I got knocked up the very day I arrived in Los Angeles, which was Cinco de Mayo, 1991.

There's a picture of me taken three days before I moved to Los Angeles, in front of my mom's apartment building in Portland, Oregon. I'm leaning on the hood of the white '68 Cadillac I'd bought for the drive to California. I'm wearing a Levi's jacket, my blond hair tied up in a red bandanna. The bandanna, the Cadillac, the Levi's, the blondness, all were reactions to the fact that I'd left my Indian husband six months earlier, trading West Bengal for New York. None of those all-American accouterments had been needed or desired in Calcutta, where we'd spent the two years of our marriage. I looked unremarkable, less au courant than a Coke commercial, but because of my recent history, these stock iconographs felt deeply perverse. I may have looked like a cheerleader manque, but in fact I was deeply exhausted and the reason I had picked L.A. as a destination was that it felt like the only place I hadn't already ruined. I didn't know anybody there, but I had a kind-of agent and a kind-of boyfriend waiting, both casual, hip-pocket arrangements at best, both begun in New York.

There was a time when I had always wanted to move to L.A. I was born in Burbank, during a brief period when my father was a student at Art Center College and my parents lived in a converted garage in an alley just off Hollywood and Vine. The garage was infested with mice, which was a problem, as my parents slept on a mattress on the floor. Just about every night my dad would wind up attacking a mouse with a can of spray paint, the only weapon at hand-so that the room was eventually decorated with many colorful kill zones. This mere steps from the Walk of Fame.

I tried to move to L.A. the summer I was nineteen. I arrived with fifty dollars and managed to get a job as a waitress in a coffee shop on Sunset, the first of several jobs involving a brown polyester mini-dress, as it turned out. I was staying with friends in North Hollywood, and bought a Ford Econoline Van for $150. Then one day a crazy Vietnam vet took my van apart in the coffee shop parking lot, after which I could never get it to go over thirty miles per hour. I gave up and went back to school.

The morning of May 5 I woke up in a Motel 6 in Bakersfield and motored into town. When I hit the first L.A. suburbs, I pulled into a gas station and changed into a flowered fifties dress that I'd inherited from my grandmother's best friend, Laverne. Laverne had been a career girl, an executive secretary who lived in an apartment instead of a house, an apartment where the white satin bedspread spilled onto white plush carpet. The dress was one she'd bought on a business trip to Honolulu. I wore it for good luck. I drove to my kind-of boyfriend's house in Venice Beach, getting there about one o'clock in the afternoon. He wasn't there, so I took a walk on the boardwalk, in my fabulous fifties Hawaiian frock. The sun was beautiful, I had aching style, and I'd just stepped out of a '68 Caddy with an original push-button radio. I didn't walk; I traipsed. After two years in India, swathed in khadi--that is, the fashion-free, government-sponsored cotton all my radical New Delhi friends wore--I felt like a sailor on leave, all cranked up with raunch and glee.

On the boardwalk, there were body builders who looked as if they had themselves steamed and laminated every morning. Couples in Gap khaki, their feet in clogs and their hair in ponytails, leaving the air perfumed with fabric softener as they passed. Latina girls with perfect lips and eyebrows, an Egyptian carriage of the head, their bodies all floppy from their baby-fat cleavage on down. The buff black guys who smelled like the inside of a new car.

Then I noticed that no one was looking back. This was strange! In India I'd been used to the freak-show stares of whole villages, or guys who threw rocks at you or tried to run you over with their Vespas because they thought-you were cute. I'd even been chased through a Himalayan forest by a group of horny Sikhs. I'd found India to be a deeply asexual place, where arousal usually took the form of scorn and harassment. Since coming back, I'd learned to love the friendly catcalling I got in New York from the slick black guys and Italian shopkeepers-I always said thank you and blew them a kiss, even when construction workers made animal sounds and did funny things with their tongues. So why now zip, zilch?

Troubled, I bought a pair of four-dollar sunglasses with blood-red lenses from a street vendor, and sat down at a sidewalk cafe, ordering a cup of coffee and some French fries that appeared to have no grease in them at all. I hid behind my coffee and my glasses, watching the passersby as if they were Stepford People.

