Eve(nin') Stars

Reflections on Now (Not as in I'm in the Evening of My LIFE for God's Sake)

Lately I’m reading and thinking a lot about Eve Babitz. No news there. But I’ve read enough this morning, which is, nowadays, a rare event, and the miraculous thing is that an undercurrent of something currently even rarer is gathering at least a little momentum—I’m thinking about writing.

Signing in here on Substack, it’s been so long since I’ve been on here that they make me forage around for a passcode in my email, which almost ruins the whole thing. Almost.

But here I am.

I don’t know if or why writing is important to me anymore, but sure as anything, it just starts happening on its own, eventually, so I guess it’s that at least.

The Eve book I’m currently on is called Two By Two and is about the L.A. dance scene. This is a world I’m not currently nor have I ever been a part of, although my sister once took me country line dancing at In Cahoots, which is one of the dance places Eve references in this book. So I do feel part of Eve-things in a haphazard but mostly meaningless way.

I don’t think what I may be getting to here has much to do with the world of dance, even though I sometimes wish I’d been a dancer—it seems so alive—that intrigues me; but there it is, I’ve already said it: it’s Eve, and because of Eve, it’s also dance too, which is ultimately the same thing—it’s really the whole thing about not just BEing alive, but feeling and acting like it too, rather than just maintaining and struggling to do basic things like get a good night’s sleep now and then amid the laundry and the unending battle with the toilet ring.

I find myself now in the perfect house, in an almost perfect city (it isn’t L.A., so it’s not perfect, but it’s as good as it gets since L.A. isn’t L.A. anymore like it used to be), recovering still from an adrenal crash that reminded me I’ll probably really and truly die some day. Which makes me think about the fact that I’ve not ever planned my life (much at all, it turns out—despite the really believable trompe l’oeil facade otherwise), but especially not around the fact that I’ll die eventually. Or rather, except for my surprisingly rock-solid consistency with a lot of things (my children, my health and my work including writing etc.), I’ve pivoted with the wind and can’t seem to do otherwise no matter how hard I try. Something was always behind me hissing stridently through its teeth “ONE LIFE, YOU HAVE ONE LIFE”, and I want to experience as much of what I want to experience as possible, which doesn’t bode well for things like living in one place forever or having one job or other things people tend to think of as reliable and focused or doing it right, whatever my parents seemed to value, and thus what I’ve always thought I should probably value too, but couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

I have to say I’m actually very glad this is the case, although realizing that this living in this body thing won’t last forever is a bit of a shock—despite, well, everything that would make it seem like I’ve been thinking about this all along. And maybe I have. I don’t know. And maybe it’s a bit of a shocker for everyone no matter what, I don’t know that either. But it sure makes me want to Really Live. Even though I didn’t actually plan on dying, I’ve also spent a good portion of my life in a kind of half-panic about whether or not I was spending my time “correctly”—which includes a lot of spiritual work that I now don’t see as half as valuable as Just Living For Real With What’s In Front of My Face, which now that I think of it maybe is a result of all the spiritual work. But anyway, I spent a ton of time thinking about when I got to the end of my life would I think I had spent my time right. This, it turns out, is very different than planning on dying, because you think you’ll just be able to go on forever checking to see if you’re doing it right, when it turns out that’s not true at all, and you might as well just live. Which is very different than thinking about living or rather, just living. So, it turns out, it seems I don’t know how to just live all that well, unless you count everything as just living.

In any case, this is embarrassing to admit.

Eve was a master at just living, and at least from what I can tell from her biographies, autobiographies (which is pretty much everything she wrote) and her “fiction”. She miraculously didn’t feel the need to Be Something, which is pounded into most of the rest of us basically from birth. When she asked her mother what would happen if she didn’t really want to Be Anything, her mother told her that probably everyone would be just fine.

Wow. Can you imagine how different life would have been if that’s what your mother had told you?

Eve partied and danced and drank and drugged and then woke up and did it all over again. For a long time. With true reckless abandon. No apologies. She wasn’t always nice, her house was a disgusting pig sty (an affront, even, to actual pig styes) and she always did just what she wanted. She knew she didn’t want to be tied down—by a man, or kids, or anything else, but especially those, even though she also had a part of her that sometimes wanted to be rescued and just sort of slump into that kind of life. But she didn’t actually do it (not that that’s how everyone, including me, sees children, husbands or family life, but I get it).

