The Photo Comes With Me

Banana cream pies, fake Chanel, and the life I made in Los Angeles

The Photo Comes With Me
Banana cream pies, fake Chanel, and the life I made in Los Angeles

As I’m packing up my life in Los Angeles after 28 years, I came across an old photo of Eve Babitz playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp. I’ve had it forever and used to display it prominently. I think I cut it out of Esquire and framed it. Hilariously, a visiting acquaintance once asked, Oh, are these your parents? I told him yup, sure are. Babitz looks nothing like my mother, but my dad is indeed a chess fanatic. He used to run tournaments in Europe and taught me how to play when I was four. I no longer have the patience.

Babitz is my favorite LA writer—more than Chandler and Fante, far more than Didion. I related as much to her flavor of glamour as to her stories and prose. She is a forever muse, and now that I’m leaving the city, I’m taking her with me.

Unlike hers, my life in LA was never about Hollywood. I avoided the Biz and anyone orbiting it. My LA was debauched nights at Spaceland, breaking into hotels like the Figueroa and the Roosevelt for a swim. I hung out with musicians and artists.

My first friend, the kid next door, was a junkie obsessed with Elliott Smith and My Bloody Valentine. We bonded over music in the pool at my first apartment across from the House of Pies on Franklin. After nights of partying, we’d buy a whole banana cream pie and devour most of it. Otherwise, we barely ate. Another neighbor ran a live cam porn business out of his living room and worked security for a pimp.

I had just lost my gig with a German film website after refusing to cover the Oscars—I was too scared. Needing a job, I checked the LA Times ads and found a strange listing: a woman looking for a pretty girl to be her assistant. We met at her pink-and-gold condo in Beverly Hills. She ran a plastic surgery aftercare facility and hired me on the spot. Much of my job involved running errands for bandaged celebs or driving a black town car to meet patient consultants for the country’s top surgeons.

The stories could fill a book, but I signed an NDA—rock stars getting tummy tucks, Hollywood greats recovering from liposuction, princesses from the Middle East with vast entourages. By day I wore a fake Chanel suit; by night I did unspeakable things at the Dresden, the Silver Lake Lounge, the Standard, or Canter’s.

Celebrities were everywhere then. You’d have dinner next to Beck or buy vegetables next to Gwen Stefani at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Angelyne cruised around in her pink Corvette, and if you were lucky, you’d spot Suzan Strauss—the Lava Lady—walking the streets.

When I wasn’t working or out with girls who sold their eggs for coke and breast implants, I sat in coffee shops and read and wrote. Or I’d visit a friend bartending at La Poubelle in the late afternoon and end up sharing the counter with Vince Vaughn, who called me sweetheart and let me sit on his lap—though he didn’t have much say in it.

Almost 30 years later, I’m a very different person—not just physically, but internally. I stay home with my cats and read and write in bed, which I call my office. I don’t drink much and certainly don’t do lines of blow off random keys in random bathrooms. I start my days with a big glass of water and floss my teeth. My kid is in college, my ex-husband found bliss as a woman, and everything is, for the most part, sedate.

My time in LA is coming to an end. Fittingly, I started in Los Feliz and will end in Los Feliz, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city. I’ll miss this messy, weird, magical town.

"Everything that is beautiful is either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
— Eve Babitz