Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.

It was paradise, but then, no one was surprised. Didn’t we all migrate here to assuage our conscience with avocados and sunshine?

“Can’t you see,” he said, “that life is too short to be miserable? You have to be with people who love you. The people who care about you. You are too fabulous, darling, to be miserable!”

That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

From afar, she looked a lot better than close up. Sort of like America. Or even L.A.

But the trouble with life is, just when you think you’re having a happy ending, things are changing, because there are no endings except death.

Unless you eat a really fine meal right before you go and take along a stash of trail food and apples to sneak eating in bathrooms, you’re going to hate yourself for ever saying yes to a barbecue—you get there at five, and by nine, you’re all sticky, bloated, and drear.

I mean, I’ve had cats who committed suicide and left notes that it was my fault; I’m not about to do it to people who could write public exposés—and mine would write, genetically it’s unavoidable.

We found an actual street parking space down there—though it took millions of quarters to make an hour—and we wandered through the smell of taquitos, corn, leather, wet serapes, and scented-candle stores, which filled the air with waxen orange blossoms and jasmine.

No wonder he only thought about sex; he never heard of mangos.

Sometimes I look at pictures of me from those days when I looked so beautiful and wonder what I might have looked like if I hadn’t abused drugs, alcohol, and tobacco as I did with such a vengeance.

One of the things I’d always dreaded about relationships was that you could say something—one thing—and it would wreck everything forever. You’d never be forgiven, not in ten thousand years.