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

by Eve Babitz

The contrast between his existence during the poverty-stricken English winter and my own L.A. days of champagne cocktails and diets made me realize that the world wasn’t all power struggles between me and pasta. In the back of my mind I thought, Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.

he was one of those creatures so young and almost mystically cheerful that he seemed doomed. “Doesn’t he know,” I asked Frank, “that peacock feathers are fatal?”

The Blackboard looked like it might twirl into heaven with just another double tequila.

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

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.

there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

I just should have shut up and gone home and hoped he’d die on the soap and get better in real life.

God what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumble-weeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn’t been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us.

I believe that most people put ninety-eight percent of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvelous love scenes.

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.

Later that day I watched Shawn swim and wanted him to kiss me, and when I asked him, he kissed my foot. I wished I were dead. I didn’t like our kisses to be jokes

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.