T.I.A.B.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
For the past couple months, I exited my bedroom each morning to be greeted by a sky blue-colored tee shirt draped over Sue’s bedroom door across the hall. I’d created this reflective ritual for myself as a memorial to our vacation in Los Angeles in August 2023, one funded by my selling four Taylor Swift tickets for ten thousand dollars, a sale that occurred nine months in advance of the trip it spawned, and a sale whose particulars I casually disclosed to Sue as she chopped vegetables in her kitchen, her reacting by shaking while gripping the counter and screaming, “WHAT?! WHAT?! OH, MY FUCKING GOD, ARE YOU SERIOUS?!” as loudly as she’d ever screamed in our sixteen years together. Rivulets of tears commenced racing one another for refuge under her chin. She was going home.
The shirt features a logo for Pink’s, a legendary hot dog eatery, with a smiling, sunglasses-sporting frank walking in step with an equally contented bottle of mustard, one of the innumerable keepsakes I purchased for Sue during our trip, asking if she wanted it as much as it appeared she did before she thanked me and Taylor Swift. As we approached Pink’s on our final day in Los Angeles, Sue insisted we dine there, swaying me on it as the spot where Sean Penn had proposed to Madonna. We waited in line while gazing at a tall, very pretty, light-skinned black woman whose long, braided hair fell loosely down her back as she stuck her chin out and primped for a professional photographer, Sue asserting that she had to be a real model, or at least a highly skilled social media influencer, an “only-in-L.A.” moment, or so she chose to believe.
Sue snapped photos of the vintage exterior overlooked by billboards of Emmy Awards nominees gussying it up, of the black and white framed photos on display chronicling the restaurant’s transition from pushcart to fixed location in 1946, of Barbie’s stopover in 2004, and even walked across the street to get widescreen images, her knack for rousing unforeseen exuberance and instantly transmogrifying into humanity’s biggest fan of something you didn’t even know existed in full force, my enchanted reaction to the place’s timelessly hip allure the confirmation she needed to once again say, “See, Blebbz!” as evidence that her postulate had been right all along: Los Angeles was indeed the greatest city in the world. The sun shined as the smell of fried food filled the air. She knew she would never be back.
I recently rerouted the ritual by nailing the Pink’s shirt into my wooden basement wall beside a Tool concert poster, a band Sue disliked because her ex-boyfriend, a born and bred local she dated after moving to Los Angeles in 1996, idolized the group in part due to their contempt for the city, cocksure that L.A. would one day be swallowed by the ocean. The city’s first tropical storm in eighty-four years had soaked the area on our second vacation day as we took a joy ride thrilled that scant drivers were on the road, slowly rolling through and marveling at majestic houses on Beverly Hills and Westwood side streets before ultimately stopping at a Ralphs grocery store in Pacific Palisades, enamored with our routine of patronizing as many grocery stores as possible whenever visiting a new area. Seventeen months later, the town would be gone, obliterated by fire.
Our time at Pink’s had become one of my go-to Los Angeles snapshots, the epitome of Sue’s spontaneity and vivacity, often in disbelief that she could extract such monumental joy from the otherwise quotidian, especially her uncanny ability to push her childlike wonderment into overdrive sparked by an ineffable zeal compelling her to love things in the purest way she knew how, proof that emotional authenticity defined her existence as much as anything else, fearless about incurring judgment for being absurdly happy no matter the subject of her admiration. We all possess the ability to live in the moment, but she channeled her aptitude for it like a limitless superpower, a word she would now sidebar to astutely note contains her name in its prefix.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“This would’ve put Sue in a mental hospital,” I texted my pal Rick as we streamed ABC7’s coverage of the Los Angeles fires earlier this month.
