Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz

Leven used to watch Jacaranda and April come in from the beach at sunset, with their hair tangled and salty and their taut arms and legs dragging sand into the house behind them, and she’d coo, “Oh, there you are. My two string beans.”

      By the time Jacaranda was eighteen, she no longer looked like a boy, even with April standing right next to her.

      People told Jacaranda she was lucky.

      But luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home and receive compliments unless they’ve an enormous sense of public duty. Jacaranda wanted to see things before her luck ran out and she came upon the prophesied brick wall.

      She imagined that she would be an adventuress and not need to go to UCLA or even Chouinard Art Institute, like Shelby Coryell, her one friend her own age. She would be an adventuress-painter, and just paint, because that’s what she’d be good at. Blue was everything.

      Outside, that first September, everyone had gone back to school and she had the whole empty beach to herself. Everything in the horizon looked clear and blue.

True Love

      Colman didn’t like the ocean.

      “It’s too cold,” he explained, shuddering in his black turtleneck. “How can you go where it’s too cold? That’s why I left New York.”

      “Cold?” she said.

      “Cold,” he enunciated clearly.

      But she was in love, so she moved in with him, way inland, to West Hollywood where he rented a ramshackle house all choked by passionflower vines. He had four ramshackle cats, named Harry, Dean, Stan, and Tentoes. His wife was divorcing him. He covered all his windows with black curtains because he hated the light in L.A., and daytime in general.

      He had black curly hair and was plainly a genius—just like her father. He taught acting and everyone in his class said he was brilliant. He was twenty-nine and she was eighteen the night they met in Barney’s Beanery, a ramshackle West Hollywood bar where she drank beer and flirted with artists at night. Barney’s was one of the oldest bars in West Hollywood. Most of the artists were surfers who lived at the beach.

      Colman was standing near the bar and his eyebrows went up gently when he saw Jacaranda. Everything Colman did made her laugh, and all he had to do was begin to tell a joke and she was lost.

      After three weeks, Colman told her his wife had changed her mind about the divorce and was moving back in with him and bringing her cats, Fred and Rooster.

      “More cats?” Jacaranda asked. “Your wife?”

      He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands out in a “What can I do?” gesture.

      Colman lied to her about everything and for a long time Jacaranda thought that that was what actors did offstage. But she found out most actors only lied for money in movies. He was entirely irresistible to all women, even Jacaranda’s grandmother, who took one look at him and started blushing and afterward said, “The Irish are a lovely people.”

      “But, Grandma, you don’t like Irish people because of their red hair, I thought.”

      “He has black hair,” she said.

      He was not too tall, five feet eleven, with pale Irish skin, and beautiful gracefully endearing eyes—there was nothing “wild Irish rose” about him. Even his lies weren’t wild. His lies always leaned toward the tame. He lied that things were dull and lifeless without Jacaranda. If she asked him what was “new, terrific, and exciting,” he’d sigh, yawn, and say, “Peace and quiet, my darling, just nothing but peace and quiet . . .” And she knew—three people would have told her—that he’d been with some starlet on the coats at a party the night before.

      What she loved about Colman was his New York accent. He talked like a Dead End Kid. Ever since Jacaranda was little and first saw television, Leo Gorcey had been her idea of “a man.” He was a lot like Mort Leven, but—instead of being Jewish—it was the Irishness that drove Jacaranda into peals of merriment; New York Irishness. New York Irishness was so exotic to Jacaranda that she had practically been able to overlook Elvis Presley’s Southern comfort. Jacaranda always felt that one day far off in the future—when she got over whatever it was about Leo Gorcey that drove her so crazy—she’d be able to take a leisurely cruise through the South. She loved Southern accents, but at the very moment when she was melting away from the effects of one, Colman would telephone and say, “Hi ya, beauty, what’s new, terrific, and exciting, huh?”

      Being in love with Colman made her look beautiful. He loved her in purple and she wore purple clothes, which did her a lot more good than old shirts and torn shorts. Purple made her hair look reddish golden and her skin look burning hot. She had a purple corduroy coat that would have stolen the show even on Rome’s Via Veneto, where B-movie starlets paraded on summer nights in La Dolce Vita.

      When Colman stood back, he could have been kissing her with his eyes, and Jacaranda knew what it was to be a palm tree who was truly adored, in lavender.

      “Honey,” Colman said, “do you love me?”

      “Madly,” she said.

      He’d hand her some Red Hots, that cinnamon candy, and drive them farther up Laurel Canyon, because to him Laurel Canyon was a country road; he liked to drive out in the country.

      Colman introduced her to all his friends, men who were junkies and actors and gamblers and cat burglars and jazz musicians. His idol was Chet Baker.

      Colman had been depraved in his youth and understood entirely her desire to be depraved in her youth, too.

      “Get it while you’re young, kid,” he said.

      The best thing he told her, though, was in response to a remark she made about how two people they both knew couldn’t possibly be married and oughtn’t to be together. He said: “Honey, don’t ever try to figure out what’s going on between two people.”

      After she moved out of his house, he resumed life as a married man, and on the face of it it didn’t seem right that they were still in love.

      “But what will happen with Colman?” April asked. “How will it end?”

      “End?” she said. “What would end it?”

      For a while (five years) they met in an apartment in West Hollywood that belonged to one of Colman’s students, Gilbert Wood, whom Jacaranda never met in all the years she and Colman spent afternoons there. She knew that Gilbert was an actor, that he sold marijuana, and that he kept his surfboard on top of his TV.

The Sixties

      West Hollywood during the sixties, when life was one long rock-’n’-roll, was easy to live in with its $120-a-month two-bedroom apartment and landlords who were used to weirdness. Though there were such things as Families with Children and a Dog, most of the people who lived in West Hollywood were dope dealers, rock-’n’-roll musicians, road managers, groupies, waiters who were really actors but were writing screenplays in their spare time, and writers who were writing four screenplays each and collecting unemployment. Hairdressers, models who did commercials, and youngish people with no visible means of support, too, resided in that area, between Melrose and Sunset Boulevard, from La Brea to Doheny. In the sixties, West Hollywood was like an open city, a port at the crossroads of all directions.

      Jacaranda offered to help a friend of Colman’s out for a few days a week with his business. She circled and Xeroxed the names of all of his clients in the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and those “Teen Come” magazines, as she called them. And it more or less turned into a steady job. She made enough money to get her own West Hollywood apartment, gas, and drugs, and not have to be in a regular office where they expected her to wear shoes. Colman’s friend, Hal, paid her $175 a week for going to rock-’n’-roll concerts and hanging around backstage, an occupation that her friends who were groupies thought was the luckiest thing they’d ever