I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  The Gamble House was built in 1908 for a rich Cincinnati family (part of Procter and Gamble) as a winter house. It was designed by the Greene Brothers who were the architects of a number of unsurpassed Southern California residences. The Gamble House is open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The inside of the house is mostly made of polished teak, carved by one of the Greene Brothers in a pattern called the “cloud design.” Seemingly the whole house is given to the cloud design, even the rugs, lamps, and banisters. The feeling that you’ve come into a splendid, spacious creation is true. The windows, lamps, and even the rug designs are by Tiffany and everything in the house is as it was when the Gambles returned from their trip to the Orient to see their house for the first time.

  Resident architecture professors at USC get to live in that house. I once went and visited one, and we had cheese, crackers, coffee, and ham out on the porch on a wicker table, much to my disbelief. The gardens of the house, which used to stretch out for Versailles miles beginning with the back Japanese lotus pool, have now been built over with other, lesser houses. But it’s still the same, somehow; it must be.

  If the Gamble house isn’t open, it’s all right to just park and walk around it anyway and to try and see in; but it’s much more fun to be taken around by one of the ladies who’ll show you the secret window in the upstairs master bedroom from which you can see who has just come in downstairs.

  Then you should get back into your car, go north a few blocks, and turn left down any one of the streets that looks the most glorious, or strikes your fancy, and just wander.

  LOOK CAREFULLY AS YOU DRIVE BY SO QUICKLY

  “How can you live in L.A., Eve, my God, the architecture,” my friends from San Francisco always say. “I love the architecture,” I answer, without thinking. I love the architecture, but you have to know how to look, you cannot stay on the main drags or go on the freeway and see anything. You have to be willing to wander off, up in the hills (even the hills in back of the Sunset Strip are pretty cute).

  The whole lay of the land, the history, and the weather have divided San Francisco and Los Angeles for so many years, maybe it’s impossible. Maybe it’s impossible for you San Franciscans with your history all around you—the downtown, the proximity of the harbor, the rain and fog, the narrow houses, streets, and driveways—it might be impossible for you to travel the short distance of only an hour and find yourself in wide-open placid spaces, in a rented car, driving down streets which seem unrelieved in their garishness, the tacky obviousness of a railroad town, spaces flat and seemingly without purpose with freeways going off in all directions, and then have your business associates point with pride at the Marina.

  But there is another town here that you could find if you wanted to, a more subtle city beyond the translucent hamburger chains and gigantic billboards . . .

  You could find it in back of the Beverly Hills Hotel, or up a winding road into the hills, or down a side street lined with little houses which are covered with flowers. You can find the transitory spirit of Los Angeles if you look carefully as you drive by so quickly, beyond the false fronts, the pancake makeup, and the sequins of your regrettable sister who’s gone on the stage and captured everyone but you by a simple determination to sprawl indifferently out into the sunset after her long train trip across the country.

  City

  April 30–May 13, 1975

  NEEDLES IN THE LAND OF FRUITS AND NUTS

  THOSE stories about Southern California’s comprising a population of fruits and nuts used to land around my feet like kites that wouldn’t fly when I was growing up there. People who lived on carrot juice were all around, and they did have rosy cheeks and they were cheerful, but I, even as a child, was too sophisticated for regional nonsense. Penicillin, after all, had been discovered and Hollywood was not the center of the medical firmament.

  But later when I went to New York, I discovered that the L.A. health mystique had overtaken me. Why else would I find myself appalled, as only someone from the coast can be appalled, by the vast quantities of white sugar New Yorkers put into everything they eat. And the donuts! Watching them eat donuts as though they were fit for human consumption made me realize what a schism had developed between me and the rest of the country. I was a full-fledged crank—penicillin or no.

  It might have been the time I read that oranges lose vitamin C ten minutes after squeezing and so I gave up juice. Or maybe it was the combination of sleazy stories girlfriends told me about sex-crazed gynecologists and how women’s-lib centers were now teaching women to do their own Pap smears. Maybe it was that the AMA toppled out of my circle of respect when some years ago my fourteen-year-old friend Suzie, too young to get a diaphragm legally, ended up having to go to Tijuana for an abortion. Even closer to home, it might have been the time I consulted an MD about my feet, which were killing me, and almost bit off the hand of the nurse who was helping the doctor inject my arches with cortisone.

