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I don’t know when I first noticed it. Maybe Hollywood. Maybe before that. But Hollywood is where it locked in.
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I’d be out late — really late, the kind of late that becomes early — and there it would be. A donut shop. Fluorescent light pouring out onto the sidewalk like a spill nobody cleaned up. Bright and flat and relentless at 2, 3, 4 in the morning.
And people inside. Always people inside.
I used to stop and look. Not in a cruel way. Just curious the way you get curious when something keeps happening and you can’t explain it. All kinds of people. Alone mostly. Sitting with coffee they weren’t drinking. Looking at nothing. The light finding every line on every face.
I thought about bugs.
The way certain bugs can’t resist a light. Don’t choose it exactly. Just get pulled. Something in the wiring older than thought. They go toward it even when the light is the thing that kills them. We call the device a zapper for a reason.
Most of them probably just had nowhere else to be. The city is cold at 3am even when the temperature is warm, and a lit room with cheap coffee is a reasonable answer to that.
But the image stayed with me anyway.
I used to go out late bars, clubs, whatever came after that sometimes ending up at one of those houses where the party never stopped. There was one down on Adams with a steel door. I’d take a cab back to Hollywood from there. Not far, but enough time to just sit and come down. And somewhere along the way, there would be the light. It didn’t matter where you were. There was always a donut shop just like all the others.
And then I’d be back in Hollywood, and that one on Melrose and Vine would be there. Just calling. I couldn’t look away. I saw the actor who played George from Seinfeld go in there once. Not at 3am but still. .
I had an idea I never did anything with. A woman in lingerie or nice dress standing in front of one of those places. Or laying on the sidewalk out front in a slow, deliberate pose. The fluorescent light doing what it does — flattening, exposing, no mercy anywhere. Her completely at ease. Pristine and elegant and impossible against that hard bright window. Beautiful in a way that had no business being there and yet made perfect sense.
I never figured out exactly what the picture would mean.
That’s probably why I wanted to take it.
Something about what we’re drawn to. Something about beauty in the wrong light. Something about all of us out there at 4am being pulled toward something we can’t name.
I never took the picture.
I still think about it.
— Neon