by Madeleine Kunkle

Our friend Madeleine Kunkle lives in LA. She writes about it, draws about it, and makes clothes about it under her brand, Hollywood Gifts. If we had to describe her work we would say: Imagine moving to LA with a dream but instead finding yourself hungover walking down Hollywood Blvd towards Cabo Cantina on a really, really, really hot day looking at piss-covered stars on the pavement with names you literally don’t recognize. It’s not the reality you had hoped for but it’s the reality you got and it’s somehow better, funnier and weirder. This text ushers in a similar feeling but centers on an LA girlie in her mid-twenties working at – where else – Chateau Marmont and hoping for something, anything, to happen to her. Enjoy! 

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I have to quit Chateau. I am barely getting any good material from it anyway. The real material lately comes from my actual LIFE which goes unlived all the hours I spend here, not so much living as letting ambiance rub off on me. Today I feel like a round-faced girl whose photo goes viral when she goes missing and people repost it and say “So sad. Gone too soon. Check in with your friends<3” And then one day later something else happens. 

Bobby is a waiter at the hotel. He and I are getting to know each other but we’re already in love which is sometimes how it is and why it’s fun. I slept in his bed last night and he slept on the floor out of respect and when I woke up he had made us coffee. My eyes opened the second he came in and they were crusty with black eyeliner. It was sort of uncomfortable, us both knowing we’re in love. When you know and he knows there is still so much in the way and wading through it is both tedious and exhilarating. I asked him about the posters above his bed. I only half-cared but I wanted something to ask him about. Boys get so riled up when they have the chance to explain something to you. He still sees me as the same as him, as someone to share with. Later he might take no interest in explaining things to me. He might notice I wasn’t listening, or that I didn’t get it, or that I don’t care. He might start keeping things to himself defensively, clinging to them, not wanting to get sucked in. Or maybe I’ll seem so different, so like a Martian to him, that eventually I won’t deserve to know at all. 

I am in the women’s locker room eating boiled cauliflower and celery from the maids’ kitchen. They announced Kobe Bryant died on the news. It is blaring on a small TV in the break room. Bobby is ignoring me. He slipped me a drawing on a sheet of receipt paper this morning and has been acting busy ever since. He’s not too crazy about this Celebrity’s Son who comes here every day and leans against the host stand to talk to me. But he doesn’t make a big show of caring either. I go to the bathroom to continue my little project. I am teaching myself to cry on command. It is surprisingly hard considering how often I do it against my will. 

Yesterday in class Connie broke the news to me that I am Not an Actress and Never Will Be. Specifically: I don’t know if you’re willing to modify your body and habits, to regard them with unflinching scrutiny, to be constantly aware of what you are and how you come off. She thinks I want to be an actress for attention or as therapy. She explained that I cock my head to the side submissively when I talk and speak statements like they are questions. To correct this would require a level of rigorous honesty and discipline she worries I am not capable of since, she says, I ACT LIKE A FUCKING CHIHUAHUA not a human woman.

Stephen Dorff: How’s your cyst?

Me: Excuse me?

Stephen Dorff: Your cyst. You had a cyst on your hand.

Me: No I didn’t. 

Stephen Dorff: You had a cyst on your hand and I popped it for you. 

Me: What?

Stephen Dorff: Aren’t you Kelly?

Me: No

Stephen Dorff: Shit nevermind. 

I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. I am not a hostess. 

Mary calls this a “Palate Cleanse.” She writes it in the Notes app on the iPad we keep at the host stand. The iPad contains notes on every single person known to have entered the building since the beginning of time. It says Shia LeBeouf showed a waitress his penis once, concealing it under a napkin and revealing it like a matador brandishing his cape. 

Daniel, my scene partner, is more controlling than I realized and has a copy of Dianetics featured prominently on his bookshelf. He has a clear idea of the scene. When I leave his house I go to the Korean karaoke place and rent a private room for two hours. I drink two White Claws, and the room gets hot because of my dancing. Celebrity’s Son texts me a photo of the beach.

Listening to the maids laugh and talk in Spanish. It’s raining. My chest has been hurting. They asked me to come in early today. I need to call the doctor. I just ate egg salad from Laurel Canyon Country Mart that costs $2.00. Knowing that fact, that it is $2.00 and I can have it again, for $2.00, gives me comfort. Even hope. Today the exhaustion feels bigger than God and like rage. I can imagine someone’s face bleeding, the eyes almost falling out, beaten to a pulp and I can imagine that face is mine. Last night I imagined each boy in class carrying me out limp like in Romeo and Juliet after R awakes to find that J stabbed herself to death. In my vision my head dangles like it did when my dad would carry me to my bed from the car in the middle of the night after long car trips and I’d only pretend to be sleeping. 

I feel so alive when Stephen Dorff and his friend practically whistle at me as I leave Chateau. I am trying out not wearing a bra with my hideous hostess uniform. The bounce I’m getting sans bra isn’t even the thing making Dorff and his pal wonder what my body feels like from the inside. It’s my sensuous high from having a single layer of fabric between me and eternity. Being a man you probably feel that way all the time. Just one thin layer separating your dick from the whole world. 

One of the managers grabs me. She is wild-eyed and crazed. She hisses through clenched teeth, digging her sharp beige nails into my wrist. “ADD TO JENNIFER LAWRENCE’S NOTES THAT SHE LIKES MEDIUM-BODIED REDS AND FERNET.”

