Eve Babitz

The idea of an “artistic community” evaporates into the slow days. Inspiration and words like that get hurried along with the fast company; it’s impossible to tell if one’s been inspired, or if it was the cocaine, or what. In an Italian café—where one day the incredibly beautiful young waitresses are going to poison (I hope) one by one all the vulgar and insulting men who’ve ever gotten away with murder and crude remarks—one night I saw on the wall, neatly, in black Magic Marker: “It ain’t Hollywood, my boy, it’s mescalito.” In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one.

We wrote back and forth for almost six months. The contrast between his existence during the poverty-stricken English winter and my own L.A. days of champagne cocktails and diets made me realize that the world wasn’t all power struggles between me and pasta.

But the night before didn’t seem like such fun. The Blackboard looked like it might twirl into heaven with just another double tequila.