by Simon Doonan
Being of a fastidious disposition, I always felt disinclined to engage in those practices which increase the likelihood of contamination of any kind. (My prissiness also disinclines me from describing these practices in detail, but I feel sure you have a rough idea what I’m talking about.)
I have spent many years in psychotherapy discussing my germ phobia and general, all-around persnicketyness. From what I can gather, I have Narg and Uncle Ken to thank. Growing up with lunatics tends, so I am told, to imbue children with a fear of contamination, both physiological and psychological. Now, as I look back on the devastation caused by AIDS and on the long list of lost friends and acquaintances, I have ceased to regard my prissiness as a problem. Though prissiness in and of itself did not save my life, it clearly decreased the probabilities in my favor. It has definitely proven itself to be more of a lifesaver than a disadvantage.
Thanks, Narg. Thanks, Uncle Ken.
In addition to my priss factor, I must also acknowledge my fear of, dare I say it, penetration. This particular fixation has, for reasons which are too obvious to require explanation, clearly played an additional role in my survival.
The blame for my fear of penetration cannot be laid at Narg and Ken’s door.
It all goes back to a horrid Freudian trauma which occurred in the early 1960s. Like so many Freudian traumas, it involved horses.
* * *
Betty Doonan’s parenting was not heavily focused on education. Having left school at the age of thirteen and successfully clawed her way to the middle, or at least the lower half of it, she was not overly fixated on academic achievement.
The most important thing, as far as Betty was concerned, was that we, the fruit of her loins, learn to ride a horse. Horses, for Betty, had enormous socioeconomic importance. Without a smattering of equestrian skills, my sister and I, according to Betty, were completely and utterly doomed to lives of mind-curdling mediocrity and misery.
“When you grow up and get a great job and your boss invites you to stay at his country house,” said Betty, as she envisaged our Town & Country future, “you will look like a right idiot if you can’t stay on a bloody horse.”
In Betty’s mind, horse riding opened up a Technicolor panorama of possibilities: it was the gateway to that fabulous world where square-jawed men in tweed sport coats and turtlenecks tossed Julie Christie–type girls in mini-kilts and Aran-knit sweaters into their Aston Martins and roared off to Elizabethan country houses for classy weekends of nouveau Beaujolais and fine dining.
I can’t help feeling that Betty Life-Is-for-Living Doonan, with her magazine subscriptions, her focus on life-enhancing pleasures, and her obsession with everything that was glamorous and international, was largely responsible for my fixation on the Beautiful People. Having never met any B.P.’s, she had no idea that they were humor-impaired.
Every Saturday come rain or shine, Betty gave my sister and me half a crown each and sent us off, not to a country house, but to muddy, hokey Stokes’ Farm, which was located in an area known as Bugs Bottom.
Here we mounted one of several aging ponies and set off for an hour-long ride, ambling along country lanes without any specific goals, other than to not fall off. Every week it was the same. There was no fancy dressage or ribbon-strewn gymkhanas. Once in a while Mrs. Stokes would drag some logs into the middle of a field, and we would jump over them. The rest of the time we trotted contentedly down the moist country lanes of Bugs Bottom. It was all very pleasant. In the fields on either side of us were cows belonging to Stokes and other farmers. They ate buttercups and batted their lashes at us.
On the occasion of the great penetration, the weather was particularly gorgeous. I was riding Jenny, a delicate, nervous pony, and my sister was riding Bess, a giant, gray, dappled cart horse.
It was fast approaching teatime. We were returning to the stable. Bess’s shiny rump was undulating in front of me. I was fantasizing about all the fabulous country weekends in my future. I was undecided about which role I would play. I could not choose between the Julie Christie part and a character of my own invention: the strangely-devoted-best-friend-of-the-square-jawed-male-lead.
A cuckoo called out from the copse of oak trees on the hill. Bees collected honey from the clover on either side of the path. It was an almost sickeningly beautiful English summer afternoon.
Suddenly the bucolic serenity was shattered by the thundering of hooves. A charging colt came hurtling toward the fence and skidded to a halt, sending my Jenny into a twitter of nervous tap dancing.