The red-lensed glasses made everything a vivid burnt yellow at first, but after a while my eyes adjusted, and I saw a new spectrum of colors, just like the old ones but vaguely artificial.

Right then I saw my first pair of silicone implants. They belonged to a tiny little sunbaked woman whose wiry, steroidal body precluded their being a natural occurrence. It was the first time I'd seen cleavage without a bra-or, indeed, a fat-free double-D. I like to remember her on roller skates. She couldn't have been five-two, even if she had on skates. Skin like a razor strap. Blond hair like straw, cut in a Rod Stewart shag.

Here was a healthy, plastic sense of self, sculptural and anapoetic, conspicuously soulless, utterly corporeal yet without any trace of carnality. It seemed, I imagined, like the German nudist camps of the 1920s, aerobic and prefascist. I was a visual dog whistle, simply outside the natives' range of perception. I flattered myself thinking that I could have been walking down the boardwalk arm in arm with Jane Russell and Betty Grable, and nothing would have happened. The sexual air on the beach was not about my kind of artifice at all, or any other kind. Artifice was something I wouldn't see again until I started running with drag queens-but that would be a few years later.

My kind-of boyfriend was home when I limped back, my dress wilted, my heel bleeding from the strap of my sandal. By now I knew it was Cinco de Mayo. None of the Mexican guys in their cars looked at me. As it turned out, my kind-of boyfriend wasn't all that happy to see me, either.

The summer before my divorce I'd whiled away in the Himalayas, hanging out with a crew of river rafting guides. I'd wake with the sun and wave good-bye to «the guys» as they trudged off with their paddles and life vests. Then, like some wacko Julie Andrews, I'd take to the hills, tripping over mountain trails, scaling rocks, cavorting in the spray of hidden waterfalls, and basking on riverbanks engrossed in a dog-eared copy of Conrad's Heart 0f Darkness, which was the only artifact of Western Civilization I'd brought with me. For lunch I'd have bread and oranges, and occasionally I'd share a cigarette with some ancient peasant woman with a bale of firewood on her back. In the evenings I'd come down and sit on the front porch, dandling the landlady's children on my knee while the servants cooked up the most wretched and pitiful vegetarian suppers known to man. Then the guys would come trudging home from a hard day's rafting-the guys, my buddies, my pals, a bunch of handsome, adventure-seeking lugs who told stories, played the guitar, and drank great quantities of Red Bull rum. They were wonderful, comradely fellows, and we all flirted like mad and never slept together. Oh, I was happy!

When the rainy season began, I came down from the mountains newly galvanized, made bold by happiness and ready to make sweeping changes in my life, which I did-and I haven't been happy since. What followed were what I like to think of as the Dark Ages, times full of the melodrama of divorce and car accidents and back taxes. I moved to California. and started life over from scratch, which was something I was really too old to be doing. Somehow it's fine to be driving around in an uninsured and unregistered Dodge Dart when you're in your twenties, but after thirty that kind of thing loses its renegade thrill. Until very recently, I lived in this state of necessary abjection, paying dues and waiting to get a life. Even though my brush with happiness was the thing that prompted me to embark on this miserable journey, I realize now that my goal was never to be happy, but to be authentic. I've been unhappy for years now, but at least I know that I'm finally in the right place at the right time.

Happiness has never been my strong suit. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where everything is moldy and damp and plaid. I took a few drugs in high school, but not all that many, probably because they were too much fun. This was the 1970s, long before grunge, though I can certainly attest that many a Northwestern youth before Nirvana and Pearl Jam lacked the will to bathe and the coin for a cup of espresso. No one I knew watched The Brady Bunch-these were the days before remote control, and watching television would have been far too much trouble for anyone I knew. We listened to Bessie Smith records, wrote fragments of bad poetry, and sometimes even went camping in the rain-but we were never, never happy.

It isn't clear to me in retrospect whether I wanted to be an artist because I was miserable, or vice versa, but I always knew, growing up, that I wanted to be Norman Mailer. Having barely survived a high school modeled after Lord 0f the Flies, I produced a facsimile of a novel, at nineteen, about death in the trenches in World War II. No cheerful coming-of-age stories were ever going to come out of this girl's battered Smith Corona.