  My own mother, who had all her life scoffed at alfalfa sprouts, had gone and got her consciousness raised, so when my sister brought over a young man who was a doctor, he found himself backed into a corner with no answers, by my mother, who outdistanced him by fifty yards on the subject of the AMA and nutrition.

  “Jesus,” he said, “how do you know all that stuff?”

  “How come you don’t?” she softly, but menacingly, replied.

  At any rate, one day when I was about to bite into a hot dog and suddenly the newspaper exposé of what was really in them flashed before me, I knew that I had become at least a semi fruit-and-nut freak. And when my feet finally gave out, I discovered I was ready to take the next step over the line—I was ready for acupuncture.

  And in Southern California, we do have acupuncture. Two kinds, in fact. The first kind is the AMA kind, where you have a doctor—a legit MD who’ll feed you white toast as soon as look at you—who decides that what you’ve got he can’t fix, so he puts you into a room with his Oriental; the Oriental tells him where to put the needles and for a mere $50 to $100, he follows instructions. The second, the illegal kind, is the kind I go to—a guy who knows what he’s doing and does it at home with no smelly hospital, and only takes friends.

  Ever since I’d heard about acupuncture, I was anxious to see if it worked. And I kept my eyes open for an authentic practitioner. My feet were beginning to kill me, and I didn’t think I’d be able to survive another day or sleep through another night—and believe me, I had gone to doctor after doctor about it. Anyway, just as I was about to give up, I found Sandy.

  Sandy was not my idea of what an acupuncturist ought to look like. I imagined an ageless inscrutable who’d just know at once what was wrong with me and cure it in two visits. Sandy, however, is someone I’d seen around in L.A. society for years and had always thought was a photographer or something. Sandy is a peer, too, which made it hard to have faith in him. How can you trust someone your own age? But anyway, I went. Maybe it was his blue eyes and dark eyelashes. My feet were killing me, so I went.

  When confronting a doctor, I figure that I should be able to describe my woes in lyric phrases like “My whole left side feels like it’s going to fall off,” and he should take it from there. So I told Sandy, “Look, my feet are killing me and it goes all the way up my leg and my ass falls asleep when I’m writing and I wish I were dead.”

  Sandy, who’d seemed a friendly sort at first, began to turn into something much different. As I babbled randomly, he fell deeper into concentration, and out of it—the way a karate black belt looks before he severs a redwood plank.

  He took my wrist, and I shut up and wondered if they took pulses in China too, but it felt good to have my wrist taken with such authority, men being what they are nowadays and never even holding your hand in the movies. Styles of love have changed abysmally for the worse. I sat happily and he held my wrist for a nice long time. When he finished he looked at me, at my good skin, which usually fools most doctors into thinking I’m a hy
pochondriac.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how much are you drinking?”

  “Drinking? This is supposed to be about my feet.”

  He looked over my shoulder at the green branches of his crank organic garden outside the window of a room that was like a tree house and he felt my wrist again. He turned his gaze back to me finally and began describing symptoms which I had neglected to mention because they didn’t hurt like my feet.

  And so my doubts about the mystic capabilities of a blue-eyed member of my own peer group vanished and gave way to the realization that this is how it ought to be.

  “And,” Sandy continued, “your system is so imbalanced and your stomach is so messed up that you’re going to have to take some time off and consider yourself as ‘healing’ because you’re really in bad shape, and I won’t answer for the consequences unless you decide you’re going to spend the next few months healing.”

  “Then what happens?” I asked warily.

  “Then you can do whatever you want except take heroin or cocaine.” (The kind of people he dealt with were prone to risky extravagances.)

  “Well, I don’t take heroin and cocaine’s passé,” I told him, “but I drink like crazy.”

