Perfect Momentum

In a preview from LARB Quarterly no. 44, “Pressure,” Dorie Chevlen learns how to crash someone else’s car.

By Dorie ChevlenApril 28, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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I DIDN’T CRASH REID’S car, twice, because I disliked him. But living in his perfect Beachwood apartment, it was certainly hard not to. The place had these big, sunny windows, and brand-new Joybird furniture, and a mismatched assortment of Goodwill mugs that seemed to insist, “See, I’m still down to earth.” Even his car, which he was kind enough to let me rent, was perfect, a zippy little Volkswagen that somehow showed not one scratch. Well, until I drove it at least.

Reid was introduced to me by a friend of a friend, as I neared the end of my first month in L.A. I was living in a long-term Airbnb, the listing for which I’d barely skimmed before committing, so it was probably my fault that it ended up being a spider-infested basement in Silver Lake. The kitchen sink broke four days in; the woman who owned the property shrugged in apology. “You know how it is, being a single mom,” she said, and I didn’t, actually, but it felt rude to inquire, so I just washed my dishes in the shower. I later learned that she’d won that enormous house and its wretched basement hovel in her divorce, and didn’t work at all, but by then I was dragging my suitcase down her hill. And besides, I wasn’t the type to leave negative reviews.

In those early days, I took the bus around Los Angeles. I told people it was because, as a New York transplant, I wanted to honor my commitment to public transit, but the truth was I just couldn’t afford all the Ubers. Most of the rides were uneventful. The week that I met Reid, though, I took the Number 2 bus down Sunset Blvd. and another rider had such a bad psychotic episode that he kicked the middle door off its hinges one row ahead of me. As pieces of the door crashed into the street and the asphalt-heated air sucked into the bus, the man turned his head and looked at me. After a moment that felt eternal, he jumped out the gaping hole; the bus driver didn’t even slow down. A man sitting across from me in a Starbucks cap had filmed the whole interaction and AirDropped me the file. He leaned into my seat, eagerly, and said, “I moved here to be a cinematographer.” His video looked like shit.

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I did not hate Reid and his girlfriend, but they did say things sometimes that made it difficult. Reid’s girlfriend was a moderately successful actress from a wildly successful acting family (I'd tell you if I didn't think I’d get sued) and Reid himself was a self-described filmmaker, which is a functionally useless term in this town, but in combination it meant that they’d be vacationing at her family home in Paris for two months and thus wanted a subletter.

They’d just wrapped a self-funded short film—Reid behind camera, the girlfriend in front—and he advised me to do the same. “Just make your own stuff!” Later that night, my last night in the basement hovel before heading to theirs, I recounted the tale to my boyfriend. “Just make your own stuff?” I intoned. “Buddy, I’m barely making your rent!” My boyfriend rolled his eyes supportively but it failed to provide the usual comfort because those eyes were shrunk down to half-inch slits on my phone. He was shooting a series in another country and he had to hop off the phone quickly. That night, it was hard not to hate him too.

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I would not have chosen a man so thinly spread across his family, his work, and me, none of us receiving the time that we wanted from him. I told him as much the first night we kissed. And yet, I couldn’t resist kissing him. His life had so much more weight than mine and I liked how I felt standing next to him, like I’d been floating all my life and I’d finally been tethered, staked back to the ground. But his absence held weight also, and though I’d never lived in L.A., I felt it acutely there, like a black hole now, invisibly bending space and time toward it, altering everything’s shape.

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Awakening each morning in their bed, I didn’t hate Reid and his girlfriend, but I certainly hated my life. My eyes would flutter against the California sun—how was it so much brighter here—and I’d realize where I was and groan. I imagined my sister and my best friend, Christina, back in my beloved New York, eating dinner at our favorite bad sushi place without me. I would ask myself what I asked myself every day: “What if this was a mistake?”