His eyes were wild with unbridled passion. He snorted maniacally and began to run backward and forward along the fence. Large gobs of snow-white foam fell from his quivering lips. He had just found the woman of his dreams. I tightened my thighs around my mount and assessed the situation: As long as he stayed on the other side of the fence, we, Jenny and I, had nothing to worry about.
Then I noticed it.
There was something strange and alien dangling between his legs. Clamped to this poor animal’s genitals was what appeared to be a large red vacuum cleaner attachment. The object in question looked exactly like the crevice nozzle from Betty’s new Hoover. No wonder he was galloping in such a panic: he wanted somebody to remove this red, rubbery, hideous, tubelike thing from around his willie.
Then with a shudder, I realized the ghastly truth. That’s no vacuum cleaner attachment! That is his penis!
Suddenly, everything went into car-crash mode.
Incensed with erotic arousal, the colt flew over the fence. His crevice nozzle cleared the barbed wire by millimeters.
Within a matter of seconds, he had jumped onto poor Jenny’s back. Horror of horrors: his grassy, passionate breath was hitting the back of my neck, filling my nostrils, and uncurling my hair. More disturbingly and unforgettably, there was a hoof on either side of me!
This animal was attempting to skewer us with his crevice nozzle!
Jenny reared and bolted. Weeping and shrieking, I hung on. The colt fell off, only to stumble and reattach himself, plonking those shiny young hooves on either side of me and butting my back with his snorting muzzle.
I whacked him round the head with my riding crop.
He seemed not to notice me. He was blinded by lust.
While this ghastly violation of myself and Jenny lasted about a minute, I feel it is safe to say that its untold psychological impact lingers to this very day. I cannot even look at a vacuum cleaner without experiencing an odd sinking feeling followed by a flash of dread.
The colt then turned his attention to Bess and her high, majestic rump. He and his nozzle disengaged from me and Jenny, and charged ahead. He then tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to climb onto my sister’s stately mount. Bess wobbled and shook with righteous indignation. She slapped him round the face with her sumptuous tail and shot him a look of regal disdain, which said, “Begone! You are less than the manure on my queenly hooves.”
The colt doubled back and refocused his efforts on the infinitely more conquerable Jenny. Before I knew it, I was book-ended once more by those hateful hooves. Where was this going to end?
Then, salvation!
Mrs. Stokes, hearing our screams of terror, came charging over a hillock. I fully anticipated that she might shoot the colt with the rifle which she kept on the mantelpiece in her office.
She was carrying a broom.
She was laughing.
She thought the whole thing was hilarious.
We dismounted and leapt on our muddy bicycles. We could not get out of Bugs Bottom fast enough.
* * *
That night, my sister and I were quite subdued. We lacked the vocabulary to describe the mayhem to which we had been subjected.
“If that is the kind of thing which happens during those fancy country weekends, then count me out,” said Shelagh as she wriggled out of her miniature jodhpurs.
“Well, I’m still going,” I said, as if our fancy country weekends had already been arranged and booked.
“Oh, no. I’m just going to tell the lady of the house that I’ve got a headache, then we’ll stay behind together and arrange flowers and put on plays,” I replied as I scrubbed colt slobber off the back of my jacket.
CHAPTER 17
BLANCHE
He is a twinkie12 and I am a troll.
The year is 1994. I have a new boyfriend. It’s a May-December romance. I am forty-two, and he is twenty-eight.
The person in question is a clay-spattered potter called Jonny. Though, like most twinkies, he is attractive and funny, I find I have nagging reservations about Jonny: I’m not sure about dating anyone who is so young that he is not familiar with the names Claudine Longet and Ruth Buzzi. I am worried this might be the beginning of a trend. Am I doomed to grow old dating progressively younger and younger chaps? Is this the beginning of my Roman Spring?
In contrast to me, Jonny does not seem even remotely disturbed by the age difference. On the contrary. He takes great delight in revisiting the issue over and over again in an ever more baroque and sarcastic fashion.