  His eyes turned toward the garden again, and I could see he was trying to figure out the best way to tell me, without scaring me out of my wits, that I’d better stop drinking. He seemed totally concerned with my well-being. And in this day and age to have anyone even vaguely interested in whether you live or die is refreshing. I knew I wouldn’t touch another drop!

  The best thing that happened to me when I quit drinking (I’d been on the Drinking Man’s Diet since time immemorial) was that I could eat everything and not gain a smidgen. I could eat dandy linguini, for example. I could eat rice, bread, apricots, peaches, and most of all, potatoes! I even found someone to eat them with, a new lover whose eyes were even bluer than Sandy’s and who liked to do things like kiss my back and hold my hand and bring me flowers on the rare occasions that we managed to get out of bed. This acupuncture stuff, I thought, as I reviewed the fortunate effects of my sole visit, is not to be sneezed at. And only $15.

  But did my feet get better? Yes, I suppose—whenever I look down to remember them, which isn’t often when one is in a romantic entanglement of Herculean proportions.

  On my fifth visit, I asked Sandy how he’d come to interest himself in the act of sticking needles into people. He told me that eight years before, he’d suffered from bloodshot eyes, eyes so dry they were painful, and that no doctors seemed to be able to fix it.

  “I was at this party one night and someone told me about this guy who could do acupuncture and that I ought to try it. I figured why not? I went down there the next day, downtown to this old guy, and he told me to lie down. Then he put two needles in the points of my ear, took a drop of blood from my forehead, and handed me a mirror. My eyes were perfect, all cleared up!”

  “And?”

  “And I told him I wasn’t leaving until he promised to teach me how to do it. I’m not at all pushy, but I was determined to make him teach me, and he was giving me answers like ‘We don’t teach whitey ancient Chinese secrets,’ but I just sat there and wouldn’t budge. So finally he told me to be there the next day at 5 a.m., and when I got there he gave me a list of things to do like take his clothes to the laundry and dumb stuff like that. And then he let me sit there and watch while he treated people. After two years of this my big day came. He gave me my own set of needles, and for the next two years, he let me serve my apprenticeship working on his patients.”

  But how had he been able to tell that I had a bad stomach from taking my pulse? No one else ever had the slightest idea I had been going around with cramps nearly all the time.

  In front of him was a giant chart of acupuncture points on the body of a man who Sandy called Karl because that was the name of the person who designed the chart. (“All right, now face Karl,” Sandy said when he finished with the needles and fire and was ready to give me a massage that was so organized that “bad blood” rushed from deep inside you and rose to the surface of your skin—and your neck and shoulders didn’t hurt anymore.) “See,” he nodded toward the chart, “all the meridians . . .”

  “What’s meridians?” (I’d been hearing about meridians and who knew? I thought they were like latitudes by which sailors could tell where they were.)

  “They’re the nerve cycles where the points are, the acupuncture points that affect parts of you . . . like what’s the matter with your feet is on the same meridian as your stomach.”

  When I had gone to the podiatrist he had referred to something called, bleakly, the Circle of Pain. I figured it had something to do with meridians because it seemed to make sense especially when a needle that was stuck into my elbow sent an electrical pulse straight to my feet. Anyway, I believed in meridians.

  “All those meridians,” he continued, “pass through your wrist, and each one has a different pulse; there are six different pulses in your wrist.”

  “So that’s how you can just take someone’s pulse and tell what’s the matter with them without their saying anything?” I asked.

  “Your pulse is like a symphony. If everything’s in balance, I can feel it. But when your stomach’s off, then everything goes; it throws everything else out.”

  All my sessions had begun with him holding my wrist and informing me of what was getting better or not doing anything.

  What I wanted to know was how he remembered after perhaps thirty patients a week or more, what my particular pulse had felt like that last time I was there.

  He smiled his bright smile, closed his eyes, and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know why, but when I take your wrist and concentrate, I remember exactly who you are and what you were a week ago.”

  If anyone is wondering whether it hurts to have needles stuck into you, the answer, no matter what some brave US diplomatic visitor to China says, is yes. It hurts. But only for a second usually. It’s like saying it doesn’t hurt to have your ears pierced; it hurts.

