Part I.
There are many things I said I would never do. I would never learn to drive a car. I would never fall in love with a stranger. And most importantly, I would never move to Los Angeles. New Yorkers love to hate LA. I am not a native New Yorker, but my mother was born and raised in the South Bronx after her parents migrated to the mainland from Puerto Rico. She left New York in search of a better life for herself and never looked back. After a series of traumatic events and miraculous revelations, she ended up in Chicago, where she has raised my siblings and me for nearly four decades. Since childhood, I planned to escape my home on the South Side of Chicago and cram all my books and piles of vintage clothes into a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan and live happily ever after.
As a respectable New York City transplant, I sincerely believed I would’ve been more content sleeping underneath a subway grate amongst the rats than live in a beachfront palace overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When it came to cities, I preferred the harsh reality as opposed to a beautiful falsehood. Everything about Los Angeles felt too good to be true. How could a desert landscape without a local fresh water source serve such a large urban population? It was unnatural. I had only been to LA once before when I was a child. After being stalked down Hollywood Boulevard by a man in a rather convincing Michael Myers costume, I swore I would never return. Besides, Los Angeles wasn’t the place for a girl like me. I was too radical, too ethnic and too real to be accepted in the land of apolitical Malibu Barbies.
My opinion of LA began to shift when I was introduced to Eve Babitz. Eve was born and raised in LA and was an it-girl of the 60s and 70s Hollywood scene. Her witty, effortless anecdotal style captivated me. Though she identified as a novelist, many of her stories were based in truth. Her real life was even more intriguing than her books. I began reading Eve’s work in a nonfiction writing class I took my junior year of college. My professor had us read her most masterful book Slow Days, Fast Company, and invited author Lili Anolik to discuss her biography and ode to the elusive writer, Hollywood’s Eve. Lili found Eve’s work by accident. Once she began reading, she fell in love with her prose and her persona. She, like myself, could not believe that a woman of her status and talent had been obscured by the literary world. She was well-connected, charming, intelligent and oozed sex appeal. She should’ve been a mega star. A household name. An icon. But that was the thing about Eve. She walked along a tightrope, always teetering on the edge between fame and anonymity.
Eve was more afraid of fame than she was of death. I think she expected to die young like so many of her friends and lovers did. She was, as older Black women would say, fast. She partied hard. She had lots of sex with many different partners. She drank a lot, smoked a lot and loved hard drugs. She never did heroin, however. That was out of the question. In Slow Days, she tells the reader that she came close to trying it one week when her publishers warned her that her book might turn out to be a best-seller. She was overcome with existential dread. Eve knew that getting everything— the fame, the money, the prince— came at a high price. She anticipated the grief which would inevitably come with losing her privacy, all her casual friends and being isolated from the real world.
“There’s no precedent for women getting their own ‘everything’ and learning that it’s not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood ‘everything’ in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They’ll only give you ‘everything’ if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends (Babitz, Slow Days).”
Eve sabotaged her own career to save herself from the degradation of celebrity. It was a move that likely prolonged her life, but it was a life riddled with tragedy. In 1997, Eve was driving through Pasadena in her 1968 VW Bug— the same one Steve Martin had gifted to her— and attempting to light a cherry flavored cigar. As she struck the match against the box, it fell from her hand and onto her skirt. Her body was engulfed in flames. She was covered in third degree burns and all the skin on her lower extremities had evaporated. She survived, but the body which had become an effigy of hedonism and glamour was permanently scarred. She became a recluse and lost her will to write after the accident. Towards the end of her life, her mental faculties had declined from decades worth of substance abuse. In December of 2021, Eve passed away from complications of Huntington’s disease. After a 78-year run, she lived longer than anyone had expected her to. She was more resilient than anyone gave her credit for. She was more than a star. She was a supernova.
Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp Playing Chess at The Pasadena Art Museum, Photographed by Julian Wasser (1963)
Though she never admitted it, it pained her that none of her books became a commercial success. Eve wanted to be successful, but her definition of success and the world’s definition of success were at odds with one another. It is in a writer’s nature to share her work, her thoughts, her stories. That symbiotic relationship between the writer and the reader is what fuels our creative drive. Yet it is our ability to blend into every social space, our covert investigations of everyday life and the human condition, which allow us to tell such riveting stories. The Hollywood Star system presents artists with a paradoxical ultimatum: either share your work with the masses and disconnect from society or remain grounded on Earth and kiss your career goodbye. What is a promising young woman meant to do with her life when she already knows that getting everything isn’t worth losing her humanity?
