Bruised Reveries: Driving in Los Angeles with Laure Prouvost

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky...

—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (June 1915)

The ghosts fly their asses off tonight

I’m just driving till it dies

Tell him I’m driving, it’s alright

—P.J. Harvey, “Driving” (1993)

“We will go far.”

“Far far away so free from all this.”

You never get to come back from Los Angeles.

We drive around, we get high by the beach, we make out. At noon, we have long talks and slowly eat ice cream, the dark chocolate and creamy vanilla swirling together as it melts between our fingers. Sweet and sticky and cold and gross and delicious as we lick it off each other. Some of the stories we tell are real and most of them are not. Hazy musings bend into disembodied poetry. Nobody really speaks the same language and the words fall through the cracks and trapdoors anyhow.

Blushing with consent and permission, we fall in love and want to crawl inside each other’s bodies and live there… “I want to enter your mouth and be warm inside your stomach and feel the acid tickling my eyes.” And we caress each other with the hard green stalks of vegetables and the crushed petals of flowers, cup fleshy figs around pink nipples and suck dripping milk off offered fingers. Smashed eggs and pineapple crowns, drinking sweat and lover’s spit, our bodies soup together and steam with collective musk. Our desires are raw and weird and we don’t care.

We drive from parking lot to parking lot along ribboned highways and concrete riverbeds sheened with water, from industrial downtowns to staggering hills, singing along to every anthem and chain-smoking cigarettes and dreaming what dreams may come. We roll our bodies to the beats, grooving in place, and everyone goes crazy, lost in a dance that we each do separately in our seats and so totally together until the spell is broken with peals of laughter.

Folded gently into cars, hands grip the hard smooth curl of the steering wheel, bare feet press rubbery pedals, groping knees over the gear shift, passing around a joint, feeling the smooth hum of motors and the surge and force of traffic and the time it takes for us to cross the city. A little bored, a little languid. Our sadness trails our cars through open windows, flapping in the rushing afternoon wind like loose silk scarves, billowing with so much broken color and wild beauty. Inside, we’re a world apart and yet so purely the landscape we’re cruising past.

We burn gallons and gallons of gasoline and we know in our hearts that all the coming disasters are both our inheritance and our fault, but we drive anyway. And the sunset skies flame with unholy pinks and burnt oranges, bruised purples streaked with chem trails from spaceships—but we are young and it doesn’t matter. We forget about rent and debt and sick mothers and faraway exes, all the things we ought to do, read, see, know. We forget about our heartbreaks and depressions. We’re just hanging out… and for the briefest of moments we sublime into the breeze and the music and these people and the car. Instead of worrying, we eat cold plums, their bloody juices dripping down our chins. We suck indecently on the pits, getting the last slivers of meat off their hard hairy little hearts.

We all left somewhere behind to be here, someplace with castles and motorcycles, first loves and flyspecked cows hoofing through grassy fields past woolly sheep ceaselessly chewing, a place with its own stench of history and perfume of pollution. And Los Angeles has all that too but it tastes different, or it’s not yours, or the exotic swirl of it is enough to feel far away. Back in old Europe, flâneurs stroll down cobblestone streets and linger in arcades, checking the train schedules for the possibility of elsewhere, but here in LA, you finger the keys in the ignition and hear the call of the open road, the flicker of neons, the snap and buzz of the radio as you flick the switch looking for the perfect song. Here Baudelaire drives a stick, a velvet arm dangling out the window as he flicks a cigarette onto the asphalt and turns up the volume. Freeways snake over the gridded boulevards and there’s always a highway to take you away. The 101 cuts through downtown past skyscrapers like canyons before heading north through Hollywood with its hills and promises, and beyond the seaspit of the coast and beyond that California. Go east and the desert dances on the windows where you choke down mushrooms and witness revelations in the heat, keep going in any direction and your wheels will roll anywhere and everywhere—the road can beckon across a continent and you know you’re not in Europe, you’re in LA. And maybe we’re all going someplace after, shedding this night ride like a snakeskin… on to other jobs and other worries, problems unimagined with mortgages and contracts, overseers and underlings, overdue bills and promissory notes, back home for Laure to Europe, but not yet. Glassy eyed and easy with affection, we drive and drive and drive.

