the party ends for everybody, one way or another.
And I’ll be honest: LA and I were on shaky terms even for the first fifteen years. There were a lot of highlights — sitting across the aisle from Dustin Hoffman as he giggled at his own movie, taking a cute boy home from Hollywood Billiards as a rebound only to end up married to him, frolicking amidst the sculpture gardens at night in a student theater group at UCLA — but we never were made for each other. LA is a stunner of a couture dress in the window; I tried it on thinking, well, maybe it will make me LOOK like I deserve it — but it ultimately leaves me staring at my own squashed boobs in a triple mirror, giving me ample evidence that I do not, in fact, fit. It was not designed for me, nor I for it, no matter how beautiful it is.
And all of that was true before that pesky pandemic came along just as things were really starting to swing, because for the last three years, I haven’t lived in LA, I’ve lived in my house, bounded by the walls and fences, and the wallpaper is beginning to look suspiciously alive.
So: home, no matter what Thomas Wolfe says. I like home. It has seasons and farms and its outside is more outside, and there’s more of it to be in. If I have to live a hermit life forever, I should at least get to choose the hermitage, and LA, for all its sparkling lights and dazzling beams, asks you to be a lot more than a hermit. At the very least, she thinks you can buck up and be a hermit with STYLE.
I’m not leaving the business, which has bizarrely started to take off. I’m not leaving my writing partner, who I genuinely think I would die without. I’m not leaving my Whatsapp group of LA ladies. I’m not leaving my big dreams of Hollywood. I’m not leaving my big sunglasses. I’m not leaving LA, I’m following our most treasured tradition of ghosting. I promise, she won’t notice.
After surviving almost two decades here, on the Westside, the Eastside, the Valley, Koreatown, Hollywood, godforsaken exile in Long Beach — I just wish I could say I’d contributed more to the place. LA might not notice you, but you should still notice it, and I think the only lasting impression I’ve made through two college degrees, two marriages, and seven different parts of town, is giving away free pie on Twitter at Thanksgiving. This is the reason for this meandering musing, because I’m sad to say this tradition is ending, or at least my part of it. It’s one of the few public things I’ve done that made me feel at all like a contributor to society, and I hope someone will take up the mantle in my absence. LA wants you to have everything, to want everything, but it rarely provides you with pie, and people need pie. People need a nice thing they don’t have to grind for. It’s one of my points of disagreement with the city, and she’ll win, as she always does. But I’m leaving, and taking my pie with me.
I’ll never be the same person I was before I came here, thankfully. LA has made me bigger and brighter and bolder. You can’t live here without a little sparkle and a lot of humiliation rubbing off. I am, all things considered, grateful she helped me grow up. And if someone else could take over the pie train, kill themselves for two weeks every November, and collapse a lung once in a while, that would be great. Los Angeles changed me in immeasurable, innumerable ways. I’d like, in one small way, to have changed her back.
Goodbye!
