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

by Eve Babitz

“You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost,”

the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right,”

To this day, I think, there remains a suspicion of California, and of its artists, as if an embrace of gentle weather and open geography is tantamount to a lack of rigor.

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.

Logical sequence, however, gets lost in the shuffle. Art is supposed to uphold standards of organization and structure, but you can’t have those things in Southern California—people have tried.

People with sound educations and good backgrounds get very pissed off in L.A. “This is not a city,” they’ve always complained. “How dare you people call this place a city!”

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.

What I want to do is, one Saturday, we’ll wrap all our troubles in dreams and get in the car (you drive),

If I were a unionized farm laborer and paying dues, I’d like to know that my leader was every bit as scary as the boss and not some vulnerable saint.)

The sky was heavy beyond Bear Mountain and the land gave up nothing but dry golden wild rye, and looked as it must have always looked.

There was no extra energy in those women beyond their children or their particular geography. There was no energy for humor or wit, and I wondered at my friends in L.A. who were always brimming over with spare words and bright phrases.

L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

Because she has always worked, she never refers to Hollywood as “this town.” “This town” is a phrase to be spoken in tones of bitterness as proof of corruption (e.g., “The only way to get anywhere in ‘this town’ is to sell your ass”). The minute I hear those words spoken earnestly, I grow uneasy and bored. Occasionally I’ll refer to Hollywood as “this town,” but only if the other person understands about irony.

The reflection from the 7:00 p.m. sunset turned the eastern sky lavender, the clouds behind us burnt orange.

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.

nobody has ever asked me to see a baseball game in my whole American life.

They don’t take me to baseball games—it wouldn’t occur to them. No wonder I’m such a sitting duck for this man. He is the only one who could take me out to a ball game, but then be could take me to a flower show in Pomona, and it wouldn’t be any stranger than the idea of us together is already.

when in he came, dressed like Johnny Carson and asking for Scotch.

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.

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

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.

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. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.

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.

William and I entered the winter season in our summer clothes.

The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy.

My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboten and I’ve never found anything to disprove this. Shawn and Al Stills were both lapsed Catholics and you can’t get dirtier or more verboten than that.

There was an elegance because of the rain.

All art fades but sex fades fastest.

Chances are what one remembers.