âAnd anyway stuff like jealousy was too late if you were going to be in love with Jim. And if you were me, you would.
There he was in a dark nightclub Iâd gone one night when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-two and poetry was curling around him like smoke. He smelled like leather and alcohol and nightclubs but he looked blind like a marble statue. Outside was the Sunset Strip but inside he was living on borrowed time.
Until I met Jim the pictures I took were so artsy they werenât art. I was so mad at his L.A., his Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude, that every picture I began to take was proof he was wrongâand they really worked. But I was much too scared of Jim to ever take his picture. âHe was always a very dark presence in a room,â my sister said. âIn fact, if you asked me today the feeling I got, Iâd say it was of a person who was severely depressed. Clinically depressed.â Sheâs now a psychologist, so she knows.
The trouble with Jim was that he was so much worse in person that I stayed in shock until he left. His silences were so much more deadly, the elliptical remarks so much emptier, and the nonstop fury within him to capture the worldâs imagination was so religious and dignified and ironical that, like pain, you only remembered what it was like when it was too late. In retrospect of course he seemed worth it.
In fact, from afar he was gorgeous. But he was too gorgeous in bed to be true, except if you wanted to borrow some of his borrowed time, which you might never get out of. (With Jim the end was at hand every night, and dawn was never a given.)
Someone once told me that greatness was a disease. And that must have been what was wrong with Jim.â
â Eve Babitz, L.A. Woman
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