Lucky’s Reviews > Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. > Status Update

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

There’s no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.

And we have to stick together or else heroine-ism will find us home alone with no women to go out drinking with, and in America this can lead to stronger spirits, wilder music, and an early grave.

I drank tequila in San Francisco to warm me up and in L.A. because it was appropriate.

My claustrophobia from San Francisco begins to vanish—that cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

L.A. was embarrassing; I tried not to notice.

The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.

I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on carth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

What did people do in Los Angeles, I began to wonder, besides rather useless business involving typewriters and offices? They didn't tend to essentials like growing food, that was for sure. They just breezed along in the supermarkets and went home to watch television, not knowing a thing about vineyards or orchards.

And so the artists in Los Angeles just don't have that burning eagerness people expect. And they're just not serious. It makes friends of mine in New York pace and seethe just remembering the unreasoning delight one encounters with the cloudlike marvels of Larry Bell.