Hello Evan

Continuing the conversation with Evan Wright, 1964-2024

Hey Evan - Yes, let’s talk on Monday, about “Teen Torture Inc.” and getting you on the podcast and also, as you suggested on July 4th, “Before that, mainly so we have a requirement to talk.” I didn’t text back how excited the idea of having a requirement to talk made me, to pick up the cellular connection we had the time we first met.

I don’t know if you remember why I was in LA in April 2019; there’s no reason why you should, but I think, now, when I see the photo of us from that night, at some restaurant in the Valley, that I was still wearing some of the god-awful make-up they’d put on me for the Prager shoot. The make-up artist had been so kind and soothing, and I’d be lying if I said I recalled exactly what she said, whether it was about God’s love or forgiveness. I do know I was in a position to accept any kindness being thrown my way.

I remember thinking it was sort of ridiculous for us to be meeting at at a place so fancy-ish (called The Library? Something like that), but it was convenient to the hotel I was being put up in and to Universal Studios in Burbank, where you were working on “Dirty John.” It would have made more sense to meet at Boardner’s, where I can very easily see us sitting in perpetuity, elbows on the bar, talking about whatever Los Angeles stories we were working on, me for LA Weekly, you for Hustler and Rolling Stone. I told you how much my Weekly editor loved that story you wrote about the ragtag baseball team, but you didn’t know what I meant, and it was just this week I learned that story was by John Albert. It was an honest mistake, we were all in our early 30s back then, trawling for stories at cop bars, at old man dive bars, then you buggered off for Iraq and became very famous and I started writing about wannabe anarchists in the Northwest and I thought we would never meet, but here we were, you lathing kindnesses on my new book, me wondering how you knew it existed, and also telling me about “Bad Therapist,” which would come out as an Amazon e-book the month after we met.

Or maybe you gave me an advance file? We talked a lot about Amazon that night, the possibilities publishing there offered authors to get these weirdly-shaped clumps of writing to the world - “Bad Therapist” was somewhere between a very long article and a book - and also, how it offered reach if often not money; you mentioned this week, with some hilarity, how some of your books on Amazon right now cost zero dollars; who knew the algorithm? I’ve been thinking about that; how it’s something to care about and also not; how once the work is out there you just write the next piece and don’t look back. Let’s talk about that, too.

Right now I am finishing up your 2009 collection Hella Nation, and it made me understand something I had not when we had dinner, about the DNA of Los Angeles, how the city said to each of us, essentially, come in, write what you want. Was it LA showing us the same stories or our mutual attraction to the same stories? While you were with Hustler spending maybe too much time watching Adult Video Network porn, I was having conversations with the head of AVN in the hallway of my daughter’s school, a nice guy named Tim whose daughter was two years ahead of mine. Your overlaps with Nina A, whose connections appeared interesting and then suspect, mirror mine with her. You wrote about the mixed martial arts family the Gracies; I wrote about Royce Gracie, who pinned me to the ground and, while lying between my legs, asked, “What would you do if I did this?” (“I’d let you,” I told him.) You wrote about girls barely out of their teens working in masturbation kennels, and I did too. You wrote about the too-thin drug-addicted woman who asked you to fuck her and you did not. I wrote about the low-level producer for Playboy who nearly cried when I ordered a pork chop at a Beverly Hills lunch spot; it had been so long, he said, since he’d seen a women eat. The coordinates I keep finding seem on a corpuscular level, the body of course being Los Angeles, she lets you do that, demands sweetly that you do that, lures you in and keeps you there and has you do her bidding, which is of course our honor, as sorrowful as it can sometimes be; it was our living and I liked it very much.

And then our lives changed, new locations, new books, you were in 2019 spending a lot of time in TV-land, as you told me that night in the Valley; it wasn’t always great but here we were, extending the night, a two-hour dinner becoming three, the double-kiss goodnight by your motorcycle, you heading east on Ventura, I heading west.

You texted on the 6th: “Are you around tomorrow or Monday? Just came inn from a long motorcycle ride and I think I need to sleep. today.” Yes, let’s do Monday, I said, and sent you a photo of my new Vespa.

“Those are very nice,” you wrote. “I was using a friend’s a while ago.”

I know that when we talk I am going to ask you to blurb the book I have coming out in September. It is about Los Angeles, and there is no one whose work during that era I respect more, and there’s a quiet reassurance knowing that you will, knowing that we are becoming friends, maybe that’s hopeful but that “requirement to talk” has me knowing there was bravery in the overture.

And then it is the 12th, and we have not talked, and someone who loves me very much texts that he is so, so sorry. I don’t remember if I did this or am remembering it this way now, but upon learning that you have killed yourself, I see myself balancing all of our collective work on my right palm and holding it there in the air.

I go back to our texts, to our previous emails, I look and look, like a character sifting sand, searching for a lipstick-imprinted cigarette her mother might have left there years before. Instead I find a recommendation:

“There’s a novel called The Kindly Ones that you might have heard of,” you wrote. “If not, it’s long and kind of crazy and follows the life of a closeted gay SS officer in WW2. What’s interesting is the author lays out how National Socialism borrowed heavily from Marxism BUT replaced the class warfare at the center of it with race warfare. When I read this a few years ago it blew my mind because it struck me how identity leftists have basically done the same thing in the US.”

I am reading the book. It’s astonishing.

A few minutes ago, I dreamed of you and your wife and three babies, all under age five. You have come to the home I share with my husband. It’s two or three in the morning and you need a place to stay, temporarily; I am happy to give you our place, we are just moving out. You look happy, in a worn T-shirt the color of seagrass, and now I am thinking what I did not think in the dream, of how much it can take to swim to surface, away from the song the sirens are singing just for you. But you were smiling just a few minutes ago, as was your wife, telling us the children were safe and asleep, her calm and pretty smile saying that despite the late hour and unusual circumstances that found us all together, everything was going to be fine.