No Need for Introductions

The air feels like LA tonight, except it’s much more humid here, and I just met one of my neighbors. She’s African and there weren’t any Africans living in the lower hills of Hollywood as far as I could see. There was an Armenian school at the end of the block (an LA block, not a city block), but almost everyone I saw in that neighborhood was white and upper middle class. I only met one black man that lived around there. He told me a story about Bob Marley fucking a woman that looked stoned when she went into the bedroom and ashamed when she came out, and he told me that I should be wary of my rockstar boyfriend. The man had a big dog that he walked at night and I met him as I was walking Benjamin, the dog that I was watching while I was there. I told him that it was my dog because it made the conversation easier and I told him stories about Benjamin that his real owner had told me. The man told me that he could tell Benjamin and I had spent a lot of time together. He also asked me to get coffee or dinner with him sometime, but I avoided a definite answer because I was afraid to do anything that might hurt my boyfriend. For some reason I also wanted to maintain my solitude while I was in LA, I guess like I’m doing in Philadelphia now. I guess that’s why the air feels the same, even with the humidity.
Most of the time I played guitar, watched movies, and drank while I was on the west coast. That’s what I’m doing now, but I was living on loans there and I could drink expensive whiskey and wine instead of cheap beer. I would get very drunk early in the night and sit on the porch smoking cigarettes while the dog laid next to me. There wasn’t much to see other than the neighboring houses and a sliver of stars in the sky between the buildings. We were far enough north of the 101 that where the view was decent you could see where the stars fell from the sky into the city streetlights and left the atmosphere glowing orange, but I could only stare at one patch of stars at my place until I was too drunk to stay outside and smoke anymore. Then Benjamin would follow me as I stumbled into the bedroom around midnight. He snored terribly, but I got used to it after awhile.
I always woke up with the smiling glare of the California sun and never had a hangover because of the expensive booze and a good eight hours of sleep. Sometimes now, even if I only have a few beers, I wake up with a mild headache and a burn in the back of my throat. I also drink very cheap beer and wake up suddenly and frequently during the night so maybe that's relative. I think maybe it’s ok to be content with solitude in a city far away from friends and family when you’ve only been there a couple of months, but when it’s been eight months the solitude feels a little heavier, something like the humidity here tonight.