It is much easier for male writers to publish their work than it is for female writers. By this, I don’t simply mean it is more common to read work by male authors than female ones in credible literary publications, although this is probably true. I mean that a male writer can be published, achieve commercial success and critical acclaim for his work, and still live a relatively normal life. This is not the case for most female writers. Think, for a moment, of the most successful female authors in the Western literary canon. They are, for the most part, celebrities. Even if they hadn’t set out to be celebrities, it came with the territory.
I remember the day Toni Morrison died. I found out about her passing at work in the library. My supervisor urged me to look for a funny tweet he had seen the night before, and instead I found Toni’s name trending. I broke down into tears. My supervisor interrupted my state of grief to say, “Why are you crying? She’s just a celebrity.” I wanted to scream at him, but I knew that he, as a White man, didn’t understand what the world had just lost. Toni was more than a celebrity. Toni was a bastion of literary excellence and a beacon of hope for all of us fellow Black female writers. The wisdom she weaved within each sentence saved my life. Before that moment, however, I had not considered her public persona. I realized I knew barely anything about her personal life except that she was a mother and an editor before she became a novelist. Toni’s books and essays were not about her own life, but rather about larger themes of Blackness, femininity, loss and love. The public’s perception of her was solely based on the quality of her work. There was a respect awarded to her that is not often given to women writers. Perhaps she avoided the spoils of success by waiting until her 40s to publish her first book. A woman writer’s youth was both a currency and a curse.
As I began considering my own path, I dreaded falling into the same traps my literary heroes had succumbed to in their careers. So many of the successful female authors I admired were awarded for their sorrowful narratives. As Eve pointed out, it is often the personal recounts of a woman’s brokenness and despair that are celebrated most. Authors like Alice Walker and Maya Angelou were exempt from sharing their private lives with the public, but only after they had confessed their darkest secrets and stories in their most renowned books. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, although brilliant, displays graphic scenes of Maya’s horrific childhood trauma and is considered required reading for young girls who would not be expected to read such heavy material if the protagonist being abused were White. The Color Purple features multiple Black female characters who are repeatedly violated throughout the story and does not offer the reader much resolve beyond survival.
Historically speaking, White female writers have been given more leeway in terms of the content of their stories, but they too have been trapped by this patriarchal system of storytelling. A large part of the reason why Eve’s work was never taken seriously by the gatekeepers of the publishing world was because of her lighthearted, humorous writing style. They did not take the feminine voice seriously unless she was crying out for help rather than laughing through her pain as a mode of healing. Authors like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf were bestowed more respect by the public after their horrifying suicides than they were given during their lifetimes. Eve paraphrases Virginia in her introduction to Slow Days, stating that, “people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip…” But this is specific to the way people read fiction, or any form of literature, by female writers. Almost no one reads George Orwell’s 1984 digging for clues into his personal life, but it is common practice to read Virginia’s Mrs. Dalloway more like a memoir than a novel. It is not enough for the young female writer to share her creativity with the world. She must give over her whole self— mind, body and soul— for public consumption.
For young creative women who wish to make a living from their craft, it is expected that they sacrifice their privacy to the public. Their persona becomes equally as important, if not more important, as their work. This is especially true in today’s world where social media dominates popular culture. Consider Caroline Calloway, an Instagram influencer who became a viral sensation after her former friend Natalie Beach wrote a riveting exposé on her experience ghost-writing captions and book proposals for the aspiring author. Since being exposed for plagiarism and scamming her followers into buying books which have yet to be published, Caroline has somehow become more famous thanks to the scandal and has been legitimized as a figure in the literary world. If she keeps up this persona of an author, she will be perceived with the same seriousness as a working writer without having to produce a single original essay or book. The romanticization of the chaotic, neurotic, tragic female writer is more appealing to the reader than the creative process of constructing a sentence, a sonnet or a song. The irony of this quirky writer-girl performance is that this character is chasing the very thing which would threaten the quality of her work— success.
