
Door to Door
ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT I SAT, the lone New Yorker in a hotel room of an LA man and his LA friends, with the artist Alex Israel, who was lying on the couch wearing black sunglasses of his own design: “I was thinking about driving around and needing sunglasses in Los Angeles in the car. You’re driving. It made sense. Because it’s bright.” “High by the Beach” played on the stereo. Having basically written this very scene in 1985, in that first book with that first sentence—“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”—Bret Easton Ellis closed the sliding doors to the private terrace, and sat