Never Enough About Eve

I was still in my teens when I met Eve Babitz. I was babysitting for a couple that subscribed to Esquire and Eve had an essay in the issue I picked up. After I read it, I too became an Esquire subscriber. Like so many others who encountered her, on a page, on a bed, or anywhere she damned well pleased, I was thoroughly seduced.

I’d never read a voice like Eve’s. It placed her before me as though she were a hologram, speaking only to me in offhand candor with her clusters of vivid stories. By the time Eve’s Hollywood was published, she had become my friend, the one who made me long to go to Los Angeles, who made me laugh with her story of the girls who peed in the guacamole. She gave me a whole new definition of decadence when she told me how Jim Morrison’s girlfriend shot up with a huge amount of heroin so she could lose weight before going to the Oscars and woke up post-overdose in a hospital bed days after the ceremony was over. Eve’s Los Angeles was a world of street food long before that term was invented, where the taquitos were so good she licked the paper plate to get every last drop of the sauce. Her hometown was a place where a cop would bark “Can’t you read?” to a group having a picnic near a sign saying picnics were forbidden, a party that included Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Igor Stravinsky. She lived in a city that embraced irony and she wrote about it in a 20th Century voice that made everybody else’s seem stodgy. 

Eve owned the last half of that century. She was never meant for any other time. When she set herself on fire, alone in a moving car, the part of her that wrote died. She probably should have too, because after that she became an artifact. 

The girl who moved through the world clad in the armor of perfect teeth, gleaming skin, and indomitable confidence became a heavily scarred woman who welcomed invisibility. Considering how ravenously she pursued and was pursued from the time she hit puberty, this may have been restful. She could eat in the Farmer’s Market undisturbed, swapping stories with the alter kockers, the old Jewish guys who hung out there too. She could roam through her city without feeling the compulsion to reinvent herself in another book. For the first time in her life, she could live without spectacle. She belonged solely to herself.

Although we never stood in the same space at the same time, when I first saw the gold and deep blue radiance of a Los Angeles twilight, I thanked Eve for pointing me in that direction. When I was contacted by one of her friends because he saw my name in an essay about her, a man who introduced me to a writer who had also known her, with whom I had a platonic love affair until he died, I thanked Eve for sending me her men when I needed them.

I never wanted to meet her. She was too close to me for any conversation other than the ones I found in every book she wrote. That her skill diminished as she grew older didn’t matter. Her stories were still there, and she’ll always be there, as she chose to be--eating ice cream in her leopardskin bathing suit on the Sunset Strip at thirteen, dancing tango in a San Fernando Valley dive, blazing her own trail through an endless forest of fast company.