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I’d been in Los Angeles for less than two hours before I started sending annoying, Whispering Angel–fueled texts to my friends back in New York:
“I’m never leaving.”
“Should we move to L.A.?”
“I feel beautiful here.”
I really meant it. Sure, everyone seems to be toned, tanned, and in a much better mood there, but this visit, for some reason, wasn’t making me feel like an awkward, pasty, lumpy New Yorker jonesing for an Ozempic dealer. Instead, as my recently transplanted-from-Brooklyn friend told me: “We are EXOTICALLY HOT here.” And I half-believed her! If only I could find a B-list rager of a house party in the Hollywood Hills where maybe I could meet my very own Tedros. Plus, I was out there on assignment — more about that soon enough — which meant I was staying in a decent hotel and expensing my poolside margaritas and Ubers.
Admittedly, high summer is my least favorite time of the year to live (and party) in New York. The air is thick with top notes of body odor mixed with ambient garbage and piss. My ConEd bill is shockingly high. There’s always Riis Beach, a.k.a. Bushwickhampton, but rarely do I feel energized enough to take the train that far out; once I’m there, I start worrying about contracting a bacterial infection in the ocean, which is usually an unpleasantly big-city-adjacent shade of greige (oh, also, shark bites). Every time I go to a party, I spend the first 30 minutes apologizing for being so sweaty, and every 30 minutes after that, I’m in the restroom powdering my face, which seems to constantly be on the verge of slipping completely off. All I do is talk about the weather, like I’m doing now. I pray that someone will invite me to the Hamptons, or at least Fire Island or even Connecticut. When it gets hot like this, I get drunker quicker, and to cool off, I keep drinking. I black out a lot. ConEd keeps emailing me about not running my ACs during the day to avoid a blackout. I can’t quit complaining.
Among other things, the weather in L.A. was perfect: sunny, yes, but dry. Cool at night. Humane. Landing at LAX, I understood for the first time why Miley Cyrus sang about hopping off the plane with a dream and a cardigan. Pair that with my requisite cringe fascination with Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Lana Del Rey, and Joni Mitchell, and I’m ready to leave my hardscrabble New York life behind. I did live in L.A. for three months back in 2018. But I was interning at a feminist magazine and it was the summer Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court and I spent most of my time at protests (pussy hats, not cardigans and big sunglasses; I met Stacey Abrams, but no real celebrities). Nobody invited me to the San Vicente Bungalows.
Instead, thank God, this is brat summer.
And instead of Kavanaugh, we have Kamalot.
And I was in L.A.
Wednesday: On my first night out, I called up a very cool friend of mine who used to live in New York who told me she was “happy to chauffeur” me “somewhere really fabulous” (everyone there, in my experience, is always offering to give you a ride, even if they’re five martinis deep). So we went to the bar at Sunset Tower on the Sunset Strip, which is next door to the now-shuttered Standard Hotel where Carrie Bradshaw stays on Sex and the City and across the street from the fake honky-tonk where Miranda rides a mechanical bull to prove she’s more than a grumpy, uptight New Yorker (for better or worse, exactly the kind of tourist attractions I’m interested in). At a table near the pool, my friend regaled me with stories about meeting rich Hollywood execs on Feeld over shrimp cocktail. For some reason, people say no one drinks in L.A., but every bartender I met knew how to make a drink the way I like them. At Sunset Tower, my waiter actually apologized for serving a Cosmopolitan with so little cranberry juice. A few days later, another bartender, after I ordered a vodka ’tini, said, “Just cold vodka, no vermouth, right?” Correct.
Afterward, we stumbled up the street to the Chateau Marmont. There were, unfortunately, no celebs in sight (though my friend told me she once met Paris Hilton in the restroom; I was told David Spade, Drew Berrymore, and Penelope Cruz were there the next night), but we made good use of the curtained-off smoking section in the garden, where the staff was happy to bring us ice-cold martinis and an ice cream sundae. I was in heaven.
The thing about being a New Yorker visiting your friends in L.A. is that everyone seems keen to take you to do the sort of things they know you’re used to doing in New York when I suspect they spend way more time in their sunny, spacious homes than we do. Of course, they will recommend you make a pilgrimage to Erewhon for a $20 smoothie (eh) or order lunch from Goop Kitchen (better) or drop by the “beautiful” Dries Van Noten store on La Cienega (as if I have the money to buy anything there), but they will mostly, defensively, take you to places that, you, you bitchy New Yorker you, will not complain about. “I bring New Yorkers here because it’s kind of like an L.A. version of a New York spot,” a media colleague told me when I met her for drinks at Stir Crazy, a coffee shop/wine bar that sort of reminded me of Dimes.
