I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  The used car salesman who had been watching her carefully, buttered his cracker with caviar, and AFTER she sprinkled onions on her caviar, he sprinkled them on his.

  Now . . . The clever reporter was baffled. How could this be? How could a woman just sprinkle onions on a cracker without first making some kind of eye contact with her lover.

  One lover simply doesn’t go ahead with onions. Especially if, as it turned out, he had to watch to see what she would do before he could feel free to have onions. A woman who eats raw onions, in Western civilization, doesn’t care what she smells like. A woman who doesn’t care what she smells like is not in love with anyone present. And that meant, as far as the reporter was concerned, that something was wrong.

  What was up, it turned out, was that Elizabeth Taylor, at the time of the interview, was having secret negotiating long-distance phone conversations with RICHARD. The used car salesman was sent out to walk the dogs. RICHARD was in Switzerland and Elizabeth was in Russia, eating onions.

  By the time the piece was written, the reporter was, happily, no longer baffled. RICHARD and Elizabeth were remarried. (The used car salesman was banished, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away Elizabeth Taylor.) And everything fell into place; it resolved itself. No longer did the clever reporter feel a sense of thwarted strangeness—Elizabeth’s human act, brilliant as it was, had instantly collapsed when—without looking at her lover—she brought to her perfect lips, onion.

  LIFE WITHOUT ONIONS

  And so, it seems, that even now, with the world in pieces around our ears, the air, water, and food poisoned, the American Way of Life out on the street—dirty, no toothpaste—Elizabeth was totally transparent in the midst of her human routine. All that’s left of the soda fountain America is that if you eat onions in Moscow, your lover is in Switzerland.

  My lover now is supremely clean. He told me I’m not the only one to complain about his unearthly odorlessness. It’s fairly creepy but I adore him so I try not to smell like anything either and wouldn’t touch an onion with a stick. Except if he’s going to be out of town for a few days, I bring them out of the closet—them and garlic—and . . . well, you’d be surprised. When he comes back I act like nothing’s happened and so far, I’ve been able to be Archie to this ridiculous Veronica in my heart. He must never learn of onions . . . not from me, not my onions. I’m not the only one, either, who thinks he looks like a pirate—one friend thinks all he needs is a patch. I myself wonder about Brylcreem. But I wouldn’t press my luck, even though I’ve seen them do it since childhood when I imposed a steady diet of comic books and movie magazines upon myself to deal with Americans. I live here, after all, and I know all about “no onions.”

  Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing

  December 1976–January 1977

  ON NOT BEING A TOMBOY

  THE VERY idea of the word “tomboy” enraged me when I found out about it. It was such a stupid trap. Either you were a “girl”—sugar and spice—or you were a “tomboy”—puppy-dog tails. The idea that they only had two categories and those were they turned me white-hot. With silent, guerrilla impatience, I sat alone in a school in Hollywood feeling like Che in a business suit, walking through the city of Havana before he got rid of Batista. I couldn’t wait to be out.

  It was insulting enough that they expected you to be a cute little girl. It was an outrage that the ones who wanted to play baseball until dark were “tomboys” and would “grow out of it.” I hid. I was neither a cute little girl nor someone who’d grow out of my present indifference and become a cute little girl. I could understand the pride of the ones who were cute little girls, though. They were behaving well and able to stand it. Who wouldn’t be proud? But I didn’t trust the stoic, grim dignity that I sensed from the girls who allowed themselves to be called tomboys—who basked in the word and proudly wore a sort of distant, “loner” mantle. They were buying a crummier product, yet they seemed to feel they’d outsmarted us. They were traitors. They hated girls. They became boys and hated girls the same as boys. They were just as good as boys. This made them proud.

  One, Delia Rogers, sat next to me for a semester. She skimmed through school like a dry leaf over a windy pavement. She drew horses. I could draw anything, but it was probably because of my horses that she invited me home for dinner. After dinner, Mr. Rogers began shooting BBs at a bronze liberty bell in the living room, and into this my mother entered to pick me up. She turned ashen, she was so furious, and told me, “You’re never to go back there again. If you want, you can play with Delia at school. That—tomboy.”

