Illustration: Robbie Eunson
My BF flicks the syringe and I inject: straight into my stomach. The drugs travel faster that way. Outside, on Sunset Boulevard, a film crew set up for their next shot. We are at The Standard in West Hollywood and I have DVT in my right leg. I thought the amount of alcohol I’d consumed on the 11-hour flight here would have thinned my blood beyond danger levels, but apparently not. It’s so painful that I can’t walk without crutches and even then I can only make it to the bathroom. Sometimes.
My blood needs to be thinned before I can fly home, so every other day I get tested and await my results along with my insurance company, who are already on the phone enquiring as to the colour of my pee. “Oh my!” said the doctor on my diagnosis. “My, that can be very expensive.”
Everyone relates everything to the “how much” situation. I spend more time with the women from accounts than the doctor. Billing to outside the US has caused major confusion so I get to know these people by name. It’s Thanksgiving and they can’t understand this isn’t celebrated in Europe. Trying to explain the National Health Service or the fact that Britain is an island makes me realise that, culturally, California is more foreign to a Londoner than France. I speak the same language – sort of – but there it ends. I figure the words intonation or nuance aren’t in the L.A dictionary.
At my second venous scan I ask the nurse what my prognosis is. She says she’ll lose her job if she tells me. “Can’t you smile or give a hint?” I ask. “I’m smiling aren’t I?” she says. Lying bitch.
I ask for help to order a cab. My BF has stepped away to make yet another phone call to the insurance people. It takes the guy on reception his lifetime times two to make the call. “What’s your hurry?” he says. I’ve just been instructed how to self-inject. I’m a little impatient. He looks at me quizzically: “You from New York?”
All Californians think New Yorkers are rude, although a Californian friend tells me that she is envious of the way “you English can be so rude to each other and yet you make it sound like compliment”. I make sure I compliment the guy as I leave.
The clinic is in Burbank, an area most people would regard as Hollywood. It is motion picture-funded, and the walls are covered in full-length black and whites of movies stars. A young Bette Davis in full frockage overlooks a bunch of old Californians in sneakers lined up for their flu jabs.
The forty-minute cab ride from Sunset is a different route every day. As Dorothy Parker said, “Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” Sometimes it’s the green valleys of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive with their art deco homes, fantasy castles and space-age pods I see. Other times it’s the palm-lined boulevards, the low-rise Spanish style bungalows and suburban gardens that lead on to the 101 Freeway with multiple lanes of 55 mile-an-hour traffic. I pass Universal and the Warner Bros lots. I love these journeys. They sum up what LA is all about. I originally flew out for a TV shoot and so in some small way felt involved in the LA scene but now, immobile and incapacitated, I’m a wounded civilian.
A work colleague joins me for lunch but declines the main course because she is currently “food specific” and didn’t realise the salad for starters came with dressing. It blows out her diet for two days.
The Standard is a trendy 60s motel redux boutique affair on the louche Sunset Strip. The foyer has chocolate-colour sofas, suspended 60s Perspex chairs and a front desk behind which a model lies, semi clad, in a glass case. The Standard is so FUN they even have their name upside down at the entrance. Room choices are poolside or Sunset. I choose roadside, ironically less noisy than poolside with its late night bar and DJ. Throughout the hotel there is an unusual jocularity to the design: the soaps say “Wash”, the pencils “Poke Me” and the thermostat “Blow”. In the mini-bar there’s a condom packet that has a diagram of a threesome. It’s the Animal Crackers I’m drawn to. I check for Duck Soup on the extensive room service menu. Is it because I’m in LA that everything reminds me of films or is it because the films remind me of LA?
The locals regard Sunset Strip as Eurotrash. Indeed many of the guests here are young, London media types sporting ironic 80s retro looks in a city inherently 80s in style.
I move to the poolside café, with its Cinemascope vista of downtown LA. It’s sunny and the temperature is in the seventies but it’s still too cold for the locals so I have the mornings to myself. Even the waitresses stay inside. At lunch things begin to pick up – this is a work town. Titanium laptops are as de rigeur as silver reflectors at poolside St Tropez. Everyone is having a model casting, editorial meeting, storyboard briefing or a loud conversation about choreography.
At my second venous scan I ask the nurse what my prognosis is. She says she’ll lose her job if she tells me. “Can’t you smile or give a hint?” I ask. “I’m smiling aren’t I?” she says. Lying bitch.
I’d developed another clot and needed to be put on stronger drugs. But this is a libellous state. People get sued for less than smiling. Option is not an option, apart from food. With food there is every imaginable choice. A work colleague joins me for lunch but declines the main course because she is currently “food specific” and didn’t realise the salad for starters came with dressing. It blows out her diet for two days. Desire or ambition define and separate individuals, but here everyone wants fame or fortune. Food is the only haven in which to define your individuality, to reclaim yourself by way of a salad garnish. I begin to amuse myself. I ask my doctor if he has something for “irony withdrawal” but he gives me the battery’s-run-down look and says it’s the first he’s heard of it and then, on noticing I’m staying at The Standard, asks what the food’s like there.
It is with relief that Mr Brown, an English friend who has lived here for ten years, invites us to Thanksgiving. His original party with the gay Hell’s Angels was a flop. We drive to his house via Griffith Park where we stop at the reservoir to take a picture. Mr Brown and my BF are both photographers and carry me down a rocky embankment in order to make the snapshot more artistic. They regret their decision when they have to carry me back up. I keep losing my mules. I didn’t come prepared to have my feet dangling between men’s arms in mid air. Typically there is no one around. Mr Brown says they are too frightened of the mountain lions. “What mountain lions?” I ask. “Exactly,” he says.
We drive down the notorious Western, which stretches all the way from the Hills to the not so gorgeous area of Los Feliz where Mr Brown lives. He points out the hookers like landmarks. At last there are other people on the streets.
Two of Mr Brown’s ex-boyfriends call to meet the English Patient, and we watch Desperate Housewives together. These flats have been artists’ studios for decades. Andy Warhol and Julie Christie are among the previous visitors. I suddenly feel very LA. Perhaps I should stay and write that script I’ve always talked about…
Luckily I am pronounced “de-coagulated”. The insurance pays for my flight home, at the front of the plane. I stretch out in style and I don’t even watch one movie. And now, when anyone asks my advice on LA I no longer say “Take Fountain.” I say, “Fly Club.”
Deborah Charles is a London-based writer and film director, toxophilite and snow boarder.