“Have you been back to Pompeii since . . . you know . . . it? Hard to talk about it, is it? I understand. Maybe we could go next summer. I’ve never been, and it would probably provide you with some sense of . . . closure.”
“By the way, how was the Renaissance? Was it really as great as they say it was?”
Verbal retaliation on my part is a complete waste of time. It is virtually impossible, in our youth-obsessed culture, to mock somebody for being young.
“You . . . you . . . toddler, you!”
“Why, you’re nothing more than a cheap little zygote!”
There is no such thing as a young fart.
The only thing I can come up with by way of reprisal is to mock Jonny’s crunchy granola profession. “Where are your Jesus sandals? I can’t believe I’m dating a potter! Sheesh!”
“Correction: a gerontophile potter.”
Under this welter of witty badinage, I have no choice other than to admit defeat. Jonny, or my Jonny, as I like to call him, wins hands down. He is young and I am old.
Before I began dating my Jonny, it never occurred to me that I, myself, me, was anything other than incredibly young. Young. Young. Young. Thanks to Jonny, I must now face the fact that I am a middle-aged person.
Prompted by this realization, I take a long, hard look in the mirror. Jonny is correct: I am no longer in the first flush of youth. Yes, I have hair. Yes, I have teeth. But there are crow’s-feet and there are age spots. I have not yet become jowly and hideous, but my prettiest years are definitely behind me. Old age, though still just a distant will-o’-the-wisp, is now, thanks to my Jonny, lurking on the horizon. Though still able to skip at a fair clip, I now wear reading glasses and feel the cold horribly: A significant part of my waking hours is spent with a cardigan draped ridiculously over my shoulders.
And another thing: horror of horrors, I am no longer able to eat in a tidy fashion. I have become that thing my mother always warned me about. I have become a messy eater. This is a phenomenon which Betty always highlighted as being the grimmest and most unattractive consequence of advancing age.
“It happens to everyone. The minute you hit middle age—bang!—you become a messy eater.”
There’s a morsel of food stuck to the middle of my Prada trouser fly. Saffron rice. We ate Indian two nights ago. It’s been stuck there for two days. I feel a pang of melancholy. In these congealed grains, I can clearly see my slobbering dotage. When Jonny is fifty, I will be sixty-four.
Thwap!
My Jonny slaps me on the bum, yanking me from my reverie. He kisses me good-bye and Rollerblades off to his clay commune.
So what if I’m forty-two! Life is great! We are happy!
A fourteen-year age difference is nothing as long as you are with the right person and you have the right attitude! May-December romances are not such a big deal: animals have them all the time, and so do celebs! Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky! Anna Nicole Smith and whatever that guy’s name was. Krystle and Blake Carrington!
Like the Carringtons, Jonny and I adore each other, and that’s what counts.
I run to the window and drop a pair of his underwear four floors onto his departing head. He shakes his fist at me.
“I may not be young, but I’m definitely young at heart!” I yell and let forth a peal of theatrical laughter.
* * *
Two months later. Thanksgiving. It’s time to meet the folks. Panic.
Everything I have heard about Jonny’s family makes me slightly uneasy: They sound so alarmingly respectable. There are no loonies or lobotomies. Despite his bohemian trade, my Jonny is, or so it seems, just a nice upper-middle-class Jewish boy from a New Jersey farm town. His grandfathers were not hard-drinking bon viveurs, they were judges, both of them. These pillars of the community devoted their lives to reprimanding and sentencing the likes of me during my plaid-bondage years. Among all this upstanding citizenry, I can find only one tiny soupçon of scandal or intrigue: Jonny’s paternal nana and zadie were first cousins.
On this unsullied landscape, Jonny’s recent disclosure about his sexual orientation looms quite large. Though generally supportive, the Adler family are, according to Jonny, still “coming to terms” with the fact that he is gay. Inbreeding = no problem. Gay = oy veh!
A new challenge is about to test their mettle, in the shape of moi. They are about to confront the reality that their youngest son not only is a friend of Dorothy’s but has fallen madly in love with a known homosexual d’un certain âge.
