Lifestyle

L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?

Published

2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?

I still think about the night before I left Los Angeles — the way Matt and I finally stopped pretending we were just friends and how his pit bull, Jesus, slept curled at the edge of the bed while we held each other, fully clothed, knowing we were out of time. It wasn’t a grand ending. There were no fireworks, no cinematic declarations. Just the quiet hum of the city outside and two people trying to stretch a single night into forever.

I had met Matt years earlier, back when I first moved to Los Angeles and the city seemed determined to break me. I’d been apartment hunting for months, a process that had devolved into a series of small humiliations. Landlords’ smiles would fade the instant they saw my brown face. The decent apartments — ones with working showers or a refrigerator — were always “just rented.” The ones I could actually get were dark, smelly or unsafe.

I was starting to think I’d made a mistake leaving New York. Then my friend Shannon sent me a Craigslist listing that looked —miraculously — normal. “Hollywood/Little Armenia,” she read. “Centrally located. Two blocks from the 101.” The rent wasn’t outrageous. The photos didn’t make me shudder. I pulled out my Thomas Guide, traced the route to Lexington Avenue and drove there with more hope than I wanted to admit.

The building exceeded my expectations. It was white, mid-century, with quirky castle-like touches that gave it personality. The street was alive with Armenian markets and mom-and-pop bakeries. For the first time since arriving in L.A., I could picture myself living somewhere that felt like a community.

Then Matt appeared.

He was tall, clean-shaven, reddish-haired, with warm brown eyes that made you feel immediately seen. “You’re here about the apartment?” he asked. I braced myself for the usual letdown. Instead, he smiled and said, “Let me show you around.”

He was the building’s superintendent, but that felt too small a word for him. He was also a documentary filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA, was fluent in three languages and had an easy charisma that drew people in. His dog, Jesus, a striking black-and-white pit bull, followed him everywhere, tail wagging like a punctuation mark.

The apartment itself wasn’t perfect, but it was a palace compared to what I’d been through. It was a studio with a big kitchen and actual sunlight. I signed the lease that week. Shannon warned me, only half-joking, “Don’t fall for your building super.” I promised I wouldn’t.

That promise lasted about two weeks.

The first night I moved in, I realized my bedroom window was broken — not just cracked, but open enough to make me feel unsafe. I knocked on Matt’s door, probably sounding sharper than I meant to. I’d been through too many slumlords to expect much. But he listened patiently, nodded and had it fixed the next day. That small act — his professionalism, his steadiness — disarmed me. It was the first time in months that someone in this city had made me feel cared for.

We were both smokers then. The building had a little patio where residents would gather, and before long, Matt and I started running into each other there. Those encounters turned into conversations about film, queerness, art and the strange loneliness of being transplants in a city obsessed with dreams. He told me about Costa Rica, where he grew up, and about how he loved and resented Los Angeles for its contradictions. I told him about New York, about how it shaped me and why I had to leave it.

Our connection deepened slowly, marked by cigarettes and laughter, and those long, suspended silences when neither of us wanted to say goodnight.

By the time the holidays rolled around, I’d stopped pretending that I didn’t look forward to seeing him. As a thank-you for all his help that first year, I bought him two bottles of Grey Goose: lemon- and orange-flavored because I’d noticed he liked citrus. He invited me to help him drink them on New Year’s Eve.

We spent the night talking about everything and nothing: music, travel, ambition. Midnight came. We hugged. And in that long, lingering embrace, I felt the spark we’d been trying to ignore. But we let go, careful not to cross the boundary that had quietly become sacred between us.

For years, we danced around it. We’d share a beer, a smoke, a late-night talk and retreat again to our corners. I respected his professionalism; he respected my space. But under all that restraint was something undeniably alive.

Then came the accident. A driver T-boned my Volvo on my way home from work at E! Networks, and I was left with two herniated cervical discs and a terrifying warning from my doctor: one wrong move, and I could be paralyzed. I decided to move back to New York to recover.

The night before I left, Matt came by to say goodbye. We knew it was our last chance to stop pretending.