“I did not become famous, but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about (Babitz, Slow Days).”
This was a deep-seated fear of mine— becoming successful. Like Eve, I was raised by and around successful people. My parents came from humble beginnings, but they both defied the odds and achieved the self-made careers they had spent their entire adulthoods working towards. They had beautiful, interesting, successful friends and lived a cinematic— albeit melodramatic— lifestyle. In Chicago, you could live like an aristocrat at a fraction of the price. Your reputation— who you knew, your work ethic, your persona— mattered more than your net worth. Thanks to my mother’s popularity as a sort of it-girl amongst Chicago’s political elite, I had always been adjacent to fame, wealth and power from a young age while still maintaining a private life of Midwestern, upper middle-class charm. I wanted to keep it this way, if not escape this world entirely.
Success felt like a trap. The more successful one became, the more one had to perform as some sanitized caricature of oneself. But everyone around me believed I would grow up to be successful too. I was well-connected, intelligent, pretty and palatable. The potential of success loomed around me. I was conditioned to meet everyone’s expectations of me to represent my family, my social group and the entire Black race with poise and dignity. It was not enough to look perfect or speak perfectly. I had to be perfect. Every move I made was monitored. I could never let my guard down. Chicago is a big city, but it functions like a small town. You never know who you may run into, and so you must never break character. Simply being associated with powerful people meant I had to play the part of the exceptional Black intellectual at all times. The longer I kept this performance up, the more I would be rewarded— and I was an excellent actress. Every mansion and social club I tripped into felt like a luxurious prison or an elitist cult. If this was success, I wanted no parts of it.
My mother was confused by my yearning to return to her homeland, the place she had escaped from when she was my age. In her mind New York was not safe, but safety is often the price one must pay for freedom. I wanted to be free more than anything in the world. Free to think critically and form my own opinions. Free to speak from the heart without censorship. Free to create when I felt called to create. To live out my destiny— not to live up to anyone else’s standard.
An admission to a New York college would be my golden ticket out of my bougie bubble and into the concrete jungle. I loved New York like a long lost relative. Though she had surely changed since my mother saw her last, New York’s essence was still intact, and I understood her nature very well. No matter how hard my mother tried to conform to the respectability politics of Chicago, she couldn’t extinguish the South Bronx fire still burning within her. She raised me to be fearless. Bold. Authentic. My mother was my heart, and thus my heart strings were inextricably tied to the city that raised her. New Yorkers didn’t care who you were as long as you didn’t stand in their way. Finally, I could walk aimlessly down the street, wearing tight jeans and an un-ironed shirt, speaking loudly and confidently, and no one would stop to ask who I was or who I knew or what I had been through. They didn’t know and they didn’t care. It was Heaven. But even Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden at some point.
Part II.
I attended Tisch on a full scholarship and was one of seven Black girls majoring in Film & TV out of a class of 350 students. Despite being trained since infancy to trespass spaces like these, nothing could’ve prepared me for this environment. Most of the other kids were nepotism babies or their wealthy parents bankrolled their creative hobbies. Many of my classmates had already produced their own short films before attending the school and had access to expensive cameras and professional editing software. I had accidentally applied to the wrong program and only sent in a short parody horror script to get into the Film & TV major. I had never touched a professional video camera before. My parents had always exposed me to classic films throughout my childhood and my family loved to critique movies at the dinner table, but I had never met anyone who had gone to film school before attending college. I was shocked that an arts school in the most colorful city in America could be so White, so patriarchal and so classist.
All of Manhattan had been turned into a playground for New York’s undergraduate students, many of whom were wealthy. When I arrived in New York, NYU and Columbia had nearly overtaken The Catholic Church as the biggest property owners in the city. As a result, the culture of the city had completely changed— and so had the price of living. Most of the real New Yorkers who made the city great had been pushed to the outskirts of each borough to make space for all the transplants. They could barely afford to maintain an empire state of mind. The cost of rent for a studio apartment in Lower Manhattan cost about $2000 per month. A monthly metro card cost $127 a month. A latte at La Colombe around the corner from Tisch was nearly $5 a cup. Just to breathe in New York cost $1.25 per inhale. To be comfortable in New York, you couldn’t just be middle class. You had to be wealthy.
