I first discovered Eve Babitz in a literary anthology I have tucked away on one of my shelves here in Mexicali. The book is titled Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. I agree. Eve is a great writer. Her books are a good time. I just read – what I want to call – one of her L.A. memoirs, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. There’s plenty of drinking, smoking and screwing, but that’s not why I read it. Eve loves L.A. She writes about her city with incredible wonder and passion. If I ever hope to put together a book of stories about Mexicali. Eve will be my muse.
I refer to Slow Days as a memoir, for all the stories in this book appear to be thinly disguised descriptions of Eve´s own personal experience. In fact, in the first chapter, “Bakersfield,” Eve depicts the relationship between an up-and-coming L.A. writer with her first fanboy, who comes from all places, Bakersfield. The narrator of this story is 100 percent City Girl, and her admirer is Pure Country. It’s hard to read Slow Days without Eve popping into my head. I just read in a recent biographical account of Eve’s life, she once said this: ”Everything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it. It was 100 percent non-fiction. I just changed the names. Why? So I wouldn’t get sued.” Eve, the Narrator of this story, and Frank D, the Fanboy, they appear to have nothing in common but their hopes and dreams for living an authentic life. I like this story because the narrator opens both her heart and mind to appreciate how others think and live. This story sets the tone for the rest of the book. The narrator decides to make the two-hour drive from Hollywood to Bakersfield to meet with her admirer. On every page, the narrator keeps one keen eye on the diverse and unique behaviors of others, while at the same time she always measures herself in the mirror.
The last chapter, “The Garden of Allah,” becomes like Eve’s bookend. In the first story I mention, Eve displays her passion for learning about grapes, farmworker unions, country folk, but her narrator believes that no young person in their right mind would choose to live a life in Bakersfield over a major metropolis like San Francisco, L.A., New York City, or London. The narrator says something like anyone would have to be “emotionally retarded” to make this kind of choice. However, the writer in Eve sees things differently. She is Open and Free. She sees every new experience as a new adventure. At the end of the chapter, the narrator drives back to L.A. along the trecherous Grapevine in her VW Bug. She is tired, hung over, and enriched. OK, maybe she didn’t make a Love Connection, but the experience helped her grow as a writer.
In “The Garden of Allah,” the same type of thing happens. In a chance meeting in an elevator at the famed Chateau Marmont, Eve the Narrator, runs into two of her childhood heroines, well, maybe not her childhood, but her high-school days. She writes with Love, Respect, and Inspiration for these two. The both of them were always BEAUTIFUL, CONFIDENT, and STRONG. Here is the twist: they invite Eve back to their bungalow to extend a crazy, insane drug binge: Coke, Acid, and something I have never heard of called Coyote’s Brain. Now, these two women appear a little worn for wear. A little bit haggard. In the time Eve spends in the bungalow with her old friends, she learns even though the lives of Gabrielle and Mary may not have lived up to young Eve’s fantasies and expectations, the older, more experienced Eve sees an undying /relentless romance in the reflection of their eyes. Despite their current circumstance and condition, whatever they HAVE, Eve WANTS.
Slow Days is a very COOL book. Consider Eve very talented and very unique. Not only does she paint a stunning picture of life in L.A., she places herself right there in the center of it. In “The Garden of Allah,” her coming-of-age story of Hollywood High is both complex and breathtaking. Here is a young woman that reads Shakespeare and looks like Bridget Bardot. At fifteen, she never knows who her true friends are. The men she meets she won’t know to stay away from until later. She lives life on the edge, and the company she keeps is fast.
As I write this, my students are composing visual analyses to satisfy a requirement for their summer research project. They are writing about the Protest and Change of the sixties decade. I’ve asked them to choose an image, photo, painting – maybe a rock album cover – to represent an idea from their paper. Will they be able to describe the abject terror on the face of a Kent State student who has just seen a classmate gunned down by The National Guard? Several of my students are writing about Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. With their words, they can capture a turning point in our nation’s history. Will they be able to draw a direct line from Then to Now? I hope they deliver a message of what they see to their readers. A picture paints a thousand words.