Sue hinted to me now and again about moving to Los Angeles, a plan I hesitantly entertained each time, anxious that the potential for natural disasters would affirm how those nihilists in Tool kind of had a point. Now, for the first time in my life, I was watching a tragedy unfold in real time powerless to summon the usual crass jokes that helped me compartmentalize the misery by offsetting it with bleak humor. Quitting marijuana four days prior proved unwise as I rated the happenings out west the single saddest news story I’d yet witnessed. My best friend, Moore, emailed a poorly timed paragraph making light of the ongoing Armageddon, our standard coping mechanism, following it with a second email fifteen minutes later upon recognizing the rawness of my devastation, suggesting I’d have Augusta, Georgia, for backup.
“It’s not even about returning as much as it's all the attachments,” I replied. “Really cementing my friendship with Rick there for the Rose Bowl and BCS [Bowl Championship Series] in 2013 as Sue was in the hospital near death and his father was in the hospital in Philly (he's also been depressed as shit about this—he hadn't consumed any tequila since New Year’s Eve and went out for a bottle tonight/I fought the urge to get baked at my mother's house), the two recent trips (obviously my all-time favorite vacation, favorite record store, favorite bookstore, favorite concert venue, two favorite meals, etc.), my co-workers I love who are there, the idea that it's a complete melting pot and idealized dichotomy of architecture/nature in America, this country's best and most diverse gastronomical city, the most photographed city in the world, a genuine symbol of hope and optimism, that I keep the spirit of it alive in my living room and car every time I'm in them, my love of cinema, the home base for the misunderstood, what it meant to Sue and my relationship with her (duh), & on & on. It's so many different things that all mean so much to me.”
Even worse, my worries kept homing in on one man, a guy who had long been the individual artist whose work I most associated with the city.
“I hope David Lynch is okay,” I texted my pal Drooq during the back and forth with Rick. “The one celebrity I’ve thought about. Poor guy can’t leave his house and outside is soaked in smoke.”
The director had tweeted in August 2024 that he was living with emphysema, a consequence of his addiction to smoking American Spirits, unable to leave his Mulholland Drive compound concerned he’d contract an illness that would end his life, a life I predicted to Drooq would end within a year of the tweet. And now his adopted city was engulfed in flames.
Lynch’s central Los Angeles-based films—Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire—cynically fixate on the commonly spewed (mis)perception of the city as a depraved hellscape, yet the man delighted in living there for fifty-plus years, particularly fond of the sun’s light, uploading weather reports he recorded in his home online, his catchphrase (“If youuuuuuuu can belieeeeeeeeve it, it’s a Friday once again!”) posted on Friday mornings for months in a group chat shared with my Filipina co-workers who knew nothing about him, but loved that he, too, seemed as excited as they were about the forthcoming weekend. He died on January 15th, five days prior to his birthday and two days prior to the twenty-ninth anniversary of my father’s death. At least the hot dog and mustard on my wall were happy.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Sue and I snagged a partially shaded table on the Pink’s patio to eat our mid-afternoon lunch as she commented on how much easier she found swallowing crappy food than the healthy stuff she kept struggling to put in her body in between the nutrient-rich drinks she concocted, holding her nose when imbibing the morning’s taupe-colored sludge, but at least savoring her chlorophyl shots she kept in the freezer for an afternoon “snack.” She’d awoken with a sore throat on our sixteenth anniversary, March 5th, 2023, but assumed it was no big deal. She still had a sore throat when I left for The Masters a month later and vowed to see a doctor if it continued bothering her the subsequent week. On May 5th, she texted me, “Do you have time to talk? It doesn’t have to be now—just whenever you can get away. Maybe after you eat dinner? Just please get prepared because it’s not the talk I wish we were having.”
