Last night I had sex with a movie star. I am in her apartment now. It is morning. My welcome is almost up, I suspect. She is hardly a movie star. She was a successful child actor, playing a cute niece to a obese disheveled comedian, then a junkie once adolesence took its full toll, once the weight of an actual body insisted on trauma, gravitational collapse. Now she smokes and drinks in New York, changing sides in the coastal war- abandoning her hatching place on the west coast. People will cut your throat while smiling, everyone says of Los Angeles. The traffic, they say. People have more silicone than brains. We reference these mantras often, while we watch their movies in our overpriced theaters. I’ve never been to L.A. I imagine they say that New York is cold, cramped, overpriced and frantic. This is self-evident. Do they chant it in defense? The light coming through the ventilator shaft tells me nothing about what kind of day it is. Through these concrete tubes only one kind of light comes; the light of the perfect cloudy day, a day when it will never rain and the sun will never pretend to change your mood. She is bustling around, pinning up her hair, repositioning her bra, brushing her teeth angrily.
“I have an appointment in like, two minutes.”
“O.K.”
“Um, I have your number and everything.” She pauses. “I can’t really lock up until we’re both gone. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s cool,” I quickly put on my hipster shoes, and smush down my hair. “I should go too,” I lie.
She kisses me quickly on the cheek out the door. She waves happily, looking over her shoulder twice, while escaping down the stairs. She blows me a kiss. Very L.A, I think. Stepping onto the street, I see the ventilator shaft has betrayed me again- it is seeringly sunny outside. What the fuck am I going to do now? Turn right, first of all. Activate my strut. Walk like I just had sex with the chick from that movie. People here form an impression of themselves in the negative space of celebrity encounters. Our elbows are notched where we have brushed them with celebrities, like prison walls or sticks on a deserted island. It’s funny. All I really want is for women to let me into their apartment, to watch them dress. I want to see living spaces and morning routines. Sex is like an entry fee. I am already looking at legs as they pass, shooting out of summery skirts with a mid-morning sense of purpose. I lock onto one woman’s butt, evaluating it with my sophisticated palette, being a coniesseur of butts. It’s not my fault. There is nothing else to look at other than ads. The city is a desert, with every impulse towards the organic funneled into sex. Maybe I want to eat a plant or something, or kill a bear, or paint myself with mud. My only recourse is to evaluate butts.
Coffee will start this day. Enough coffee becomes like internal excersize. Just sitting becomes exciting and exhausting. Plus I need to shit, which of course I couldn’t do at the actresses’ place. Sitting down with my coffee, outdoors at some yuppy soho bullshit on a wicker chair, I laugh at the actress. I wonder what her appointment was for, if anything. Her last work was in a mattress commercial. Running her hand across the mattress over and over, luxuriously, smiling, backpedaling in her career quite severely. I hear some republicans talking at the table next to me, rare birds. If she was here, feeling randy, I could she her standing up to lecture them. She’s done it before, to get written up by the reporter at another table, a “where are they now?” blurb. I pull out my list pad. It is time to make today’s list. A good list has a particular shape, a graphic beauty that demands its items be systematically destroyed. Not much comes to me right away. I need to water my aunt’s plants.

It is 7 p.m. My aunt’s keys are jiggling outside the door and she enters. The plants are watered.
“Did you water my plants?”
“Yup.”
“How was yours?” She asks honestly, digging through her purse to find her phone.
“Uneventful.” My aunt is great. She doesn’t care what I do. She doesn’t ask who I slept with last night, although if I tell her she’ll love it. She’s never here, no time for guys, she might be gay, always working, advertisizing. I have her spare room for free.
“I’m just stopping in. I’ve got a dinner.” She moves to the window overlooking union square as someone picks up on the other end of her phone. She clutches her arms close to her, swaying back and forth slightly, talking quietly and watching people walk below.
“No Law and Order date tonight?” I ask, sounding playfully wounded when she gets off the phone.
“Sorry, I’ve met someone else,” She says dramatically. She goes in the bathroom for a while, and reemerges on a straight shot to the front door.
“Enjoy yourself, kiddo. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I instruct as the door closes. I turn on Law and Order. In a few minutes I recognize the episode. My friend Franco plays a dead, shoeless immigrant. Only his foot made the final cut, poking out of a van. I strain for the scene, and once its over, I surf the channels. The MTV music awards are on, singers descending from the ceiling upside down, slowly, shimmering in glitter, taping live less than a mile away.