I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  It was the modern era, so they put me on the latest thing, an anti-depressant called Paxil. It didn’t do anything for the insomnia but it did enable me to speak with enthusiasm about everything that was wrong with me. I would list my complaints, starting with my head (too cold, sticky rubber pillow), my arms (bleeding), my gut (constipated from the opioids), my heels (developing bedsores). Laurie would come and read Colette to me, but my body was so traumatized that every story just sounded like pain. I was paranoid and had incredible twisted ideas of what they were doing to me in the hospital. It wasn’t till two years later, when I finally kicked the Paxil, that it dawned on me that the thing that was supposed to make me sane was in fact doing the opposite. I shouldn’t have been surprised; one of the things I learned at AA was that the drugs that usually work for “normies” sometimes work wrongly for people like me.

  Eventually my lovely therapist Christine was able to get me on my feet, and I was able to use my near-atrophied legs again to practice walking up and down the hallways. Suddenly I got nicer, and the staff was nicer to me. Unfortunately, despite everything, including flowers, being forbidden in case they gave me a virus, I did get a virus: VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococcus). My room was quarantined for the remaining weeks I was at County. Only doctors and nurses were allowed in. Eventually they let up a little and the few people allowed to visit had to scrub up, put on sterile mint-green paper masks, paper coats, rubber gloves, and even booties, and deposit them in a basket labeled TOXIC WASTE in the corner of the room, which by the end of the day was piled almost to the ceiling and carted off with humiliating regularity. Even my beloved life-size poster of Magic Johnson, which I could glance over at when I needed to see his incredible smile, was incinerated in the end. Michael had brought the poster in memory of the Lakers games he used to take me to. We would sit in his third-row seats, and everyone who passed by, like Jack Nicholson, would wave hello. What a scene. Now Magic Johnson had HIV and like me was a shell of his former self (though a shell with mystique and beauty). Likewise the radio, which my friend Anne Rice had sent me, and whose oldies station provided some distraction, had to be destroyed too. God, that virus, that quarantine!

  My appetite was nonexistent. The feeding tube that had been pumping thousands of calories into me until recently had naturally caused me to gain weight. After that I was faced with the notoriously horrible 1950s food at County General. Soon I weighed what I had when I arrived—another miracle of modern medicine. I begged my friends for something edible, and Michael brought me pasta with pesto, but my mouth was still sore from the respirator, and it hurt to eat even that. Diane sent me a gold box of Godiva truffles, but the thought of them made me mad instead of ravenous. Nancy brought me smoothies from Jamba Juice, our favorite.

  One day I woke up craving a tuna fish sandwich like my mother used to make. It consisted of tuna mixed with chopped celery and lemon juice on whole wheat bread, nothing else. I mentioned this to Carolyn who brought me a tuna sandwich she made herself, only on white bread, with green pepper. My friend Sarah Kernochan brought me one on white bread with cucumbers, for Pete’s sake. It was then that I realized that everyone in the whole world has their own idea as to what a tuna sandwich is. Now my sister and I have had the same dynamic practically since she was born, her being obliging and kind and me being horrible and ungrateful. But I knew I could call her, and that she and I being the only two people who understood what a tuna fish sandwich was, she could bring me what I was hoping for. I was glad because I knew that if I longed for this, life was possible again; the craving made me feel human. I would eat a few bites, feel full, and then stash it away in a little fridge on the floor. But then this imperious killjoy nurse, this caricature of Loretta Swit’s character on M*A*S*H, declared that since I was contagious, there could be nothing of mine in the cooler: “Impossible. Unsafe.”

  “But it’s all I like!” I cried.

  “The hospital has egg salad,” she said, primly.

  The funny thing was, this nurse actually loved me and was a fan of my writing. But here she was, taking away my sublimely perfect tuna, and pawning off County General egg salad.