By my freshman year in 2016, the Occupy Wall Street movement had taken place a short train ride away just five years prior to my arrival in Manhattan. My family had nearly been swallowed up by the financial crisis of 2008, and the wealth gap in the United States had become cavernous. Those who struggled to make money couldn’t stop spending it. Those who had all the money in the world worshiped it like an idol. They made the hoarding of money an artform. As Andy Warhol once put it, “making money is art and good business is the best kind of art.”
The neoliberal political economy of the post-Reagan era had transformed the streets of downtown Manhattan from a once gritty, bohemian underworld for artists into a sanitized, posh outlet mall for trust fund babies. In a world where the barrier to enter any major industry in New York was as high as the skyscrapers dangling above our heads, connections were valued, acquired, and traded like stocks. In Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, author and professor Wendy Brown dissects the nature of homo oeconimicus and prophecies the grave danger this new creature poses to our society and our existence as a human race. She writes:
“[Homo oeconimicus] as human capital is concerned with enhancing its portfolio value in all domains of its life, an activity undertaken through practices of self-investment and attracting investors. Whether through social media ‘followers,’ ‘likes,’ and ‘retweets,’ through rankings and ratings for every activity and domain, or through more directly monetized practices, the pursuit of education, training, leisure, reproduction, consumption, and more are increasingly configured as strategic decisions and practices related to enhancing the self’s future value (Brown, Pg. 33-34).”
Every decision–down to the clothes one wore, the way one spoke, one’s political leanings portrayed on social media, etcetera–was often strategically crafted with the intention to appeal to friendship groups in the upper class who might accept them into their inner circle and increase their financial, social and cultural value as living, breathing human capital. One had to somehow be comfortable in these upper-class environments, well-versed in the language of elitism and respectability politics, yet be a humble, socialist self-made enigma all at once. I didn’t know it then, but my peculiar upbringing was a rehearsal for the role everyone wanted to play.
Despite having to go into debt to afford the cost of my dorm room on campus, my social capital and my reputation as a good writer attracted kids who aspired to be artists, or rather, aspired to hang out with artists. I had an underground but relatively amusing social media presence where I ranted about anything that came to my mind and shared the most intimate moments of my college life. Every time I had an interesting thought or a memorable moment, I shared it with the public. At first, the only people watching were my friends and acquaintances, but then this network began to expand. There were people who approached me at parties and referred to me by my handle instead of by my real name. Strangers knew more details about my life than my own family members did. I didn’t mind being vulnerable. I loved meeting new people and being open with everyone. I just didn’t like the feeling of being perceived by my posts, of being reduced to an image or an archetype.
Over time, it became clear that most of the people in my immediate social orbit were not around me because they loved me. They were around me because they believed I might be successful someday, and that if they stuck around, they too might become successful by association. I was just some stock in their investment portfolio of fake friends; human capital to hold onto and cash in when my star would shoot off into space like Google in the 2000s. This filled me with sorrow, but I was not angry. I knew that this was the way of the world. It was every person for themselves. A death match for clout. They hadn’t yet realized that America’s idea of success was not a prize worth fighting over.
New York had become overrun with fame obsessed, money hungry transplants who wanted to live out their fantasies in real time. Every other party felt like a big budget Harmony Korine film, or an amateur stage play of Warhol’s Factory. Every guy moving to the city wanted to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, and every girl wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw. I just wanted to be myself, but this self was becoming harder and harder to perform.
Despite my rebellion against the Black bourgeoisie, I could feel myself morphing into a one-dimensional character. I still hadn’t learned to establish boundaries between myself and the people I loved. The only time I felt authentic was when I was alone. The social conditioning to be perfect still haunted me. I played to each person’s expectation of me as the perfect friend, the perfect student, the perfect party girl, the perfect representation of what a modern woman was meant to be. It was as if my soul, as expansive and multi-faceted as it was, was slowly being shoved into a neat little package that could be marketed to network execs and turned into a 30-minute episodic dramedy for television. I knew I had to get out, but I didn’t have an out. I had no reason to complain. This is what everyone around me wanted. I was on my way to getting everything, and losing myself in the process. For the first time in a long time, I prayed. I asked God to save me. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew this was not the path I was meant to walk. The Divine heard my cries and answered me in the most unlikely way.
