[ESSAY][02/17/26]If You Want It
by Sean Koa Seu
I once believed that there was no greater pleasure than driving in Los Angeles. Add a case of cold Mexican beer to the back seat and a sweet Jewish boy to the front seat and that’s heaven. I have thought, “Well, surely, this is the best drive of my life,” and never mind the honking when I make my illegal left turns onto Sunset Boulevard. Before I moved to the Southland, I would cry when someone honked at me. Now I see it as a hoot and a holler, an ecstatic yelp! We’re mad or we’re horny, or, more likely, we’re just Not Paying Attention. Add your instrument to the symphony, ram the palm of your hand into the steering wheel. Toot-fucking-toot!
You just can’t beat driving in Car City. You don’t understand the blitz of listening to the playlist your Industry Boyfriend made for you while you whip past the Formosa Cafe. Even better when said boyfriend lends you his car while he’s on a job in New York City (dreadful) and it gets such good mileage—much better than the car your husband bought, the one that you ruined when you drove into a concrete pole in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. I love that car, that big old Jeep, yes, it’s reliable and true and there’s a rusty gash in the side that I put there, yes. But my new boyfriend’s tiny Subaru is a joy. Perfect for picking up beers and boys and going wherever it is one goes.
Admittedly, driving in Los Angeles has made me forget all about destinations—the where is less important than the floating, roaring, flying. I drive to the library days before my books are due, and I’ve driven to the post office even though my building has a box for outgoing mail. I have driven to the beach and back without leaving my car. But, today, with the nice boy and the beers, there is a destination, one of the few destinations in Los Angeles which rivals the road: a party in Silverlake.
O! The party! The party in Los Angeles is high art, perhaps the highest art—on par with the Philharmonic or the billboard. It is improvised performance. It is scored. It is an installation. The best parties are hosted by artists whose work you admire. They are in conversation with the local politics, and in L.A. the politics is pleasure. This seems textbook hedonism to those who have not read their L.A. theory, but pleasure is not selfish in the Southland. It is the reason for living, working, even loving and dying—but you either know that or you don’t. Pleasure is the destination at the end of the road of action—it is the thing that activates, it is activism. You either revel in feeling good or you don’t. You’re either learning how to make the illegal left and cruising merrily on your way, or you’re grumbling at the intersection for twenty minutes asking yourself why the system didn’t design the roads better. Girl, just hit the gas! That old adage that the smartest people are often the least happy? It’s the opposite in L.A.
I love to arrive at the beginning of a party. I’ve never enjoyed missing the opening credits. A party is a rich and multi-faceted narrative, a performance that resists linear progression, and its mechanisms are established in the first three minutes. To find any semblance of a plot, you must understand the status quo. You must watch the scene change from its beginnings to its ends. In my opinion, if you’re late for a movie it’s better to scratch the whole thing and head to the bar instead. This is often true even if you’re on time—better to live life than to watch it. It’s the same with parties, get there on time or you’ll miss the whole story—who wants who and why? We need to establish the question so that the answer may reveal itself.
Another thing about the party is that it is necessarily local. You have to be there. As such, the global, the universal, the “big picture” (yawn!) dissolves into a deep well of specifics. Bad days, weeks, entire lives have been forgotten in the soluble details of the party. Nations, even. So. Here’s some details:
This party has a samovar for mojitos, and an open bar. The theme is twincest, which, if you watch gay porn, is obvious, and if you don’t watch gay porn, well, I hope you at least read. One of the hosts was late for their DJ set, and all four stories of the building were available for mingling and kissing and whatnot. My date, to my surprise, knew one of the hosts. Good! I don’t need to make every introduction. There were two dance floors—one on the terrace overlooking the hills, and one in the laundry room. Fantastic. I have myself a mojito, and a second mojito for good measure.
I’m nervous about my date. He’s a cinematographer, absolutely adorable, gooner smile, silver and blue coloring like an angsty bruise, freckles up the wazoo. People in the film industry either love themselves or they love movies. He loves movies. Earlier that week he showed me a short film about a couple in a war zone haunted by condoms. I’m not sure I really got it—but we got high on his couch and he made negronis. I swooned, we gooned. Still, I haven’t seen him at a lot of parties. Sometimes he makes disparaging remarks about his body. I always scoff because he’s adorable, and much too grown up to be worrying about that sort of thing. I wonder how he’ll feel in a room full of party kids doing coke. I sent him a long text message making sure he knew there would be white powders there—here—and I’m sure he’s tried all that, but is it his scene? What will the scene be anyway? I notice I’m shaking the ice in my otherwise empty cup, and quickly head to the bar.
My anxiety is broken by this giddy blond surfer-type wearing only a fanny pack, who’s sidled up to us. He’s yapping about D.C. The District! No I’ve never been, but I’ve heard it’s a swamp. D.C. Nightlife is much better, but aren’t we here drunk on this patio and it’s bright as day? How much better could the night be? And isn’t D.C. where all of the architects of genocide live anyway? I’m not sure what I would do if I ran into one at a party. Thank god we’re in L.A., where deliberate architecture doesn’t exist! Hee haw!