  •

  Finally the doctors took a look at my ass, pronounced it “healing,” and made preparations for me to go to White Memorial, a rehab hospital not far from County. As miserable as I’d been at County, with its funereal teal blue everywhere, I was afraid to go to a new place. What would the staff be like? Would they be as great as David? What about the night nurse William, the only one who could stand me in my rotten insomniac moods, who would chat with me from 3 to 5 a.m.?

  My sister assured me that compared to where I was, White was the Beverly Hills Hotel—all the beds had purple spreads and really the people were lovely.

  And so, six weeks after my admission, I was wheeled out of the hospital on a gurney, screaming the whole way at the fresh, cold air. I hadn’t felt an actual breeze in months; it was exhilarating.

  *

  I was greeted at White by all the nurses, as though assembled just to meet me. These nurses were beautiful; I was amazed. One, Maria Rosa, was especially kind, an angel, in fact. No more struggles with catheters, tubes, or needles. She was brilliant with them all, and she never told anyone to relax, a sure sign she was adept.

  Here were the famous purple bedspreads. I had a room to myself and a window with a view. I even had my own telephone—not that I could stand its loud ring, given the state of my nerves. Of course I was still in quarantine, but this was a fabulous version of it.

  Maria Rosa handed me a sheet. “Here’s your program for tomorrow,” she explained.

  How delightful! I thought. Maybe they put me down for a massage—who knows?

  At eleven the next morning, I was wheeled down to the Jacuzzi, where I was met by an extremely cute male assistant with whom I immediately fell in love, muscle-bound as he was. You know me and muscles. As far as I was concerned, Johnny Depp came in a distant second to this assistant. This brilliant flirt thought I was cute too, and he was the only reason I didn’t fall into despair when I knew I had to go to therapy. “I used to be charming before I got here,” I told him. It was the first time I’d been able even to imagine making any kind of joke since the accident.

  “OK,” he said. “You stand while we— ”

  “Stand?” I snapped. “I can’t stand. You’ll have to hold me.” I hobbled to my feet, leaned back into the muscles, and “stood,” which is to say leaned, for about forty-five minutes, while a girl picked at my skin with sharp tweezers, pulling at me while I screamed. This was the therapy.

  Here, instead of being lowered into a therapeutic bath of warm water on my beloved gurney, as had been the practice at County General, I was seated in an electric wheelchair that plunged into frigidness. This water was so cold that pain was its essence. I screamed at every move—but then I was always screaming. I was used to it by now. At County the Jacuzzi was the only time I wasn’t in pain, whereas here, it was the only time I was.

  Finally, wrapped in a sterile white sheet, covered with a sterile towel, bandages taped to my body, I was wheeled upstairs. Lunch awaited me, and I actually felt a pang of hunger. Had the morning’s exercise worked up an appetite? It occurred to me that maybe what looked like beef might not be bad.

  It turned out to be barbecued beef and it was so good I actually gobbled it up. The vegetables too. I hadn’t so much as seen a single vegetable my whole time at County. The nurse who came for my plate explained that White was a Seventh-Day Adventist hospital, and supplied its kitchens from its own vegetable garden. It was the most fun I’d had at a meal since that tuna sandwich my sister brought me. Oh well, I thought, at least I have something to look forward to.

  •

  The routine at White wasn’t all that different from County General and I wasn’t feeling much better, at least to start. Between the Paxil and being woken up for a vitals check, I never was allowed a minute to sleep. My digestion still wasn’t “regular,” so I wound
up having to have several more enemas. And I was bored: at County there were videos (I must have watched Tin Cup eight million times), but here there was just the TV—with nothing worth watching. My friend and editor Vicky Wilson had sent me a history of the Byzantine Empire, which was fascinating, but I was still in too much pain to read. I longed to be left alone for one whole day, but I was subjected to standing and tweezing therapy even on Sundays. None of it really mattered, though; I loved this place. If you rang for the nurse, one would come and chat, and except for the weekends when the place was staffed by temps, we always had the same nurses—the same everyone. Because White Memorial’s chief physician was a woman, there were no male doctors barging into my room laughing about cigars and calling me Eva.