It pains me to report that people in L.A. are also still debating Dimes Square. I was there for less than 24 hours before three separate people informed me that the “Clandestino of L.A.” is a bar in Echo Park called El Prado. (Note: Honor Levy lives in L.A. now.) I never made it to El Prado, because, as I learned, it’s a natural-wine bar, just like the kind that are all over the Lower East Side. I was in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to go to “the Clandestino of L.A.” All I wish for this bar is for it to find an identity of its own.
Thursday: I was invited to a party in the bowling alley at the Hollywood Roosevelt, hosted by Harmony Tividad, a member of the band Girlpool. It was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for: a scene-kid affair with some Hollywood provenance (Marilyn Monroe once lived at the hotel). When I got there, I watched a model type snap a photo in what someone told me was a supposedly haunted mirror in the lobby. “I look 12,” she said approvingly. “I love it.” Spooky! Inside, everyone was dressed like it was Bushwick in 2021: lots of Euphoria-ish eye makeup, corsets, and alien-tentacle hair. Near the bar, a guy who bragged to me that he is six-foot-six forced me to watch his audition tape for The Young and the Restless, but the DJ was playing the Dare so loud I couldn’t hear it. What’s that saying about everyone here being a couple years behind New York? It doesn’t matter: I’d never seen so many people dance to different beats, literally. In the smoking section, a dude-bro asked me to film him while he rapped about Kamala and Palestine. I politely declined.
I was more impressed by a trip to Capri Club, an Eagle Rock aperitivo bar with several different types of negronis on the menu, and where everyone was outside smoking on the sidewalk. It’s located in a former Italian restaurant with red booths so, yeah, maybe the reason I liked it was that it was an “L.A. version of a New York spot.” “The New York–ification of L.A. has meant more ppl there are warming up to cigarettes lol,” a friend, a native Angeleno, DM’d me.
On that note: The vapes hit different in L.A. I bought a “Flum Pebble” (flavor: mango icy) from a smoke shop in WeHo, which was playing the music video for Charli’s “360” on a television over the cash register. I could not, however, bring myself to spend much time at any of the Gay Guy bars nearby, only Schmitty’s — and I only went there because it was next door to the smoke shop. (Two gay-bar exceptions: I think Akbar, the Brooklynish gay bar in L.A., is better than any gay bar actually in Brooklyn, and all the girls at the “sapphically inclined” Ruby Fruit were sexy, bleach-blonde, and tatted.)
Friday: I went to a party for “lesbians over 40” (my kind of people) called Hotter Flash at … the vegetarian restaurant the Butcher’s Daughter, where I mostly gossiped with some new friends over orange Gia Coppola wine. There it struck me — and I admit this is another cliché in a letter full of them — that, yeah, people are a lot nicer in L.A. (Thank you to everyone who offered me a puff of their joint without my asking.) When our conversation eventually turned to critiquing outfits in the room, one of my new friends hesitated: “Maybe we should quit talking about everyone.” I can proudly report that we somehow still had fun when I wasn’t being such an asshole. I didn’t spot any “celezbrities” as I was promised, but I did acquire some pretty good gossip about Hannah Gadsby. Let’s just say: I’d love to party with them sometime.
Saturday: I texted one of the most prolific, well-connected L.A. boys I know, and he told me he was seeing a movie with his mom. “LAST NIGHT WAS THE CHILL NIGHT,” he texted the next morning. What? An actor I know also failed to come through after putting out feels to all of his “WME friends.” He was also seeing a movie. Someone told me to go to a party at … 6 p.m. at … the Dries Van Noten store. Finally, I got asked out with another L.A.-pilled girl also on a work trip from New York, but her friends took us to a rooftop downtown, which smelled like sewage. We both couldn’t quit whining, “Is there anywhere nearby kind of like the Chateau?” Cue the eye rolls.
Sunday: I hit the Silver Lake Pool & Inn for a pool party hosted by the Social Club, a new Gen Z members-only club. There, I learned the definition of an “East Side Guy” (he looks sort of like an East Villain, come to think of it). It was a spectacular day party — New York should really have more pools with bar service — and yet, when 4 p.m. rolled around, everyone quit drinking (well, those who were drinking) and went home. “It’s Sunday night! I’m going home to make a tomato sauce!” a Mama Cass–type in a caftan told me. I ordered another spicy marg. Unfortunately, the bar was closed.
No one in L.A. ever seems to stay out that late anyways. Every night, I was back in my hotel room by a respectable 2 a.m., and the desk guy always seemed confused as to what exactly I’d been out doing. “Crazy woman!” he said one night. “I keep wondering, where is it that you go?”
When I woke up the next morning, while packing for my flight, a friend back in New York texted me, “I did coke openly on the sidewalk on the LES last night at 4am.” I missed running into friends on the street, if not the summery stench. I missed the subway, if not, again, its smell. I stayed in L.A. just long enough to not yet feel bored by it, which is just enough time.
It was time to go back home.
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