Post-Pandemic at the Petit
"Exactly how early can we show up to lie by the pool?"
"Rooms usually aren't ready until around 3, so..."
"We are running away from our children. If we show up at 9am, can we lie by the pool all day, or...?"
"Oh!" she titters, as much as a swanky hotel front desk clerk clocking minimum wage is allowed. "Sure, yes. You can run away from your children here beginning at 9am."
And so, we crept towards the roof of the Petit Ermitage bright and early on a hallowed Saturday morning that my hallowed mother-in-law agreed to watch the kids so that we could spend one day without having to make 47 snacks, meals, or compromises.
As we crept westward, through Hollywood to West Hollywood, I spoke on the phone with Miranda, who was my only roommate in LA before she moved to Seattle and Tyler moved in. We lived in West Hollywood together for a brief 6-month period, until our apartment got cockroaches that exterminators could not seem to get rid of, and so we went skittering back where we felt best - east, in Los Feliz. All of my West Hollywood memories are associated with my time living with her: hungover brunches at BluJam cafe, improv classes at UCBWest, drinks at the Village Idiot, haircuts from a stylist that insisted we hang out and then behaved so positively deranged on our first friend date and then began stalking me?? (story for another time), weekend mornings in spin class at Crunch gym (Colin K! Andrew S!), depressing, hard, and soul-sucking acting classes on LaBrea, the slow crawl from Fairfax to serve food all night in Pasadena.
West Hollywood has a completely different feel than East LA -- it's another city entirely. The people look different, the restaurants look different, the energy is different. Just driving there was like having a curtain pulled back on Los Angeles's Multiple Personality Disorder.
I'd never been to the Petit Ermitage, but it always seemed like a faraway signifier of richesse. A boutique hotel tucked away on a West Hollywood side street, with a rooftop pool and a candlelit terrace restaurant. A flash-player hummingbird used to flit across its webpage, which I would go to stare at sometimes in my early 20s, imagining myself able to afford a night away there.
My general takeaway from spending 8 hours lying by the Petit Ermitage pool is that there is nowhere more batshit fucking insane that we could have chosen to spend our first post-vaccinated alone time out in the world together. Without two toddlers to constantly consider and attend to, we were free to lie down and listen to the world around us for truly the first time in 400 days, and the clientele at the Petit Ermitage provided the most delirious of soundtracks.
The clientele at the Petit Ermitage did not seem to have gone through the same year we did. None of these people have been quarantining for the last year, I whispered to Tyler.
Oh, absolutely not.
A brief examination of the clientele I observed in between paragraphs of this phenomenal book:
A 40-something guy walked in, holding hands with a girl with the BMI of a deciduous leaf who could not have been more than 22. They waltzed onto the upper deck that had Reservation signs on all of the chaises, which we were shooed away from upon arrival. Over the hours, tens of people arrived, all seeming to know this couple and one another, greeting various people in this Patient Zero's party. At one point, Tyler said "Look -- there's Phoebe Bridgers."
I looked up from my book to see a blonde woman. "In those pants? I don't think so," I clucked. She took her sunglasses off, revealing that it was, of course, not Phoebe Bridgers.
But the guy next to us worked for Kanye, and man, did he love talking about it.
"Yeah man, so great to run into you here. I met you through Natasha, right? Natasha knows eeeeeverybody..." *cue 15 minutes spent extolling Natasha's circle, her hotness, her social aptitude.*
"But yeah, only like 30 people know I work for Kanye. It's not something I tell a lot of people, because inevitably they ask me to show him their music. Or ask for free shoes. It's like, um, I'm not trying to get fired here." My stomach churned with the mention of Kanye - it occurred on minute 3 of our time poolside. I had been away from LA's bullshit celebrity navel-gazing for so long!
A girl returned to the chair where these two guys were talking. "Ugh, sorry. My client had to choose between two shitty gigs: one in Miami, and one in New York."
"Oh really? Where is she gonna play?"
"On Twitch."
"Oh, raaaaad..."
She and one of Kanye's henchmen kiss goodbye, and he thanks her for leaving him the chaise in her wake.
"You're welcome. But I better get something out of this!" she laughs, too aggressively. I shudder. "I'll expect reciprocalness someday!" My mouth drops open, a fly drunk on sunscreen and tequila-soda floats in.
Almost everyone was under 30, which is maddening because you have to stay at the hotel in order to visit the pool, which meant that they could all afford this hotel, which confounds me.
Excuse me - how do you make your money???!!? I wanted to ask everyone there, especially the gaggle of 19 year old girls in the kind of bikinis a proctologist wouldn't have to bother requesting they remove.
Butts, butts, I'm telling you there were butts everywhere. Every single bathing suit showed off the gluteus maximus, as my 8th grade gym teacher Mr. Bretthauer used to refer to it, presumably just so that I could remember it 20+ years later. I felt like I was on drugs, looking at all those butts. Like I was suddenly dropped into a Hunter S. Thompson scene, where everyone's posteriors were melting into the fading afternoon like Munch characters with their hallucinatory contours giving up on their time on this earth. Tortuous haunches mocking me with youth, wealth, and an appalling lack of personality.
(The most demure of suits)
"Oh, I'm so glad you changed. That one is soooo much cuter," one of them admonished the other as she returned from their suite.
I'm so glad you changed.
I told Tyler the incredible true story from my book about the group of of pachydermicidal African elephants that brutally attacked several villages after growing up with no elders due to poaching, and when I paused I heard the girl next to us regaling (?) her group with the tale of her curling iron burn on her stomach.
A man with two full paragraphs of text tattooed on his upper back kissed every woman that entered the (birthday?) party. The 40s guy and the 20 year old are now fully dry humping on one of the pool beds, and continue to do so for the next hour. They must be on molly? Or is this just...West Hollywood now? Always...?
It was disappointing, to have gone through what we've (presumably) all gone through, and to bear witness to an entire section of the world that hasn't changed a whit. Hasn't been moved, in some way. I never leave a hotel pool without making at least one friend, and after 8 hours, not only did I make zero friends, but I also truly couldn't come up with a single group that I would have wanted to talk to. And after hours of listening, that was a well-informed decision!
What is it to make something of all this? The joy of observing again, after all this time stuck observing the same people, the same walls.
I love this. I murmur to Tyler. I love these people. This scene.
You do?? he asks, surprised. I think they're all awful.
And they were, but that's what made it fun. It was like lying in the middle of the movie scene, after spending a year paused on a black-and-white commercial. Every absurdity was in stark relief. High saturation. A B-movie meets Boogie Nights, minus the humor and the tenderness.
(Wow, wonder what this bathroom mirror was for?)
I had never been made so aware of the sharp distinction between East LA and West LA. It's truly two completely different cities. I'd just never before had the opportunity of a year-long global pandemic to separate the two into such a sharp binary.
Minutes before we begrudgingly left the pool on Sunday, the German rooftop manager threw buckets of ice into the heated pool, perfect cubes of ice sailing through the 88-degree air.
"Tell us before you do that next time," ordered the 55 year-old Man of International Mystery Accent with only his bottom button buttoned, flanked by two mimosa-drunk teenagers on the chaise next to us. The guy returned shortly with more ice, and every single person around the pool grabbed their phones in unison to take pictures of him cooling down the pool. So I did, too. But I bet our captions were different.