How to cope if you are phobic (of spiders and love)

.. an essay in honour of Eve Babitz

Best reason I got in the car of a man I’d met an hour earlier:

He was name dropped in a Beastie Boys song. This felt to me at thirty like a protective shield, a lyrical Iron Dome. (Nothing bad happened. Well, when I got to my destination I loaned a colleague the polka dot mini dress I was wearing - swapped clothes with her -and when she gave it back the next week, the neckline was permanently twisted. But that’s not dangerous just a bit annoying and it wasn’t the driving man’s fault). Then my colleague who had been, like me, a romantic tearaway, got married to a gentle man who loved her and was good looking and kind and had a great job. I attended their wedding with my best friend and we were so confused as we watched their ceremony, like, what if a relationship could be good? What do you mean? A decade later, they're still together and my dress is still twisted.

Best reason for calling things off with a man I was absolutely crazy about:

He made fun of me for being afraid of spiders. No more sex for YOU from me ever again, thank you. Women generally hate spiders because our sex organs are internal- we subliminally fear a small, fast moving creature will climb inside us.

My best tattoo:

Maui the God of Tricks when he took the form of a Lizard to battle mortality. It was tattoo’d on the Island of Hiva Oa, where Gauguin brought syphilis, killing half the population. The island tattoo artist chose it for me. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, the God of Tricks, decided that if, in lizard form, he could crawl inside the vagina of the sleeping Goddess of the Underworld, all the way up inside her and emerge from her mouth, then man would be immortal. But Hine Nui Te Po woke up and crushed him to death with the strength of her vaginal walls. And that is why man is mortal. On this same trip they showed me the cliff from where virgins used to be thrown as sacrifices to the sharks in order to appease the Gods. This is very very bad. This is definitely the worst nightmare of what might happen if you got into the car of a man you felt safe with because they had been name checked in a Beastie Boys song.

My worst tattoo:

Was inked on my finger for a Bob Dylan b-side I particularly love because it’s really an apology for how shitty he was to Joan Baez, culminating in the line

“I still can’t remember all the best things she said.”

Unfortunately for me the song is called ISIS and yes, the nihilistic terror group then emerged from the wreck of the Iraq war but sometimes I felt from my finger itself.

The saddest story I have ever read:

…is ‘Bakersfield’, by Eve Babitz from her collection ‘Slow Days, Fast Company’. The great prose stylist and love addict tries running away with a nice, ordinary man who runs an orange orchard. He treats her impeccably and she tastes hearty, wholesome food instead of L.A diet food and it’s wonderful but she knows she can’t stay there and, when they part, she will never go back. I am so excited for the release this week of Lili Anolik’s new biography ‘Didion and Babitz’ that this whole post is in Eve’s honour, who loved so hard and with such impeccable taste.

(Pre-fame Steve Martin by Eve Babitz):

I struggle sometimes with how much I can want sex, the things I believe it can heal, and how much I fear being violently raped, how badly it would destroy me, that I move between these perseverations like an ice skater trying not to go under. This is really, at the end of the day, what it is to be a woman in the world and in your head.