Sublime

She could call Max and wreck everything, go over and have nineteen Bloody Marys, a gram of coke, and catch the clap from some darling English prince, or she could gloat. Max would love being in on her success; he loved being in on things before they happened. The only time he liked being anywhere was before it happened.

I’ve read Proust all the way through because everyone said I’d like it, but Colette’s little sketch of Proust coming into a room after everyone had thought he’d gone and already had begun gossiping about how he was a fag was only about three paragraphs and you could imply the other 9 million pages. Nevertheless, I liked the other nine million pages

(on my other side was this nice girl named Cathy whose only flaw was that she was kind of gullible and that kept me from being too shocked when I saw her in Life magazine crouched under a rock as one of the “Manson Family” and called Gypsy).

No matter what was in fashion, Janet Wilton was a step beyond. She was the one everybody was trying to become, except that the minute they became Janet Wilton, a curly brunette with blueberry mascara and rapist-slash cheek toner, Janet had turned into a French blonde with a simple powdered nose, and was suddenly pink instead of pomegranate.

In 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, wrote, “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.” The author Eve Babitz had her own version of this: “It’s very easy to stand L.A., which

Since these particular organizations need new members, they often welcome beautiful girls to attend their cocktail parties. It keeps members happy and brings in new ones.