When I moved to New York after college, I was thrilled to find myself ensconced in a veritable artist's garret, banging out bleak fiction in a weekly hotel full of vagrants and maniacs. I was in my element in New York, where a big, goofy grin and a dollar would get you a ride on the IRT--if nobody pushed you onto the tracks. There were times, walking through Central Park in the snow at noon with a hole in my shoe, when I felt a strange rising sensation in my chest, a levity born of my utter abjection. Ye joy-mongers take note: no amount of senseless euphoria can match the heavy, swollen, lush, fevered opulence of a moment of true despair.

Of course, it wasn't all bad. I read a lot of good books, I had friends, I even fell in love a couple of times, once with a grad student who explained that «love» is properly defined as «a state of enduring and diffuse solidarity,» right before he broke my heart by running away with a Marxist feminist anthropologist. Even heartbreak was precious then, as I spent more and more time alone in my room, feverishly scribbling. But eventually the core of my being was consumed by failure, and my cursed inability to get a single word into print. Norman Mailer, I felt certain, hadn't spent his twenties temping for an ad agency.

Years passed before I got that longed-for bolt from the blue, a phone call from an editor who wanted to publish one of my novels. I remember distinctly the physical sensations that accompanied the news: my lungs collapsed, all feeling went out of my extremities, the inside of my skull itched, and I wanted to throw up. All I could think was Aneurysm.

It would seem that getting a novel published should have made an impression on me, but by that time I'd reached a state of irreparable neurasthenia brought about by typing too much ad copy under fluorescent lights, I hadn't written a word in a couple of years, and I had an Indian fiance who was already picking out curtains.

I failed to wake up from this desultory stupor, and the punishment for my misstep was two years in Calcutta, unhappily married to a very nice man. I had great plans to make like Gunter Grass abroad and pen one grim, reflective masterpiece after another, but it never happened. Instead I sank further and further into the couch, reading Jane Austen and back issues of The Economist. I was depressed. This would have been fine, except for one thing: angst is unheard of in South Asia. Troubled Indians might develop a tic or a twitch, or set themselves on fire over some fine point in the government's educational policy, but rarely do they exhibit any kind of mood. No, they leave the wallowing to the water buffalo.

I was, apparently, the only person in Calcutta with an affective disorder. Talk about culture shock. How I missed the irony, the disaffection of home!

But then came that heavenly Himalayan idyll, when I ran up and down mountains like a maniac and realized, in doing so, that such a thing as happiness was indeed possible. There I was at long last, a living, breathing, functioning, integral being, full of vitality and purpose. I felt fit and ready as never before. I didn't write a novel that summer, but I felt as if I could have, if only I'd thought to bring a pen.

So I got a divorce and came back for the pen.

I had a vague idea I'd write screenplays, or magazine articles, or whatever, just to make a buck. Meanwhile, I moved into a studio apartment in Silver Lake and started working as a temp at the Southern California Gas Company, which was downtown, in the tallest building in Los Angeles. The other secretaries were quick to tell me that the building was on «rollers» or «ball bearings» so that we'd be safe in case of a quake. They always added, reassuringly, that the whole building moved all the time. These girls weren't like the secretaries from Queens, Catholic girls who got lunch from Blimpie's and went on package vacations to singles resorts in Jamaica and spent hours in the ladies' room dishing and putting on eyeliner. If you were a temp, you got to be their little sister, and they expected you to tell them all about the wild parties you went to and the guys you fucked, and they would never let the boss stick you with «busywork.» The downtown L.A. secretaries had two-hour commutes to tract houses in the Valley, and an unparalleled reverence for employment. They ate skinless chicken and wore pantyhose and took aerobics classes on their lunch hour and always wanted to know if you minded before they asked you a personal question, like «Do you know how to do a mail merge on Windows?» Not to mention the jobs in L.A. paid a lot less.

Every morning I exited the elevator on the forty-second floor of the gas company and walked past the receptionist and the enormous Ed Ruscha paintings behind her.

