L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz
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wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.
Every time the school counselor’s office called me down and wanted to know why a girl with my grades wasn’t planning on going “on” (i.e., to UCLA), I felt like oatmeal from head to toe.
The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade – provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition – besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask.
“Mother,” I once asked, “you don’t want me to become anything, do you?”
“Only what you really want to be,” she said.
“But what if I don’t really want to be anything?” I asked.
“I’m sure everything will be just fine,” she smiled.
But of course in those days, the early sixties, girls could still get away with “getting married and settling down with some lovely young man,” and the school counselor didn’t drive me as crazy as she probably would have later. Since looking at Sheena sitting in an office in the Administration Building at Hollywood High, it didn’t take a trained L.A. city school expert to realize all I cared about anyway was fun and men and trouble.
Of course there was one thing I wanted to do when I grew up, which I had known all along, and that was to invite people over and have dinner, like my mother.
The thing about L.A. is that there really was no place to sit down. Well, maybe the Stravinskys and people like that had houses where people could come over but most of the people they invited outside of my parents and me all had accents too. It seemed a shame to me that there was no one in all of L.A. who could speak without an accent and be invited over for dinner, and I just knew that there were plenty of people without accents who’d love to come over for dinner and who probably didn’t even know what it was like to sit down since they’d spent their lives in L.A. and therefore had no idea how interesting they were.
Already I knew that my best friend in high school – Franny – could talk a perfect blue streak and be every bit as gripping as the people my grandmother always said were brilliant.
And anyway, I didn’t necessarily want brilliant people coming over to sit down. I more wanted people who were more or less peculiar, like artists or writers or people Franny and I met hanging around Schwab’s who spent their life at Santa Anita going to the races (of course they had accents like people in Guys and Dolls which was fine with me). And I wanted people like my friend Ollie from junior high who’d been kicked out of Virgil, L.A.’s toughest pachuco high school at that time, and dumped on us at Le Conte where suddenly we had this Japanese girl, Ollie, in the tightest skirt anyone had ever seen, with a razor blade in her hairdo, who sat in the back of Algebra calling it “obnoxious” and getting called down to the principal’s office for disturbing the peace. All the people I’d ever met so far in my life who’d struck me as the least bit out-of-the-way I’d managed to keep track of, even when Ollie had been sent to Betsy Ross – the local reform school – and even when she got kicked out of there at the age of sixteen and married a car thief I still always knew where she was. And I wanted all my L.A. people one day to be invited into a large crumbling L.A. mansion (exactly like Franny’s which was my dream of a crumbling mansion from the moment she first showed it to me) to eat burritos and drink Rainier Ale and all meet my parents.
And I wanted my parents to invite their friends so the European accents could finally join up with all the other funny bohemians I knew in L.A. – and we could all sit down.
Naturally when I was in the school counselor’s office for the yearly question “What do you plan to do when you graduate?” I always stuck to my guns and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“But you’ve got to be careful that you don’t just drift,” she’d always say.
“Drifting” sounded fine to me, but to a school counselor it was the Biggest Danger life had to offer.
And that’s really all Lola cared about too until she was twenty-six when Vera Minsky discovered her.
Chapter Five
THERE WERE PERHAPS a hundred Teretsky dancers during the thirties and forties who passed through the troupe, but of course I only knew four when I was growing up. (My mother and Aunt Helen were not Teretsky dancers and my mother never ever swallowed Trotsky.)
There was Aunt Goldie, Lola, Estelle, and Molly – and of course Goldie was really the star of them all, since Lola and Estelle really only became dancers when it seemed like there was little else to do that was any fun during the Depression. And by the time Molly joined during Lola’s last days, nothing on earth could have made her a star like Goldie for she was not foolish enough to put up with notions of such hogwash and, besides, she never could dance worth beans in the first place.
It was at this class that first day that one of the scouts for Teretsky discovered Lola, who looked like a Martha Graham dancer insofar as having black wavy hair (at least before it was hennaed redder and redder). Lola also managed to look like a dancer that day when she was just twenty-six because anything Vera Minsky (the coach) told them to do, Lola could do better than Minsky herself. Or at least longer. Lola never really was driven like Goldie – Goldie was a dancer. Lola became a dancer because there was nothing else for an artistic girl bent on adventure to do in those days. Lola in fact hadn’t even been terribly interested in getting away from her mother – running away from a stifling home. For though Lola’s home was probably just as stifling as anyone else’s inside, outside it was okay with her.
Chapter Six
THE THING ABOUT OPHELIA – my cousin who was Goldie’s daughter and when Goldie quit being a dancer once she broke her leg so she married Mad Dog Tim (as I always thought of him), the mild-mannered union organizer who insisted on living in Watts to live among the populace and who insisted on working in the factory with the ordinary mortals, so even though he was often up for promotion he never would say yes because he was determined to be as fucked over as anybody till the day he died – was that she was old-fashioned.
And Ophelia – when her mother married Tim and she found herself at the age of twelve moving to Watts – changed her name from Andrea which it had been so far, making herself the character whose youth was sacrificed because some idiot couldn’t act nice.
Of course, when Ophelia was twelve she looked ten, and she was another one with black wavy hair and big brown eyes and the look of a Russian wolfhound about her when she laughed. And as she grew into puberty, she didn’t look much older because she was always so skinny and so half-crazed-by-anxiety-looking the whole time. Perhaps when she grew up, she might have found herself with a conscience like Lola’s and been able to throw herself into picketing, too, except that she’d been raised in the jaws of Mad Dog Tim and had gotten her youth filled up with Socialist Workers’ Party kids in camp, meetings, and benefits – and Ophelia wasn’t like that.
Whenever Ophelia came over to our house, she took the opportunity to luxuriate.
She luxuriated in the bathtub (because in Watts they only had a shower, even though they lived in a regular house which looked like it ought to have a bath).
In the days when Goldie had danced in New York before she broke her leg, Ophelia had lived there in a flat with cockroaches which made me green with envy. I had no idea until I lived in a flat with cockroaches in New York myself either what a flat was or what a cockroach was, never mind what New York was, and I’d get mad whenever my grand-mother got this weepy catch in her throat and said things like “Oi, poor Andrea, she’s suffered – how she’s suffered!”
Because I always thought, “Suffered! Hah! I don’t even know what a cockroach is!”
My grandparents – especially my grandfather, who liked Andrea (even after she became Ophelia) better than either Bonnie or me, probably because Andrea looked like a Russian Jew whereas Bonnie and I looked like goys with a vengeance – were always giving Ophelia