Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz

lost their way and where handsome devils sat around on their amps trying to outdo each other in songs, blondes, and downers.

      She went to the Monterey Pop Festival, though she never really remembered how she’d gone, come back, or what she’d done for the two days in between. Everyone took Sunshine acid and smoked grass called Icepack. And then, of course, there was all that tequila and rum and Courvoisier that rock-’n’-roll was finding out about after deciding grass wasn’t enough.

      She wore skintight satin pants and purple satin blouses. Her hair tangled down her back in blonder streaks of bleached disarray. She spent a lot of time in front of mirrors putting on brown eyeliner and mauve rouge, trying to see from behind her bangs, which still grew down to her nose and made her face look sweeter and more vulnerable when she was quiet and didn’t smile.

      “I hate rock-’n’-roll,” she said, one night in the middle of the Stones at the Forum, and left.

      HER SURFBOARD WAS lashed onto the top of her new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon but she hadn’t even been outside in the daytime, it seemed to her, since she took up with rock-’n’-roll. She was all white like an adult, not tan.

      “I probably can’t even stand up anymore,” she moaned to April.

      “Yeah, and it serves you right, too,” April said.

      “God, this thing is so heavy,” Jacaranda complained, lugging her surfboard along to the beach near April’s Santa Monica apartment. Jacaranda thought her lungs were going to rip.

      She got to the water and touched it with her foot. It was February and wasn’t very hot on the beach. But once Jacaranda was out where the waves broke, she found she could stand up and that her balance soon was intact. And she remembered how nothing else mattered.

      “See, you can do it,” April yelled from the shore.

      April was now twenty, and because she was truly sympathetic to the human condition, she was besieged by a band of stars and handsome devils, who came to her when life for them stayed too glamorous for too long and didn’t seem real. Eventually, April went to sea and became a sailor.

      “I think I’ll move back to the beach,” Jacaranda said, panting and wet from throwing herself headlong into a battle of cold and tides. “I wonder if I still could make money painting surfboards.”

      They paused together to take one last look back at the ocean.

      “God,” Jacaranda said, “it’ll be so nice to read a real book instead of the Daily Variety.”

      “Mother will be so relieved that you’re going to settle down,” April said.

      “Me?” Jacaranda asked.

The Apartment

      The apartment was in Santa Monica on Third Street, just a few blocks from the ocean, in a tumbling hillside alive with butterflies and cats. It was a long rectangle divided by two walls into a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. All three rooms looked straight out into a horizon of blue, gray, green Pacific with sunsets blazing orange in summer and glowing pink in winter. The bathroom was minute and the whole place had a rickety temporary attitude with a roof that leaked, but it only mattered when it rained and Jacaranda, being from L.A., thought the rain was more than a fair trade for damp rugs and puddles in the kitchen.

      Three friends of hers from high school had opened the Eye of God Surf Company and offered to pay her thirty-five dollars per board for airbrushing tertiary and rainbow fades over the smooth surfaces of new boards.

      The woman who rented her the apartment let her rent a garage in the back for twenty dollars a month where she could paint boards.

      For the first six months, all she wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf. She was clean again, for the ocean salt water was purifying and good for washing away the ravages of depravity.

      “What’s all that light doing in here?” Colman asked, on his first visit.

      “It’s from the windows,” Jacaranda explained.

      “But aren’t you going to get sick of looking out at that ocean all the time?” Colman asked. “Look at this place, it’s bright as day in here, how will you sleep?”

      “You don’t like my apartment,” Jacaranda said.

      “No, no, darling,” he lied. “That’s got nothing to do with it. I love this place. Really. I do.”

      She’d spent five whole years inland so that Colman could drop over in the daytime. She couldn’t help it. She’d never told him this thing about herself but now he’d have to know.

      “Colman,” she burst out, “I usually wake up at seven. In the morning.”

      “Oh,” he said. He thought about this, and then, “You mean, you sleep when it gets dark outside? At night?”

      She’d only seen him in the afternoons when he’d just woken up, and naturally he assumed she had, too.

      “Hey,” he said, “did I tell you about this graffiti I saw in the men’s room at the Knife and Fork? Someone printed: ‘I’m ten inches long and three inches wide. Interested?’ and wrote his phone number down. And then, in pencil underneath, someone else said, ‘Fascinated. How big’s your cock?’”

      As Colman walked down the hill toward his old Buick, she knew he would have nothing more to do with her now that light was in her apartment.

      The next day she found Emilio, a black satin cat with ambitions that seemed more peaceful than the ones alive in Colman or West Hollywood. Emilio specialized in patches of sunshine and sharpening his claws on her one chair and purring if she so much as uttered his camellia name, “Emilio.”

      About fifty of her friends continued to speak to her after she turned against rock-’n’-roll and they braved Olympic Boulevard down to the wilds of Santa Monica (not the beach her friends meant when they said “the beach”; they meant Malibu).

      “I don’t know,” most of her friends said, “it’s so far . . .”

      “From what?” Jacaranda asked.

      “The Troubadour, Tana’s, everything!” they replied.

      Jacaranda didn’t care if rock-’n’-roll was the pulse beat of art in America, or a massive connection to everyone her age, or the background wallpaper of a generation that didn’t seem to be dropping off and giving in to Frank Sinatra. She was tired of it.

      “Maybe you’re turning into an adult,” April suggested.

      “Me?” Jacaranda cried.

      Surely there was something one could do besides becoming an adult just because she didn’t want to live in West Hollywood or stand in a crush of eighteen thousand people at the Forum, listening to a white boy making all that money singing “Love in Vain.”

      But what?

      “Will you feed my cat for me next week?” Jacaranda asked.

      “Where are you going?” April asked.

      A week later, Jacaranda boarded the plane in Oahu.

The Innocent Virgin

      Jacaranda had taken the plane to Oahu to catch the smaller plane to Maui. She felt as if life contained nothing but odds and ends. She had always presumed that once people got to be twenty-three, they were Too Old, yet she was not old enough to content herself with brooding over the past like Marcel Proust, whose book she was reading on the plane, and who obviously had nothing more pressing to do than regard the years as a museum filled with beautiful reproductions of lost jealousy and bygone fashion. In another sense, she felt herself to be an Innocent Virgin—too young.

      And so she began to see that instead of life becoming subdued as in Jane Austen novels, things were not to be that simple.