  Mother didn’t believe in guns after dinner in the living room.

  Mostly, our tomboys concentrated on hitting home runs after school in games where they were the only girl. They hated girls’ games. Girls played smaller games, in smaller courts, with softer balls. The lines around the space were different for girls.

  I wanted to go home. At home there were books, and I could sit outside under the tree on our savage crabgrass and read, and pet my cats, Liliocalani and Nefertiti, and yearn for European capitals. I didn’t want to be inside anyone’s lines.

  •

  I was nineteen, and I’d been in Rome for six months. I stood at the bottom of five flights of steps, looking for an apartment. Someone told me one was for rent at the top. I was determined to have my own address.

  At the top I was dying, but I knocked anyway, and a young American opened the door. It was Delia Rogers. All dressed up, looking at me and my jeans doubtfully. Delia wore stockings and gloves, among other things. Her hair had never been blonder and was back-combed within an inch of its life.

  Over coffee she told me that she was dating a married man. He was a movie star. He’d taken her to Moscow and Madrid. “If there’s one thing living in Rome has taught me,” she remarked, about to leave, “it’s to be a lady.” “Oh,” I said, closing my mouth from when it had fallen open after she told me, “his wife doesn’t understand him.”

  I watched her make her dainty way down the street. She still walked with stoic dignity. Her now fragile shoulders straightened under her grim “loner” mantle. But I could see how, when she was being especially flirtatious, she might confide that in her youth she’d “really been a tomboy.”

  The glamour of being an expatriate, of having my own address, of actually living in Rome, faded that afternoon, and Hollywood began taking on a cosmopolitan, even worldly aspect.

  In French, tomboy is garçon manqué—a missed boy; a boy lost. Maybe, I decided, as Delia got into a cab, I’ll go home. Besides, I didn’t really want to be in Rome that night after dinner in the living room when Delia got nostalgic for her lost girlhood.

  womenSports

  August 1977

  LOSING WEIGHT MADE ME A NEW PERSON—A NOVELIST

  FOR YEARS—years—because it started when I was thirteen, I was made gravely aware of my being the wrong thing to be: plump. The first remark was my father’s precise assessment that what I had wasn’t “baby fat.” He said, “It’s candy fat.”

  It was. It was M&M’s, Milky Ways, this special See’s candy they sell mainly in L.A. that was so fancy I actually had to save up for it, and Three Musketeerses. It was also the crumb rolls they baked at our junior high. It wasn’t that I actually was fat or anything, it was just that I wasn’t supposed to be eating all that candy—it showed. It showed at the beach. It showed in “tight” skirts. It showed in gym. But I was never dumb enough to think I was Fat; because I wasn’t, I just wasn’t perfect. And I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps. So, altogether, I didn’t feel that awful, because you couldn’t tell in a loose skirt; and, besides, in those days, people were so preoccupied with breasts that they could hardly take their eyes off mine long enough to notice my waist wasn’t a slinky willow branch. I was gravely aware, by the time I was thirteen, that my waist should be a slinky willow branch, to give me an hourglass figure; but being gravely aware and being seriously disturbed enough to stop eating cand
y are two different things.

  Everything went OK until the Beatles’ amphetamine skinniness. Then I stopped eating candy. But by that time it was too late because, to be Beatley enough, you had to have been raised on English boiled cabbage and milky tea. Anyway, by the time the Beatles trotted out onto Ed Sullivan’s stage with those heartrendingly sexy toothpick legs—THWAP—everyone had toothpick legs. Except mine weren’t right. The heart of the problem wasn’t really my legs; for, actually, alone, my legs could stand by themselves. The heart of the problem was my ass. It was no good. It was there, for one thing; and no serious Beatle person’s ass was there. But mine was worse, I’d never seen one like it even in a Rubens painting. It’s low. Someone once told me that it’s got a name: “saddle-ass.” It seemed about right.

  I discovered that, if I took a lot of uppers and didn’t eat anything, I could get myself down to 132 and people would begin to make approving remarks like “That’s more like it. . . .” Usually, I weighed ten pounds more. I’m 5'7".