There are so many smells in the bowels of Chateau. A strong, aquatic men’s perfume – no – “body spray.” Dirty uniforms, mold, stale coffee. I like it in the utility closet. I can eat two poached eggs with plain asparagus from my lap in peace. I must find a way to keep falling in love with Daniel; Connie says our scene requires I seduce him. Why does my chest hurt? I will call the doctor tomorrow. If they don’t let me work the premiere on Friday I will quit. 

I almost couldn’t experience the opera yesterday. Couldn’t feel it, wasn’t there. I sat on the third floor bathed in light from huge windows, eating a saran-wrapped cheese plate and drinking Pinot Noir from a plastic glass, looking at the chandeliers. I felt catharsis only at the end when the performers took their bows. My eyes welled but I held back tears. I wasn’t in the mood to sob or to be the young girl sobbing alone at the opera. Not in front of the dignified old people. I imagined the feeling the singers might have, bowing, and I longed to be UP THERE. Shamefully my tears had nothing to do with elation, not even envy, just plain YEARNING. PINING to be UP THERE with my whole starved, pathetic soul. Sometimes I think the pining in me has been there longer than anything else. What if I am not a performer, not a showman? Connie said I’m “on the fence.” 

They let me work the premiere. Josh Safdie mocked my appetizers and I got in trouble for letting Ron Jeremy in. Dean didn’t recognize me when I handed him a chicken skewer. I walked past him 18 times in 2 hours. People don’t see you when you’re wearing the little waiter outfit, even people you know. When he realized, he was sheepish and afterwards he texted me, “If you’re a server we should all be servants. You should be getting feted at an event like this.” 

Last night I went home with Celebrity’s Son and I feel hungover like a headache everywhere. Vague. Sick and languishing in it. A sick you make yourself. Sweaty and cold, simmering in the shame of my embarrassing performance. The splayed-out spread-eagle of talking too much and laughing too loud. I spilled a drink on his shoes. Last night, in his house, seeing his dick for the first time. I wanted to ace it. Sad! How lazily he fucks. He can barely fuck at all. I knew then what I knew all along, that I didn’t want him. I just wanted someone famous inside of me. Some Nepo Baby, someone born relevant, someone ignorant to the sensation of anonymity. Someone wanted by the world before he wanted anything for himself. I wish I could be a lesbian but I’ll probably suck dick for the rest of my life because it’s what I know. 

I have to rehearse the scene with Daniel tomorrow. I am making eggs. I got to the part of Anna Karenina where she imagines suicide. I have NO MONEY. With God all things are possible including overwhelming despair. I don’t know how I’m going to survive my life. I miss my mom. Maybe I’ll quit tomorrow. I deeply want to watch a movie. To be alone in the dark with it. Maybe I will never touch down on Earth again… Feel something. Want something. Miss touch. Need love. Scared. Full. Open. Here I am. Where’s my words?  Guts? Where’s my diaphragm? Am I pretty? My body tickles. The eggs are burning. It all happens. If I am so smart, why am I so empty? Am I alone? Who’s walking who? When I was roller-skating on MDMA I wished to fall. Bobby will call me. No, he won’t. I am dead to him and if he was God then I died in his world. This is my second life then. I pray for peace and HUGE mega rockstar status for all my great loves and enemies. I am 26. 

The feeling of it being your birthday, and you’re on the beach in Malibu, 60 degrees, the only one in a bikini, the only one in the water. I am 26 and I often think I am the only one in the water. I sometimes feel like a powerful secret. I almost don’t want to go to my own birthday party. I want to be alone with the ocean. The sand feels like melted butter and everything is gravy. I want to forgive myself for everything. I feel like being alive. Some people want to be dead because they want things resolved. Me, I want every tangible thing, every item in the room to exist hot to the touch and conspire to make me Here. And then I just want to be poetry, like Connie says. I want the sun and the ocean and the stars to conspire to make me alive, which is what they do. 

Today I felt the red hot moment in the car. I was driving across town, smiling, and I knew there was only one me, and that you can’t be more than loved. When the 10 becomes the Pacific Coast Highway it’s like you’re inside the barrel of a gun and your car is your own private bullet. The little tunnel spits you out and only then can you glimpse the bright blue ocean. It feels like a new idea, a first kiss. Today I lived for no one else. I was hit so hard I could smell my own brain. I am suddenly completely convinced that I am here, have been here for 26 years, I just got lost for a while trying to be cool. Lana Del Rey said you must burn every bridge except the one that leads to your greatest desire. 

Standing on the balcony of my apartment in the shade of the trees. Sunday, 12pm, the smoke from somewhere clouding everything, but only slightly, and I can feel it in my throat. Not cold or hot. I remember Bobby’s face and how he told me about him and his cousin going to free the horses in Malibu. He said could see the fire creeping over the hills, flooding really, literally a mile a minute. Like a cartoon, the fire closing in and the horses, spooked, braying then running free. They always come back, he said. I hadn’t known that. 
Reading, sucking down words fast, waiting for the chapter to be over and never end. Wanting to write as much as read, spit as much as swallow. Coffee on my breath, bleeding in a t-shirt I slept in, vibrating from caffeine. All elements coalesce to draw me perfectly, as who I am and who I want to be. A man walks by with a shirt on a hanger, pressed from the cleaners. Royal blue with white stars like the flag. This cannot be the same sky as over the plains of Oklahoma or Santa Fe. It must be a myth, this business about one sky, one earth, and the moon belonging to everyone. I want to believe… But the sky in Hollywood is a gray curtain with some dry ice making artificial fog, and I have work tomorrow at 7am. ★