Eve's Hollywood, by Eve Babitz

Every few years I go back and read "Eve's Hollywood" by Eve Babitz. I cannot understand how her books have managed to go out of print. What a shame! Her gorgeous writing picks me up every time. Everyone should read her stories, but people who grew up in California will take special pleasure from them.

From the story "Frozen Looks"

The past is entered through creaking iron gates laced with fog and the sheer sigh of Joan Fontaine's memory as she begins, "...sometimes I think of Mandalay."

...

The gates to my past aren't rusty, creaking, laced with fog. They're the unceremonious whoosh that the sound of the rear door of a bus made as down I stepped, impatient to drown in the hot, open days of my 14th summer. Barefooted on the rough rubber steps, I'd jump from the bus and hurry past the old people on the Palisades, scramble down the cool cement steps to the bridge over the Pacific Coast Highway and turn delirious at the sight of the day of heat cooled only by moments frozen into the summer, isolated like prickly cactus standing in the dawn.

In the mornings of that summer I would awaken seriously at 7:30 already afraid that it might be 7:45 or a tragic 8--but it wasn't. My bathing suit lay on the sandy floor right where I'd taken it off the night before and that and my father's old Mexican shirt, 66 cents for the bus, a dime for a snow cone and a nickel for a frozen Look Bar were securely in my purse as out I went. Sometimes my mother would thrust an orange my way before I was halfway down the block, or a fried egg sandwich, but I wasn't hungry much in those days except to hurry up and get to the beach.