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. But I want it clearly understood from the start that I don’t expect it to turn out well.

Besides its being bad luck to even whisper that you’re happy, it’s also not nice basically.

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip,

He looks like a Marlboro commercial up close. 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.

There is a rodeo in Glennville at the beginning of every June and our twenty-two-year-old James Dean friend rides bareback horses. He wore a cowboy hat with the eye of a peacock feather stuck in the band, and 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?”

I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. 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 love hordes. They screen out free choice; you’re free at last: stuck.

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.

“Just friends,” they’re called. An American distinction if ever there was one. Only we would say “just” about a friend. My “just friends” were more reliable than most of my “just lovers,” since “just lovers” were always capable of saying, “Gee, you’re puttin’ on weight,” or “Are those the shoes you’re wearing?”

It seemed that all my lovers had but to whisper, “I have to catch a plane out of here in the morning . . .” and I was theirs.

From earliest childhood I have rejoiced over the Santa Ana winds. My sister and I used to run outside and dance under the stars on our cool front lawn and laugh manically and sing “Hitch-hike, hitch-hike, give us a ride,” imagining we could be taken up into the sky on broomsticks.

Once, when I was fifteen, I walked for an entire afternoon along the empty cement in 110 degrees of hot dry winds just to get the feel of them, alone. Everyone else was hiding inside. I know those winds the way Eskimos know their snows.

She was an actress, and like all actresses, she was only real when she was pretending.

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.

(Olivia’s favorite joke was one that a friend of hers used to exclaim upon seeing Olivia’s three-day-old bouquets: “Oh! How lovely those must have been.”)

she was always photographed stepping out of a Mercedes wearing understated garments that weren’t so understated that they didn’t state clearly that she was dutifully willing to rise to the occasion of her birth

Shawn’s always trying to smooth things over and I’m always trying to rumple them up.

“We walked in the rain together when we were girls,” Jo said dreamily. “Nothing will ever replace that.”