Eve's Hollywood

“So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.”

“Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions.”

“We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.”

“She knew exactly, sort of, what she was going to do.”

“In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”

“You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.”

“Attitude' was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.”

“The thing about prisons of your own devise is that most of them are designed for traveling and can be taken anywhere, even from small towns in Michigan where you were ugly, all the way to glamorous rock shows where you have to have a pass to get backstage.”

“Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn’t exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar’s and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, “…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.”

“I dressed next to her in gym (on my other side was this nice girl named Cathy whose only flaw was that she was kind of gullible and that kept me from being too shocked when I saw her in Life magazine crouched under a rock as one of the “Manson Family” and called Gypsy).”

“New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.”

“Every article about her sooner or later gets around to the subject of her lovers, who were reportedly legion. (Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stone Records: “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.”)”

“people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”

“Attitude” was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.”

“Once when I testified before a Senate Committee about LSD, Bobby Kennedy asked me how many people I knew smoked marijuana. Brazenly I announced, “Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.”

“I suddenly flew into such a rage that I wanted to beat the shit out of him. "Can't you the fuck... Look at you!" My mother's childhood songs sound like a Southern Cop drunk.”

“That always seemed like the whole thing; they’ll let you have stories, but you can’t ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.”

“We were always being taken to rehearsals when we were little and it is probably because of that that I like rehearsals better than concerts. There is something about listening to a group of people try over and over to get it right and at last do that provides a tension of drama you don't get when they're all dressed up giving a concert.”

“Taquitos are much better than heroin, it's just that no one knows about them and herion's so celebrated.”

“Don't let anyone tell you Joyce Carol Oates is not Shakespeare; she knows everything just like Shakespeare did. She knows what it's like to be beautiful and what it's like to be in a car accident and what it's like to be a gas-station attendant planning a robbery. She knows.”

“I refuse to have God dance me off to Texas or blow my bubbles for me. If God wants me to believe in him, he'll have to do better than that. I'll wait under a doorframe.”

“One of the main Brando things is dispensed formalities. If you stand around waiting for the guy to open the door for you, you'll suddenly discover you're with Ernest Borgnine and that Marlon Brando has gone to Ensenada with the car hop.”

“Her hair came halfway down to her waist and was dark auburn and like a lion's mane always. I never saw it combed. It always looked like she'd just risen from a bed of passion that only she could have inspired.”

“That is The Answer, I thought to myself, that dumb moosh is why all those people are banging their heads against the walls. Well, I thought, I suppose they deserve it.”

“The second morning he took me to Carol’s and it was love at first sight to this very day, only she’s up in San Francisco with children and I can’t stand children. Carol was perfect. She looked exactly like me, only she was black. She was from the Bronx and was a proof-reader and she’d once been one of Walter’s girl friends when he tended bar at Stanley’s, a Lower East Side Bar. Carol and I took acid every chance we got.”

“Earthquakes are only earthquakes, but a good sunset...”

“All really enormous charm, the kind that Graham exuded, does much more than it needs to. It gushes out so much that you can live inside it. That was the reason that Graham didn't just mow down women, which most men would have been satisfied with. Graham had men friends who might have died for him and even gas-station attendants felt it and did his windshield better. Animals woke up and came and sat on top of him when he came into a room. Plants that were dying in my house would get better if Graham fixed them. My grandmother met him accidentally one day and still asks about him.”

“With the wisdom of age, I see now that what she felt towards me was not scorn but jealousy and that she was terrified that I might turn out to have a future or even be great.”

“The beach from that summer was called Roadside. It was 1958 and a lot of kids from West L.A. went there—tough kids with knives, razors, tire irons and lowered cars. No kids from my school or any of the schools nearby went to Roadside, they went to Sorrento where there were never any fights and where most of the kids from Hollywood High, Fairfax and Beverly spent their summers listening to “Venus” on the radio or playing volleyball. If I had only known about Sorrento, I never would have gone to the beach so passionately, since Sorrento was a dispassionate beach involved mainly in the junior high and high school ramifications of polite society, sororities, Seventeen magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet.”

“New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.” He can forgive New York’s shortcomings and think of them as charms, but he cannot forgive L.A. for the spaces between the words, the blandness and the complete absence of push.”