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atomization, the proof that things fall apart:
so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.
This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew.
“We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here
Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here
trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.
for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.
A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.
Saw the walk, heard the voice.
As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.
that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells
possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
The center was not holding.
All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.
San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.”
Max sees his life as a triumph over “don’ts.”
I am still interested in how Max got rid of his middle-class Freudian hang-ups and I ask if he is now completely free. “Nah,” he says. “I got acid.”
Vicki dropped out of Laguna High “because I had mono,” followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time and has been here “for a while.”
the girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August (1960? 1961?).
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently
for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.
aperçus
Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
Nor do I really need to remember that Ambrose Bierce liked to spell Leland Stanford’s name “£eland $tanford” or that “smart women almost always wear black in Cuba,”
But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it.
We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.
It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag.
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong.
My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal.
lassitude
The truth is that La Scala and Ernie’s are only five hours from New York by air. California is somewhere else.
Eureka— “I Have Found It”—as the state motto has it.
All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.
U.S. 99 in fact passes through the richest and most intensely cultivated agricultural region in the world, a giant outdoor hothouse with a billion-dollar crop.
makes one wonder, late at night when the ice is gone;
It is hard to remember what we came to remember.
the charge of a fortress island could not be something a man gives up without ambivalent thoughts.
And, like the frontier, it was not much of a game for women. Men paid for Newport, and granted to women the privilege of living in
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.
one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.
still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals.
