Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

Here in L.A., we don’t confer authenticity through lineage, titles, or deeds. Instead it comes from the adoption of the aesthetics, of this unstable slice of coastline,

Any Eve reader knows they’ve come to the wrong place if they want judgment on the recklessly self-absorbed antics of the city’s denizens.

an obsession needs to be nourished with acts and deeds.”

It would almost look corrupt, except to be corrupt you have to have once not been, and nobody in this place was ever that.

In the balm of those sunshine days, in a land where winter never raises ugly questions about survival and canning vegetables, fun was all the truth we needed.

I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.

In those days, I had this principle that all men should have hair—lots of hair—or else what good were they? Unless, of course, they were so rich they could introduce you to the Rolling Stones, in which case, I suddenly became flexible.

When people would first arrive from New York, they’d say stuff like “This place is full of fruits and nuts and you have no seasons.” So I knew they saw through the cheap thrills of shallow sunshine and were principled easterners determined to be unimpressed. But after a few weeks, even they would show up at Barney’s Beanery driving a brown Porsche, and they’d move into one of those Snow White wishing-well houses where all they could hear were birdies in the trees and all they could see were hollyhocks, roses, and lemon blossoms.

We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.

Hollywood is a fiction that happened, a tornado of fabrication, a comedy of publicity. It’s as tenuous today as it’s always been, but it’s still standing. Whatever it is, it’s not over. Not yet.

I have found that malls are an acquired taste, like anchovies, and just as I’m beginning to think they’re not that bad, they’ve become something of the past.

The poverty of values trickled down to the streets.

It’s amazing that the people you really love in your life are the ones who connect you with other people you really love.

I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.