The rental car is a Nissan Versa the color of a hospital waiting room, and I despise it with a passion that feels both sudden and deeply earned. It smells as if someone tried to erase a crime scene with vanilla air freshener, failed, panicked, and added a second, more aggressive vanilla. The result is an olfactory hostage crisis. Every breath feels like inhaling a candle from a pharmacy bargain bin. I am in Los Angeles on assignment, which means I am in a Nissan Versa on the 101, which means my spirit has already been lightly sanded before the pilgrimage has even begun.
The assignment is this: complete the full “double feature” circuit that fans of Obsession—the tiny-budget horror movie that has somehow become a cultural magnet in the middle of a half-asleep box office—have mapped with the solemn precision of medieval pilgrims, if medieval pilgrims had TikTok and ring lights. Little Toni’s first. Then the seven-minute drive. Then The Green Man in Burbank. Two locations. Less than two miles apart. An entire emotional apocalypse compressed into the distance of a sneeze, a lane change, or, in my case, an extremely predictable wrong turn. I specialize in wrong turns. I have made wrong turns in cities I do not live in, parking garages designed by villains, and once, with breathtaking commitment, in my own driveway.
I am doing this because my editor believes—and I fear my editor is right—that the story is not really the locations. The story is the space between them: the seven minutes in a car when a person moves from garlic bread to the serious moral question of whether they would risk a monkey’s-paw disaster for a promotion, clear skin, or the feral human wish to be loved past the point of good sense. I am doing this because the production downturn has hollowed out Los Angeles like a decorative gourd left too long in a hot window, and the fact that anyone is driving anywhere for anything other than an audition that will never call back feels like a miracle with valet parking. I am doing this because I want a One Wish Willow, I have been told I will not get one, and I find that tension delicious in the way a cat finds tension delicious right before it ruins a sofa.
But first: Little Toni’s.
I get lost immediately, because of course I do. My phone’s GPS has apparently decided that “North Hollywood” is a loose philosophical concept and sends me to a driveway behind a dental office, where a man is power-washing a single deck chair with the cold focus of someone settling a debt. I circle the block. The Nissan Versa’s turn signal clicks like a metronome having a nervous breakdown. I pass Lankershim and Vineland three times before I understand that Little Toni’s is right there, on the corner, and that I have been looking for something more cinematic: a neon cathedral, maybe, or a visible sign, or at least a cluster of weeping pilgrims. Instead, the restaurant is simply present—short, sturdy, unimpressed—beneath a red-and-white striped awning that has been surviving Southern California’s nonsense since 1956.
I park in a lot that charges five dollars and somehow feels personally disappointed in me. Inside, the lighting is the color of a childhood memory that may or may not be legally admissible. There are checkered tablecloths. There are candles tucked into straw-wrapped Chianti bottles. There is a woman at the counter who looks at me with the tired patience of someone who has seen every possible way a person can misunderstand a menu, including several methods not yet invented. I adore her immediately.
I do not tell her why I am here. I tell her I would like the lasagna. She tells me the lasagna is “a commitment,” and I respect a woman who leads with the truth. I sit in a booth roughly the size and moral shape of a confession booth, which feels appropriate. The restaurant is half-full at two in the afternoon: regulars with the loose, blessed posture of people who know exactly what they are ordering, and one couple in the corner clearly doing the same circuit I am doing, phones out, photographing the bread basket with the solemn concentration of archivists documenting the last crostini on Earth.
But I am not here for the bread basket, though I eat it like a man recently rescued from a carbohydrate desert. I am here for the mood. In Obsession, Bear brings Nikki to Little Toni’s on their first date, before the wishing, before the horror, back when the film is still pretending to be a romantic drama about two coworkers with awkward chemistry and a shared allergy to honest communication. The restaurant is where the movie keeps its humanity, its last soft place before Bear walks into The Green Man and buys the carved wooden willow that will dismantle his life with the thoroughness of a cat destroying a sectional. To eat here first, as the fans do, is to perform innocence. To pretend you do not know what is coming. To pretend you are not the kind of person who would drive fourteen minutes for a cursed knickknack.
The woman two booths over knows exactly what is coming. She is maybe sixty, with hair the color of stolen copper and a denim jacket covered in enamel pins, including one tiny One Wish Willow. She catches me looking and lifts her coffee cup. “Doing the thing?” she asks. “We did The Green Man yesterday. Sold out, obviously. But they had citrine. My daughter’s getting into witchcraft now. It’s either that or TikTok, so I’m calling it a win.” I do not ask what the win looks like. I am afraid it involves a coven, a viral dance, or a coven doing a viral dance.