To prepare myself for this project, I read a lot of sixties books. My shelves here in Mexicali are full of them. Much of my reading carries over from a past semester when we researched the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. On August 5, 1962 Marilyn was found dead, naked and alone, from an overdose of Nembutal in her new Bel Air home. This must have crushed future writer Eve Babitz. She was still a teenager vacationing with her family in France when she read the headline, “Marilyn Est Morte!” A recent graduate of Hollywood High, Eve was the most serious devotee of the Hollywood Icon. I just read Eve’s recently (re)released collection of essays I Used to Be Charming. At age eighteen, she wore her hair like Marilyn. She dressed like Marilyn. She attracted the same attention from men. I want to say she lived for Marilyn. For her, the clock was always ticking.
I write this down for TWO reasons. One: More than a few students each semester choose to write about the life and death of Marilyn M. Maybe that’s because I begin the first day with a video clip that summarizes the dark conspiracy theories behind the Hollywood icon’s tragic death. My students all seem very inspired by Marilyn’s story. I expect they may react similarly to Eve Babitz. In the sixties, when Eve walked into a room, she often may have been looked upon as the most beautiful and bravest woman there — by both sexes. The black and white photograph (above) was taken in 1963 when Eve was just two years out of high school, already beginning to write her own memoirs. She was asked to pose nude with surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, not for one of his paintings, but for a photograph of her seated at a table with him playing chess in a museum. Marcel was fully clothed and completely wrapped up in the game. Eve was totally naked and equally comtemplative. At the flash of the camera, Eve was probably losing the game, but she was winning her battle, because for her, as a young woman in the sixties, she was the one in control. This was her MARILYN MOMENT. The picture would deliver a clear message to her current lover and men everywhere that she deserved more attention and respect. Et alors, when she went home to her one-room Hollywood bungalow she had the beginnings of an iconic essay that would later appear in Esquire magazine.
Out of all the stories in this collection, I would probably want to share Eve’s “Dodger Stadium” with my students. That’s because it LESS about SEX and MORE about LOVE. I get this feeling from the story, for Eve accepts a sudden invitation from a former lover to baseball game for which she has shown little knowledge or interest. She is used to going with men to concerts, and parties, and motel rooms – but not one of them in her entire life has ever thought of taking her to see the Dodgers. This story reminds me of the story “Bakersfield” that I have mentioned earlier in this post. Not only do I admire Eve the Writer, but I love Eve the Person. When given the opportunity, she will always choose FRESH and NEW to the SAME-OLD, SAME-OLD. “People take me to screenings of obscure films, they drag me along to fashionable new nightclubs, they have me meet them in a taxi, honey, and whisk me off to dangerous Cuban samba places to bailar the night away,” she says. “They don’t take me to baseball games – It woudn’t occur to them.” But, in “Dodger Stadium,” Eve fufills my wildest fantasies. Eve drops all pretensions; she GETS INTO IT. Baseball! She wants to know about the parking, the people, the stadium. She marvels at the “grass all mowed like Japanese sand gardens and the dirt all sculpted in swirling bas-relief.” Although this is the first game she ever saw, she is clearly miffed by the opposing team’s strategy to use pinch hitters in critical game situations.
I know, I know, Eve Babitz made a name for herself writing about SEX, and DRUGS, and ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, but if I wanted to read about Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing, I already have plenty of places on my shelves here in Mexicali I can find that. By the way, her date has brought her to a Giants/Dodgers rivalry game. They are sitting high up in the bleachers with the Dodger faithful, and when a Giant hits a late-inning home run, she clutches her date’s arm tightly and screams with all the passion she could muster, “DAMN GIANTS!” This is where my heart jumped into my throat. Like many men I suppose, I’ve indulged in this very same fantasy – to have a woman share in your passion – but I know it will never happen. Isn’t this what we all want from our favorite writers- to build upon a moment, capture a feeling, that brings us out of our seats?
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