Her alcoholism, the cause for her hospital stay in late 2013, would kill her despite being sober for nearly a decade. A tumor had attached itself to her esophagus and she rejected chemotherapy, considering it a formula for killing herself to live, her outright refusal to shed her unrivaled blonde and pink hair ensnaring my empathy. “I’m not going to die an ugly monster,” she confessed, a woman who fretted about growing old, wishing she had the resources to receive injections to revert her face to how it looked in the black and white headshots she’d had taken per the recommendation of her agent after relocating to Sherman Oaks in 1996, headshots that now hung on the wall beside the Pink’s shirt, her rarely glimpsed bangs, crisp white tee shirt, and pleather jacket imbuing the dozen two-tone shots with the ‘50s Hollywood vibe she prized in American Graffiti and Grease.
“I think that guy might be a minor celebrity,” she whispered as she held another chunk of her vegan sausage, averse to biting directly into it due to a filling she’d gotten in her front tooth, excess sugar consumption replacing her addiction to peppermint schnapps and vodka. “He’s talking about filming a TV show, but I can’t figure out what it is. Dammit. Hang on, let’s listen more.” She leaned forward with her mouth straight and eyes widened like it would impart supersonic hearing, earning chuckles instead.
The bald man had stood in line behind us for a half hour then sat at the neighboring table, loudly conversing with another man who we determined he hadn’t seen in a year or more, Sue and I devoted to teleporting to our college days (and hers as a bubbly, polished local news reporter in her mid-twenties), upstart journalists forever on the case to procure tidbits fundamental to a good story while we engaged in nonsensical banter as a cover for our eavesdropping. Nothing substantial got scribbled in my notebook, but after we finished our spread, the last time Sue ate her favorite food, french fries, she requested I take photos of her beside the towering pink wall guarding the restaurant’s parking lot.
Sue playfully pointed her chin in the air in deference to the model we’d seen, the grapefruit-sized tumor pressing against her tanned neck skin as she attempted to convey sexiness, a quality she openly admitted she lacked, while wearing a child’s-size royal blue tank top home to a glittery purple owl and the word SMART below it, a pink and lime-colored floral-patterned skirt, and her light blue Crocs flip-flops adorned with Jibbitz, receding back into her dorky self as I took a sequence of photos where she, donning the dollar store white sunglasses she swore by, giddily stuck her tongue out, flashed peace signs, and danced in place like the little girl she clung to being throughout adulthood. This was an established practice on our day trips, but “putting on the Sue,” as she affectionately called it, had been magnified a millionfold out west.
She’d withstood a coughing fit four days prior to our lunch at Pink’s, spending the night in the fetal position in our hotel room bathtub to avoid interrupting my sleep — reiterating that the vacation was ours, not hers — and because she feared ruining our day, the details of which she prolonged sharing until the urgency faded, aware that I’d be upset but more apt to let it go upon seeing how well she’d functioned in the hours since the incident. Her worst coughing fit would ensue a week prior to the one that killed her, a bloody battle, exhausted afterward but unwilling to consult with a doctor or be self-pitying about the pain it caused her, she wrote a recap in her health journal then resumed a reality television show for background noise while researching more, as if doing anything out of the ordinary might disrupt her own fate. I truly don’t know how awful she felt inside, a topic she spurned providing clarity about, in equal parts to protect my own volatile neuroses and scared that verbalizing the truth made it that much worse.
Following Pink’s, Sue coveted a tattoo to commemorate the trip, walking up a steep staircase into a shop on Melrose Avenue where she got lucky, the man conveniently having a forty-five-minute opening as a client tapped her credit card to pay. (“Forty-four minutes, really,” Sue predictably told me.) I returned to a record store across the street where I’d purchased two albums and heard juicy local heavy metal lore from the owner the previous afternoon, this time snatching an original copy of Monster Magnet’s Powertrip from the racks and telling him, “I’ll never see this in a store again” about the album Sue and I consistently used as our soundtrack when not conceiving children early in our relationship.
