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

by Eve Babitz

Women, especially, engage themselves in ghastly self-inflicted tortures for which they’ve been primed since childhood. After all, historically it’s always been dreadful for women, and the logic given them was “It’s going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it.”

I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.

The idea of an “artistic community” evaporates into the slow days. Inspiration and words like that get hurried along with the fast company; it’s impossible to tell if one’s been inspired, or if it was the cocaine, or what.

Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear.

But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.

the world wasn’t all power struggles between me and pasta.

(All we ever think about, really, me and my friends, is wine.)

But I knew if I didn’t dance with this man that it would be one of those missed chances that puncture your life.

Men, I thought, are so wonderful.

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’d like to weep tequila tears for the inevitable extinction of certain American boys on horseback.

The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.

that cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

And perhaps the dream could have gone on unbroken, except that they never do.

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. Sometimes one hardly even notices it’s happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one’s suspicions. I have found that what usually brings this lethargy on is if the woman displays some special kindness. Like making dinner.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.

“Listen,” he said—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.

In this day and age of men and women ducking for cover until whatever results from radical feminism and the general gory corruption riddling the country from stem to stern, I fell right smack in love with an obvious American man.

And I understood everything perfectly after that: Men and women are stuck with each other. Men go to parties they don’t really like because women want to go, and women in love go to baseball games and are graceful about it, though they never would have thought it up all by themselves. It’s very relaxing being stuck. And so there he was, fifteen minutes later, an impatient, suspicious man brought up in a tradition of being kept waiting by women.

The way he drove a car was the most inexplicable thing about him; he drove with an absent-minded, almost puttering kindliness, as though when he was inside a car, the world got slower; it was time for reverie almost.

I never expected that my external personality, which had hardened into that of a blasé Hollywood lady of fashion, could rupture at the first sight of those Americans down there in their white uniforms, but there it was. I was hooked.

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

Having quit smoking, I knew what she meant. Unless one is in the exact right mood, it’s impossible. Smoking has been so glamorous for so long, all those matches, those pauses, the lipstick on the tips—the smoke itself curling its casual way through the most nerve-wracking moments. But in another way, smoking, although glamorous, has never been as glamorous as heroin—and dying from cigarettes just doesn’t have the tragic sunset quality that O.D.ing lends to death. Heroin is the celebrated romantic excess of our time.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates.

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.