I had fallen in love with Eve’s writing, but I still wasn’t sold on Los Angeles. Eve wrote about LA as if the city were a beloved sibling— with adoration and an honest acknowledgment of all her faults. She knew that people in LA were fake. She wrote about it extensively. She just didn’t care. I cared. If I wanted to escape the phonies, why would I move to the land of plastic dolls and clout czars? It just didn’t seem rational. I flew back home to Chicago for Thanksgiving and was bombarded with questions from my loved ones about my impending graduation.
“So when are you moving to LA?”
“LA is the best place for writers, you’re going right?”
“When you get to LA…”
This went on all night. They all knew it was a rite of passage for Film & TV kids to move to LA after college. It was the next logical step if I wanted a career in screenwriting. I deeply resented this notion. Not once had I mentioned moving to LA. This was not even a thought in my mind. I wanted to be a New Yorker more than I wanted to be a successful writer. “Don’t go all Annie Hall on me,” my roommate and dear friend insisted. I assured my family and friends that I was staying put in Brooklyn. When I flew back to the borough, my roommates and I went out to dance and catch up over drinks at The Rosemont. Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love” had just leaked on Twitter, and the DJ was already blasting it on loop at the club. I pardoned myself from the festivities to use the restroom. As I washed my hands in the corner of the dimly lit crawl space, a man cracked the door open.
“Sorry, but do you mind if I come in? I really have to go.”
“Sure, go ahead. I’ve seen it all before.” I quipped. He laughed and proceeded to pee behind me as I dried my hands. Suddenly, he turned his head towards me with his dick still firmly in hand and asked:
“Hey, has anyone ever told you you should move to LA?”
“Why would you ask that?” I was defensive. I didn’t want to tell him the truth.
“I don’t know, you seem like a fun girl. You’re cute. You’re young. You’re here so you would love West Hollywood. It has lots of great bars and parties. It’s fun to be young there.”
“But it’s fun to be young in New York.”
“You don’t have to stay in one place, you know. New York will always be here.”
“I’ll think about it. Thank you.”
We exchanged smiles before I left the room. A feeling of nausea and transcendence came over me, like I had just met an angel with an important message from above. I approached my roommates to tell them about the interaction.
“Stephanie, we’re in a gay bar. Every guy in here is going to tell you to move to LA. It’s not that deep.”
I wanted to believe them, but there was something about his delivery that shook me to my core. I looked around the bar to find him, but he had disappeared into the night. I took it as a sign. If the opportunity presented itself, I would be open to the idea. Little did I know of the whirlwind that was approaching in the new year. The Covid-19 pandemic would soon bring New York to its knees. Everything I thought I knew about the world, about life and about myself would change in 2020.
After a series of traumatic events and miraculous revelations, the Divine sent me a lifeline. It was July 2020. My lease was up at the end of the month and I was struggling to find a new apartment. I knew what I wanted. I could envision a 3 bed, 2 bath duplex with a washer and dryer in unit. It had a bright yellow door and a backyard where I could smoke weed, paint and meditate. If I had a roommate, we could use the spare bedroom as a home office. But a place like this in Brooklyn would be impossible for me to afford.
Suddenly, a friend of mine who I had lost contact with texted me. She told me there was a director looking for an assistant for her new film and she thought I would be perfect for the job. I thanked her and immediately applied via Instagram DM. Within two days, I interviewed and got the job. The same day I got the assistant gig, my childhood friend from Chicago texted me that her roommate in LA was moving out at the end of the month. The place was a 3 bed, 1.5 bath duplex in West Hollywood. It had a washer and dryer next to the kitchen, a backyard area and a free parking space. Though it didn’t have the bright yellow door I imagined, the bathroom had canary-colored tiles. The rent was even cheaper than what I was paying for my room in Brooklyn. The girl who once said she would never move to LA died in the pandemic. The new Stephanie was open to anything God had planned for her. Within two week’s time, I packed up all my books and all my vintage clothes and moved across the country.
Part III.
