Drinking in LA

The 77th Emmy Awards were over and I was heading home in the back of a self-driving car. I texted a friend, as I watched the wheel turning by itself: ‘I feel like I am being driven by a ghost.’ And of course, I was: the ghost of the cab driver whose livelihood has been taken away by a tech giant. I listened to music, encouraged by a disembodied voice to sing along as loudly as I wanted to: ‘We can’t hear you.’

In August I got a message to say I had been nominated for an Emmy, along with the rest of the Philomena Cunk writing team, for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, for Cunk on Life, and was invited to attend the ceremony. I spent the next three weeks scrolling Vinted in search of an outfit, making a change from the hellish things I was otherwise seeing on my phone. There was desperation in the air for something good to happen, and this would do. ‘I hear you have been nominated for an Emmy,’ people said to me. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t know what to wear!’

My mother texted to say she strongly suggested I take a burner phone. People were being turned away at the US border: artists, activists, journalists, academics. I removed myself from a WhatsApp group I had made to co-ordinate a rolling fast to raise funds for Gaza. I deleted my Instagram account. I edited conversations to remove any immediate trace of political involvement. I had to look like somebody who knew nothing, asked no questions, took no action. It was grossly easy to do.

In LA I drank champagne at night and electrolytes in the morning and abandoned my critical faculties. On the evening of the ceremony I put on my dress, negotiated a mild panic attack, and headed to the theatre. We didn’t win, which was fine, although just before they announced the winner I had allowed myself a brief moment of anticipation (Saturday Night Live swept the board for its fiftieth anniversary special). We watched other people win and make speeches. Barack Obama won for doing the voiceover for a nature documentary. I don’t know what he was up to instead, but he couldn’t make it to collect his award.

The only mention of genocide was by the actor, comedian and activist Hannah Einbinder, who ended her acceptance speech with: ‘Fuck ICE, free Palestine.’ Some compelled us to ‘be kind to one another’, or referred darkly to ‘the state of the world’. People mainly wanted to talk about how important television is. Afterwards, we were ushered over to the Governor’s Ball. In the middle of the room stood a humungous, candelabra-lit reproduction of the Emmy statue, reaching towards greatness, tits first. We danced to a band performing ‘Pink Pony Club’ with aggressive professionalism, in a production that shone a multi-megawatt spotlight on what was, after all, a group of colleagues obliged to socialise on the company’s dime. An office party for celebrities.

When I got back to England and reinstalled Instagram my phone was once again flooded with images of unimaginable violence. Palestinians are fighting against epistemicide using the tools available: namely, social media, even as it seeks to silence them. The posts from individuals in Gaza beg us to take notice. The questions remain the same: ‘Why is nobody paying attention? Why have we been forgotten?’ Red text on a black background: ‘What more can I do to make our voices reach the world? The world doesn’t want to hear or see.’

‘Did you have a good trip?’ people asked. ‘Yes,’ I wanted to say. ‘I stopped thinking about the genocide.’

I first went to LA more than twenty years ago. A guy on the shuttle from the airport invited me to sing with his band. A bartender told me they had watched me walk down the street earlier and prayed they would see me again. I assumed that this attention had been in exchange for the currency of my youth and that this time I would pass invisibly through the streets and beaches and bars as I do at home. But strangers stopped me to tell me they liked my haircut, asked me who made my dress. I responded to the attention like a sunflower, turning my face towards a warmth that I hadn’t noticed I had been shaded from. I smiled more. I couldn’t frown because of the botox, anyway. When the cashier at Trader Joe’s told me to go ahead and have myself a great Wednesday, I confidently told him that I would.

‘We can’t hear you,’ the disembodied voice reassured me in the Waymo. It was freeing: the childish desire to be left alone even as you depend on others to get to your destination. A previous passenger had used their freedom to smoke a blunt with all the windows closed.

On my last night in LA, a human cab driver drove me through the hills and said something to annoy me. ‘Wish I was in a Waymo,’ I texted someone. I didn’t, of course; I just felt uncomfortable, and self-conscious, and angry, which are good feelings, which remind me that I am of this world.