I am a passenger

I stay under glass

I look through my window so bright

I see the stars come out tonight

I see the bright and hollow sky

Over the city’s ripped-back sky

And everything looks good tonight

—Iggy Pop, “The Passenger” (1977)

Along the freeway, a deep red neon sign flashes letter-by-letter to spell out: U-R-G-E-N-T C-A-R. One last letter likely lost, its rhythm buzzes over and over with a tawdry languor. The dashboard screen and the speedometer glow softly in the darkness. The day flashes by, a staccato of memories and sensorial splendor, accidental magic and exhilarating touch.

Driving into the night, our bodies dissolve into the city’s streetlights and cracked sidewalks, the drape of powerlines and the arc of on-ramps, the purple jacarandas and crackling fan palms, the dewy lawns and strip malls and drive-throughs and parkways, still warm with sunlight under a moonrise like a bowl of milk about to spill. You are both the electric hum and the cough of engines, the silence of sleeping children and the noise of all-night danceclubs, the heartbeat of loneliness and the cough of traffic. And the shape of you wraps so snugly into everything, back into the seat, fingers wrapping a phone built to be held just so as they flick through songs and messages and photographs. Then hand and handset flow into each other as you lick the screen, the heat of it steaming and melting the wet slip of your body as you dissolve into the plastic and metal and concrete along with your yearnings and fantasies, memories and emotions, flowing into a thick resin that coats the asphalt highways, preserving all your consumer goods and aspirational objects and temporary passions in its goo like Jurassic mosquitoes. And we know that the city wasn’t built for cars, but for bodies that are cars, inseparably united as one, that together speed along midnight highways to desert retreats tracing double-yellow lines past the slow-dance of Joshua trees, hugging two-lane roads that curl through the mountains and roar through tunnels and under overpasses, until we lose the last of our boundaries, speeding into the ocean with a breathy sigh.

Our car’s a glass slipper, a painted condom, a second skin, a submarine, and only ever just a machine surging with desire: the gas burns hot and the smoke from the tailpipe is our exhausted selves. Everything’s adulterated, corrupted, mixed up, and so are we and it feels good.

You love the dirt and smear of how bodies splash against the things we make; the hot mess of humans scratches and splurts into the plastic and they somehow come together with tenderness and joy. That persistent alienation of modern life like a bad flu vanishes as we finally just let go. The difference between you and not-you seems like just another fiction that falls away, but with a moan of overwhelming pleasure and a giggle of sheer glee.

Under the sea, you write poems with squid ink and catch the fish nibbling raspberries with your bare hands, and the octopus tentacle around a toxic blue, sopping suckers writhing into the force and churn of the tides. The slippery, viscous skins of sea creatures are what we imagine our own guts to feel like... strangely erotic, almost obscene.

“Yes, let’s go.”

And the stories we’ve been telling ourselves and everyone else, they all come true, and for once in your life you feel free.

And the car drops each of us, one at a time. You click the door shut behind you and it speeds away. The taillights and the last sweet chorus of a song on the stereo disappear around a corner. And you feel sweaty and spent and tired as you tinkle keys into the lock and step through the front door. In the shadows are all those things that tether you to the earth, those purchases and gifts, those objects that fill a house, and they whisper in the darkness as if they missed you. And one foot after the other, you hunker down the hall and through your bedroom door, the weariness of the day dragging half-waking thoughts into the tapioca of sleep as you fumble with shoes and buckles, slipping off clothes and crawling into the cool sheets.

And lying there, you feel Los Angeles in your body, a fantasy and a reality you’ve caught like a disease. You’re filled with the broad sky bending from daylight blue to smeary sunset to purple night, you feel the cool clear sunlight and the seductive moonlight and the streetlights that line the boulevards and freeways with an orange glow that makes everyone look both furtive and famous, you feel the speed and possibility of cars to take you anywhere. You know that it’s changed you, how you see, how you move, what you make.

Before falling asleep though, you gather the day into a little amulet. It is more than a memory, an extra limb, an amendment to your body. You know you’ll need it later on, facing some future despair. And with a soft sigh of pleasure and a gentle laugh, whenever that moment may come, you’ll be back in Los Angeles driving with Laure… because you and she never really left.