It took a while for me to warm up to the city. I still missed New York. I walked an hour in the heat to get a bagel from Sam’s on Sunset just to pretend I was in Brooklyn again. To be fair, I was told it was only 5 minutes away, but the man who gave me the recommendation on 3rd street assumed I had a car. I didn’t even have a driver’s license. I never thought I would need it. In New York, I could reach any destination on foot or by train (sometimes by taxi or Uber if it was the early morning and I was coming home from a night out). The great thing about walking around Los Angeles was that you got to have the sidewalks to yourself. The bad thing was everyone on the street could see you and judge you from the safety of their G-Wagons.
Everyone in LA had a car. It was a necessity. The city was sprawling, and all the best neighborhoods were disjointed and connected by highways. To be without a car in LA was a signal to natives that you couldn’t afford one. Any distance on foot, no matter how close it seemed on a map, would take at least 30 minutes to reach. Public transportation was a joke. I heard whispers of a subway train, but I had yet to see any evidence of this. The bus system was functional, but often inconsistent. People in traffic would watch me walk across Beverly Boulevard with my bags of groceries in utter disbelief. That homeless girl has great taste in shoes I’m sure they thought to themselves. I knew I would have to get my license if I intended to stay in LA permanently.
This was a huge commitment. Did I love LA enough to compromise on one of my never commandments? I had only just met LA formally. We were still in the flirting stage. I was open to learning more about her and seeing where this adventure could take us, but I had to assert my boundaries. If things got serious between us, then I would get a car. But until then, I was a lowly pedestrian.
The job I moved out to LA for ended abruptly after just a few months. My boss turned out to be racist and the production company who bought the script pulled the plug on the project out of fear of being cancelled. Though I was disappointed, I was not worried. I knew the job was just a vehicle to get me out to California. I asked Lili Anolik for advice on what to do next with my career. She had become a mentor of mine and encouraged me to continue writing and developing a digital media platform I founded called Black Sheep Collective. “Whatever you do, don’t work in print. Print is dead.” I appreciated her honesty and her warmth. I took her advice and began working for myself.
I deleted all my social media accounts and went off the grid. I also took a vow of celibacy to calibrate my sex drive and set it to creative mode. I wanted to be more present with myself, my work and the world around me. I was enjoying my new life. I loved my home and living with my childhood friend. I became closer to my college friends who lived in LA, and we kept each other grounded as we navigated post-grad life. I was eating healthier, praying each morning, connecting with nature whenever I could and working on my creative projects nearly every day. I lived on my own terms and moved at my own pace.
LA was everything Eve said it would be and yet it had completely changed by the time I arrived. There was something magical and dystopian about the place. It was ugly and gorgeous. Opulent and impoverished. The segregation between the haves and the have nots was visible. The haves were hidden in the hills, shaded underneath the palms trees and drinking green juices in their air-conditioned homes. The have nots were cast aside with the trash on the streets, their withered bodies exposed to the beating sun. I existed somewhere in between. I was living on unemployment and had enough of a disposable income to afford groceries, $7 pre-rolls and the occasional shopping haul at Squaresville. Despite my limited financial funds, my social capital and my appearance gained me entry into the most exclusive spaces and social scenes.
There were some days where I would end up in someone’s mansion, sipping on gin and juice by a pool and silently soaking up the sunshine. There were other days where I would meet strangers on the street, mostly blue-collar workers and those living within the local homeless communities of WeHo, and chat for hours about American history and politics. There was always this feeling that anything could happen. If you were at the right place at the right time, a good story would be waiting there for you. But the more comfortable I became, the more I wanted to leave. I began to run into familiar faces at parties and on my walks around West Hollywood. Onlookers became suspicious. Anywhere I went, people looked me up and down. Not because they recognized me, but because I seemed like someone they should recognize.
One night, after my roommate and I befriended a couple of models at a rooftop party in Hollywood, we followed them to a mansion in Bel Air. We were starving, and the older gentleman who owned the house was kind enough to let us raid his fridge and eat some pasta his personal chef had meal prepped for him. He also had ounces upon ounces of weed neatly tucked away by the kitchen and allowed us to take a couple buds home with us for free.
“Wow, he is a really nice guy.” I said to my roommate.
“Yeah, Steph. He thinks we’re hot. Of course he’s being nice.”