  Finally, when I was in my late twenties, I discovered the “Drinking Man’s Diet.” Because I drank like crazy, this seemed exactly the right premise for me. With the diet, amphetamines, and the gentle augmentation of cocaine, I, for a month, weighed 128. It was a triumph. Photos document the occasion.

  Of course, this couldn’t last. Amphetamines make you lose all your friends, and my life fell apart. I even resumed smoking cigarettes after having quit for four years. Only I didn’t lose weight when I smoked—so I was back to 142 and smoking and then, when one day about six months ago it said on the scales that I weighed 154, I decided that something would have to be done—so I gave up scales. And I was drinking like crazy every minute.

  One day, having given up scales, I decided to stop drinking. It seemed to me that my perceptions were always coming in as they would to a drunk person and that drunken perceptions had been fully covered by brilliant minds like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Lowry, Hemingway, and, well . . . just everyone, more or less. Most writers, it seemed from what they wrote, drank all day and all night. And they were really good. They had Being Drunk, Hangovers, Bitter Martini Quarrels, and Guilt totally monopolized as far as writing about those things was concerned. Especially that guy who wrote The Lost Weekend. That guy, I thought, was as drunk as anyone was going to get and live to tell. So, it seemed to me that perhaps I should stop drinking and that way maybe some opportunities for different points of view would happen by, ones that so far had not been Mailered.

  It turned out strangely I’d been such an alcoholic that the first six weeks, the amount of time allotted for your liver to rise from the dead, were like being on this ocean liner traveling through fog that cleared. Giant liftings drifted away with each moment. I didn’t feel I had to move, hardly; I was on the edge of my chair, bolted wide-eyed with amazement at the procession of clearer and clearer marvels.

  It didn’t even matter that my nerve endings were sticking out of my skin an inch and a half. Or that the softest breeze ruffled against my skin like fire. It didn’t matter that the first four weeks found me crying due to lost numbness. It didn’t matter that the clearness made me weak; because the next clearness made me wildly joyous, and the one after that made me tenderly peaceful. All of these were very different from Numb-Brittle-Coarse-I-Love-You type evenings that came from fashionable alcohol.

  So I sat on the edge of my chair in the middle of this giant marvelous incredible movie. Now and then I’d feel hungry and eat whatever was around, until I’d feel really hungry and have to go to the store, which was not too bad because the movie went to the store, too; it just wasn’t as intense to me in the supermarket as lying on my couch looking at the ceiling, or talking on the phone to my friends who turned into different people as each day brought more and more vivid clarity.

  Some friends, unfortunately, became blurrier. They were patches of fog that burnt off my ever-changing adventure to find the source of the Nile. Some friends, it turned out, could only be tolerated if I were numb. It wasn’t their fault, it was just that when they drifted grayly by my exhibition, everything had to stop while they were dull. When they weren’t looking, I’d steal off to my barge; and, when they called, I told them I was “busy,” although what I actually was doing was lying on my couch looking at the ceiling.

  Now, after about four weeks, I stopped crying my usual two hours a day and virtually could count on being able to go into public without being triggered accidentally into water-water-everywhere. Not that I minded water-water-everywhere; and, I discovered, other people didn’t really mind either. I could just say, “Look, I’m afraid I’m going to cry, but it’s not about you or anything, it’s just crying . . .” They’d pause, about to raise their soup spoons to their lips, and—seeing it was serious, they’d take my word for it and finish their soup.

  I walked very carefully at that time, like an invalid, which is why, probably, I didn’t really hurt myself the first time my elastic-waist trousers tripped me. They went under my shoes and tripped me. “What is the matter with these pants,” I wondered, “they’re falling down!” Maybe the elastic is old, I thought, and safety-pinned them more securely.

  Only it wasn’t just those trousers, it was all my pants. Every one of them was falling down. I had to keep holding everything together so I wouldn’t trip or blow away, in spite of my invalid pace that kept me edging along, holding onto the railing.

  “You’ve changed,” the few people who saw me said.

