Slow Days, Fast Company

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.

My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboten and I’ve never found anything to disprove this. Shawn and Al Stills were both lapsed Catholics and you can’t get dirtier or more verboten than that.

There is something fascinating about a person’s face when they’re not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing. Pleasure is a lure. When you’re smiling, the whole world would rather smile with you and have another watercress sandwich than ponder the universe with an ex-Beatle. The first time I began to realize all this was with Shawn the night it finally rained. It became clear to me that beauty has nothing to do with fashion, that love can conquer anything, sex is art, and let’s see . . . hope springs eternal. I love the rain.

The very next night I was having dinner with this fashionable young rich man who looked at me as I smoothed some paté over some toast and said, “You better watch out with that stuff. It’ll make you fat.”

“Well, gee,” I said to him, “there are so many perfect women, it’s just horrible you have to spend time sitting here with me.”

Arrogance and conceit and remarks like that one are much more fun than starving all the time. Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect . . . you can wreak all the havoc you want.

And for the very first time in my life, I began to deep-down know that even though I was not as thin as George Harrison, it was going to be all right. In fact, it might even be funny.

The funny thing was that I’d always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind. Better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust. I believe that most people put ninety-eight percent of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvelous love scenes. I believe that adultery is an art form. In France, they more or less lay their cards on the table and ennoble love affairs for the creative adventures they are, because for most people, these are the only creative adventures they’ll ever have. The only chance they’ll ever get to touch the face of heaven.

You know that when you have dinner with a girlfriend, you’re going to come home a whole human being

Driving home, with my back against the giant orange bat of a sunset, east on Olympic Blvd. in the rush hour, I decided enough was enough, I would be satisfied with just the sunsets in Los Angeles and forget finding the someone I didn’t mind.

I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm and my friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery, and resourcefulness, and who never told you the same story twice. Now, women I didn’t mind. I mean

I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

Having quit smoking, I knew what she meant. Unless one is in the exact right mood, it’s impossible. Smoking has been so glamorous for so long, all those matches, those pauses, the lipstick on the tips—the smoke itself curling its casual way through the most nerve-wracking moments. But in another way, smoking, although glamorous, has never been as glamorous as heroin—and dying from cigarettes just doesn’t have the tragic sunset quality that O.D.ing lends to death. Heroin is the celebrated romantic excess of our time.