I sat in a beige cubicle all day every day. There was a phone on the desk, and my job was to answer it. I was there for two weeks, and the phone rang twice. I sat at my desk and cried all day every day. After two weeks, I was sent to Warner Bros. in Burbank. At Warner Bros. I was a secretary in the Airline Rights Acquisitions department. The secretaries here wore jeans and had self-esteem. But then, this was the Entertainment Industry. I sat at my desk laughing and puking until I knew I was pregnant.

I lived in Silver Lake for only six weeks. Shortly after we realized I was pregnant, I moved in with the boyfriend, whose name was Scott. The cottage in Venice was three blocks from the beach and the boardwalk. It was cute and dirty, with permanently sandy floors, one fair-sized room that served as living room and kitchen, a bedroom the size of a bed, and a bath with a moldy shower stall. We found a flamingo-pink vinyl sofa at the Salvation Army, and painted the walls bright yellow, blue, and gray.

In Venice, I learned how to fight. I had been married to a guy who made the Mahatma look like a drunken sailor. I had never once heard him raise his voice in all the years 1'd known him. Scott, I soon found, was handy with a harsh word, and had a particularly unfortunate personality quirk: the sight of another's pain always made him angry.

I was in the habit of exhibiting much pain, on top of which pregnancy made me sick and irrational. There were times in India when strange varieties of dysentery had laid me out, vomiting and hallucinating, but this was far worse.

I was like a chicken bomb. To make a chicken bomb, put a chicken in a plastic bag, fill the bag with milk, seal it, and leave it somewhere. After about a week, the chicken bomb explodes. You can imagine.

His voice contemptuous and controlled, Scott drilled into me for being fat and lazy, and I spat bile back. We hated each other. Eight months pregnant and weighing 170 pounds, I was sobbing and stabbing the kitchen table repeatedly with a butcher knife, screaming «Shut up! Shut up!», while he enumerated my faults liver and over in a booming Midwestern monotone. I splintered door jambs. The whole nine months, my first in L.A., are a blur of saliva and ginger ale mixed with tears, swollen eyes and ankles, and lots of blinking into an unfamiliar sun. When the baby was three weeks late, I seemed merely to have reached a permanent equilibrium of fluid and wounded hostility.

The bright side was that the Latino boys on the boardwalk really went for pregnant girls, and I found myself once again subject to III admiring eye from time to time, or a sexy, chivalrous smile. I took to wearing a lot of mini-dresses on my walks to the bookstore and the vegetable stand.

Tyrone was born in February 1992 in Santa Monica, at the Disney Emergency Center. A few months later, Scott and I split up, though it was several months before either of us could afford to move out of the shack in Venice.

The day Scott left, I went to a party and picked up a guy. Under the ambient party lights, he looked like a shorter, blonder Keith Carradine; he said he was a painter. The next morning, the painter turned out to be a vegan astrologer with something like three percent body fat. He got up at six A.M.-to go jogging, he said. Sex with this creature was dry, odorless, flesh-free, disconcertingly clean. A ride through an automatic car wash with the windows open would have been wetter and nastier. I'd been married, and later boyfriended, for so long that this was really my first safe sex, too-I'd used condoms before, but this act seemed wildly prophylactic.

I imagined being probed by an assiduously polite customs agent at the airport, or getting fucked in a toy store by G.I. Joe, his freshly de-cellophaned hair still smelling of polypropylene. I remember thinking: so this is sex in Southern California. It seemed right out of a  J. G. Ballard novel, an alternate future unfolding in a topsy-turvy place where cars and shopping malls are the sexual prosthetics of choice, where the human body itself is but a purgative abstraction, brought under strict authoritarian control through a scientifically masterminded program of surgery, enemas, and gang violence.

After the astrologer/painter/jogger guy left, I had a Bromo-Seltzer and went back to bed. I lay there thinking about all my false starts, near misses, and retrenchments of the past year: the bad boyfriend, the new baby, the temp jobs, all of it a long prelude.
I lay there thinking, Now I get it.

I had arrived.

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson