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It’s Memorial Day and I am bombing around Los Angeles looking for an after party. My friend’s fortieth birthday abruptly ends sometime around 1AM, which for me on a bank holiday is early. We’re in the Johnny Grant apartment at the Roosevelt, but the elevator is out. A red-faced Australian tourist is yelling at the nonplussed security guard manning the service elevator, which doesn’t even go to the top floor. "I’ve come all the way from Sydney for this!" he says, taking great breaths and blowing them out, trumpeting like an exasperated elephant. It costs fifty dollars to send a bellboy to fetch two packs of cigarettes and bring them up, since we can’t get down, which is why I’m now in an Escalade cruising down Sunset. Uber Black costs the same as UberX for no reason and my friend Bjarne tells me to meet him at Cheetah’s, a strip club in Silver Lake that I remember vaguely as some sort of hipster burlesque, but I’m totally wrong about that. I get there before Bjarne and text him the bouncers are wearing bulletproof vests and I’ve never had a good time anywhere the bouncers wear bulletproof vests.
“Almost there,” he texts back.
I wait and smoke a cigarette from one of the bellboy packs just knowing I am absolutely not the vibe for this place in my green seersucker shorts, my blue striped button-collar Oxford, my ratty, water-damaged loafers, my fucking Balenciaga purse. Bjarne’s Uber driver says he knows a place in WeHo, but Bjarne and his friend don’t want to go gay. I roll my eyes, concede, and we go to the bouncer, perky with an iPad behind a hideous metal gate that groans and scratches the pavement whenever they let someone in. “Five hundred dollars for the three of you.” We all burst out laughing and just walk away. It is absolutely not preppy white boy night, but now the Uber driver who wanted to take us to WeHo is gone. So we call another car and try the new place in Silver Lake, but it’s closed and ask a friend about a party in Elysian Heights, but it’s over, so Bjarne’s friend bails and we go back to his apartment for a night cap. Mezcal and soda. But Bjarne’s sour.
“It’s not even late.”
“The bars haven’t even closed in New York.”
“I just got back from Norway. In Norway, this is early.”
The whole night, bombing around LA, I see no one. The streets are empty, just coyotes and skunks. From his balcony, you can see the orange sodium vapour lamps being replaced by energy efficient compressed fluorescents, the warm glow of the night cut through with brightness: white, blue, electric.
“So where’s next?”
And I know Bjarne isn’t asking about tonight.
“Some people are moving to London. Some people are moving to Paris.”
“I feel like things are moving towards Asia. Maybe Asia? Cambodia? Vietnam? Thailand? Something…”
He pauses.
“I don’t want to move to Asia.”
I agree.
“I don’t want to move to Asia either.”
We laugh.
“What about Poland?”
Bjarne perks up. He’s a newly minted American, but was born in Poland. It’s booming. The rent in Warsaw is cheap, he points out. I note they’ll be richer than the Japanese. “Wow.” “Crazy.” We both utter, somewhat simultaneously, growing tired, the way everyone else had hours ago.
I tell this story as a sort of vibe calibration—
—where I find my peers to be at. They have too much energy for America. Like birds flying into spit-polished plate glass. Thwack! The cities feel like mirages. Scrolling through Instagram, things are happening! But of course, they’re not. Images carefully crafted to give to look and feel of vitality. Yet all the parties, when you’re there, feel like sets for parties.
And so everyone keeps looking for somewhere else…