A pink infinity symbol decorated Sue’s left ring finger when I met her back at the tattoo shop’s register, that same symbol already tattooed on her wrist, its concision easier to hide than her other cherished motif, the peace symbol. We’d texted one another “LYTIAB” for years, our acronym for “Love You To Infinity And Beyond,” an everlasting encomium we sporadically said to one another in our best (“Comma, questionable at”) Buzz Lightyear voices, our way of reinforcing how our love would radiate as long as the cosmos did. Sue told me about her tattoo artist, a softspoken Gen X-er who lived in Echo Park with his girlfriend and loved the downtown area we’d visited earlier in the week when Taylor Swift paid for a dozen self-help and cancer perseverance books along with the finest meal we’d ever eaten together, which included a peach and tomato fruit salad with shiso, a Japanese herb proficient at aiding the respiratory tract that I found growing at a farm located a few miles from where Sue and I lived for the last weeks of her life, her seizing onto the synchronicity by suitably implying it was a sign from The Universe coaxing us back to live in Los Angeles.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Three days before the Los Angeles fires broke out, I bought an eight-by-ten press photo of Sade Adu, my favorite singer, the last woman to make Sue and I cry simultaneously. Once I’d configured my turntable in our new basement, I invited Sue to join me for what I hoped would become a weekly deejaying session, spinning her four tracks as a method to force her to co-star in my most celebrated housebound activity: listening to records. Madonna’s “Holiday” opened the proceedings, Sue smile-crying at it being our happiness anthem, then Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line” resonated, her vaguely remembering how she stipulated that it be “our song” when it played on one of her light rock compilations late at night in her old apartment, crying once more, this time accompanied by my laughter at her expressively belting the chorus with trademark added syllables and head bobbing. The third song, “By Your Side,” had been my pick for “our song” when Sue was obsessed for a year with the idea of us hosting a “fake wedding,” partaking in all the matrimonial motions with our nearest and dearest on hand, but not unifying as a government-certified couple, an idea that I, a man strongly opposed to marriage, regarded as both a waste of money and way of compromising one of the few beliefs I rebuffed being open-minded about.
Our realtor, Jessica, had told me how real she deemed my love for Sue because I’d honored her plea to not tell anyone about her illness (two exceptions were granted) and made no appeal that she reconsider the decision to essentially end her life, not that treatment guaranteed her survival. “Do unto others, dude,” one of Sue’s aces in the hole, was the prevailing, and really, only wisdom. I hadn’t pondered the lyrics prior to placing the stylus on side one, but the refrain landed with a wallop, Sue shuffling off the barstool on which she was awkwardly balanced, a self-anointed klutz until the end, to embrace me at length and thank me for choosing it while sobbing, her first and final time hearing the song.
And if you want to cry, I am here to dry your eyes
And in no time, you'll be fine
You think I'd leave your side, baby
You know me better than that
You think I'd leave you down when you're down on your knees
I wouldn't do that
On January 16th, I opened my mudroom door and saw a blackish rectangle protruding from the mailbox. As I grabbed it, I read the Sherman Oaks shipping address and realized the Sade photo had materialized in a soot-covered envelope delayed a handful of days by the fires, and inside it was a soaking wet backup envelope. Dreading that it would be trashed, the seller had thoughtfully secured the photo inside a resealable plastic sleeve, the identical way Sue had done when fulfilling sales of magazine cut-outs on her eBay store, ensuring Sade could be framed and hung on my wall near the Pink’s shirt.