She crystallizes the whole story for me. Not because she says anything grand, but because she is here—with her daughter’s new hobby, her coffee, her little pin—performing a ritual she does not entirely believe in because the alternative is admitting that the industry that built this city is a smoking crater and sometimes you simply need to drive somewhere and do a thing. Even if that thing is failing to buy a twig. I want to ask what she would wish for. I don’t. Instead, I eat my lasagna, which is indeed a commitment. It is a commitment the way marriage is. Or a hostage negotiation.
Then I return to the Nissan Versa, which now smells faintly of marinara layered over the vanilla, and begin the seven-minute drive.
It takes me fourteen.
I am nothing if not consistent.
I miss the turn for Burbank because I am thinking about wishes, which is, irritatingly, the assignment. What happens in the gap? What do you think about during the seven minutes between the place where the wish becomes possible and the place where the wish gets made? I am retracing the route of a movie about a wish gone wrong while actively wishing that a piece of merchandise will be in stock. The irony is not subtle. It is sitting in the passenger seat like a copilot, adjusting the air conditioning, judging my lane changes, and refusing to pay for gas.
Bear’s wish is, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world,” which sounds romantic only if you have never read a fairy tale, or met a person, or spent ten minutes near consequences. The monkey’s paw delivers. Nikki loves him more than her mother, more than reason, more than the basic human instinct to blink. The film understands that the problem is not the corruption of the wish. The problem is the corruption of the wisher: the tiny selfishness dressed up as romance and sold as a greeting card.
I think about Fik, the fan south of Torrance who debated his hypothetical wish with his friend Eugene and landed on, “I wish I was the luckiest person at all times.” Eugene, hero of logic, immediately found the trap: “What if you’re the luckiest person in a plane crash?” It is the kind of sentence that makes you want to apologize for every half-formed desire you have ever had, including shorter DMV lines. I think about this while the Nissan Versa makes a noise I choose to interpret as philosophical disagreement—possibly Kant, possibly a loose belt—and I realize the seven-minute drive is the real location. The restaurant and the shop are set pieces. The drive is where you negotiate with yourself. Would you risk it? Is your private hunger specific enough to avoid catastrophe? Or are you simply hungry and should have ordered more garlic bread?
I arrive at The Green Man slightly incorrectly, parking in the lot of a neighboring business whose sign reads “NO GREEN MAN CUSTOMERS” in the same font as an eviction notice. I did not expect this level of territorial aggression from a dry cleaner. The shop itself is modest: a one-story storefront with a green awning and a window display of crystals, candles, and a homemade cardboard cutout of the film’s main character. The management has embraced it with the enthusiasm of a small business that has discovered it can triple revenue by selling symbolic twigs to people in emotional peril.
Inside, the air is thick with sage, ambition, and the ghostly regret of a thousand unfulfilled intentions. The walls are lined with jars of herbs I cannot identify and absolutely do not want to mispronounce in front of a witch, a teenager, or the most dangerous creature of all, a teenage witch. There is a display case exactly like the one in the film—glass, backlit, just a little too small for its own drama—and inside sits a One Wish Willow. Except it is not a One Wish Willow. It is a replica, a wooden lie, and beneath it is a card reading “DISPLAY ONLY / SOLD OUT.” Something in my chest deflates with the soft sadness of a soufflé in a drafty kitchen, or a man who has driven fourteen minutes to be told no.
Linda Snovak, the store manager, stands behind the counter with the brisk competence of someone who has been interviewed too many times in three months and has grown a polite layer of media armor. “You’re here for the willow,” she says. Not a question. I admit that I am. She tells me the last batch sold out by opening, with a line around the corner. She tells me Focus Features sold them online for $6.99, limit three per customer, and sold out in twelve hours. Twice. She tells me there are several thousand in circulation, which is still not enough, because the entire point of a One Wish Willow is that everyone wants one and almost no one can have one. This is also, I realize with a little shiver, basically the premise of the film. I look at her with the awe of a man who has accidentally met the marketing department and lost.
“We get people who come in and buy citrine necklaces,” she says, gesturing toward a case of amber-colored stones. “Or tigereye. Candles. Spell kits. Conjure oils. They want the energy of the place. They want to feel like they’re in the movie.” I want to tell her that I already feel like I’m in the movie, specifically the part where the protagonist is about to make a catastrophically avoidable decision.
