Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: How I learned the difference between love and survival in a chemsex world
On Christmas morning, the man I thought I needed left me in another man’s cabin.
Hours earlier, Thom and I had been sprawled on the floor of a Santa Rosa utility closet where we’d been living, passing a meth pipe between us. I was 34 at the time. The mattress barely fit and it folded like a taco beside lube and dead torch lighters. Thom, in his 50s, had become my partner in chaos.
“Christmas. Anything you wanna do?” he asked with a tenderness I didn’t trust.
I scrolled Grindr. I’d traded seeing my family for crystal meth and the relief of nobody expecting anything of me.
After crashing my mom’s car and a stint in jail, I couldn’t face her disappointment. A decade in New York had promised stardom; by Christmas 2016, the promise had curdled. All I had left were men who only wanted my body. That was all I had left to give.
I showed Thom a torso-only photo on Grindr. “This guy’s having people over.”
He squinted. “That’s Ed.”
Thom’s Prius wound into Guerneville, a gay mountain retreat with meth undercurrents. That’s where Ed, a onetime costume designer, held his gatherings. Porn playing, GHB Gatorade, torch lighters that actually worked — everything we’d failed at. Billy, who was in his mid-20s, answered the door naked.
The cabin smelled of rot and wood smoke. We stripped down. It was part ritual, part performance. It’s how I’d stayed high and housed for the last few months. So I knew what came next. I knew my role. I pulled on a jockstrap two sizes too small.
Ed, who was in his 60s, grinned. “You’ve got that ‘West Side Story’ face, like you’re about to break into dance at the gym,” he said.
“Well, I played Tony,” I shot back. “No dancing for me.”
He laughed, and we were off, trading theater jokes, wardrobe malfunction stories and references Thom couldn’t follow. Thom’s jaw tightened as our connection excluded him.
He watched, his contempt spilling over, calculating whether I was worth competing for.
His face said exactly what I was: too much, replaceable. We were all using each other: Ed and Thom locked in an old rivalry, me the bait that kept older men supplied with boys. Billy was about to be replaced by me — I didn’t care. That was the cycle.
Thom yanked on his jeans, gave me one last sharp look and slammed the door. I waited for his car to circle back, even just to tell me off, but it never did. So I stayed with Ed.
Months blurred together without Thom. His absence weighed more than his presence ever had. With Ed, there was more than meth and sex. He spoke to the part of me that still loved literature, pop culture, acting — the part I assumed died. It wasn’t love the way people imagine it, but it was the closest thing I’d felt in years.
We settled into a routine of smoking, not sleeping, drawn curtains and dirty dishes until one morning I made peace with dying in a chemical haze.
“You really loved Thom,” Ed whispered over eggs neither of us wanted and then added, “I’m just glad I won.”
The words were petty, but I knew what he meant. I wasn’t just another Billy. In his own broken way, Ed cared, enough to know I didn’t belong there, not forever.
I stared at him, trying to read his next move. Was he kicking me out?
“If I let you stay here, I’d never forgive myself.” His voice was low, steadier than usual.
Ed was a dark character, fueled by his own hurt — he didn’t need to consider my future, he could’ve kept using me like everyone else had.
“Would you take me to L.A.?” I asked.
Ed nodded. “I’ve got an uncle in Venice.”
So we packed up his orange Honda Element. We tried leaving a few times, car loaded, engine running, but we were too high or too terrified of life on life’s terms. Then we finally made it. Even collapse felt easier in motion than rotting in that cabin.
The Central Valley stretched endlessly with dead grass and lawyer billboards. As palm trees started appearing, the air felt different — warmer, full of promises I hadn’t earned. But I told myself I would — if I could just get clean.
Ed’s uncle’s garage apartment reeked of must and jug wine. It was blocks from Venice Beach, yet still a prison. I didn’t know how to break free from the drug or the cycle that had trapped me. “Isn’t there a Ferris wheel on the beach?”
This was me trying to sound like I’d be willing to brave the world outside. But Ed knew better.
“That’s Santa Monica, the pier.”
The next day I reached out to Diana, an old college friend in North Hollywood. I’d told myself just get to L.A. — old connections would save me. But the look on her face when she saw me, my emaciated frame, the chemical burn under my clavicle, sour smell I couldn’t mask, told me otherwise. She hugged me stiffly, then pulled back.
“Jesus, Nick,” she said.
Ed said he was leaving and going back to Guerneville, but I begged for one more night. At a cheap motel, I accused him of hiding drugs.
“They’re my drugs,” Ed snapped. He grabbed his keys and was gone.
Abandonment had a sound — engine noise fading into Ventura Boulevard traffic. By morning, I still hadn’t slept. Outside, the sky burned neon pink and orange, the kind of L.A. sunrise that’s beautiful even if it’s born from smog. I just lay there, listening. Every car that slowed could be Diana or nobody.
At 10 a.m., she knocked, flinched when she saw me and helped me into her car. On the drive, she filled the silence with inconsequential chatter, as if nothing had changed. I pressed my forehead to the glass and counted palm trees to slow my heart.
Three months later, I landed at Van Ness Recovery House, an old Victorian in Beachwood Canyon under the Hollywood sign — 20 beds, three group sessions a day and nowhere left to lie.
The program director, Kathy, slid me a scrap of paper. It had a phone number with an area code I recognized.
“Ed?” I asked, though it wasn’t really a question. I knew what was next. I’d told the whole story in group. She knew everything.
“No contact. Ever,” Kathy said. I nodded.
“Tell him it’s over, and then hang up.”
Kathy handed me the phone. My hands shook as I dialed.
“Nick! How are you, sweetheart?” Ed answered, his voice warm and familiar.
Tears came before words. “Ed, I can’t … They say I can’t talk to you anymore.”
Silence stretched as Kathy watched and waited.
“But you helped me. You got me here. You …”
“Hang up, Nick,” she said firmly. “He’s a backdoor to your recovery.”
“I have to go,” I whispered.
“Wait, Nick, …” he started, but I hung up, Kathy’s eyes still on me. I handed the receiver back to her.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” she said. “This is your last chance. You can’t afford an escape route.”
Outside, the Hollywood sign caught the afternoon light. For the first time in months, no meth psychosis obstructed my view. It looked different, not a destination, but a witness.
Ten years later, I’m married to someone I met at an AA meeting; a quiet, steady love, the opposite of the chaos I once mistook for devotion. We bought a house in the Valley, have two rescue bulldogs. Today, when I drive past Van Ness — that old Victorian recovery house where I learned to tell the truth — I remember the Nick who thought survival was the same as love.
It wasn’t. But it got me to Los Angeles, where I finally learned the difference.
The author is a Los Angeles–based writer with recent bylines in the Cut, HuffPost and the Washington Post.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
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As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
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1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
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1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
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