Magic Johnson

Written on the door to a bank.

A Shih-Tzu Pug Hybrid is only a ‘Special Assistant’ when you’re a suburban mom addicted to Adderall and the show Intervention.

I love LA because while watching the sunset in a hot tub on the roof of a building that Johnny Depp has a condo in, an eight-year-old talked to me about yoga.

And this guy was at a Hairy Krishna parade.

While there I got a side-swipped car from Rent-A-Wreck. I asked the gnome-owner if he had anything with a stereo. He said yeah and gave me a discman with a tape-adaptor.

The gnome was 5’ tall with long greasy white hair pulled back in a ponytail, bald on top. His skin was red and translucent at the same time and he had a huge white pustule under his eye.

He followed a raw-food diet and asked me if I wanted a bite of his raw wrap.

This sort of shit is just sitting around on coffee tables.

Went to the beach and had flashbacks of the last time I was at the same spot, nine years ago.

For our two-year anniversary, my then-BF and I went to the coast. We ate mushrooms while watching the sunset and then climbed up a dune. At the top, we passed through a small cluster of trees that opened up to a flat rock clearing that was surrounded by a straight drop down to the ocean.

It was like hiking through a cartoon forest to get to a Greek stage. By the time we got to this space, we were “peaking.”

We ended up on different trips. I was laughing at the way trees look and he was thinking about the futility of existence. His chanting “it doesn’t matter either way because it doesn’t matter either way” snapped me out of funtime. He had been reading Camus (I think we were 19 and 22) on the drive down and was now leaning over the edge of the cliff.

The moon was small so it was black out. I voiced the cons of jumping off but he couldn’t hear me over the chanting so I wrestled him to the ground with the speed of a fatty in vaseline. For eternity or hours of physical effort and ignoring my own tracers, I was on all fours dragging and pulling him by different combinations of his limbs.

Through the rocks and sand, I patted the ground in front of us to make sure I didn’t crawl of the edge. I got us out of the forest “remember when we were here a few hours ago and you were telling me about how your best friend growing up made cardboard models of his bedroom before rearranging his furniture and now he’s an architect and dating a woman that looks like Bjork?” and halfway down the steep dune before collapsing.

By the time the sun was coming up, I was exhausted and we were both bleeding and covered in sand and I held him with one arm, trying not to slip down the dune.

I remembered I was wearing a backpack, and that there was an apple in it.

I described what an apple was for awhile and then gave him a bite. He was like a baby discovering teeth, chewing with his mouth open and drooling. After swallowing, he blinked in slow motion like in slap-stick when the underdog is covered in coal or flour and asked “What happened back there? Was I okay?”

I called him an asshole, then we slid back to the motel room and curled up in the corner of the tub with all of our clothes and the hot shower on.