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.

since I’ve always lived in cities where a lot of the people are desperate refugees from small towns determined never to go back except for funerals, I thought everyone was like that. I couldn’t imagine someone in this age remaining past twenty years old outside of New York, Los Angeles, or London.

Their wedding rings reflected the pink twilight, their golden bracelets caught the light of the mustard hills.

With actors, first they find out what you like, and then they do it. They instinctively understand. But it’s not real. You know?” “Well, it’ll be something to see what I like,” I said. “I’ve forgotten.” (I mean if someone’s going to know instinctively what you want, you may as well find out what it is.)

And there, on that cold marble floor in that tricky company, I fell hopelessly in love without a backward glance and wondered what a nice girl like me was doing in a place like that.

Baseball is easy to fathom, not like football, which people explain to me at great length and I understand for one brief moment before it all falls apart in my brain and looks like an ominous calculus problem.

friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery, and resourcefulness, and who never told you the same story twice. Now, women I didn’t mind. I mean, you can go places with a woman and come back just fine (or as my agent, Erica, plowed right in and said: “You know that when you have dinner with a girlfriend, you’re going to come home a whole human being”).