We spent Sunday at the horses. Syrupy, golden sunshine penetrated everything. There was a wind, and within it was the ghost of a chill.

"It's almost never like this in LA," Jesse said. "Sunny and windy like this."

Jesse pointed out the art deco magnificence of the grandstand and I tried to imagine how many men had wasted their lives in there, evading wives and children, looking for that one big win. Southern Californian men of the 20th century: migrant farm workers, lowlife barflies, stuntmen and junkie cabaret musicians. But good things happen too.

I drank gin and tonics and bet like a fool.

Suddenly you hear the horses when they turn into the stretch. You're momentarily ashamed that you've been gaping at the mute and sterile screen. You hear the pounding of their hooves and you can almost feel it. The vain and pleading hollers of the crowd.

We were in the infield, where there was a playground. We bet and watched and read the form and bet and watched. Odds shifting on the board. Always a scratch or two. The starting gate reappearing somewhere on the track. The kids held races of their own.

It was over and we walked back out the tunnel. Below the grandstand, men sat in disordered groups and watched the last remaining off-track races. Exhausting all their chances, putting off their journey home.

The flight out of JFK early on Saturday morning had a distinctly LA vibe. A commuter plane of Angelenos returning to their sunny home after the dutiful completion of errands back east. I spotted a woman I knew ages ago, when the band played New York City. She's an actress who's succeeded in the margins; she's just famous enough so that you'd probably recognize her but you'd never know her name. I made eye contact at the coffee stand but she betrayed no recognition at all. It's funny the people you see.

I watched the line to the Jetway, waiting for them to call my group. There was a very fat black man, shuffling and lurching in his orthopedic shoes. He pushed a wheelchair that was loaded with bric-a-brac, bag lady style. He was speaking into a Bluetooth earpiece.

"Sir, are you going to check that?" an airline employee asked.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and returned to his phone conversation. I listened in.

"Yeah, so listen. I'm with a rapper who's having problems with dem 5150 boys. That's Tony Yayo's crew. He with G-Unit."

I looked around for the rapper. Eventually he sauntered up, a fairly inconspicuous youth, and took his place beside the fat man.

Planes taxied spectrally in the darkness out the window of Gladstone's at Los Angeles International Airport. A montage of NASCAR crashes played in the sky, reflecting a television high above the bar. The woman to my right ordered a gin and tonic. The bartender, a matronly woman who had once tried to act, asked for her ID.

"They make me ask everyone," she said apologetically.

"I'm two and a half times legal," the woman said.

"I'm three times legal."

A knife rested on the floor, blade pointing away from the dirty table where it belonged.

I peered out at the engine through the grated window up near where the Jetway met the plane, the turbine turning in the wind. Coming to a halt. Turning a little more. No one talks to you on airplanes anymore.

The sun was waiting for us and when we got outside it clutched us in its hot, dry grip. The brittle vegetation and pretty little lawns down Harvard Street were in shock too, not stirring but seeming to murmur a faint complaint of thirst. It seemed funny to be walking because walking is something that just isn't done there. It felt like you could go from one point to another but you'd never really get anywhere - the vista didn't change; there were no big boulevards and streetlights and rows of fast food joints, cheap hotels and lamp shops. Just the thorny brush, the scintillating street, the houses and the sky. We got to Jesse and Anna's friends' house and it was a beautiful, big house, they'd just had it redone; there was a veranda I guess you'd call it and a big, florid garden in the back. We ate at picnic table under a sparsely vined trellis. Wisteria. They were very nice - she was almost too nice, painfully nice, you felt like you should watch your mouth and even watch your mind around her - and at the end their son Ben woke up, who's disabled, and she cheerfully introduced him to the group then fed him potatoes and boiled chicken.

I moved to Los Angeles to become nobody. I was an extra on a variety of shoots, occasionally a stand-in. I aspired to become a double and honed my physique accordingly, observing cultish Hollywood diets and spa regimens. Occasionally I was employed for the neutrality and mutability of the back of my head, an attribute treasured among assistant directors. On awards nights I was a seat filler, nice work if you can get it. I was a professional cipher.