Crescent Heights

In some ways, I suppose, our addiction is not just to a substance but to the exotic conditions surrounding that substance: the intricacy of plotting where to meet the dealer at what time to least arouse suspicion, the adrenalin of finding a liquor store across town so that you don’t bump into someone from rehab, the ambrosiac taste of a beer in a dive bar at the precise moment some fat idiot drones ‘Keep coming back…’ in a striplit community center, balancing his styrofoam cup of coffee between quivering thighs. Similarly, we become addicted not just to the affect of the drug, but to the grandiosity of our own sublime, majestic tragedy: the sunlight filtering through blinds, lighting up dust motes settling on skin ashy and gray, stretched taut against a hollow skull, a body beaten, defeated and whimpering as the comedown grips hold. Vile and loathful we may be, but there is something about what others view as pitiful, as the lowest of the low, as filthy and execrable, repulsive and inhuman, diseased and outcast, that appeals to us passionately, and once we have glimpsed the quickest path of descent, we are racing down it gaily like children on some grand 1950s adventure story - Biggles does Blow, Nancy Drew and the Missing Crack Pipe - at once hating, loathing, despising ourselves, at once adamant that nothing in sobriety could ever taste quite as delicious as our own spectacular, superb self-destruction.

Girl, Undressed

'No Man's Land' came out in paperback - but it's got a new cover and a new title. Join my fbook group!

I'm writing a script of 'Alice in Wonderland' at the moment, and it looks like a kid's book I'm adapting into a movie is just about to get greenlit. Good times.

fate

I have this friend, Bob. He's sixty or so. I met Bob in Colorado working on the Obama campaign. I didn't like him as he smelled and always had his ass hanging out his pants and kept going on about Roosevelt and giggling a lot. But then we became friends and I drove him everywhere in my goddamn money-draining fucking Mercedes and we used to scrabble through the office to find quarters until we had enough for a packet of cigarettes. Bob still calls me occasionally. Last time he called it was sometime after christmas and he was drunk and holed up in a motel with some woman called Shanice he'd just met. He seemed happy. Bob had a sweet deal running weed and mushrooms to Chicago and San Francisco. He grew them for some drug dealers in Sonoma County. Then he got caught with 20 grand of cash stinking of weed trying to board an Amtrak train in Union Station. The DEA confiscated the money and Bob was too scared to go back and tell the drug dealers he'd lost all the money so he joined the Clinton campaign, and then the Obama campaign. Bob was someone who was always fucking happy, you know those people? Always goddamn smiling away despite sitting in a pile of shit. I really wish I had that ability. Somedays it's OK and I accept there's nothing I can do except take the sofas people offer me, and the money, and keep writing the novel and hoping something will happen so I can go back to LA. But most of the time I'm anxious and pissed and I can't eat and there's nothing to do all day except stew in words and go to AA meetings with a bunch of tattooed, transgender hipsters, who are pretty awesome, but they'd be more awesome if they were in LA.

There's something to be said for not struggling against fate, but my question is, when is not struggling against what seems to be fate, instead simply giving the fuck up? It would be awesome to be happy like Bob, but I don't want to be happy with a bottle of Jack, a motel room and some chick I picked up that morning in the free clinic. I can't figure out if that's wrong or right.

Dune

We spend the day in a taxi shuttling between Giza and Sakara for six hours with a wrinkled little driver who snickers audibly at our stupidity. The scene demands I laugh at Donovan as he receives an important gift from me. By the end of the day my laugh has become a hideous, emphysemic croak from all the fumes consumed through the window of the cab. I crawl into bed with advanced lung cancer, and sleep badly, gnawed on by money worries and paranoia of yet another eviction of some unknown kind, perhaps from Clive, the Hotel Lialy, or The Godfather, who can't evict me as I don't live in his house, but knowing him, he'd have a good try anyway.

I email evil roommate the next day to ask if I could get the rest of my rent back for January seeing as he has, in all fairness, evicted me and I could do with the cash (for online shopping). He tells me to fuck off, so I set my Liverpudlian family on the case. Scousers enjoy arguments and are like vicious, abused little dogs, particularly with money matters: the more one kicks at us, the more we sink our teeth into your wallet. My father emails triumphantly to report that evil roommate hung up on him after a threat of legal action. I like to see father so youthful and invigorated by dissension. I feel in many ways he would have an awfully dull retirement without me to liven it up.

