We were never formally introduced, you and I, dear friend of my youth. I saw your picture though, and knew that you’d arrive soon, and how I worried! How I wanted to be your friend, how I longed for the intimate connection to be instant, as if we had known each other since childhood, forgetting that we were still children even then. Your voice was deep, and the porcelain beauty of your face, hair that was piled in unruly knots and black as a shiny chunk of obsidian, reminded me of an actress from the fifties, Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter. You didn’t know that I secretly watched the film she was in, bought the VHS second third fourth hand from a homeless man who had a little shop on his blanket by the bus stop where I would wait every morning, where she looked the most like you, over and over, trying to see if I could decode the mystery that veiled your heart.
I watched the film on my old TV and VCR – rescued from the trash bin, both components so old, they were made with wood panels. Late into the night, I would watch you-but-not- you in the moldy room where I lived, in the dark recesses of my parent’s basement, a brief stay after many years of being a refugee of their war, battles fought and never won in every room of the house. The war was still raging on, and there was no truce ever called, but the basement was always somewhat of a safe house, and the entrance could be accessed from the outside, so that I might never have to see the war torn couch or dining room table, the shrapnel stuck in the walls by the family portraits – I would be free of the land mines that could go off at any time my father was awake and somewhere in the house.
I lived underneath their battlefields for a few months, trying to collect enough funds to instigate another attempt at freedom, and an apartment that once seemed mythical and allegorical, started to materialize slowly, its walls and floors being built with late night drunken plans and not-sure-if-they- are just-being-polite-or-they-really-mean-it invitations from friends who were older, and free, living in Los Angeles, and not in the middle of a twenty year marital war.
What would I say when I met you? They all said you were so nice, but they were boys, and their impressions meant little to me, for boys then just assumed girls were either ‘so nice’ or a bitch, and usually if they were a bitch, they were probably nice, just were not interested in that particular boy, but since none of them were your conquests, the secret of you was not revealed until we were finally together face to face. I dressed over and over, pulling jersey over jeans that were too tight and buttons that would pop off or dresses that were seemingly perfect until I noticed the coffee stain down the front, nervously preparing as if for a date, and in a sense it was, because I was in love with you, not knowing you in the least. I wanted you to love me, and I wondered how it would be possible to do it. My makeup was carefully applied, and I said a silent prayer before I left to meet you, that you would be part of my fate, that my destiny would include you, that you would love me, and you did.
My legs shook a little, and then I walked slowly, and I couldn’t see you outside the club, just a few figures milling about, smoking cigarettes, waiting to go on. I was relieved not to see you, because I wanted a chance to look in the mirror first, a chance to run away and forget about meeting you – escape the possibility that you wouldn’t like me, that you would see right through me, that you would expose me as the fraud I believed myself to be. But by the time I walked up to the entrance of the Holy City Zoo, the tiny comedy bar that was run and ruled by stand up comics, and a few audience members who tried and tried to understand what these brilliant lunatics were all about, it was too late. You were so tiny, as little as young girl only just about to face the long road to womanhood, but I forget, we were both girls then, and I had put you on a pedestal that assumed physical height as well as everything else taller than mine. Friendly, warm, you used my name before I gave it to you, and you began a conversation that lasted for the years that I can only recall as ‘then.’ You invited me out the next morning, to more talking. You forced me to move to Los Angeles, right then and there, you insisted on my talent that was awe inspiring to you, that you would be my friend always, that you laughed hard at my jokes and then after the choking display of joyful agreement, you would wipe away the tears and explain in exact terms what made you laugh, what made me so brilliant, what I brought to you as a friend.
I miss the sound of your voice.
The cloudy night that I came to LA, with all my possessions in the dirty red Volkswagon that was my home then. I was scared you wouldn’t be there, terrified that you were another one of the fake late night drunken invitations, one of the liars who never knew how much I needed to believe them. Parking my car, the terror began to mount. It is a new city, and I am alone, but for you, and if you are not here, then what have I done? Thoughts of homeless shelters and prostitution and the long unwieldy length of a soup line swirled around my head, but were stopped suddenly by the sound of your inimitable laugh. Of course you were there. Hadn’t you assured me you would be?
I met you at the round table, upstairs at the Imrov on Melrose. I met many people that night, who have all vanished into the ethereal place where entertainers go when LA doesn’t work out like they’d hoped. I watched you perform to the dead drunk crowd. How funny you were, and brave, bracingly so, and that courage is what made me realize that we were meant to be together, because I had it too, maybe even a little more than you did.
I moved into another apartment, with two girls from San Francisco, and we crammed 3 or less hours of sleep a night. Mostly I slept at your house, the bed so large and high up from the ground, that smelled like you, and made me feel safe and happy. During those times, we shared a bed more often than some lovers do. We never became sexual with each other, and I never thought we would ever, not in the years that were then, except at the ugly, sickening bitter end of that time, that night at our friend Brian’s house when we were very drunk, and you had your hair in multiple long glossy braids. I can still feel you on my mouth, but I doubt you remember. You held my face in your hands, and kissed me softly with hard lips that seemed to say goodbye. Little did I know, that was exactly what you meant.
