Before meeting Tony, he had ruled out the idea of falling in love in Los Angeles. The citations in this city felt as an exhausting game that I no longer wanted to play, one full of superficial meetings and people more interested in the networks than in connecting. I always felt that everyone was chasing someone a little more impressive than the previous one. Or rather, someone with more followers.
I was trying to finish the law faculty and keep my head over the water. Romance? That felt like a luxury for someone with more free time, more energy or less on their dish.
Tony was the last person he expected to fall.
We met while we worked in Amoeba Music, the iconic Hollywood record store that feels like a dusty cathedral for aged audiophiles and punks, or at least the old location. In the new Hollywood Boulevard store, I was there for a job, not for a love story. Tony had just returned to the store, just sober, needing what he called a job of “getting well.” He had worked in Amoeba Music from time to time for 15 years while traveling with his band, his life apparently a chaotic rotary of sound checks, diving and reinvention bars.
It was much greater than me and outgoing, wild, loved by all. I am reserved, shy, focused. He felt as if we were from different planets.
But slowly something changed.
Between the records of shelves and the registration of shifts, we begin to speak. Then he jokes. Then laugh. I realized that under his bustling surface he was the friendliest and most affectionate man he had met. We connect with our mutual love for movies and how we both feel more alive in the soft silence of a dark theater than anywhere else in the world.
We spent our nights in capture of double functions in the new Beverly, enjoying the Moody Indies in The Vista or planning our weekends around midnight projections in the Alamo Drafthouse. Our first “not dated” date was a midnight of “Kill Bill” in the new Bev. Sitting by his side in that little theater of Velvet Red, seeing the character of Uma Thurman to break through through betrayal and anguish with a katana, I felt something unexpected that scares me. It was violent and stylized on the screen, but below everything there was a woman who claimed her power, and perhaps that is what I also felt. He felt like the beginning of something.
Tony already did not always like the same films. He loved big and bold films as “Aliens”, and I leaned more towards the founded dramas, the type of emotionally messy stories Paul Thomas Anderson tells. But we both loved the experience of going to the cinema and talking about them later, breaking them down by scene by coffee or fried potatoes late at night in swingers.
The moment I realized that my feelings were more than friendly they arrived a little later. Tony was supposed to see Iggy Pop at the Hollywood Palladium one night. But that day, he asked me casually: “If my plans fall, would you want to hang out?”
I said sure, without thinking much about that. According to him, when he told me he couldn't get a last -minute ticket, I said: “Good.”
It was a quiet and revealing word. Good. Because I wanted to see it. Because I liked it.
We ended at Lily's Bar at the Adler Hotel to Hollywood Hills, right on Amoreba Street. It is the place where so many little moments had accumulated among us. The bar was dark, intimate, in Hollywood in a way that almost feels like a secret. We talk for hours. At some point, I told him I had feelings for him. We kiss.
I couldn't believe the kiss happened. He was all that was not: bold, unpredictable, magnetic in a way that made people sink around them. He fell in love with someone like him, he felt that he left a shelf without knowing what was underneath. I was afraid of what it could mean. What happens if we were too different? What happens if I got lost in his possible chaos or did he get bored with my quiet corners? Despite each warning bell in my head, I could not deny what was throwing me towards him. And when we finally kissed, it wasn't just a kiss. It was a surrender to the idea that love does not always appear as you imagine.
I would like to be able to say that I left that night feeling safe and safe, but I did not. I was terrified. I was still in the Law School, still trying to find my place in a city that I often felt that I was masturbating. I felt like a child. How could I be ready for something serious with someone much older and apparently different?
But here is the thing: he didn't have everything solved either.
We were two people from different worlds that crashed with each other in the same corner of Hollywood. We had no road map. Only this strange and beautiful thing that grows between us and a mutual disposition to see where it could lead.
Two years later, we are still discovering it. Together.
We live in Hollywood, not far from where everything began. Sometimes we will walk through Ameba and remember that version of ourselves: I, burned and preparing for more disappointment; He, trying to heal and rebuild. We will pass to Adler, and smile at the idea of that first kiss and the girl who almost convinced himself to risk something real. Or we will pass through the new Bev, we will see what you are playing and we will ask ourselves if it is worthwhile to get awake until 2 in the morning again.
I never thought that love would look like this: a boy who has been everywhere, meets everyone and has hidden stories in every bar and theater of Los Angeles; And I, someone who has mostly kept their heads down, trying to overcome everything. But somehow, we find a rhythm. A quiet and constant rhythm under the noise of this city.
Love did not reach Los Angeles as expected. But it came anyway.
The author is studying for the Julio de California exam and is A Pilates certified instructor. She lives in Hollywood. She is on Instagram: @EHHHRIQUA
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
