L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz
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of the word, dressed in a Red Cross Volunteer Aide’s outfit with some kinds of medals attached to her jacket, which meant she was a general or something gruesome like that, her hair hidden behind a nurse’s nun-type headdress, her overbearing bosom completely making Lola’s and mine both pretty much as hers was, except that we weren’t battle-axes, forcing your eyes to look elsewhere from obviousness.
Beside her stood Frederik, a delicate Berliner Jewish intellectual who found himself spending the rest of his life in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. (for the first few years) and then, in a house nearer Hein in Hollywood, wooing her as best he could into whatever it was they did.
“They used to give musicales,” Lola told me. “They’d invite the whole Berliner community over on Sundays and she would play the cello and he would play the oboe—”
“The oboe!” I cried.
“That’s right.” Lola shook her head.
(As anyone with a knowledge of orchestra instruments knows, playing the oboe for longer than two years makes you go insane.)
One time the musicale was a special fundraiser – though since Lola was nineteen at the time and it was 1930, what the worthy cause would have been even Lola can’t remember (usually it was Flanders Field-type orphans her mother leaned toward). This particular night Lola had to get all dressed up in a taffeta and net powder-blue formal which came down to her feet and stockings, a garter belt, the works.
“And I was to play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto – my first really Berlin debut,” Lola remembered. “Only even though I could play it fine in public in front of judges – playing in front of all those women, they all looked like her, you know, Hein – and all those men who looked like Frederik, so sensitive and delicate – I just stood there. I couldn’t remember one note. And they just sat there, politely. And I just stood there. God.”
“How long did you stand there?”
“Five minutes,” she sighed.
“Oh, Lola, come on, not five whole minutes. Not five! They wouldn’t let you just stand up there for five whole minutes and not play a note.”
“My friend timed it,” Lola said. “She began looking at the clock at eight-fifteen and watched me run out of there – I left the fiddle on the stage – at eight-twenty. Precisely. And we’ve always been very precise.”
Lola ran down the street to where her current boyfriend lived in a rooming house, rattling his window and insisting that he meet her at the corner. The “corner” was right at Beechwood and Franklin, which, today, is two blocks from where I grew up and is three blocks from where my father and mother’s latest home is. (That particular neighborhood in Hollywood has always been so hard to shake that when my parents sold their house – the one I grew up in – and moved to Europe, they finally couldn’t take it anymore; they missed too many things about L.A. that Rome and Paris and Heidelberg just don’t offer – they missed winters you could gloss over, I think, mainly; they got one just like it a few blocks away. It was larger than the one I grew up in but otherwise just like it, so whenever I go home things don’t seem to have shrunk, like other people’s houses do when they return, or like my grammar school seemed to when I wandered through it once as an adult. Returning to L.A. my parents couldn’t think of the city as anyplace other than that part of Hollywood, near that corner of Beechwood and Franklin.)
The guy, whose name Lola thinks was Ted Kovokovitch (a Yugoslavian in California to plant grapes), met her within seconds.
“And there, right at that corner – you know? – I pulled up that damn taffeta and net skirt, pulled down those awful cotton drawers she always had us wear – and we—”
“You didn’t!” I cried.
“Yes. Twice.”
“But there’s a street lamp!” I said.
“Is there?” Lola asked, frowning a moment. “There wasn’t one then. All we had to worry about then was the Dinky.”
“The what?”
“The Dinky,” Lola said. “That little railroad train they used to have going up Canyon Drive. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton – all those western pictures they made up at the end? – they’d carry the stars and all the extras right past Hein’s front window. It was the most amazing thing, looking out through all that Queen Victoria massive power of our living room – the drapes alone, my God, they must have weighed twenty pounds of velvet and lining and interlining, each panel – through the torrey pines that grew in our front yard, and there, going past on this tiny little car, not anywhere as big as a streetcar, that’s what they called it, the Dinky, would be this face – this face everyone in America knew. Everyone, that is, except Mother. Or any of her friends. But of course Mother wouldn’t even allow the servants to go to the movies, she thought them so immoral. And I have no idea where she thought we lived.”
“So the Dinky was all you were afraid of?” I asked.
“All he was afraid of, you mean,” Lola insisted, “I was an animal.”
“Well,” I said, “I was worse than an animal.”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked, the summer I was seventeen.
“Well, remember that dog Tango we used to have when I was ten or eleven?” I asked. She nodded her head. “Well, Tango and I began having an affair on the bathroom floor, sort of – not that he deflowered me or anything, I mean I did have some sense of the fitness of things, but you know I did let that Tango lick me every time I could lock us in the bathroom and lie down. The tiles were so mint green, Mother had just had it done. Anyway, I had to give him away.”
“Don’t tell me your poor mother found out?” Lola cried.
“No, it was worse,” I said, “it was worse. You see, he began waiting for me to come home from school or the beach – he’d wait there by the window day and night. I was afraid they’d get suspicious. The poor thing was obviously in love with me. And I could see that – well, I had to give him away. That summer we were up in Lake Arrowhead I did it because we were far away.”
“The poor thing,” Lola sighed, “he loved you.”
“See,” I said, “so I was worse than an animal.”
Lola looked at me for a moment and turned away.
“You’re sure you aren’t just trying to be polite?”
“Me?” I cried.
“That little dog with one blue eye and one brown eye?” she asked. “Why, your poor mother!”
“So what else did you do?” I asked, expectantly, longing for anything else she could tell me about being an animal.
“Oh,” she said, “there was the time there I was, in the Model T, stopped at a light on Hollywood Boulevard.” When suddenly, she was “. . . so overcome, I just had to . . .” and she licked her fingers right then and there, shooting her hand up her skirt before the light turned green.
“When I was done, and I was putting it into first gear, just in the very nick of time,” she laughed, “I looked up and saw all the people from the streetcar next to me, all watching – they’d seen everything.” She laughed now over it all, not turning scarlet with shame in the least which is what I still do whenever things I did like an animal catch up with me – or at least what I did when I imagined no one was looking, finding out I was wrong when it was too late. But I’ll probably always be turning scarlet whereas I don’t think Lola ever did, even when she looked up and saw the whole streetcar full of faces looking straight down into her lap.
In my day growing up in Southern California meant you didn’t grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly – what it is – to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from