My mood is foul. Cairo is cold and dirty and stressful. I grunt in monotones at Gabe and Donovan for two days, and they, sweet boys, try and appease me with chocolate and sympathy, but to no avail. It is only after a night of beer and a morning of yoga that my chemical cocktail coalesces into an uneasy harmony of Margarita-proportions, and I feel less suicidal, although still anxious to return home to California.

Cairo is a foul place. The people are nice, but still, Cairo itself is a bit shit. It attracts a certain kind of tourist: the common and the stupid. I am constantly amazed at the number of white women walking around in see-thru, skimpy outfits, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are in a Muslim country. Walking rape, I mutter when I see these women. Whores. Bitches. Gabe and Donovan look at me in consternation but I remind them I am a writer and merely a cipher for the prevailing emotions and attitudes of those around me, and in a sense, devoid of any free-will or determination of my own, and thus accusations of misogyny are completely unfounded. Also it's kind of like being a Jew. You can't be mean about Jews unless you are one, and then it's totally allowed. Ditto bitches, sorry, women.

We went to Giza to shoot today. Walking rape with a visible g-string sauntered past and the gods obviously disapproved as a raging sand storm whipped up in furious objection, and we were forced to retreat to KFC and the comfort of online shopping for consumer items we neither needed nor could afford. Cairo brings out the worst in me and my ailing credit card. Because of the sandstorm, shooting has been postponed for several days and it looks like I can't fly back to LA until Thursday, rather than Tuesday as originally planned. I hate indie filmmaking. I like order and planning and a big fuck-off trailer filled with organic foods and hot beverages and people to talk to, not a desolate corner of Egypt and public transport home.

The week stretches before me, empty, desolate, pocked only with visits to pyramids to shoot painful scenes in sandstorms, and the lure of online shopping outlets. The insanity creeps closer everyday. My editor at Penguin emails and informs me I should take a writing course with "people I really respect," not "effete snobs". I can't think of anything more conducive to self-loathing and writer's block than a room filled with a bunch of earnest, poetry-reading wankers all slathering for a chance to rip my prose to shreds and reduce me to a blubbering, self-harming, broken mess. I thank her for the advice, and steer my reply onto a different, more interesting subject. Me.

Have not heard from Clive for weeks, months, years, since Tuesday. I fear he is plotting my eviction.

The shoot rolls on, relentless and unceasing. I wonder vaguely if I really needed the black, shiny, lame yoga pants and whitening toothpaste, but fortunately I registered for free shipping because of the size of my purchases.

Cairo has been a learning experience. I feel I know myself after Cairo. It is a horrendous acquaintance, and I am looking forward to the selfish oblivion of California once again.

Children with Moobs

I arrive in Cairo. Predictably, given the nature of indie filmaking, it turns out Mr Gabriel Fleming, Director, has not yet written the script.

We sit in a restaurant over chicken shawarma and debate possible plot options.

"So there's a scene where you and Donovan have to escape these two guys, and I can't figure out how you would do that..."

"Banana peel," I suggest helpfully. "Potholes. Hiding under a burqa. We both get dressed in burqa. I scream 'RAPE' and point at our pursuers and the milling crowd mob them in outrage while we slip quietly away."

"Don't be silly," says Gabe briskly. "This is Egypt. They'd probably turn around and stone you."

We all snicker and then pretend it wasn't funny because, let's face it, it was a rampantly racist joke and Gabriel should know better.

"Chunky children. Children with moobs."

"That doesn't work with the plot Ruth!"

"No, I was looking at the fat kids on that table."

An array of plump blond children wibble into the restaurant and shriek delightedly as they surround an empty table. They quiver like finely set jello.

"Shut the fuck up, I'm trying to eat!" I scream before I can stop myself.

