Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

THIS IS a love story and I apologize; it was inadvertent.

It’s difficult to be truly serious when you’re in a city that can’t even put up a skyscraper for fear the earth will start up one day and bring the whole thing down around everyone’s ears.

What I want to do is, one Saturday, we’ll wrap all our troubles in dreams and get in the car (you drive), and I’ll take you on my glorious Weekend in the wilds of Kern County.

Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

I thought again about the peacock feather he’d so innocently stuck into his hatband and thought I’d like to weep tequila tears for the inevitable extinction of certain American boys on horseback.

L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

I don’t really know if it was the flimsies or the dinner but I’ve often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

Oh god, I said to myself. I shouldn’t have said anything. I just should have shut up and gone home and hoped he’d die on the soap and get better in real life. I never should have made him dinner.

You won’t like this piece because you don’t like baseball so you can just skip it. Besides, this man means nothing to me.

he never had to say his name, our voices were imprinted on each other’s aural hearts—“I’ve

And there, on that cold marble floor in that tricky company, I fell hopelessly in love without a backward glance and wondered what a nice girl like me was doing in a place like that.

“My team?” I almost scoffed. I mean, I’ll go along with him to a baseball game gracefully, but he didn’t expect me to take sides, did he? But it was too late because somehow, before the thing even started, I had acquired an intense, fierce loyalty to the Dodgers, and I don’t know how it happened.

There’s no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and learning that it’s not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood “everything” in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.

Having something that both kills pain and is illegal is too tempting when you’ve suddenly got everything

I packed everything I owned back in my car and drove south, back to L.A., knowing that I was never going to grow up like you’re supposed to.

Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion both regard the Santa Anas as some powerful evil, and I know what they mean because I’ve seen people drop from migraines and go crazy.

He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.

The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.

In Los Angeles rain is such a special occasion that to savor it fully you must match it up with the right crazy place.

I could go on and on about Quaaludes, but the medical profession would probably get huffy,

Then the Beatles came with their Jane Ashers and those Mary Quant clothes that you could only wear if you were ten years old and raised on English cabbage.

Arrogance and conceit and remarks like that one are much more fun than starving all the time. Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect . . . you can wreak all the havoc you want.

My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboten and I’ve never found anything to disprove this. Shawn and Al Stills were both lapsed Catholics and you can’t get dirtier or more verboten than that.

When they designed those big palaces in Rome they must have known all along about hope and death, but they were so graceful they made it look easy.

Since I’ve started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I’ve had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback.

Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

I lived on a street in the middle of Hollywood with an abundance of palm trees and my orange sunsets over the jacaranda branches.

Citrus trees are so green they seem like mescaline hallucinations, even out in Bakersfield.

There was a point beyond which I would not lie to myself, and pretending I liked football was it.

They only came in black and white, while Mary was all the colors.