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

by Eve Babitz

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. 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.

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.

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.

And he treated me with a chivalrous masculine know-how that I sopped up like a person who’d never heard of how chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place.

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

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’ve often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

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.

I had just finished making myself some nice scrambled eggs in my brand-new Teflon pan with not only cheese but this newfangled great whipped chive cream cheese, and it was Saturday and only 5:30. (I had considered putting chorizo, that Mexican sausage, in, but chorizo has so much garlic in it that if you make anything out of that someone you barely know who’s wildly attractive will turn up and I just wasn’t up to one of those, Saturday night or no.)

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

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.

I’d broken off with both of those guys because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

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.

Maybe the reason I don’t get stuck on Italy is that I’m so jaded—that a girlhood beside the Pacific Ocean makes one accept perfection like arms and legs, without getting all tarred up. Simple tricks like rain are what get me.

Women I know are always saying that they’re glad, after all, that they weren’t popular in high school, because all the girls who were are now taking Valium and are divorced and stupid. But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five. It’s common knowledge.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.