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Besides its being bad luck to even whisper that you’re happy, it’s also not nice basically.
I had a sudden transplant of sense as I imagined myself “the man” and just how creepy I bet I could be: dodging emotional entanglements and lying and otherwise having a lovely time. Forgetting to phone.
where one day the incredibly beautiful young waitresses are going to poison (I hope) one by one all the vulgar and insulting men who’ve ever gotten away with murder and crude remarks—one
Rock and roll in L.A. tries even now not to be so gorgeous, to be raunchy and soulful, but it won’t work. Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne can’t scare anyone. Like the art from the old Ferus, L.A. rock and roll is just such perfection.
Men, I thought, are so wonderful.
The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.
(You can see, can’t you, how my generous spirit and diplomatic nature just rise to these occasions.) And I add for one last observation, “Men are all creeps!”
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.
He is dressed in tweeds and tailoring whereas I look as though I’ve been roused from a bed of bonbons, ostrich feathers, and tuxedo highballs.
I wonder if . . . (one of the tennis actors slides me a look) . . . 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 wonder if I’ll ever be able to get my big huge basketball player back like he was before. Or are all my occasional romances to fall to the ground after a month or so, like the jacaranda flowers? I always seem to end up with these Irishmen, drinking strong spirits, having to resist actors who know what I like, however delicate and flimsy it may be.
I pounced on him and lured him off to the sidelines. “Do you think these shoes are too purple?” I asked. “Too purple?” he said, looking down at my feet. “If they’re not too purple, they’re not purple enough.”
The Last American.
after he opened the car door for me—he’s from another era, too, not just the opposite sex),
Wait a minute, I thought to myself, I thought baseball was . . . I mean, I thought people who went to places I never went, like baseball games, were all fat, middle-aged, blue-collar workers holding Pabst Blue Ribbon. Or, at the very least, the well-scrubbed Young Republicans with their crew cuts and their girlfriends with freckles. All these people looked like they were going to a Dylan concert.
Like the first time I smelled caviar, I put it right back down on the plate and waited five years until a Russian countess offered it to me again with cold vodka in her exile’s parlor and then I loved it. (I didn’t want to be one of those people who don’t like caviar.)
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.
We entered the courtyard swimming area and there, in the pool, with a grayish-white Irish washerwoman complexion and wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, was Janis Joplin, floating. The blue pool flickered around her. “Is she dead?” I mumbled. I was afraid. “We’ll come back,” my friend said as we backed out. A week later she died.
Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have “everything,” not success-type “everything.” I mean, not when the “everything” isn’t about living happily ever after with the prince
Janis Joplin was always wondering when her prince would come, and the wait was such a bore that she purchased total surcease on the smooth, blank, clear, smiling lake of heroin. A famous friend of the famous.
it was nothing compared to the man I’d picked as my adult male companion—a mean Texas Scorpio who would have shot me as soon as look at me, if he hadn’t been so drunk he couldn’t see.
It wasn’t the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.
William was lacking in some major essential that made passion impossible, but he still looked at me and I’d catch him in the shadows, staring,
The thing is now that when I’m with Shawn I don’t even care if there’s some grandiose carnival in the sky I might be missing. Just think, if we didn’t have the Santa Anas, how straight we all would be. Like the patterns of those searchlights outside the Blue Champagne.