“I love you,” he said quietly.

“I love you too,” I told him.

We kissed, finally, with the kind of tenderness born from years of self-restraint. But we didn’t take it further. We just lay there, spooned together, holding on as if stillness could save us.

After I moved back east, we kept in touch for a while, then drifted apart. He eventually married a Frenchman and moved to Europe to make films. I stayed in New York and wrote my stories.

Sometimes I think about that broken window — the one he fixed the day after my first night in the building — and how it set the tone for everything that followed. Love doesn’t always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it’s in the quiet repair of something broken, the small acts of care that build into something profound.

Matt taught me that. He made a city that once felt hostile finally feel like home. And even now, years later, when I think of Los Angeles, I don’t think of the rejection or the struggle. I think of him.

The author is a freelance writer. He lives in New York City and is working on a memoir. He’s also on Instagram: @thebohemiandork.

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.

Lifestyle

‘Wait Wait’ for November 15, 2025: With Not My Job guest Tiffany Haddish

Published

21 minutes ago

November 16, 2025

Press Room

‘Wait Wait’ for November 15, 2025: With Not My Job guest Tiffany Haddish

US actress Tiffany Haddish attends Netflix’s “WWE Monday Night RAW” premiere at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California on January 6, 2025. (Photo by Michael Tran / AFP) (Photo by MICHAEL TRAN/AFP via Getty Images)

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Michael Tran/Getty Images

This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis, Not My Job guest Tiffany Haddish and panelists Brian Babylon, Paula Poundstone, and Roxanne Roberts. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.

Who’s Bill This Time

What About His Emails!?; A Holy Film Festival; A Wreck Gets Celebrated

Panel Questions

Flatulent Design Flaw

Bluff The Listener

Our panelists tell three stories about a woman named Tallulah in the news, only one of which is true.

Not My Job: Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish answers our questions about female-fronted comic strips

Tiffany Haddish, comedian, actor, and star of the comedy Girls Trip, plays our game called, “Girls Trip, Meet Girl Strip.” Three questions about comic strips with female leads.

Panel Questions

New Life For Old Sweats; Saxy Wedding Music

Limericks

Bill Kurtis reads three news-related limericks: Getting Deep on the Beach; Turn the Lights Off; A Starchy Cold Remedy

Lightning Fill In The Blank

All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else

Predictions

Our panelists predict what will be The Pope’s favorite movie of 2026.

Lifestyle

Americana troubadour Todd Snider, alt-country singer-songwriter, dies at 59

Published

18 hours ago

November 15, 2025

Press Room

Americana troubadour Todd Snider, alt-country singer-songwriter, dies at 59

Jason Isbell, from left, Todd Snider, and Sheryl Crow perform at the To Nashville, With Love Benefit Concert at Marathon Music Works on Monday, March 9, 2020, in Nashville, TN.

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Amy Harris/Invision/AP

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Todd Snider, a singer whose thoughtfully freewheeling tunes and cosmic-stoner songwriting made him a beloved figure in American roots music, has died. He was 59.

His record label said Saturday in a statement posted to his social media accounts that Snider died Friday.

“Where do we find the words for the one who always had the right words, who knew how to distill everything down to its essence with words and song while delivering the most devastating, hilarious, and impactful turn of phrases?” the statement read. “Always creating rhyme and meter that immediately felt like an old friend or a favorite blanket. Someone who could almost always find the humor in this crazy ride on Planet Earth.”

Snider’s family and friends had said in a Friday statement that he had been diagnosed with pneumonia at a hospital in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and that his situation had since grown more complicated and he was transferred elsewhere. The diagnosis came on the heels of the cancellation of a tour after Snider had been the victim of a violent assault in the Salt Lake City area, according to a Nov. 3 statement from his management team.

But Salt Lake City police later arrested Snider himself when he at first refused to leave a hospital and later returned and threatened staffers, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The scrapped tour was in support of his most recent album, “High, Lonesome and Then Some,” which released in October. Snider combined elements of folk, rock and country in a three-decade career. In reviews of his recent albums, The Associated Press called him a “singer-songwriter with the persona of a fried folkie” and a “stoner troubadour and cosmic comic.”