Christina thought it was. “What the hell are you talking about?” she had asked me when I told her my plans to move here. Except she didn’t say “hell.” It was a fair point. My sister helped me pack our shared apartment, eating Thai on the floor the night before I left, but Christina stayed away, mad at me for abandoning her. She said that if I’d never met my boyfriend, I wouldn’t be leaving, which wasn’t right, exactly. But he had loosened my innate sense of geography. He could be anywhere at any moment, and I wanted to be that way too. I wanted the people in my life to prove to me what I’d proven to him, that their love could exist in constant motion.

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I spent most of my time at Reid’s sending emails to different entertainment agencies, praying one of them would want to represent a bright-eyed journalist with a stack of unproduced screenplays. No one responded. Who could blame them? I kept my day job, as a product reviewer for a newspaper, and resented the hours I put into that work, squandered hours which I thought belonged instead to the new creative projects I so desperately longed to get paid for. I tested black wool tights that September, in 90-degree heat, methodically scraping my stockinged toes on Reid’s brick patio, and watched as his beautiful neighbors steered their dogs away.

I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone how miserable I was in L.A., or how miserably ineffective my career plan was turning out to be. Sometimes I’d admit it to my boyfriend, but his own misery—the long hours on set, the guilt at missing his kids—felt so much larger than my own that I blushed in shame, grateful he couldn’t see it on his small screen. What sort of asshole was I, to be unhappy in this beautiful place that I’d chosen, because why, because I thought it might be nice to be a screenwriter? I had never had an açai berry before moving to L.A., and now I was confidently pronouncing it out loud. My boyfriend was away because someone had hired him to be, paid him to be, because he had real bills to pay, real mortgage, real responsibility. I was just a stupid idiot with a stupid idiot dream. I was actually pronouncing açai wrong, but no one in L.A. loved me enough to correct it.

I walked around Reid’s neighborhood in sunglasses and a baseball cap most days, shielding my face from the relentless sun, and also, often, shielding passersby from my tear-swollen eyes. I was repulsed by what a cliché I’d become. I said yes to every social invitation those first few months, because there were only so many follow-up emails I could send, only so many hours a day that I could write anything funny. And if I stayed too long at that apartment, the utter adoration of its usual inhabitants would make me turn mean, the cloyingly sweet postcards on the fridge mocking my loneliness, the closet stocked with their perfectly matched vintage jackets taunting a future I worried I’d never have. “Just make your own stuff!” Reid had told me. All I could make, apparently, was a mess of my life.

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And that’s how it went, for a long time. One night, dodging the claustrophobic wretchedness of my own thoughts, I got dinner at a Mexican spot with an ex-boyfriend’s mom’s former subletter, who I’d known a lifetime prior in Chicago, and a bunch of her friends whose names I immediately forgot. There was nothing wrong with any of those women, just that they weren’t mine. They didn’t want to order guacamole for the table, and it made me ache for my friends in New York and the ease I felt with them, that I knew my sister would debate queso before Christina reminded her she was lactose intolerant, that I’d crunch the math when the check came because no one else wanted to. Sharon Tate and her friends had eaten dinner at this restaurant the night before their murder, and I wondered if they loved each other or if they were just passing time.

Leaving dinner, still thinking about a murder spree from 50 years in the past, I got into Reid’s car and tried to zip out of the parking lot as fast as I could. Too fast, it turned out. CRUNCHHHHHH. I had zipped right into a light pole. The valet attendant gave me a look like “What the hell,” except he wasn’t thinking “hell.” That was fair.

I took Reid’s car to an auto shop and when Rafy, the owner, told me the repair estimate, I actually gasped. The shop cat brushed herself against my legs, purring almost sympathetically, somehow sensing that I was on the verge of tears. Her name was “Allie,” because Rafy had found her in the alley behind the shop, a detail that only made me want to cry more. I tried calling my boyfriend but he didn’t pick up. Anyways, what could he have done, away in a foreign country, with financial burdens of his own? Anyways, what could he have said?