  “Please . . .” I’d say, shyly, “. . . just go on with what you are doing. I’ve been sick.”

  Somewhere in the fifth week, a sort of unearthly stamina took hold of me. Things I’d never even turned to grapple with because they were too complicated and demanded a concentration beyond my known range became simple as pie. All my writing people—my agent and my editor and those who knew what to do—had been harping at me that if I were going to write, I had to write a “novel.” A NOVEL!? Have you ever thought about what it takes to write a novel? It takes a concentrated intensity, an idea that you can hang things on for one city block at least. It takes a strong rope that knows what it’s doing with a major tree at either end. It takes something that could keep me in front of a typewriter for more than three hours. Three hours was all I could do before my concentration broke and nothing could hold me longer except amphetamine.

  Writing on amphetamine is tricky because Mein Kampf has been done already, better. A long time ago, I saw photographs of three spiderwebs in Scientific American: One was done by a regular spider to catch flies, and it was OK—not great, but it’d catch flies; the second was done by a spider on LSD, and it was a perfect mandala—perfectly centered and equally radiating from the middle so that, even though it was creepily perfect, it looked as though it’d catch flies all right; the third one was done by a spider on amphetamine, and it was a fantastic undertaking, convoluted stratagems, nineteen possibilities-taken-care-of; however, they all took place over in the bottom right-hand corner—at least nine-tenths of the space was empty; flies could swoop through and never notice the wonderful trap in the corner. So amphetamines weren’t what you’d want for writing a novel. A novel has to be its own world, to fill its loom. If you know what I mean.

  On the fifth week, a rope-end fell into my hand and it appeared to be knotted at the opposite end of the city block to a tree. All I had to do was tie it to a second tree where I was and anything would hang on it. It was an Idea, a novel, a simple tale of outrage, lust, and drawing-room faux pas—a sure thing. The chapters were so simple, a nice seven. It seemed hardly necessary to write them down; but, on the other hand, why not—so I did. In fact, since I was “why not” about the chapters, I figured “why not” about the entire deal; and, in the next eighteen days, to sparkle up the time, I took notes, so that when I recovered from the voyage certain aspects would be recalled. Four hundred and thirty-two pages of openhanded observations. If you slanted them in a certain way, some people might call those notes a novel. I sent the man
uscript off to my agent, who dropped dead.

  “This,” she telephoned to say, “may be a novel.”

  “This,” my editor at the publishers said, “is a novel. Do it over; and, for God’s sakes, don’t get bored. I can’t wait to operate on it.”

  I thought it was a little greedy of her. After all, I was the one who’d gotten the corpse from the guy in the alley at midnight; and now she wanted to dissect it all by herself, and I hadn’t even finished drinking the blood.

  My book had a title that didn’t bore me, a title you could wake up to on mockingbird hill and not yawn and clean the oven. I decided to call it—simply—SEX AND RAGE. It was not the kind of title that those accustomed to my breezy landscapes were, at first, about to say “yes” to. They thought it sounded like Bondage & Desire. I insisted it was more in the category of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, or Dombey and Son. I could hear them frowning at me over the phone all the way from New York. They were bartering with a difference in my soul.

  For, from my cocoon of sobriety and obsession, had emerged this 119-pound blinking fawn, caught, for a moment, in a shaft of misty sunlight.

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?”

  “WHAT DID YOU DO?

  “YOU LOST WEIGHT!”

  “Is that you?”

  Accusations barked from the mouths of friends: I’d lost weight! And, I was shy enough already—naked like that, my skin un-numbed and fresh to the air. I backed away hastily from diabolically turning civilization inside out, turning out the way I had. I was supposed to be this numb white-wine-drinking robust woman who wrote short pieces. Now I was this slinky willow—a shy, vulnerable, Perrier-with-a-twist fawn who looked like a dewdrop starlet. An irresistible impulse made me wear black mascara and peachy rouge and lighten and wave my hair like some fifties picture of innocence they used to “groom” over at Fox. No one had seen me in such a long time, they thought I’d pulled out to do this to them on purpose.