Sue’s primary request when I crafted our vacation itinerary was to venture to Sherman Oaks, the city where she lived in two different apartment complexes during her four years in southern California. Upon arriving, Sue ogled the swimming pool housed feet from her old front door, the entry gate locked until an occupant left, and snuck in with her stuffed rabbit, Hildegard, to take photos and say hello/goodbye while I waited. (“Sorry, baby,” she later said to Hildegard while smooching her and patting her wet fur dry with a tissue in the car.) When we visited her second Sherman Oaks abode, I teased her for moving a few blocks away, much like her parents had literally moved across the street from her first childhood home to the one where they resided the rest of their lives, adding some lightness to the bittersweet. At times when my self-flagellating streak surfaced, I scolded myself that I should’ve never known Sue, that she should’ve become famous in Hollywood, that she didn’t deserve to meet the wrong man, forsake her dream city to marry him, and have it end in misery, returning to Enfield, a town she would begrudgingly learn to like before her death, but also a town she hated until the day she left for good, at least in theory, in May 1996, the same town where she would return to her sister killing herself, both her parents dying from Alzheimer’s, and almost drinking herself to death with me by her side for all of it. And still, in part due to inheriting her rosy point of view, I considered myself fortunate to be with her for the duration, perpetually hopeful that her next act, surely on the horizon, would signify a rebirth of her confidence and imagination. New ideas were her best friends.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
In many ways, August 25th, 2023, was the climactic day of Sue’s life, not to dismiss the milestone of leaving her childhood home for good several weeks later, but when she told me in May that she wouldn’t see Christmas, as pessimistic as any sentence she uttered in sobriety, I knew she meant it. We drove from Melrose to an ice cream shop in Larchmont, a neighborhood within Los Angeles that felt like a Lynchian fever dream, its quaintness and prefabricated contrast to the immediate surroundings reminiscent of New England main streets we revered for also intimating that porn kingpins and nitrous huffers lurked within, suspicions that creep into the minds of people who’ve viewed too much television and cinema.
Sue had pledged to herself to cease consuming processed foods once we got home, so eating ice cream was an obligation, her topping two scoops with rainbow sprinkles and mugging for photos with her multicolored fingernails and bracelets doubling as her own fashion sprinkles. Eating ice cream was an imaginative heaven for Sue, all ills on hiatus as she repeatedly analyzed each bite’s awesomeness in between emitting ecstatic sounds, the fact that vegan ice cream had endured as a staple in our hometown grocery stores certainly one of the reasons why she made peace with living in Connecticut again. “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream,” I told her on a few occasions when we ate it together, quoting the poet I crowned my life philosopher at age twenty, his thesis that ice cream, or indulging pure pleasure, reigned supreme, a philosophy Sue supported despite thinking the bulk of modernist poetry scanned as incomprehensible malarkey, a word she treasured.
“I don’t wanna leave here,” Sue said about the neighborhood, “but I know we have to.” We constantly raced against the clock on all our Blebbzventures, road trips to any locales that mattered, fighting to live in the moment while painfully aware that Father Time didn’t give a shit about our desires. With an hour to spare before our final outing, we briefly walked in Runyon Canyon, the entrance in the vicinity of the adjacent apartment complex where my co-worker’s mother would be forced to evacuate during the fires. Sue paused to sit on a bench not long into our walk, regretfully informing me that she couldn’t breathe well when trudging uphill as I sat with her and rubbed her back and left thigh for a minute or two until she decided to take more photos. I silently wiped tears from her eyes and kissed her forehead, us holding hands on the way out, an unspoken blow to one of our shared customs.
As we departed, she bought a cup of fresh watermelon juice from a cooler at the gate, her other favorite food, a fruit I had to cut for her each week with Big Scary Knife, which she judiciously kept at bay in Big Scary Knife drawer, terrified to handle it. She had purchased a pair of floral-patterned pink bell bottoms to match an off-the-shoulder pink blouse, her outfit for the Culture Club concert we were attending at the Hollywood Bowl. Once we parked—the staff lines cars up bumper to bumper, a strategy that yields less traffic than venues with traditional parking lots—she asked me to surveil for rubberneckers so she could strip to her undies, not panties, a word she inexplicably detested for somehow being insulting, to don the day’s second outfit, a neon pink and green almost shag carpet-textured jacket that I implored Talor Swift to pay for at a trendy store during the tropical storm the centerpiece of her glamorous, or “totes fab” (as Sue would cheekily say), get-up, a farewell nod to the awards show wardrobe stylings she studiously documented in notebooks all the years I knew her.
