An excerpt from Eveâs Hollywood by Eve Babitz
The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupiâs, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Sally told me about her new acting class and how the guy who was teaching it was fantastically adorable but wouldnât give her a tumble and also about how sheâd contracted this case of âchronic gonorrhea,â which I thought was unfair, especially the chronic part.
She licked her fork of lemon icing and scowled, âShit, Iâm so depressed, I havenât been laid in 3 months.â
âYouâre not missing anything,â I said, having recently come to that conclusion. Our 18-year-old vast jadedness came out in little puffs from our ears, like steamboats. âTheyâre all assholes, they got no class and I actually met one guy who thought going down on a girl was something called âmuff-divingâ and only perverts did it.â
âReally?â she said. âHow bourgeois.â
We watched the fashionable traffic go back and forth on the Strip for a while and felt fantastic. Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something. She actually could act.
Neither of us knew what I was going to do, but it didnât matter.
âYou know, Evie,â she began, âI think it would be fun to be in love.â
âLove?â I scoffed, as cupid hovered above me waiting for just the right moment to take aim.
âWho would you fall in love with?â
âOh, Evie, you should see my acting teacher ⊠Heâs so adorable ⊠he really is.â
âBut heâs different ⊠Heâs âŠâ
Since we both were almost twins about Marlon Brando, I shouldnât have been surprised if her acting teacher was adorable. But all those Thunderbird Girls were in his class and that whole thing was already decided upon when it turned out I got headaches if there were more than one in the same room with me. My idea of the word âloveâ anyway was something that other people did to get themselves into the right frame of mind to have children. Iâd be satisfied if it were only Zapata and I could appreciate it from afar, the way things were going.
âYou know,â I said to her, âIâd just like someone who didnât make me feel old.â
âThatâs love,â she said.
I finished my Mocha Almond Crunch and wondered at Sallyâs definitions. In those days, I still ate cake.
My surprise birthday party was filled with a relaxed mixture of relatives and friends. Sally and I left out of the back door without saying goodbye because she heard of a party in Laurel Canyon that wasnât relaxed. I told my mother I was going and she said goodbye, and to have fun.
Sally dressed like the Thunderbird Girls. She wore all that garter-belt, Merry Widow, boned stuff and black cocktail dresses. Girls of 18 were still trying to look âolder,â and then I sort of wished I looked older too, but I wasnât willing to do anything about it if it stuck into my waist. The party was good and not relaxed. It was a fast crowd.
It was a house in Laurel Canyon where this guy who knew everyone was having about 2 years of winning at the race track, so he threw parties all the time and lechery for young girls was de rigueur.
Sally and I had been going to these things since she met Wendy, and sometimes you could meet someone who wasnât an actor. For me by then, anyone who was an actor was automatically an empty space and didnât count. Nothing they said registered in my brain and nothing they did ever was mistaken for a true action.
All I had were students at L.A.C.C. and these actors. I didnât know any artists yet, and even though I had nothing to choose from (actors and students being nothing), I stuck to my guns and held out. I wasnât going to change my mind and think an actor or a student was Zapata or that it didnât matter. Rainier Ale existed. You could buy it in the store in case you forgot what the real stuff tasted like. Â Â
Sallyâs acting teacher came in with a friend from an overcast night, so how is it that I remember him still as coming in alone from the stars? Cupid let go with a spear dipped in purple prose, not just an arrow, and then he drew another one, so there were two, one conventionally through my heart and the other through my head. They were both about 8 feet long and two inches thick. They were crude.
I half rose up against the impact and he saw me across the room as he came in alone from the stars and then disappeared. He was swamped by girls, deluged in a tangle of beautiful arms and feminine exclamations of flower-petal softness. Three of the prettiest had twisted free of their conversations and it was like Santa Claus in an orphanage.
I, it turned out, wasnât the only one.
Graham, as he was to be called, was one of those people who distinguish certain handfuls of time â like Brando â in the rare arrangements that circumstance occasionally allows so that life is made to seem worth living. A least for people like me. I have girl friends who have met him and are actually frightened of him like people used to be afraid of witches. Not me. Anyway, I think witches are kid stuff.
Graham wore black and had black hair, long and shiny, that fell over his face and got pushed back from his listening brown eyes as you talked to him. His eyes were the true eyes of a liar. The hands that pushed back his hair were the hands of someone who loves women and who knows what to do. His eyes listen to you, carefully watching to see what you want to hear so that it shortens the time until his hands can undo your clothes and touch your back into heaven, into blue heaven and lies. Lies that werenât lies because there was a blue heaven, the white horse gallops back to the wilderness where Zapata, who is not this lacy corpse, is waiting and if you doubt, there is Green Death at the liquor store.
All really enormous charm, the kind that Graham exuded, does more than it needs to. It gushes out so much that you can live inside it. That was the reason that Graham didnât just mow down women, which most men would have been satisfied with. Graham had men friends who would 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.
I sat back on the couch to watch Graham and the girls.