My cinematographer suggests we tour the building. I’m grateful for this idea. We’re in a laundry room. I feel comfortable with him here, in the domestic, where I normally encounter him. But this laundry room is lit lime green, and it’s also dusty. He’s a good kisser, but a group of boys come dancing in and he gets shy, which I appreciate. We haven’t seen anyone shy yet at this party, and it’s important, I think, to always experience the full range of human emotion at these kinds of events. The most important emotional experience being, of course, Falling In Love.
Then my husband arrives.
He’s not really supposed to be here. He’s the husband who has the Jeep with the rusty gash, the one that I made. All week, over our various pasta dinners (I’ve been too lazy to cook), he’s been saying maybe to this engagement. Maybe he’ll come, oh, he won’t know if he’ll be up to it. Well, I knew I was fucking going, so I brought a date, and I twinned with him for fuck’s sake. So now I’m at a party in matching outfits with a boy who is not my husband, while my husband stood stupidly at the bar, next to a girl wearing a Twin Towers t-shirt. It didn’t look good. Still, he looked impeccable.
My husband is jealous. If he had it his way, I’d only sleep with him, and he’d get to sleep with me and the rest of West Hollywood, and a bit of the East Side too. But I’ve always had a strong sense of equity, and a bit of an addiction to True Love. So I date. This creates problems within the marriage, but only those day-to-day types of problems, like when I forget to run the dishwasher at night. Things tend to flare when he believes that I’m dating more than he is—like during my birthday month, or the summer, or the holidays, or whatever. There are eye rolls and skirmishes and sometimes even tears, but if I couldn’t date boys I would just die, and then where would the marriage be?
My date and my husband say hi to one another and drift their separate ways. The great thing about L.A. is how aired-out it is, so people and intentions and things you meant to write about tend to just float away. This is ideal dating weather. Husbands can brush up against boyfriends and, before anything embarrassing happens, a gust of dry wind carries them far from each other. There’s just so much space.
Drink number five.
And I’m blown away, too, by the charcuterie platters on the third floor—the heaps of expensive cheeses paired with skin contact wine. And the shes, gays, and theys together in the laundry room, when-I-go-to-the-club-I-wanna-hear-those-club-classics, and look! A boy in aviators just got here. He grabs the husband and they head for the bathroom. Brilliant.
I’m up on the fourth floor, where I don’t know anyone, when I meet a couple from Ukraine. I ask them, “How do you like Los Angeles?” and the sun shines out of their faces. And they tell me how friendly everyone is. Oh, aren’t we all so friendly? I ask them if they think we’re good. Forget friendly, forget sexy even, I want to know if I am good. If we are good. Are we good? The couple offers me a bump. We go into the bathroom.
My date finds me and says he’s walking home. He tells me he walks along the side of the freeway sometimes. I tell him that the next time he goes, he should bring me. What is more romantic than walking along the side of the freeway? What could be more dystopian, more Mad Max, more Nakba? I offer him a ride and he declines. He tells me to get home safe. And so I let him leave the party before the sun sets and there goes my twin, in our matching Aloha shirts. Suddenly I’m alone at the party, and it’s all mine, well, except for my husband who is still in the bathroom, or maybe he left for work. And I think of my crush walking along the freeway and I get sad for a second, but then I have another bump.
It’s late-in-the-evening-early-in-the-morning. I sit down on the veranda outside where I meet an astrologer, who I’m thrilled by, and I tell him that I, too, am an astrologer, and don’t I recognize his voice from a podcast? He invites me to a house in Pasadena later that week, which I instantly accept. For a moment I think of asking him to tell me the future, but then my stomach turns and I think better of it.
Then all the boys are gone—my boyfriend and my date and my husband and all the rest of them. And it’s three in the morning and friends are expecting me at the next engagement. So I exit without telling anyone. I stumble toward the street.
I once believed there was no greater pleasure than driving in Los Angeles. Now I know the truth—there is no greater pleasure than driving drunk in Los Angeles. I hop behind the wheel and the car leaps forward. I blast BRAT and roll my windows down. I make an illegal left onto Sunset and start heading toward the bar. Is that my twin on the side of the freeway? I swerve to miss. I’m flying past the underpass encampments. Someone is putting out a fire. So what? The entire world is mine. Where am I meant to go? I have forgotten. I am following my desire to the end of the road. And I’m screeching to halts at red lights and going zero-to-sixty at the greens. And I’m laughing at the billboard advertisements selling makeup and designer flip flops and I don’t even notice the one that says WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT.
SEAN KOA SEU lives in Hollywood. His work has appeared in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, The Rebis, and Open Assembly. His zine LA Plays Itself was commissioned by Departure Lounge.