Sometimes, when people commended Sue’s hair or jewelry or clothing, I recalled how she told me that she wore it all for herself, but also in hopes it would make people happy. Throughout our vacation, numerous fascinated people complimented her—a beaming Hispanic man with his shy young daughter, a flamboyantly gay black man, the assistant manager at a restaurant dedicated to making salads, the parking attendant at a museum (“You should be handing out flyers in Venice,” he encouraged her through the open car window), and dozens of others—until she tearily said to me, “See! This is why I’m always telling you I belong here!” A lifelong advocate for the misunderstood, it took beholding the adoration of their most passionate cheerleader at her home base to grasp the certitude of her claim, not that it was in doubt. Sue was Los Angeles before she got there and for the entirety of her time away. Los Angeles was Sue for four years then a bonus seven days, although I imagine it wished it got her for longer.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Eight days marked the duration of my abstaining from marijuana, my sleep patterns in disarray without it. Ineffective at remembering hardly any dreams for years, the one emblazoned in my brain starred a vivid roll in the hay with the actress Sydney Sweeney, a dead-eyed, busty blonde who my Angeleno co-workers chided me for being the sole man they knew not infatuated with her…until I quit that damn jazz cabbage. As the fires raged on, I abandoned my preoccupation with the news to read modernist poetry again, each stanza a slippery slope, inevitably triggering righteousness about my atheistic conviction that deities are merely a byproduct of the human capacity to imagine.
“Life is all an abstraction,” I told my therapist. “A palm tree isn’t a symbol of triumph; it’s just a fucking tree!” I hated myself when I got like this, truculent and while not quite arrogant, a bit pompous and glib in rehashing to anyone who cared (or got paid) to listen that life is a combination of entropy and meaninglessness, not a philosophy Sue would be enthused to hear me preaching. When things happened beyond the scope of any reasonable logic or explanation, Sue liked to theorize that, I mean, you never know, but maybe an unseen somebody-or-other had a hand in making this magic moment, and assured that in the myriad subtle, patient ways she’d gotten me to at least contemplate her perspectives, I might be willing to negotiate with my hypothesis that when one’s life ends, it’s no different than a light bulb going out. I wouldn’t budge, referring to them as “sky dictators” and “merchants of superstition” and other bitchy invective I’ll skip.
“It shocks me to hear you, a guy who loves poetry and music and movies, say something like this,” my therapist said as I described how reality and the imagination had to be bisected to be made whole, that my cerebral emphasis on being logical grounded me whereas my demands for artifice, my imaginative thrill-seeking, counterbalanced the rigors of being alive with the paramount way to source joy. The only gods I worship are people like The Ambassador of Happiness and The Emperor of Ice Cream, purveyors of real pleasure and fantastical desire.
Yet I failed to abstract Los Angeles itself, to see it as a city that had long been beckoned to sink into the Pacific and reappear as Arizona Bay, or now, to burn in multiple apocalyptic blazes while local heroes performed citizen’s arrests on shameless, amoral arsonists, people Drooq rightly called vermin (worthy of execution, I added), the march toward the void being accelerated to end more hopes and dreams in embers. It made me hostile with no real outlet for the hostility aside from a comparably downtrodden friend unfamiliar with the version of me who discontinued making jokes about misfortune, a sign of maturation, or so I wanted to believe, deducing that it was more a case of self-aggrandizement commensurate with all the assholes who extended their useless “thoughts and prayers”—derided to the degree that they’re now colloquially truncated to “t’s and p’s”—during catastrophes, because it impacted Sue’s favorite city, now my favorite city, not Minneapolis or Little Rock or somewhere else that couldn’t break me.
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” That’s a quote from Lost Highway, an excellent distillation of how life works, and the crux of a disagreement Sue and I had one drunken night, me trying to convince her that any memory is fictitious on some level because nobody can remember his or her mood in that exact memory, or what the weather was, or what was said verbatim, or all the factors intrinsic to reality, factors eluded even in documentaries and diaries, and why a healthy imagination is the key to living one’s life to the utmost (in addition to staying positive while keeping loved ones alive each day they’re gone, among other necessities).
