I first heard of Eve Babitz in 2014. I was reading Lily Anolik’s Vanity Fair article in the pretty apartment in Ridgewood I shared with my girlfriend of about a year and a half. Reading snippets aloud, pacing in front of the blue sofa I had convinced her to buy with me. “Better red than dead!” She wrote that on a business card after getting burned all over her body! I was shouting and chortling, a mixture of horror, amusement, & admiration. And when she heard that these famous men she’d once fucked pitched in to pay for her operations she literally croaked from her hospital bed “Blowjobs”.
This kind of shrewd, bawdy, mysterious, and decidedly feminine verve was the precise kind of energy I’d always felt kindred to. Though it was also notably different, because in this case, the woman in question was not only of California but also completely in love with it. She hadn’t left, hadn't fled to New York like the rest of us, in search of more serious glamours. She had stayed in LA, and apparently, this article claimed, written dazzling books in its honor.
I was curious and also slightly disappointed. Couldn’t imagine yet that anything written about Southern California, the place I had so desperately wanted to leave, could sway me. Make me fizzy and beatific and inexorably altered in my perceptions. But the article had sold me at least enough to order a book. Her first, I decided, was the best place to begin. So Eve’s Hollywood arrived in the mail shortly after my initial discovery and I began to read. Completely unaware that by the time of her death, some nearly 8 years later (she died last month, December 17th) I would find myself weeping as if I had known her. Having read all of her books so many times over (I’m talking more than ten times a piece), that it felt as if I did.
To start, I grew up in San Diego, not LA. More a big town than a city. In a part of said town where charming slightly deco-style neon signs (modeled on the original ones that went up in the 30’s) mark the entrances of each neighborhood. Mine was North Park, teal with a wavy border and big white lettering in all caps. Right on the corner of 30th and University Avenue, an avenue I walked up and down over and over again searching for something, anything, to interrupt the place and time I believed to be, in such a very specific teenage way, most utterly dull.
I wanted to go to New York where people talked about important subjects and read dense books and wore proper clothes and didn’t squander all their hours on the beach. My father, a drinker, would take us to Pacific Beach and stay for hours, him on the sand, drinking vodka, surrounded by a retinue of gross young men. Beach types, with seemingly no job or agenda, who seldom went in the water and merely sat with him, all day, growing drunker and drunker on the ever-sunny shore.
The first time I ever took the bus alone, I was 12, and it was to get away from that beach, from those men. I begged my mother on the phone, a payphone I believe, to let me take the bus to my grandmother’s. She relented and my dad gave me bus fair and off I went. Winded and triumphant, giddy with freedom.
So by the time I read Eve, at 20, in New York, I had accomplished the ultimate continuation of that bus ride. I had escaped. And New York was everything I’d imagined it to be, antithetical in so many ways, to California. Gone were the giant flourecent supermarkets that sold absolutely everything, the girls in ugly Pac Sun sweatshirts and flip-flops, the maddening go-with-the-flow lack of urgency, the scary freeways, the tepid season-less mundanity, the stained wall-to-wall carpeting and shitty electric stoves. The ramshackle newness of it all, as if in a constant state of erosion and renewal, both architecturally and philosophically. And gone was I, from my family, from high school, and from all my nightmares of being stuck there forever.
Yet suddenly, here was Eve, only two years in, making it all sound so beautiful and full of wonder. Making my distaste feel juvenile. Unobservant. Misplaced. And you see I had to listen to her because we agreed on so many other things. We agreed about colors (people as either silver or gold, or sometimes incredibly both, the talent of colors, when someone’s personal palette makes everything else in the room fade, the specificity of the description of an antique French stool being cream of celery soup green, the obsession with blue, her references innumerable—I could go on). We shared an obsession with the people around us, their details always sticking in our minds forming vignettes and narratives of prolific proportions (Coco’s particular heavy makeup and trunkful of brown bags full of clothes found at thrift shops just waiting to be bestowed upon the perfect recipient; Kate’s shoes, always silver, just part of her habit for intensifying what was already there; beautiful obnoxious Nellie whose physicality exempted her from reality and meant she’d give you any object in her possession if you only complimented it; Max’s parties, his linen napkins, the way he always smelled like children’s birthday cake…). I even understood the duality with which one can both be a hedonist and resent their corporeality. Be in a constant state of war and upkeep, while also on a joy ride.