There were late nights in coffeehouses with boys who are now multimillionaires and famous magazine cover men, but then they were just kids, like us. You had a big notebook, and explained that being the only girl in the circle, you had to get used to long periods of invisibility, and when you felt that you started to get blurry at the edges, you would open up your book and start writing, and pretty soon you couldn’t see any of them. I got myself a notebook too, and I wrote in it all the time, and we stopped going to the late night boy’s club, because we were our own club, and never once did you ever become blurry to me.
I liked you in glasses best, because you were exhaustingly pretty, the dazzling beauty of your face being too much to bear head on. Like looking directly at the sun. The glasses were in fact a safety rail for your large brown eyes, so that I might not lose my balance and fall into them. There were the good times, of coffee and cigarettes and parties and boys and makeup purchased at the Beverly Connection, after stomach exploding binges at the Souplantation – our secret romantic meeting/overeating place, and being nobody with nothing to lose and the whole of our lives ahead of us. The conversation that began in San Francisco continued, without punctuation, pause, glitches – at least on your part, because you felt at home with me, like I understood everything, like I knew you so well, like I was part of you. You never knew how in awe of you I was, how I worshiped you, how terrified I was of you.
I would call you in the morning, and you would never want to speak. “Just come over here, I can’t talk to you without seeing you. It’s weird.” You would hang up abruptly, which hurt, but then you just wanted to be with me, to see and hear and feel me as a physical presence and not just a disconnected voice on the line, and there seemed to require no ceremony for that to happen, so I came.
Everyday, we would have an adventure, and they seemed to have no end, until the end. There was that night that boy you loved who said he did not love you, but would not leave you alone, who claimed he loved another, yet stayed night after night to make love to you, and you insisted that I stay, no matter what he said to me, no matter what you said, no matter if you happened to change your mind, to ignore you, I was not to leave, and I stayed the night, cockblocking him until he finally left, only to call you from the telephone booth on the corner, begging for another invitation.
You were so angry to be you, and not someone he would love, and yet he loved you, and you are beautiful, but you didn’t see it. You flatly refused to see it. You wanted to be one of the girls that turned heads, but didn’t affect minds, and the rage you had, because you were not that kind of girl scared me. Because they all fell in love with you anyway, no matter what you thought of yourself, and you possess a kind of beauty that is rare and lasting, unforgettable and undeniable, a beauty that makes the ‘Are you hot or not’ posse boring and irrelevant. How envious you would be, of the girls that served us in hipster boutiques and coffee houses, with their long, lean arms and taut bellies. You cried and screamed about how it was unfair, and the unfairness would kill you someday, why you couldn’t be one of those girls. I almost asked why you wanted to sell yourself short. Trade in your extraordinary beauty for a mass marketed copyrighted watered down version of prettiness, shallow and unsatisfying, because you thought that was the key to the Kingdom that you longed to reign. I held my tongue, because I looked up to you, as I still do, even though you are still shorter than me.
That night was a sad one for the boy, you and me. How you thanked me and thanked me for staying, and for helping you forget about him, and then years went by, and we saw the boy, no longer a poor Hollywood boy but powerful and famous, now a man on a talk show, and he was asked about his biggest regret in life. He said your name.
If asked the same question now, I would probably say your name too. What happened, friend of my youth, friend of the years we refer to as then? You became incredibly famous. Intimidatingly famous. I was jealous, but you would have never known it, or heard it in the sound of my voice, for we saw less and less of each other, and never spoke on the phone long enough to truly assess the dialogue taking place beneath the words. But your success was the thief of our love, and it stole you from me while I slept next to you. The conversation was never brought to a reasonable end, we were just cut off, and there were still so many things left unsaid. Your name is now part of the pop culture lexicon, and I see you everywhere besides directly in front of me and I don’t recognize the you that you are now. I just know the you I once loved, and still love, who looks exactly like you, but isn’t you.
So, if we never get to meet again, know that I miss you, I love you, and I wish the best of all of everything for you in your life. I am happy for your fame and fortune, no longer jealous, as I have made my own. But fuck you for growing up, becoming the you that you are now, and for never calling me back. And just so you know, the girls you once wanted to be, the lithe, lean bitchy shopgirls that you would seethe with envy over, still work at the same coffeehouses and boutiques, and sometimes newspaper stands, where your beautiful, unfamiliar yet to me once intimately known, luminous face stares out at the world, from the cover of a magazine. They go see movies that you star in and remember when you used to be around, just another girl in Hollywood, like one of them, and hope against hope that they will make it like you did, but they never will. Because there is only one you. No actually there is two of you, the you before and the you after, but they don’t know that, and really they don’t know either one, so we can just leave it for simplicity’s sake that there is only one you. There will never be another like you, and I wonder if you see how beautiful you are now. I hope that you do. But really, fuck you for never calling me back.