When a nonbelieving friend toured my house last summer, he scoffed at the framed Jesus painting in my mudroom along with the cross in my kitchen because he thought I’d begun to see the light. I explained how they’d both hung in Sue’s childhood home throughout her life, no mockery on hand, but rather a simple inclination to let her faith live, unafraid to stare down Jesus each day in the home Sue and I shared as a reminder that ideological divergences are not dealbreakers, and how they’re even capable of being abstracted and reimagined as secular good luck charms.
The evening before Sade arrived in my mailbox, I visited Moore at the prison, receiving a manila envelope at the end of the hour. Inside it was a David Lynch drawing I’d commissioned for Drooq after he’d suffered some grisly, borderline Lynchian health issues (a testicular infection and body rash). As eerie as the timing emerged in its wake, the drawing first offered an upbeat memory about an artist as imaginative as any who come to mind, one of Los Angeles’s most noteworthy misunderstood, Moore inscribing “I plan on writing an epic poem about this gorgeous pie” on the reverse side, a line one Twin Peaks special agent played by Lynch himself announces to a waitress in his inimitable nasally yet forceful tone paired with his absolutely preposterously captivating manner, a bull in a china shop who gets the job done standing still. Perfect way to complement the dedication ceremony? A trip for cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and fries with Drooq in advance of screening Blue Velvet in the man’s honor.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
As we walked to the entrance of the Hollywood Bowl, a quartet of near carbon copy fetching girls bedecked in seductive eyeshadow and copious lipstick, each with taut skin covered in Sue’s beloved glitter, and all dressed to accentuate their smooth, long legs and ample cleavage, asked Sue if they could take a photo with her. True to form, she declined, apologizing and saying how beautiful she thought each of them looked, praising a necklace, ponytails, and some furry boots, disappointed that she’d forgotten the fourth girl. She lamented how she couldn’t trust strangers with her photo, but maybe she’d come around to the idea that the imagination was more powerful than the real thing, that their memory of her would bring her more alive than a tangible yet disposable frame ever could. The gay man working in the gift shop lovingly acknowledged Sue’s get-up and graciously took pictures of us standing next to a vinyl record rack as I wore a boring turquoise hooded sweatshirt with a broken zipper and cargo shorts in the shadow of the Queen of Tinseltown.
“This is the best popcorn I’ve ever eaten,” Sue said, corralling another fistful from the oblong bucket, the kernels all massive like deadheaded flowers coated in oil and salt. Berlin opened the show as their singer, Terri Nunn, wore a candy apple red dress and weaved through the crowd, stopping fewer than ten feet from us as Sue prodded me to take photos from my closer angle with her phone. Culture Club played for ninety-ish minutes, as superb a concert as we could’ve hoped for, both of us, old record store buddies at our final show together, saying how we wished it lasted several hours longer, a blissful ending to our trip at a locale that registered as a gateway into the past and future, a flower power-esque time(less) capsule home to a renowned bandshell and classy box seats where we sat with secured folding tables.
A couple hours later, I caught Sue taking selfies in the hotel mirror, something she infrequently did in my company, as I assisted in packing her bag for the following morning’s flight, later noticing myself perspiring while hunched over her suitcase in one image, laughing at the juxtaposition, the shots serving as a testimony to how our differences merged to make a flawed yet well-functioning whole. It’s all about sacrifices (“and her laziness,” some critic quipped—fingers crossed).