Eve has an interesting way of drawing attention to cruelty and injustice, both personal and otherwise. She positions herself, not like so many writers today as exceptional, but rather within the tension. The liminal space between oppressor and oppressed. Though in her later years suffering from a degenerative brain disease she grew increasingly right-wing (she once got access to a Facebook account, though usually didn’t have a computer and posted things like “Democrats started the KKK” and “I love Rush Limbaugh”). I am less interested in her later-years derangement and more interested in the wisened or disinterested (depending on your perspective) approach she took to formal politics. Preferring instead to focus on interactions on the ground.
Here is where I stand. A lot of what she writes is awash with a tendency to exotisize. She says things like “She was the colors of the Arabian Nights, dusk in Cairo…” or waxes fantastically about the kids called, blanketly, “Pachucos” in her high school, a nebulously racialized identity fraught with danger and style, that fascinated her, especially when compared to the other boring white girls requesting “Mr. Sandman” yet again during rainy day dance classes inside the gym. There is a lacking awareness of how this kind of thinking collapses detail, cherry picks and fetishizes certain vague features, as appealing and desirable to the white gaze. Thus, of course, upholding the white gaze.
On the other hand, I don’t think her overly-casual and often coy attitude to politic is accidental. For example she writes in the same chapter: The most obvious Pachuco was little Julian Herrera (probably still in jail for statutory rape—how come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape—because they’re white?). Eve’s Hollywood, where this line appears, was published in 1971.
It also seems unlikely that the first line of her chapter titled “The Watts Riots”: I spent the riots in the penthouse of the chateau Marmont with this ex-philosophy major from Stanford whose family owned all the more oily pieces of land in Arizona, Mexico, and California and who had taken up the profession of herding cattle (EH, 143), was so damningly callous on accident. That she neglects to say much more on the event itself at all, and instead discusses everything else (that they had bourbon and potato chips, that they watched a naked couple embrace two stories down, that the winds smelled of eucalyptus and jasmine), achieves an eerie but accurate effect.
I am not proposing a nihilistic read here, in fact I wholeheartedly reject doomsday narratives for cheap laughs and even cheaper self-justification for the already amply privileged. Nor do I wish to over-interpret, to extend too much benefit of the doubt, or to suggest that Eve is not sometimes deeply flawed. I could in fact name various instances that are without any possible ideological salvaging (her weird derision of “Eastern Religion”, her near-constant fat phobia, her grossly dismissive “feminist” analysis of things like clitorectomies in other countries, to name a few). But whether she is having a very adolescent-flavored conversation about how beauty seems to require a merciful disposition after encountering a beggar in Italy, reflecting on the tension of The Watts Towers being in Watts, commenting on the different unionized factions of the people who pick fruit in Bakersfield, trying to help friends targeted during the McCarthy era, upset by her own wealthy friends carelessly getting a homeless man arrested, memorializing one of her friends who died of AIDS, or naming Maybelline black cake mascara (the kind you spit into and brushed onto your eyelashes (LAW, 40) as the defining unifier between two old friends whose political allegiance zagged in opposite directions— there is bald sense of witnessing and naming. A decision to draw attention to and even occupy, discomfort. A discomfort which I believe is deeply necessary. Which is holding the mirror up to ourselves regularly. Never self-declaring benevolence or exception. And, drawing attention always to life’s greatest paradox, how very serious AND not serious at all absolutely everything is.
Plus, with Eve, the pitfalls of humanity are rightly matched by their shining, disarming, brilliant, twinkle. Their wonder and beauty and delight. The sheer abundance of our sensory world, ravenously noticed and written down.
I think it’s a mistake to think of this kind of romanticism is naive. When actually it most likely stems from an acute awareness of pain and disaster as perpetual and inevitable conditions which in fleeting moments our own inventions and sensibilities can transcend. Eve resists the depressive apocalyptic trope her era (and ours) insists is smart. At the end of the day loving things and thinking they are worthwhile is the most difficult thing to maintain. She was, most of the time, truly tickled. Obsessed with being alive. And so am I.