Gabe and Donovan look at me in horror. I realize my personality problems have become more pronounced. I am plagued by paranoia and misanthropy at the moment, not helped by the constant stares you get wandering the streets of Cairo as a white woman, even when every inch of you is covered. Cairo is like a grimy Paris, full of sheeshas and dodgy mustached men and skinny dogs with curly tails. Tall twenties buildings are faded and dirty, ramshackle iron-wrought elevators shuddering and sighing to a halt in between floors. I get up after a sleepless night and wander down to hotel reception, where I sip treacly Turkish coffee in between two burqa-clad matrons and watch an episode of American Gladiators from 1987. Tracy Hutton from Texas wins the elimination round. We sit there, transfixed. The lady from reception, wearing a gaudy hijab, glides over and touches my sleeve, a gentle smile playing upon her lips.

"You must leave room. You can stay in friend's room."

"But we're not married!"

"So sorry. You go."

I am constantly being evicted. This new eviction sinks me into a deeper, ash covered gloom, shrouded by cheap cigarette smoke, heavy lidded eyes peeping over beige knitted cable sweaters, peeking and prying and watching. There's no privacy in Cairo. It's too gray. Gabe and I shuffle around town to find me a new room, and I think longingly of Clive, my infidelitous actor, and sleeping away comfortably on his sofa while his dog licks my face and he ignores me and leers at on-screen large breasted hot women.

I sleep in the new room all afternoon, and awake to a huge mosquito supping away on my blood.

Sporting a new itchy red spot on the side of my face, we regroup and go out to dinner at a fast food place which sells some kind of macaroni with spicy sauce. There seems to be a trend for the owners of such establishments to commission faux-oil-painting airbrushed portraits of themselves sporting seedy, masturbatory grins upon their faces. These are hung at all convenient wall spaces, so you are constantly being watched by multiples of lairy man as you eat. I assume the pose of one of these men, fat grin, money eyes, leaning on thumb and index finger, and a lady catches my eye and giggles appreciatively.

Thank god we start filming tomorrow. Insanity is near. Chunky children, children with moobs.

Cock.

Inauguration Day

I avoided it. I couldn't go and that made me sad, so I listened to Public Radio and shed a little tear instead.

Enough schmaltz. The week has been taken up with moving, packing and running annoying errands around LA. I finally got to let loose at the weekend with a trip to the Chateau avec Le Godfather. We were immediately besieged by his boyfriend's pussy-posse, who unbeknowst to me, bombarded his boyfriend, who is currently shooting a movie in Rome, with texts such as 'Come back to LA, he's with that slut again', 'Your relationship is in danger' etc. Now as fond as I am of the old codger, the idea that I'm sleeping with him is pretty repulsive. Yes, I am extremely good at talking to old men and making them think they're attractive by laughing at their crap jokes, but I'm not so good at bedding them, so I don't. Yeurgh.

I went to Malibu at the weekend for a drink to get over the trauma and met an interesting blond lady who told me she used to be an escort and once got paid 3k for sucking (insert famous black comedian's name here) dick at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Apparently his pseudonym for such encounters was Curtis Koplin.

I am blatantly in the wrong profession.

I spent the week after this plunged into depression again. The worst thing about my depression is it takes two forms: self-pitying sloth, or self-destructive mania. I'm currently on a mania ride and have managed to insult a variety of very lovely people who I have friend crushes on, and now probably don't want to know me.

So I moved to Venice to look after Clive's dog and house. It's very fucking nice. I wish Clive would marry me, but I'm too young to be yoked to matrimony to infidelitous actors. I am still at my prime 'other woman' stage of life, as proven by the slut comments which consistently surround me. If I got laid as much as everyone thought I did, my vagina would be the size of the Chunnel by now.

In 48 hours I fly to Egypt to finish shooting the India movie. I shall keep you informed of my actions and fuck-ups.

India

It looks like I'll be in India for the first half of January to be in my friend Gabe's indie movie. As I have 23 bucks in my bank account, he's paying for my flight and accommodation and visa fees, thank fuck. God knows how I'm going to make it through January with no income (bills! bills! bills!) but this is far too good an opportunity to pass up - particularly as xmas is gonna be miserable and poor this year. I'm going absolutely bonkers working in a bar six nights a week and making dreadful money right now, so fuck it, I'm going to India.

If you would like to contribute to the 'Pay a Poor Brit's January Rent so she can enjoy India' fund, feel free to click on the paypal link.

Happy Holidays....