I ask whether anyone has ever asked for magical advice about their wish. Linda laughs, short and knowing, like a door creaking open in a house that has information. “Every day. There’s a kid who comes in, maybe twenty-two, and he says he wants to wish for infinite knowledge. And I say, ‘Sweetheart, do you want to know everything, or do you want to understand everything? Because those are different curses.’ He bought a candle instead.” I am frightened of this child, and I have only met him through anecdote.
This is my Fik moment. My “luckiest person in a plane crash” moment. The point where the fantasy of the wish smashes into the paperwork of the consequence. I want to linger there. Possibly build a summer home. But a group of teenagers enters the shop, whispering with the ecstatic terror of people who have just discovered that a fictional world has a real address, so I step aside and let them have their pilgrimage. I am a professional. Also, they are blocking the citrine.
I buy a candle. It is called “Clarity,” and it smells like the opposite of the Nissan Versa, which is to say it smells like clarity, or at least like something that has never known marinara. As Linda rings me up, I ask about the other locations: Cassell’s Music and Roguelike Tavern, the two other filming spots, both closed since the movie came out. She nods, and her face shifts into something quieter. “Cassell’s was an institution,” she says. “Roguelike was newer, but they had good energy. The production didn’t save them. Nothing saves anything, really. We’re just happy to still be here.”
It is a sharp little grace note: the reminder that for every location that becomes a destination, others become memories, then footnotes, then nothing, then a parking lot. The Green Man survived because it sells something people desperately want to believe in. Little Toni’s survived because it sells lasagna that looks you in the eye and demands commitment. Cassell’s Music and Roguelike Tavern sold instruments and drinks, respectively, and in a city where the industry is going through what polite people call a “production downturn,” what less polite people call “the apocalypse,” and what the Nissan Versa would probably call Tuesday, that was not enough.
I leave The Green Man with my candle and my failure. The teenagers take turns posing in front of the display case, hands clasped as if in prayer, as if wishing, as if any of this will help with their college applications. One wears a shirt that says “I SURVIVED THE ONE WISH WILLOW” in a font lifted from the film’s promotional material. This shirt does not exist inside the movie, which makes it merchandise about merchandise, fiction about fiction, a snake eating its own tail in a mall food court. I find it weirdly moving.
The drive back to the rental return takes twenty minutes because I get lost again, this time near a freeway entrance that seems to lead not to another freeway but to a different geological era. I start thinking about the wish I would make if I had a willow, if I believed, if I were brave enough or stupid enough to risk the monkey’s paw. I would wish for something small, probably. Something so precise it could not be twisted. “I wish for the Nissan Versa to smell like nothing.” “I wish for the lasagna at Little Toni’s to remain exactly as committed.” “I wish for every closed location to get one more good year.”
But that is the trap, isn’t it? The small wishes may be the most dangerous because they reveal how small we are: how petty, how precise, how tender our hungers can be. How willing we are to drive seven minutes through Burbank in a car we hate just to stand in a shop and be told no. How willing we are to buy a candle anyway, get lost again, and call it research. As if getting lost were the whole point. As if the destination were only an excuse to be somewhere else when the wish fails to come true.
I return the Nissan Versa. It still smells like vanilla and marinara, and now something else too: sage, maybe, or the ghost of a wish that never got made, or the final breath of a saint who died in line at the DMV. The man at the rental counter does not ask about my trip. I do not tell him. But for one dangerous second, I almost do. I almost say: I drove the pilgrimage. I ate the bread. I failed to buy the cursed object. I am, by every measurable standard, completely unwell. Instead, I smile. He smiles back. Together, we agree to pretend I am a person.
I call a rideshare to the airport. The driver asks what I was doing in Los Angeles. I tell him I was writing about a movie. He asks which one. I say Obsession. He goes quiet. Then he says, “My wife made me watch that. She said it was about communication. I said it was about never trusting a wooden carving. We’re both right, I think.” I do not ask who won. I already know it was the wooden carving.
We drive the rest of the way in silence. It takes seventeen minutes. In the gap, I think about wishes and willows and the strange, stubborn luck of being in a city that still, against everything, finds reasons to drive somewhere and do a thing. Even if that thing is eating lasagna with emotional obligations. Even if that thing is sitting in a rental car that smells like a vanilla hostage situation. Even if that thing is failing, gloriously and completely, to buy a twig.