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“I hope I don’t see you again anytime soon,” Rafy said when I picked up Reid’s car the next day, miraculously dent-free. But he would, because later that night, I overestimated the space between me and the car parked in front of me and scraped it on my exit. SCRRRRRRCH. “No, no, no, no, NOOOOO!” I screamed, behind the wheel, except I didn’t say “no.” Not seeing any damage to the car in front of me, I drove off, which I later learned is considered a hit-and-run, but I clearly didn’t know much about driving at the time. Also, I’m sorry.

When I got home and parked outside Reid’s, the damage looked nearly cinematic, illuminated as it was under a streetlight, juxtaposed with all the pretty cars and the manicured lawns and the succulents that framed it. I stood on the threshold to Reid’s, keys in my hand, swallowing the realization that I would have to return to Rafy again, and pay Rafy again, for a car I did not own, for driving poorly in a city I did not know, and that I had, without a doubt, blown up my life and left everyone I loved for a dream that I conjured up too late in my career, and that I’d chosen to live here, in this godforsaken car-ruled hell instead of my beloved, subway-veined New York, voluntarily, that nobody forced me, which only proved that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, intractably wrong, and—and I didn’t get any further than that, because by then I was crying.

Eyes half-blinded with tears and shed mascara flakes, I called my boyfriend first, but I knew he wouldn’t answer and I was right. I called Christina next, even though I thought she’d say, “Told you so.” But she didn’t say that. She waited for me to stop blubbering and then asked, gently, “Isn’t it a bit early for your dark night of the soul?” She thought my plans to move here were foolish, but she’d listened to me anyways, long enough to pick up the lingo.

I wasn’t sure insofar as it applied to my life, but structurally at least, she was right: the crisis belonged in Act II. So I paid Rafy with a credit card and left Reid’s car at his shop. Rafy offered to drive me home and I should have worried about getting kidnapped by this near-stranger, but some dumb optimism had returned to me—the heroine can’t get murdered in Act I!—and I climbed into his car. This is going to be okay, I told myself, and for the first time in a long time, I believed it. He gave me a hug when we arrived back at Reid’s, and I thought about how, later, when I told my boyfriend I’d let this mechanic drive me home and hug me, he’d worry about my judgment. But it would be a misplaced worry, because it would have already happened, and if I didn’t tell him about it, well, it would be like it hadn’t happened at all.

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All of it happened, though, and telling you makes it real yet again. I was sure, then, that I was doing everything wrong that I could—writing the wrong material, dating the wrong person, living in the wrong city. And clearly I was driving wrong too. I was sure of this, damn sure; I was wrong.

I hired the first driving instructor my Google search offered, and paid him in cash to ride with me for four hours. We roamed around the city in Reid’s car, listening to bad rock ballads that I was too polite to change, and he told me my real issue was one of confidence: I didn’t want to control the center median, I was overchecking my blind spots, I was too sheepish about making people wait.

Heading back to Reid’s neighborhood with the instructor, I could feel my phone vibrate through my purse—I knew it would be my boyfriend calling me back after hours of missed connections. My hand itched to grab it but I was doing something more important; eventually, it went still. The sun began its rosy-fingered descent over the Hollywood Hills, and I admitted to my instructor my last driverly concern, that I got anxious when I couldn’t see where I was going.

He shrugged like this was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “You only need to see six feet in front of you to keep moving forward.” As he said it, I knew I was going to write the line into something. I mean there was the freaking theme, spoken out loud, so perfect it was almost trite. I turned to him to say thanks, but he jabbed his finger at the windshield before I could, snapping me back to attention.

“Still have to watch the road,” he said. 

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Featured image: Paul Wolff. [Cars at night], 1930–1940. The J. Paul Getty Museum (84.XM.139.123). CC0, getty.edu. Accessed April 22, 2025. Image has been cropped.