Those were the days of the city of angels, walking around watching prostitutes getting dragged into cars by pimps by their hair, ghouls on crack with misty eyes and dried saliva in the corner on their mouths, aimlessly searching for the next pipe, the next cloud on their knife. Me, I lived in a cocoon within a box, within an abandoned factory, surrounded by misfit hipsters, wandering up to the roof to gaze at the smog, drinking the sunset; the time when Kevin arose every evening. I would wake up at sunrise, hearing him play an electric piano, on my circular mattress, in the neighbor room, my clothes scattered on the floor from the night before, the red light from the singular light bulb left on from the night before, the tones of musical autoschediasm like sonic vanilla chocolate cream flowing through the thin walls of the loft, into my dreams, erasing all pain, like opium on some beach close to the border to some ancient forgotten kingdom. He lived by night, nocturnal to his core, both in spirit and practice. I would get up and hydrate away last night. He would play his last tones and drift away.One night we went to Echo Park with his old car, straight after his breakfast, as the last red sun rays of the day shot their bittersweet message through the windowpanes. He started his car down the street in South Central, where the loft was located, in between Mexican trolleys of tortilla and obscure businesses no one really had any business in knowing. Down the street I found a man bleeding to death on some stairs, or so it seemed, I stared, and Kevin told me to keep walking. In the car he put on some Lou Reed cassette, where Lou is talking, can’t remember the title, some depressive and doped down sermon, his voice and his message not reaching the ears through the air, but the spine, numbing it, mixing in with the fumes of gasoline and the smell of the leathery seats and his leather jacket beside me. We didn’t speak many words on the way to Echo Park, I don’t remember any single one of the words, just the mood of the converse, the soft and numb attitude we were sharing; vain romance and feeble nihil intertwined.We arrived at the party, and no one payed any significant interest in me, no one said; “wandering jew of Norway. Tell me about your snows.” I just drifted from room to room, like a half moon, barely watching people talking, mostly wandering away from everyone within my own mind, hearing only the echoes, feeling like a reflection of my own shadow. At some point I found a bonfire in the garden outside the house. I got hold of some whiskey, remember some people were interested in whoever I was, a short who are you where are you from conversation, then nodded off, drifted into sleep, as someone started playing a guitar. Kevin shook me up at one point, at the edge of the extinguished bonfire, put me in his car. All of this is quite hazy. Maybe it was another night, the one where we went to Night Gallery. I only remember fragments of that night too. The color of the night. Not much more. I remember more leaving places than the place itself. Remember the night ending more than the night itself. It’s all a haze really. A decade of haze. And echoes.As we sat there in silence, on our way back, there were flashes from the night, of him laughing, having fun, while I disappeared into myself, in that house, in Echo Park, into my own private gateway of personal oblivion. He was smiling, laughing, flirting, even dancing, playing, joking. Or I dreamt it as I slumbered at the edge of the bonfire, in the garden, surrounded by kinsmen, but too tired, too worn, to take part. We sat in the car, in the night traffic of the land of la la, and he was mumbling some lyrics; “So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own. And you go home and you cry and you want to die.” I looked out the window, at the sunrise again, filtering through the smog. “I wonder how many cigarettes a day there is in that smog”, he said. “I know that song”, I answered. He bit his lip. “Which song?” I looked at him, his profile, his chin, his composure, deep into his own story about himself to himself. “The one you were humming.” He sighed. “And you cry and you want to die”, he repeated. He kept on repeating that line until I left the west coast a moon phase later.Later we found ourselves on a roof at skid row. I remember him standing on the edge at the corner of some water tower in the distance, after two days and nights too eventful to recite, demented from the consumption of awakeness, his silhouette standing there looking down onto the ghouls three, four, five floors below, and their tents, balancing on the ledge, using the girders as tight ropes, flirting with gravity, a rendezvous over a zombie apocalypse. A silent soiree. Him standing there tiptoed on the fringe, obscuring half the sun, looking down, looking at their slowish end or his own rapid one. Him, me, some girls living there, making collages, wrestling on the roof, intense conversations, playing music, sharing a burger brought to us in a paper bag with a bottle of booze, someone singing. Sharing the days, strangling the nights. We were living the most intense days of our lives, probably the most valuable part of our youth, the memories which flicker across your perception as you drift off on morphine in your white gown and white sheets, yellowing from the sweat of disease, in some distant, but all too close, future. I will never get those moments back, though they live in me, deeply embedded in my sense of self.Sometimes I can close my eyes and hear his tones through the walls. The smell of his car and his jacket. Lou Reed talking his lyrics, from the cassette deck, the two of us sitting in a diner somewhere at night, sharing our hearts intensely, the mood of the sacred moment, even though now I don’t remember a word uttered, only the affection, his face as he spoke his heart, the holes in his chin as his face turned into a smile, then a mask of cold sorrow. I remember it all as one assemblage closely knitted, but still mushed into one brew, except the faces, in flashes, sad and smiling, the feeling of the shadows we were moving soundlessly through the streets, flying through the night on invisible wings, like liquid humans flowing into backyards, rooftops, lofts, gardens, houses, abandoned theaters, artist run spaces, looking at nothing, drinking the scene, barely there, all too tuned with the moments, mumbling to ourselves and each other, searching for a good time, finding only sweet ennui.