I hadn’t considered that, but it made sense. While I stood by the sink and ate my bowl of pasta, another girl sitting silently beside her boyfriend at the kitchen island turned to me and told me that I had “a perfect body.”
“Me? Really?” I was taken aback. Only in a post-Kim K era Los Angeles would a size 12 Black Latina girl be perceived in such a way.
“Your proportions are perfect. Your height, the ratio between your waist, your hips, your boobs; it’s perfect.”
I could tell she meant this not as a compliment but as an empirical fact. I could also tell that she herself had gotten work done to achieve this look. I thanked her kindly, but I was confused with what to do with this information. I had worked very hard not to be perceived as perfect in any way. In fact, I did not want to be perceived by anyone at all. I guess there is no way to control anyone’s perception of you, but this presented a very dangerous dilemma.
Though this interaction was benign, I became aware of the gaze my physical body attracted. In LA, beauty is more than just a characteristic. It’s a multi-billion-dollar business. Pretty privilege was a very real thing. My roommate, who was a professional model herself, showed me an app where she could redeem free meals at various restaurants and chains around LA just for being a model. The more models who frequented these establishments, the more laypeople would want to go and buy food there if they could see all the pretty people up close. Everyone was pretty where I lived. I couldn’t just dress like a bum walking down 3rd street to get to Trader Joe’s. There were celebrities and models and influencers everywhere. Anytime I left the house to run errands, someone would ask me, “Are you a curve model? An actress?” They were always shocked when I told them I was “just a writer.”
I couldn’t help but feel for Eve. It must’ve been grueling to be such a deep person standing in shallow water. When you googled her name, her bra size and the names of her former lovers were among the first results. She was described as voluptuous, seductive, a sex dynamo with irresistible curves. People were so fixated on her body that hardly anyone paid attention to her work. In an interview with Colleen Fitzgibbon for BOMB Magazine, Carolee Schneemann responded to Pat Steir’s comment that she seemingly struggled to navigate the male-dominated art world because she was, “too beautiful.” Schneemann responded:
“If women are beautiful, they’re a source of arousal, and that distracts male purpose. Beauty is adhesive, it’s sticky. There’s also the traditional mind-body split. In order to be intellectually dependable, you can’t have a voluptuous, luscious, erotic body, because the split is between intelligence and sexuality.”
This was the first time I had ever been perceived as sexy. Maybe that’s not entirely true, but it was the first time my beauty was treated with more importance than my intelligence or my talent.
I was still very innocent, naive and aloof. Sometimes I got so lost in my own imagination that I forgot I was even in a body. I could not conceive how someone could look at me and assume anything about me based on my physical appearance. I never looked at people in that way or made any preconceived notions about people based on their appearance. I knew that I was not my body. I was a soul. To me, the body was nothing more than a vehicle my soul had borrowed from the Earth to reach some unknown destination, and my intuition was my navigation system. But most people didn’t think the way I did. Most people in this town cared about the flesh and the material and nothing else. I learned this the hard way.
I left Los Angeles abruptly after being drugged at an Oscar winner’s party and assaulted in a Rolls Royce outside of the venue in Hollywood. I now despise Rolls Royce cars and I can’t look at a glass of pink champagne without wanting to barf. It was truly a miracle that I was able to escape without anything worse happening to me. I had hoped I would never have to experience something like this, but I always knew the odds were against me. Almost every woman I knew had been assaulted at some point in her life. Now that it had happened to me, I was just so grateful that I was alive. By the grace of God, I escaped from my attackers and got home in one piece.
It was strange, but when I finally realized that I had been drugged, a wave of calm came over me. I felt pity for the men and women involved in my assault. I couldn’t help but wonder about these individual people as little babies. I envisioned each of them in a cradle being rocked to sleep. I wondered how these human beings who were once such innocent souls became so corrupted by the world that they would morph into monsters. The ravenous homo oeconomicus. This was a cultural cancer which had spread beyond one woman’s story. This was an evil which could not be named. But what I knew for certain was that no one, not even the most successful people in Hollywood, could ever break my spirit.
Part IV.
There were many things I learned during my year in LA. I learned I could call any place on Earth my home as long as I was free to be myself. I learned I was protected and loved unconditionally by the Creator and that I would always be provided for exceedingly and abundantly. I learned that the career I had been pressured to chase would someday gravitate towards me at the right time, in the right place. I was not willing to compromise my integrity or sell my soul to get everything. I already had everything I needed within me. This is where my creative journey really began. I had finally found the path to my destiny.