He modeled himself on — and at times met and was mentored by — artists like Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark and John Prine. His songs were recorded by artists including Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver and Tom Jones. And he co-wrote a song with Loretta Lynn that appeared on her 2016 album, “Full Circle.”

“He relayed so much tenderness and sensitivity through his songs, and showed many of us how to look at the world through a different lens,” the Saturday statement from his label read. “He got up every morning and started writing, always working towards finding his place among the songwriting giants that sat on his record shelves, those same giants who let him into their lives and took him under their wings, who he studied relentlessly.”

Snider would do his best-known and most acclaimed work for Prine’s independent label Oh Boy in the early 2000s. It included the albums “New Connection,” “Near Truths and Hotel Rooms” and “East Nashville Skyline,” a 2004 collection that’s considered by many to be his best.

Those albums yielded his best known songs, “I Can’t Complain,” “Beer Run” and “Alright Guy.”

Snider was born and raised in Oregon before settling and making his musical chops in San Marcos, Texas. He eventually made his way to Nashville, and was dubbed by some the unofficial “mayor of East Nashville,” assuming the title from a friend memorialized thusly in his “Train Song.” In 2021, Snider said a tornado that ripped through the neighborhood home to a vibrant arts scene severely damaged his house.

Snider had an early fan in Jimmy Buffett, who signed the young artist to his record label, Margaritaville, which released his first two albums, 1994’s “Songs for the Daily Planet” and 1996’s “Step Right Up.”

Lifestyle

Miami Beach charter boat owner arrested in alleged teen sex trafficking case

Published

20 hours ago

November 15, 2025

Press Room

Miami Beach charter boat owner arrested in alleged teen sex trafficking case

A Miami Beach charter boat owner was arrested in a sex trafficking case involving a 17-year-old girl, authorities said.

Kutay Satiroglu, 45, was arrested Wednesday on charges of human trafficking, lewd and lascivious battery on a child, and contributing to the delinquency of a child, Miami-Dade jail records showed.

Miami-Dade Corrections

Kutay Satiroglu

According to an arrest report, Miami Beach Police officers began their investigation after the teen’s mother said she received a call from her older daughter that the teen was at Satiroglu’s house being held against her will and physically and sexually abused.

The teen later told investigators she met Satiroglu at a nightclub in April and at first told him she was 21 but by the end of the night confessed that she was only 17, the report said.

Satiroglu is the owner of a charter boat business and offered her a job as a boat steward, and the two began a sexual relationship, the report said.

While they were in a relationship, the teen said Satiroglu would have her engage in sex with his friends in exchange for money, charging anywhere between $200-$800 per meeting, the report said.

She also said he would advise her how to collect the money in advance and that the money was used to fund their household, the report said.

Satiroglu also gave her drugs during the sessions and whenever they would throw parties, and would also force her to call her girlfriends to come over and have sex with him, and if she didn’t comply, he would “discipline her by physically harming her,” the report said.

The teen said he was physically abusive toward her on numerous occasions, often beating her whenever he was in a bad mood, the report said.

She said that two days earlier they’d been involved in a physical altercation, and that there were two other females in the yacht who did sex work on his yacht charters, the report said.

The teen said she complied with Satiroglu because she was in love with him and wanted to make him happy, the report added.

Satiroglu refused to speak with detectives before he was arrested and booked into jail, the report said.

At a hearing Thursday, a Miami-Dade judge ordered Satiroglu would be held without bond.

In a statement Thursday, Miami Beach Police credited the teen’s older sister for coming forward with information.

“Due to her bravery and coordinated response of our detectives, a minor was rescued from a dangerous situation, and the suspect was taken into custody without incident,” the statement read. “The Miami Beach Police Department remains steadfast in its commitment to protecting the most vulnerable members of our community and will continue to aggressively investigate and prosecute all acts of human trafficking and exploitation.”