My panic about the Jersey trip increases. I am convinced that, at the very least, I will get arrested for trying to cross state lines with a twinkie.
What to do?
There is no time for a rejuvenating face-lift, or even a skin peel. I could tape up my face, but that would involve keeping a hat, or a wig, on all weekend.
Botox? In 1994 it was still being tested on gerbils. Maybe I could go to the Botox headquarters and tell the researchers that I am a gerbil and get me some.
Makeup? I want Jonny’s family to think Clint Eastwood, not Gary Glitter.
I take the only possible course of action open to me: Back-lighting! I decide to accept Jonny’s invitation but to remain softly lit for the entire weekend. This will obviously present myriad challenges, but hey, it worked for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and it would work for me.
Blanche deluded everyone about her age and her past by lurking in the shadows and refusing to go out until it was dark. It worked like a dream. Everything would have been fine if that nasty, common Mitch (Karl Malden) had not come along.
Mitch: I’ve never had a real good look at you, Blanche. Let’s turn the light on here. (He tears the paper lantern off the lightbulb. She utters a frightened gasp.)
If it hadn’t been for that prying Mitch, Mademoiselle DuBois would probably have made it all the way to the insane asylum without anyone guessing her age.
* * *
One chilly Friday night in late 1994, Jonny and I barrel into the Holland Tunnel. Maybe barrel is not quite the word. I have always been a bit of a slow driver. Once I was pulled over by a cop on the Hollywood Freeway and given a ticket for going thirty miles per hour. I was enjoying the view, what can I tell you?
While I drive, my Jonny tells me bloodcurdling stories about our destination, the southern New Jersey farm town of Bridgeton. His description makes Reading, my lackluster birthplace, seem like Monte Carlo. The Beautiful People have certainly never been to Bridgeton. The only Bridgetonian celebrity Jonny can cite is a flamboyant black cross-dresser, nicknamed Charlie Powderpuff. Charlie made headlines in the local paper after being beaten to death with two-by-fours in an alley.
Welcome to the lovely Garden State!
We pull up in front of a groovy modern home, circa 1968. My geriatric driving has served me well. Night has fallen. One point
for Blanche!
Inside, Jonny’s family—parents, Cynthia and Harry, and brother and sister, David and Amy—are waiting in the ultra-mod family room. I dash into the fray and position myself in front of the TV. Confidently backlit by its powerful rays, I brace myself for introductions.
The greetings are warm, effusive, but brief. Everybody is preoccupied. It is clear that they had been awaiting our arrival with a certain amount of impatience.
Suddenly there is a mad dash to the kitchen, where many cruel, unforgiving fluorescent lights blaze. I peer cautiously round the corner. The entire family, including Jonny, is clustered around the kitchen table like a pack of dogs. They are shrieking at the tops of their lungs, and they appear to be feeding.
Every now and then a family member comes up for air. I see to my horror that they were all masticating large, pinkyred, pungent boiled crabs.
The specter of inbreeding looms over the repast.
“Blue crabs,” yells Jonny in an outdoor voice between mouthfuls of foul-smelling crabmeat. “It’s a South Jersey thing.”
I wonder if the shouting is a result of inbreeding, or is it, like the blue crabs, simply “a South Jersey thing.” And then I remember that Harry, Jonny’s dad, is deaf.
I’m starting to relax. Snarky, hilarious, warm, and welcoming, the Adlers have the makings of ideal in-laws. As an added bonus, Amy and Jonny’s mom, Cynthia, are vain and attractive. Blanche is beginning to feel quite at home.
Then everything goes all nasty.
The crab course is followed by a local delicacy: an enormous platter of deep-fried mishigas.13
The subject of sleeping arrangements has come up. Harry jump-starts the mishigas by suggesting that I might like to sleep on the couch in the den.
I can see his point. My Jonny’s bed is quite narrow, and at the end of the day, my Jonny is also his Jonny, and he is protective of his Jonny. Harry is not about to relinquish his Jonny to the backlit, middle-aged stranger in the faux chinchilla sweater.