I do not know what the future holds for me. I do not have a five-year plan or even a one month plan. I follow wherever God leads me. As a writer and an artist, it is imperative that I am allowed the freedom to follow my heart. There are far too many artists today who are actively denying their own intuitive voices so they can quell the sounds of their grumbling stomachs. Our society perpetuates the trope of the starving artist by making it nearly impossible for those who are born into working class families to afford creative materials or have access to these exclusive artistic and academic spaces where they may meet their future collaborators and mentors.
We see the artist’s struggle— working menial labor jobs, withstanding inhumane living conditions, numbing the pains of emotional distress with unhealthy coping mechanisms— as a necessary agitation for the formation of her incandescent career. If creation and communication are one and the same, what message is this artist sending to her audience if the source of inspiration for her work is her trauma, her toxic behavior, her agony? What does her artistic journey say to young creatives who wish to become successful that she had to dim her light and subject herself to unjust treatment in order to be published, be heard, be taken seriously?
Make no mistake: creative labor is legitimate labor. It is hardly simple to come up with an idea for a work of art, find the materials to construct this piece you have imagined, and then find the courage to share it with the public. It can be an exhausting, time consuming, expensive process and there is no guarantee that it will pay off. We take the risk because the reward is much greater than any sum of money or number of empty accolades.
The gift is to take that which is not concrete, bring it into form and allow this new manifestation to re-shape the minds and hearts of those who encounter it. It is an act of alchemy or, better yet, an act of love. Perhaps our world system does not know how to pay or treat creatives fairly because creativity is a pillar of femininity and we live in a hyper-masculinized empire. If the artist’s goal for creation is not profit, then the creative industry does not see her work as a wise investment. We do not see the value in an artist’s work until the artist’s life has been deemed valuable. If her work cannot be commodified, then she must be neatly packaged and marketed as a product to be sold and swallowed whole.
The stereotype of the chaotic, broken woman writer was born out a genuine struggle for female artists to create freely and support themselves in a misogynistic world. Virginia Woolf deconstructed these myths about female authors and artists perfectly in her essay A Room of One’s Own.
“For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certain.”
Until now, there has been no precedent for female artists to get everything and still live happy, healthy, normal lives. If the patriarchal definition of everything is actually nothing, what is the true meaning of everything? Every woman’s idea of everything is different just as every woman’s creative voice is unique to her spirit. However, there are some truths which are universal to all artists.
It is our responsibility as creatives to live in the present. It is said that the present moment is where our worldly time and God’s eternity intersect. It is in this place where we experience the serendipity and abundance of life. If an artist is too concerned with her future, her past, or her survival, she cannot live in the present. If she cannot live in the present, she cannot create freely. Authentic stories can only be told with true life experience. An artist’s life— her memories, her observations, her inspirations— is her muse. The quality of the artist’s work is reflective of the quality of her life. It is her ability to savor every moment, every conversation, every sensual detail and store it in her creative toolbox that makes her a valuable cultural asset. It is her talent and her work which should be taken seriously— not her persona.
It is ironic that just as women and other marginalized groups around the world are tasting equality for the first time, everything seems to be falling apart. Perhaps the chaos we are witnessing now is not a sign that the end is nigh. Perhaps these are the birthing pains of an emerging new world. A world where everyone can have everything and sacrifice nothing. There will be more space for women and people of color and queer folk and the disabled community and humans from all walks of life who have been previously disempowered to rise and fulfill their destinies. There will be more time for everyone to discover their creative gifts and live joyful, meaningful lives.
Real success is being who you were called to be without any fear or interruption. To create beautiful things and share our creations with compassion for one another. Imagine all the writers and artists and inventors who should’ve been household names. Imagine how wonderful the world would be today if these souls had been given the resources, the space, the emotional support and the respect to be themselves and create freely. It may be too late for them, but it is not too late to avenge them. The dawn of a harmonized society is upon us. Everything we need to build this new world is within us and around us. We are dynamic beings in an infinite universe. There is more than enough everything for everyone. Everything is everything.