When Eve tells you about ordering only mineral water at Ports some afternoon, you can feel the oppressive heat and lethargy of the day. The atmospheric pressure, like a nylon sheet tangled around you in sweaty sleep. That water is suddenly, the only thing you want to drink because it comes in clear glass bottles with a silver label depicting a humid landscape, a few orange and Tijuana-green palm trees, a silver bay, a silver frame all around it. Ports serves this mineral water in brandy snifters with lots of ice and a slice of lime. The bottle is left beside your glass to satisfy visual cravings, which were, it turned out the only ones in evidence (SDFC, 80-81). And I can remember, can know what it feels like to be so hot your own flesh feels like someone annoying sitting too close to you on a slow bus where the air conditioner is busted and the fuzzy synthetic seats rub against your sticky inner-knees and all that can be done is to adopt a kind of self-preserving paralysis that gazes in delirious appraisal at something inanimate, soothing, and pretty, ahead.
I am suddenly remembering my own Eve-like stories. Like the time I was eating a spoonful of peanut butter while standing in the kitchen with my mother in the afternoon after school and the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang and standing there at my door was a boy I was completely obsessed with who had been away in Mexico and incommunicado for three months or something, much to my dismay. Suddenly, there he was, with no warning, standing on my front doorstep. I think I was wearing a blue dress and the spoon with the little bit of licked peanut butter was still in my hand and I whooped when I saw him and threw my arms around his neck and he laughed and said would you like to walk to the park? I of course agreed and we went to the park and he told me of his adventures. One of which was proposing to his childhood sweetheart who always smelled like gardenias, and another of which was the fact that she’d said no. This had possessed him to romp all over the place and go to different cities and he said that in Mexico if they ask you if you’d like something to eat and you refuse the men behind the bar will always say: Who is she?
That’s what he told me, and classically, I was devastated but pretended not to be. It was also a shame because I loved the smell of gardenias but had stopped wearing my own gardenia perfume because I was not interested in smelling like someone’s childhood sweetheart. Anyway. We talked for a while, but did not kiss, and when we parted he gave me a jar, a jar with a white orchid perfectly suspended and preserved in a clear glittering jelly resin. He seemed very pleased, and it was nice. Though of course, I would have much rather just have had a kiss.
Now, even the idea of walking to a park begins to make me swoony. For while I suppose rich people in TV shows meet up in Central Park regularly, that’s not what I or anyone I know ever did much. Parks, for me, remain tied to words like Morley and Balboa, and the recesses and trysts of former ages.
Suddenly I wish more than anything to go for lunch at that place on India Street where we used to get dirty rice all doctored up with chili paste and soy sauce and summer rolls full of red leaf lettuce and tofu and vermicelli and mint and carrots and cucumber and cilantro. I am sighing at the imaginary whiff of cinnamon brewed into coffee at Ranchos, where I’ve been eating breakfast since I was eight years old.
Perhaps—since I had actually escaped and hadn’t wound up with a baby and/or a boyfriend who claimed to be a DJ, and wasn’t wearing vaguely culturally appropriative feather earrings and semi-ironic acid wash, and hadn't gotten hooked on heroin, and wasn't sat beside any drunk men on a beach—I could finally relax and take a long look at what was good about the tepid sunburst I’d been raised in.
Eve made me take a second glance, resist the easy cynicism that is so often celebrated and replicated. Made me unashamed of my tendency to zhoosh things into something rosy. She promised it was best to chuckle, when you can bear it. Which is why her books, if looked at too swiftly, might be considered fluff. When they are in fact, the smartest fluff around. Like Eve, I care about things and some of them are important. But, I also just want us to have dinner, to have a nice time, to sit on a staircase and perform our skit of fantastic charmingness while smoking cigarettes on a Summer afternoon at our chic boss’ barbecue.
And like she said, sometimes, watching someone have a marvelous time left you with the feeling of having experienced truly great art, art that bravely faced all life’s sorrows, joys, unbroken stretches, wealths, poverties, and sicknesses with the calm certainty that in the end when all was ashes, when the cities were buried beneath millenniums, all would still smell faintly of pink roses…(S&R, 236).
Grandma Jeffie wore Maybelline black cake mascara.
Beautifully written. The first I had heard of Eve was in your previous blog, and now added to a long list of books to get through. Thanks