  The young Mexican man who had been in County General was here too. His burns, unlike mine, were visible: on his hands, his shoulders, his face, even. His family didn’t speak any English, but I loved them; you could tell they were kind.

  OPIUM DREAMS

  Inside, it was the usual Sunset Strip restaurant. I managed to huddle myself upstairs to the Skin Bar. At the sushi bar sat a man who looked like a mixture of Tim Ford and Mick Haggarty, while at a table in the back, Bianca Jagger sat in a black-and-white outfit out of von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, drinking an orange drink.

  On a white marble edifice at the sushi bar was a five-foot-high glass goblet, and inside it was a gorgeous girl dressed in a kind of gingham bikini, singing with all her heart “I Will Always Love You,” the Dolly Parton song that Whitney Houston made such a big hit.

  She was singing this to the Tim Ford/Mick Haggarty guy at the bar, who was waiting for me in order to aid and abet my escape. I was going someplace away, like the desert, so I could escape my fate and get with real doctors, who’d feed me great food and let me sleep so I could get better in a more civilized fashion.

  I remembered then that downstairs in the restaurant was my old friend Carolyn Zecca-Ferris, whose father used to manage the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Obviously, she was a woman used to dealing with all manner of surprise guests, and she had shown me her own private vegetable farm that raised special vegetables so perfectly organic that anyone (me) who ate them could grow new skin instantly and be all better in a few days of peace and harmony, instead of the hideous baths, gurneys, and staples that I had been forced to submit to at County General.

  At the bar, the beautiful girl singing “I Will Always Love You” was singing this straight at the guy at the counter, and she was so beautiful, with such a beautiful voice, that if ever there was a siren designed to fog the mind of man, she was it. Yet my savior was ignoring her, gladder to see me than to be seduced by her, even with my sticky bandages, blood, lymph, blown-up with black legs.

  “But first I want you to promise to introduce me to Fred Roos,” he said, this being Hollywood, where there’s a business reason for everything, including escapes from Alcatraz-hospital adventures. I was grateful because I had Fred Roos’s number in my phone book, which I somehow had with me.

  “Let’s call him now,” I said, to prove I was game.

  “Let’s call him when you’re well,” he said. “It’s four in the morning.”

  “Oh,” I said. Was it four in the morning? “Jeez, Fred would have been mad.”

  Off we went in some kind of vehicle, arriving at a place with strange children, as dripping with ooze as I was, where the special vegetables were being sliced up in beautiful ways, so we could all get well. A San Francisco–style healing, where acupuncture and healers abounded, just in case you couldn’t stand the AMA.

  But then, damn it, I woke up, right back at White Memorial . . .

  •

  I began to make progress.

  I’d been sent from County General with bedsores on my heels. One day a surgeon of great valor came in. He gave me a tiny little opiate and with a small knife dug the bedsore first out of one heel, then the other. The scream of pain in my throat was so shocked that no noise actually came out. The pain was surprising. Nothing else, outside of a bikini wax, even came close. But then after my first bikini wax, I’d vowed I’d never subject myself to another.

  Amazing tortures arrived for me in the form of occupational therapy. The surgeries had affected my hands and upper arms. In removing the skin from my arms, the doctors had cut too deeply. It was a long time before the incisions stopped bleeding. For two weeks I worked on desensitizing the nerves by clutching first a handful of sand, then beans, and finally dry pasta. It took about two weeks before I realized a magazine could touch me and I wouldn’t scream. But it really took a year for the pain to fully subside. Until then, even the brush of a pillowcase was excruciating.

  When it came to relearning to walk, years of dance lessons made me fearless. The social workers and therapists watched, frightened, as on the very first day my near atrophied legs miraculously climbed, first up a flight of stairs then down. But I had done much more dare-devil things in tango. In fact, all the common things most people struggled to relearn, I learned with relative ease. The real problem was that the new tissue was not really adhering the way it was meant to. I was leaking so much that if I didn’t keep my pants legs rolled up, they’d become all gummy.

