The Sophist 11: Laura
You died in your house in Echo Park, Los Angeles, the day before yesterday. I know that house. I could draw it. I could even try to draw the big red heart you painted on the front of it, but it wouldn’t be anything like how you did it. I remember after you first moved in, you invited me over and told me I’d be able to find the place easily, even though it was slightly set back from Echo Park Avenue, because there was an old disused butcher's shop at the front and you’d painted a heart on it. Ok, I thought, that’s cute. Bit Californian. A loveheart.
Which is why I walked right past the building and missed it while looking for it, because it wasn’t a cute loveheart at all and you never said it was, that was just my assumption. You had in fact painted an actual red beating heart, with all the aorta and ventricles intact. You painted that blood-pump onto what used to be Vega’s Meat Market, a Mexican butchery that perhaps used to sell the hearts of animals a little like it, and for the past however many years since you moved in, everyone who has walked down Echo Park Avenue has seen your heart on that wall, along with the words '1830 LOVES YOU'. I don’t know if you did it to celebrate death or celebrate life or just to make sure that an old guy’s shop didn’t get forgotten. I want to say now that you were of course doing both, that you were someone who always saw both death and life in everything, but perhaps that’s just the sort of thing I want to say about someone who is gone.
And then you turned the meat shop into a venue for scrappy, dreamy local musicians who wanted a place to play really loudly, and you let people come and sing and shout. And you sang and played too, with your band Psychic Love. I remember after you named the band you were laughing because some people said they didn’t like the name, too basic, too ridiculous, too obvious, Psychic Love, ffs. And how this made you like it even more. Its basicness was part of the appeal.
“Don't be late and don't tell the cops” the gig invites would say.
I remember once sitting in a bar called Figaro and just marvelling at how the light in there slid off your skin. I couldn’t tell if you knew that you were beautiful. I took photographs of you. This was when I lived in LA full-time, back before iPhones so I was taking them with my digital camera and it may have made you a little awkward, but you were good with that too, awkward was default. Surely, I remember thinking, surely she knows that this beauty is unusual? At the time I thought you had to know, but now I think I was naive and that you couldn’t have. But perhaps that’s just another level of naivety; my assumption that the knowledge of beauty could save a person. Maybe beautiful people know full well that they’re beautiful and they still go ahead and die anyway. I think I remember asking about the scar, the long line down your face. I think I remember what you said. Scars want to be heard, I think. Scars are a monologue that is trying to turn into a conversation.
I remember on another of my working holiday trips back to LA, once I lived in London and had become a mother, I came to see you and we went to Valerie - you always went to Valerie - and I ate such a large omelette that you texted the next morning and asked if I fancied going back to Valerie for a further nine eggs and for some reason you saying “a further nine eggs” rendered me hysterical, which was of course your intention. We went back for a further nine eggs. It was Halloween and my daughter, who was about four, had borrowed a dress, but you said she needed more and you took her to your house and found diamond stickers for her face and you did magical things to her hair and you let her play on your Hammond organ in the house that was strangely dark like some of those LA houses are - it’s such a bright city that if your windows sit too close to the hill there can be a lot of shadows.
You got us ready for trick-or-treating because I had never done it before and didn’t know what to expect. You dressed us up, getting excited for us with your big wow eyes, always such big wow eyes, and your big wow lips. You had a smile that was surely designed purely to let children know that magic was about to begin. I have never seen your face walk into a room and not felt a quiver of excitement about the laugh that was about to roll off it.
I went on a date with a man. You were so excited for me and you said you’d come over to where we were staying and babysit so I could go out with this guy I’d met, this artist, another Echo Park painter like you, even though you didn’t know him, even though you were a singer and an electronic musician and a lot of other things by this point.
I distinctly and happily remember the date going so well that I texted you from the toilets and you said FOR GOD’S SAKE STAY OUT! I’LL SLEEP ON YOUR COUCH IF I HAVE TO! and I said you should drink my wine so you drank my wine and slept on my couch. It was almost like being on two dates at once - this man there loving me in the bar and you there loving me back at the house. Rarely have I felt so held; sandwiched in between nice people who only wanted nice things for me. It was like being loved in two directions at once.
Tonight I read what people had posted about you on the internet. So many names I didn’t know because I don’t live there any more, people from the music scene that you built around you after I left town. All of them saying how kind you had been. That you were so welcoming. So accepting. That you built a scene at Vega’s Meat Market expressly for weirdos, you had said, so weirdos didn’t have to feel weird alone.
Your filthy giggle. Your immaculate sense of humour; the knowing jokes that came with the big innocent face, the almost translucent skin. Laura I don’t know how it is that you are dead at 32 but I can't stop thinking about your pumping, bleeding heart. Tonight I put my hands together and said a prayer to carry you well along your way.