They did it all wrong, those girls. With hair spray. When I found out that hair spray was horrible just like everyone knew in the first place but went ahead and did anyway, I was careful to never do any of that stuff if I could help it again. Just because itâs simpler to forget what youâre doing is not a good reason to put gook on your hair. But they were doing it wrong with nylons and pancake makeup and those Merry Widows on their already slender waists. They were cluttered up with too many formalities to ever get the thing off the ground. One of the main Brando things is dispensed formalities. If you stand around waiting for the guy to open the door for you, youâll suddenly discover youâre with Ernest Borgnine and that Marlon Brando has gone to Ensenada with the car hop.
Graham, whose name I gathered from hearing it cried across the room, looked at me.
I looked away and then back; he was still looking. He was going, I thought, to play it all the way through. Sally pulled him from the crowd and brought him to the couch next to me where sheâd been sitting. It was a strategical error, though how she could have missed those two spears sticking out of me, I donât know. She introduced us.
âIâd like to talk to you before you go,â Graham said with this intimate Manhattan chocolate-kisses voice, which reminded me of the âDead End Kids,â all of whom I love except for Mugsy, whom I was enslaved by. Graham reminded me of Mugsy and Iâd loved Mugsy since I could see.
âYou would?â I asked.
âAre you old enough?â
âI was 18 today,â I said. Jailbait was still a consideration before the Beatles.
âYouâre old enough,â he said. His voice was exactly like chocolate. One of my dreams of childhood was opening a door and finding an entire room with nothing but chocolate in it, no air, all chocolate so that you had to chip off a piece with a knife just to begin. I have never wondered how the chocolate got into the room. His voice was what he used to tell the lies with, but it didnât matter, I suppose, since blue heaven and chocolate noise make distress over lies pathetic.
It was like a skipped formality when he lied, to see if you were true.
Nobody was looking like Brigitte Bardot yet but me, except for beatniks, and thatâs no fun, they threw ashes on the spirit of the thing. So what Graham must have seen when he looked at me was a tall, clean California Bardot with too much brown eyeliner, too messy hair and probably too young. I wore my lavender sheath and sandals, no stockings or bracelets. I was dying to kiss him.
âLetâs go,â I said.
I dragged him into a back room where the coats were and locked the door. Iâd absconded with everyoneâs heartâs desire.
âWhatâs your name?â
âWhatâs your real name?â
âWhy are you an actor?â
âWho told you I was an actor?â
âIâm a director. I used to act but they make you ride horses all day and I got sick of breaking my ass. Besides, horses are so stupid you could hit them with a stick.â
That was the trouble, I suppose, he always made me laugh. I changed the subject. âDo you give head?â
âIâm the captain of the Olympics. Why? Donât any of the kids at school go down on each other these days?â
âNo. Theyâre callow,â I said. I was sitting on the bed of coats and now leaned back on my elbows so that my skirt hitched up to a point that would be fashionable only a few years later but was then unheard of.
âDo you give head?â he asked. His hands resisted me, he was always very smart.
âNot very good,â I said.
âSomebody should teach you,â he said.
âIâll pick you up tomorrow night.â
âNear where you live.â
âHow come not at my house?â I asked.
âYouâre married!â I said. I accused, accurately.
âAre you in love with your wife?â
My lavender dress and I rose from the coats and slammed into the bathroom, where we doubled up deflated from âmarried men.â Like the hairspray, I just used it. I drew the line because thatâs where the ones who used hair spray and went to UCLA without question said to draw it. There was this huge âmarried manâ neon sign that read like a Times Square newspaper ribbon about âruining your lifeâ and âonly bring unhappinessâ and âthey only want to use you.â I looked in the mirror â no tears, fortunately for my too much brown eyeliner. Shit, I said to myself, if I stop now Iâm liable to wind up with a fucking picket fence.
âYou asshole!â I said again, under the circumstances.
âWell, darling âŠâ his hot-fudge voice trailed, âIâd rather be one than in lovewith one.â
âWhat time tomorrow?â
It lasted a long time and was worth it.
When Kennedy was assassinated, Graham and Iâd been having a fight and I hadnât seen him for 2 months. I went to Santa Monica Blvd. to look for him and even now that heâs got all this money and power, I still think of him in the Arrow Market or Carlâs. He loved walking through markets and making remarks about the products, and I would be stuck to his side, laughing. So I thought, with Kennedy assassinated, he must be in the market because there is, for some people, nothing more of a solace than certain markets.
He was standing out in from of the Arrow Market with an armful of groceries when I finally found him after wandering up and down Santa Monica for two hours. He was talking to friends.
âHello, darling,â he said. They were always my fights, he never was in them, he used to just wait until I stopped being mad.
âListen âŠâ I said. âI mean, what do you think? âŠâ
âOh, about Kennedy?â He laughed. âWell, Iâll tell ya, it is terrible and a tragedy and all that ⊠ but it sure does pick up daytime TV.â
***
Nowadays I drink tequila when I canât get French Champagne. Grahamâs in London in limousines with violent beauties, though I know heâd prefer rumpled 18-year-olds just as Iâd rather have Rainier. Sometimes he telephones from some studio in the middle of the night 9,000 miles away and tells me he has always loved me and really loves me still.
âYeah, well, send me some money,â I say.
âWhat? I canât hear you, thereâs something the matter with the phone.â
But when I hear that liarâs chocolate voice I am, each time, thrown into a confusion of the night he came in alone from the stars.
Buy Eveâs Hollywood here.
