New York
I have not been good at keeping a summer diary. I am negligent towards personal responsibilities and had a depressing summer that I did not want to write about, because that is just dwelling with carpal tunnel. But looking back I did do some fun things! Here’s a list that makes me sound bicoastal:
My friend Olivia took me to Balthazar for my 29th birthday on the hottest day of the summer. We had oysters, crudo, bone marrow, and steak frites au poivre, and when I went to the bathroom she ordered me two desserts with candles in them. She had a mocktail (sobriety) and I had two martinis and a French 75.
I went to Chicago to see my friend Hannah, and when she drove me to O’Hare Airport there were all these amazing billboards for hair plugs, including “O’Hair” and “United Hair-lines.”
My friend Alana visited from Los Angeles and we went to Clandestino, where we sat at the bar with Diet Cokes. Alana is in a group chat on Twitter called “Diet Cokeheads” in which people send each other photos of Diet Cokes they are drinking all over the world, which I think is really gorgeous. We ran into a famous writer we both know and I accosted her with a 10-minute soliloquy on the Netflix show Sex/Life, the only show of 2021 which I would argue transcends its medium, becoming art. It’s about a sexually frustrated Connecticut housewife who can’t stop fantasizing about her Australian ex-boyfriend fingering her all the time. At work I pitched a piece in which I would calculate how frequently she gets fingered per episode – an educated guess is every two minutes and thirty seconds. I said “fingered” several times on a Zoom call and no one laughed.
I did a lot of karaoke at Winnie’s, including two renditions of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”, which in my biased opinion brought the house down. My friend Shannon loves to sing karaoke, and she stands up and does slow sexy versions of things while dressed in vintage bustiers from James Veloria, and I feel an embarrassing maternal pride.
I drove home late at night with my head stuck out the window. My friends in California were surprised by how much I speed, possibly because I look like an overgrown toddler: the overgrown toddler loves to drive at 100 mph. My mother says I have a “lead foot.”
My patient friend Caroline, who has a face with soothing qualities reminiscent of the pristine surface of an opal, guided me through several apartment viewings in grown-up Brooklyn. Now my deli or bodega or convenience store or whatever the current agreed-upon term is features a sign in the window that says “only five children allowed at a time.” I am single and I do not even have pets.
On my last night of living in Los Angeles, I went to dinner with my friends Elaine, Marina, Dalya, and Molly. We went to Dan Tana’s and had fishbowl-sized martinis and gloopy pastas, and afterwards we went to a house party in Beverly Hills on Benedict Canyon Drive, where Robert Durst murdered Susan Berman. Everyone at the party looked underage. We danced with drunk adolescents with center parts and enjoyed the house’s anonymous décor, including a cheery plaque that simply read “Beverly Hills: a great place to be.”
I was bummed out, and so in an effort to distract myself I started watching Lord of the Rings for the first time. I am twenty years late to the party but boy have I ever arrived. My friend Sydney, also in need of distraction (her silky miniature dachshund, Babette, had been barking at toddlers) watched the trilogy with me from Berlin, texting salient observations like “legolas is a pro-ana king.”
I have been haunted over the summer by the sort of women’s injuries that many boring female writers like to rely on too heavily and many chic female writers like to dismiss as cheap, neither of which are positions I respect. My love life is a pit of darkness, a loop of violent humiliations and wounds that grow wider with age, nothing but searing pain, a salted field in which nothing could ever grow, only die, die, die. My sex life is so fun and involves an inordinate number of jiu jitsu practitioners.
Elaine and Marina threw a giddy cowboy-themed house party in Los Angeles. Another friend, Ralle, came as my date and everyone of every gender wanted to sleep with her; she’s charismatic. Two months later, I ran into a fellow attendee in New York who told me she was amazed that everyone there had been so happy. I was sorry to inform her that they had all been on mushrooms.
In California in June, I had a few weeks in which I had been hired for a new job but hadn’t started yet. So I went to the beach nearly every day, swimming in cold water in Malibu, Laguna, and San Diego. I drove around with a drug rug in the backseat of a scratched red Toyota Corolla and used it as a towel. I stayed pale because when I go to the beach I run right for the water, and I believe there is no bliss like being slammed by a wave in the Pacific. I listened to a lot of RHCP during this period.
My friends Matt and Ruthie do ecstatic musical performances together in which they dress up in Yeti suits and red bobbed wigs. I ran into them while I was on a bad date so they took me to Fanelli. Matt told me about these special fans of his from Macedonia who he talks to all the time, as an old Elvis movie played on the TV next to the bar.
I brought Caroline and my friend Gaby, who I love partially because we both have the same dark curly hair, as my dates to a work party. Gaby and my co-worker George described me as “nice” and Caroline laughed so hard that her green ruched top ruched right off her shoulders and she cried a little.
My friend Ana would Facetime me from her hometown, Mexico City, while we were putting on makeup or eating dinner. It was so comforting to look at her face as she relayed anecdotes about boutiques devoted to chess and road trips to Acapulco, where at age 11 she met Quentin Tarantino, a moment immortalized in a disposable camera photo in which she gives a thumbs up while he smiles uncomfortably.
I went to a packed party in a three-story townhouse with a yard in the West Village. I checked the price on Zillow when I walked in, $7 million. There were baccarat tables, a Frank Sinatra impersonator, and a cake shaped like Emily Ratajkowski in a bikini. My friends Trey and Laura were there and were so kind to me, even though I hadn’t seen them in a while. I ran into a man to whom my friend lost her virginity during our freshman year of college and he gave me a kiss on the cheek that was too wet.
My mom came to visit and we celebrated her one year sober birthday and her regular birthday. It was nice. Restaurants are making creative mocktails these days.
Molly’s boyfriend had a beautiful opening at his gallery for the artist Sasha Gordon, for her show called “Enter’s Thief.” Gordon’s paintings are incredible, these large-scale works lit up in green and cobalt depicting versions of the artist which look like they swallowed several candles. Elaine and I went to the afterparty together at Yamashiro. It had an open bar, and we got so drunk while looking at the view from the Hollywood Hills. At 3 AM, we picked up takeout at Canter’s and took it back to her apartment. When she fell asleep on her cloud couch, I decided to trip the few blocks back to Dalya’s, where I was subletting with her roommate Elyse and Elyse’s new sheepadoodle puppy, Friday. There were purple jacaranda blossoms everywhere, which I have since had tattooed on the inside of my forearm. I fell over and ripped my new shirt in a jasmine bush, and it smelled so good.
Jocelyn Silver is a writer.