  •

  There were tense meetings at White, when the social worker got together with the head doctor and the two bickered over how soon I could go home. The head doctor was determined to keep me there until I was as healed as much as possible. But after almost two months in rehab my time was up. They booted me, even though I was far from fully recovered.

  Just before it was time to leave the rehab center, I was finally allowed flowers in my room. My agent at the time, David Vigliano, sent a miraculous bunch, one of those newfangled bouquets that look just like dripping petals. Anne Rice sent a four-foot-high arrangement that turned my room into the Four Seasons and was so alluring that people came from all over the hospital to get a look at what the Vampire lady had sent. Don Henley (that witchy man) sent white roses stuffed so tightly in this wicker basket that it took weeks for them to fade. And last but not least, Ed Ruscha, Paul’s artist brother, and his wife, Danna, sent a breathtaking combo of huge sunflowers and gigantic irises, half van Gogh, half English garden.

  •

  Home in my condo, I was visited daily by a home-health aid. The agency sent a different one every day by some twisted logic, which meant that I had to explain on a daily basis exactly how to wrap around me the endless rolls of bandages I still required. After about two months, my sister found Heather, a physical therapist whose specialty was burn patients and who was universally adored—even if she did have a set of those sharp tweezers and knew how to use them.

  The expenses added up. If my cousin hadn’t figured out how to get discounted bandages from Kaiser Permanente, those things alone might have bankrupted me. I was fortunate to have friends who knew about finances. Michael Elias brought around Debby Blum, a whiz at setting up foundations. She made it so that people could donate money tax-free. Everyone from Steve Martin and Harrison Ford to Ahmet Ertegun gave generously. Laddie Dill held a silent art auction in my honor at the Chateau Marmont, which was pretty amazing. I was determined to sue the skirt company and make them pay, though.

  Six months later, when I was finally on my own two feet, I visited the burn unit at County General. The doctors had told me that “nobody comes back.” I took that statement as a dare, but I also wanted to see the people who had saved me, and to let them know that I remembered everything they had done. But the thing is that I hadn’t really remembered at all. Dr. Zawacki, who I thought of as a kind of insane older Mickey Rourke, was just a benign smiler, happy to see me dressed and upright for the first time. And the whole place wasn’t that obnoxious pale turquoise I’d thought it was, there was only a single curtain in that horrible shade. The Jacuzzi, which I experienced as kind of a baroque object of torture and relief, was just an ordinary long aluminum tub. My dark room was bright—I mean really bright. It was small too: the di
stance between the bed and the bathroom, which I thought must be a city block of pain, was no more than ten feet.

  1997, 2019

  FIORUCCI

  The Book

  FIORUCCI

  The Book

  THE FIORUCCI SCENE

  Fiorucci is the name of a man, the name of a look, and the name of a business. A phenomenon. Walking into a Fiorucci store is an event. Milan. New York. London. Boston. Beverly Hills. Tokyo. Rio. Zurich. Hong Kong. Sydney.

  Fiorucci is fashion. Fiorucci is flash. Fiorucci stores are the best free show in town. The music pulses; the espresso is free; the neon glows. Even the salespeople are one step beyond—they often wear fiery red crew cuts. But it is, after all is said and done, a store—a store designed to sell clothes. But the difference is all that sex and irony. Anyone who knows anything can see that finally the entire operation is motivated by the very same energy that lights the fire under rock and roll.

  A couple of years ago I made my first trip to Fiorucci, in Beverly Hills, just off Rodeo Drive. I took along my friend Ann, to lend an air of veracity to the expedition since I knew that Fiorucci only sells clothes up to size 10, and I’m a 12. Within two minutes, I found a wonderful little violet petal straw hat that only cost $20 and which made me look like the past recaptured.

  “Oh, you look beautiful,” Ann promised. “It’s just your color. It’s perfect. You have to buy that hat.”