I think Eve was very much the counterweight to her friend/mortal enemy, Joan Didion—Eve lived life from the other side of the coin but was no less a sharp intellect or observer—while Joan’s famous giant brain was front and center, even as she hid in plain sight behind her husband and her cold reporter’s take, Eve’s intellect was obscured by her sparkly dresses, her cleavage and her just as out-there as her cleavage lifestyle that distracted everyone until she was almost dead; that’s the way she hid. She also loved people and cared and really saw them and experienced everything. I’m not saying this is better than any other way to do things, but it sure was full-out. The fact that Eve is dead now is exactly the same fact that will be true of all of us at some point. No matter how we lived, or didn’t.

I find myself, so unlike Eve (which is probably why she both appeals so much to me and repels me at the same time), mostly picking up the house, making sure my daughter, the dog, the fish, the plants and the guinea pigs are fed at regular intervals, and that my clients are moving forward in the best ways possible. And trying to make sure I don’t completely fall apart myself and, applicable here, to not look like I’m a sad unfortunate victim of something I didn’t choose (because I did)—meaning I try to work out and wash my hair once in a while. I try to give my daughter the best childhood she can have, but often find myself sighing at her Eve-like abandon and disdain for picking up her clothes or toys or doing anything she doesn’t have a passion for, and then getting pretty annoyed and blame-y at myself for caring so much about her doing these things that I used to not care about either but that now seem to be the basis of my existence.

This morning I have at least 2 hours to myself—which is a gift and wonderful, but they also seem paltry and thin, those 2 hours. And in those same two hours I need to decide: do I work out? Do I rest? Do I catch up with a friend or relative? Or do I write? This morning, I rest and write. But to do that, I don’t work out or do anything else. But I’m tired anyway—and it’s one of those days that working out will probably make it worse, not better. My body is telling me lately to rest. To lay down. Not to go dancing or go to an art show, or see a friend, or to do much of anything let alone with anything close to reckless abandon. It sometimes feels like insult to injury: I’ve spent most of my life taking care of others and now I’m tired and that’s it. That’s IT?? But I am not going there, and plus maybe it’s not that true.

I think that’s part of why L.A. is what L.A. is to me: my true Home and this place of Life and Creativity and Fun. It was actually my home, for one, but also because I felt free there—it’s where I spent the only years of my life when I wasn’t Raising a Child and engaged in a Responsible Career, not tied to a partner, just finding out who I was and enjoying the hell out of life—if not quite in an Eve-abandon, then at least something somewhat Eve-adjacent, as she would say. In L.A. I did what I wanted, for the most part. I dated when I wanted to, I had passionate affairs, I slept in and worked just enough to pay my bills. But I know, at the end of that era, I was also ready for it to end. I was bored and ready for something new.

I love both of my children with all my heart and would never change anything about them or about me having them. I love my home, I love my pets and my plants and my life. I love being a mother. I love my clients and my little office. But like a lot of women, I also miss myself. And within that, I miss wild abandon. There is too seldom a balance between me and me taking care of others. But if I had the opportunity to balance that more in my favor, I don’t think I’d choose it, at least not right now; I know how fleeting childhood is and I don’t want to miss any of my daughter’s, and I love even the circumspectness of my life too much to walk too far in the other direction. Maybe that’s part of the always-reviewing part of me: I love everything at once and can’t have everything, at least all at the same time. There’s a yearning for sure. But we’re maybe getting a bit ragged and maudlin here, and I’m feeling a bit too exposed.

So I’d love to end this piece (“piece” seems so self-important—rant? Essay? Thing? I think “thing” is the most accurate) with some kind of hopeful reinvigoration of Life, or rather wild-abandon-Life Re-Discovered—and I do hope for that, at least in some incarnation I actually want. I hope that at some point I’ll have rested enough, I’ll be comfortable enough in my new city, I’ll have time enough and won’t spend it regretting I didn’t enjoy my daughter enough—that I’ll truly want to join life outside of home and parenting again. I try. I forayed, in fact, into dinner with friends last night which was lovely, although I felt I talked too much (after very little time with adults prior—that tends to embarrassingly occur) and leaked and sweated out too much uninteresting detail about my life (which is mostly about being a mom)—and then sort of got blame-y on myself about it which is probably the worst of all ways to spend your time. I’m getting, though, honestly, too far from what I used to see as “ideal me”, to a place where I just am glad I get to be alive, to experience whatever it is that happens, to get to love my daughter and take care of our home. But some days, friends, I wish, just a little bit, I could come up with a teaspoonfull of that reckless abandon again. Maybe it will happen. We’ll see. I have a feeling I may be pleasantly surprised.