  Lesser known, but a legitimate practice in acupuncture is burning incense on the body. Apparently this is to draw up to the surface whatever’s wrong so it can be heated out. First they put something on your skin to make sure you don’t go up in flames, and then they apply the tiny burning pieces of incense and wait until the heat becomes unendurable. When Sandy did this to me the first time on my feet, side, and back, I went into a hypnotic trance, and felt like an angel coming down from mescaline. It’s my favorite part.

  “In Japan they call it scaring,” Sandy said brightly, then added good-humoredly, “Those Japanese!”

  “They’re nicer in China,” I had to admit. “Owww. But not that much nicer.”

  I have this feeling that in any therapy, three-fourths of what’s beneficial about it is that someone’s paying attention to you for a whole hour—just to you. Any pain endured during this time is worth it. In psychiatry they make you remember horrible things you’ve seen fit to shove out of the way. In gym classes they kill you health-club style. With acupuncture, it’s exotic and it seems to work.

  And my newest friend with golden eyes, who rubs my back with geranium-scented apricot oil says, “Maybe it’s me or something . . . but you seem to be so much better than when I first met you. More relaxed or something. Happier.”

  “Mmmmm,” I agree and think of Sandy’s thoughtful trance that first day when he was trying to figure out how to tell me to straighten up and fly right. And I could almost hear him say, “I’ll relax you,” as I turn languidly to gather rosebuds while I may.

  Playgirl

  November 1975

  MY LIFE IN A 36DD BRA

  Or, the All-American Obsession

  WHEN I was fifteen years old, I bought and filled my first 36DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man. Tits! Why, he hadn’t even noticed!

  The tacit understanding was
that if I did indeed have those giant knockers one hears so much about in locker rooms and sees flopping across magazine covers, why he simply hadn’t seen what all the fuss was about! Instead he had been quietly pursuing his bird-watching of ankles, knees, and nicely turned calves.

  For years I believed these men, which goes to show how dumb one can be when one puts one’s mind to it. And for years I felt sorry for the men who, by some sad twist of fate had gotten stuck with me when they’d have preferred legs. On the other hand, I always knew that if I ever really wanted anything, all I’d have to do was lean forward slightly. Suddenly the world was waiting to hear what it was I wanted, how fast I wanted it, and whether they could get a better one for me wholesale.

  Now, my legs aren’t that great. They’re OK—with feet on the end of them and toenails at the ends of the feet. They’re not the long legs that you see in Vogue magazine, those grasshopper stems glistening out in Vaseline bronze for “this summer it’s white linen, briefly” copy. (And as for my ass, well it’s so nondescript that no one’s ever presumed to tell me that was what they were after.)

  In fact, I inherited my legs from my mother, and her apple- dumplingly adorable (but short) legs used to cause my father to laugh for what my mother described as “no reason.” Then my mother would blush all the way down to her amazingly taut and gorgeous breasts. Perhaps that was the real reason my father laughed at her legs.

  I inherited my breasts from the women in our family, judging from old photographs taken in Russia in 1905 and old photographs taken in Louisiana in 1907. Only I was what is euphemistically described as a “Late Bloomer,” but which might better be called The-Heartbreak-Hotel-Death-Row-No-Love-Low-Down-End-of-the-World-Blues. There I was fourteen years old in Hollywood with all these incredible girls around me bulging out of these powder-blue sweaters, these salmon-colored sweaters, these pink and charcoal-gray sweaters, these full-fashioned cashmere navy-blue sweaters. And I’m in huge white blouses coming out of my skirts because I’d rather have people think me a pig or a slob than flat-chested. My best friend, who’d spent hours with me in the seventh grade laughing and talking (she was really a smart funny girl and we had splendid times), suddenly turned up after one summer in Lake Arrowhead with beautiful 34C tits in pink sweaters—and she never spoke to a girl again. (Yes, she did—to the only girl in school with tits bigger than hers. But that girl wasn’t beautiful the way she was, or smart.)