Other highlights flashed while swiping through her camera roll when flying to a layover in Denver: the man who professed to be an expert photographer outside a Trader Joe’s in West Hollywood taking an astonishingly amateurish yet hilarious photo where we’re poorly framed with our eyes closed, the signature bad-yet-good photo that cakes itself into your vacation memories; the flowers we bought and kept in a plastic water bottle on our hotel room air conditioner beside the window all weeklong; the gay Thai teen waiter Sue fawned over as he cracked a coconut tableside and handed her a straw to enjoy its milk; at Canter’s Deli, another gay waiter, one of Sue’s people (“My peeps!” she’d say), a Kansas transplant named Jeff who gave us a post-meal tour of the entire restaurant and regaled us with factoids like where Mad Men scenes were filmed and pointed at the booth where longtime regular Slash ate; dining with Sue’s old co-worker, Maggie, a sarcastic and chic Georgian with a blonde bob haircut who I’d heard reverential stories about for ages, she easily exceeded the hype, including when we conversed about our mutual love of David Lynch; Sue saying, “There’s your fake boobies, Blebbz,” about a stone-faced Asian woman with comically large breasts wound up like jack-in-the-boxes ready to explode from her blouse who walked by us minutes after I bemoaned the lack of plastic chests on view; our joint love of palm trees and cashews, the latter a healthy yet decadent alternative for which Sue hurried her morning routine so we could obtain them on our way to the airport, Taylor Swift buying a ten-dollar organic, buttery jarful to mark visiting at least one grocery store per day (fancypants Erewhon, “ob-vee-us-slay,” Sue would jest), arranging the jar on the kitchen table at home to esteem how even the nuts were tastier out west; and her pink and green jacket I accidentally left behind in tandem with my turquoise sweatshirt at the airport terminal, a colorful piece of each of us lingering in Los Angeles until Mother Nature claimed her final victory.
During my detour into darkness with my therapist, she asked if I was glad that I returned to Los Angeles before the fires, demonstrating that I could love the city on my own (even if Sue was present for a split second on my birthday when I saw her energy field in a Malibu area since decimated by the inferno). Of course I was glad, especially since new reminiscences added to my love for a utopia that would continue living in my imagination until my demise, telling Drooq how a vacation we’d discussed taking there together might not happen any time soon in the wake of the destruction. Did it matter? I could be in Los Angeles any time I ate a hot dog or ice cream, any time I heard Boy George’s voice, any time I smelled shiso, any time I saw Sade in my basement, any time I wanted.
When Moore’s parents visited me a few weeks prior to Christmas, his father proved to be my most attentive guest yet, affixing his glasses while thumbing through my books, reading various items on the walls, even studying film posters as I told his spouse how their son had painted the mammoth abstract painting in my kitchen as my thirty-fifth birthday gift. Unfortunately, the house isn’t accommodating to more than two people dining, so we ate lunch at a local brewpub, but Mr. Moore, typically a reticent man akin to my own father, emailed me a note soon thereafter.
“I just wanted to drop you a quick line to show our appreciation for your hospitality during our recent visit to the museum. I was very impressed with the castle and the décor. Everything was neat as a pin and entertaining. I, myself, am a slob; Jean is the neat one, otherwise my place would look like a hobo home. It was good to see you and we, as I am sure you, miss Sue. She was one of the top folks I have ever met with a super positive outlook on life. She brought a smile to everyone and was so pleasant wherever she went. Your home brought back great memories of your visits in past years.”
At the Sueseum you’ll find The Empress of Ice Cream slouching at a barstool in the basement, a napkin with some cashews sloppily hovering on its edge to test my need for order, as a hot dog and mustard bottle walk along the wall while Sade watches from nearby. There’s a curated world that animates, much like Buzz Lightyear when Andy runs an errand, in tribute to her light that cannot be extinguished, pervading my spirit, my memories, and my persistence in seeking out the misunderstood to remind myself that rainbow-hued unicorns are among us ready to be glorified. Much like life itself, or so David Lynch said about art, it doesn’t have to make sense. But it does require calibrating your headspace to the necessary abstractions.
Los Angeles may one day burn to the ground, but it’ll always burn bright in my mind, where reality and the imagination must coalesce to achieve pleasure. To infinity and beyond.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