I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Then, it happened to me.

  It was in the summertime, I was fourteen. I started my period and then I started “blossoming” in the most phenomenal display of glorious last-minute cavalry rescue. It was, as the English say, gratifying. Now, at least, I didn’t have that to worry about any more.

  Later I noticed that men would view my tits and become aflame with desire for them, and they would fantasize about having a pair of their own: “God, if I had tits like those I could fuck my way into a million bucks . . .” I also started getting plenty of, “Shit, she must really be horny.” (They get horny so I’m supposed to.)

  Recently, in Ralph’s, my local supermarket where anything often goes, there I am, trying to decide on some lettuce—lost in thought, idylls of watercress—when I feel a man behind me and quickly, before I can turn around, he says in a low, authoritative purposeful salute: “Big tits.” And he’s gone.

  That’s like seeing a movie star. You run up—with all kinds of fantasies beaming through your regular thought process—you run up to Cary Grant and say “Cary Grant!”

  What’s he supposed to do? You’ve just said his name to him—a tradition, a heritage, a massive plethora of dreams and meanings. It’s the same with men and my tits. They cannot imagine my doing anything that isn’t somehow connected with how big my tits are. And my tits aren’t even that big. I mean . . . they’re not Cary Grant. They’re more . . . John Garfield or Dean Martin. You know, there’s that shock of recognition but not the fainting spell Cary Grant would inspire.

  The other night I went out on the Last-Blind-Date-I-Shall-Ever-Go-Out-On-Ever-Again. The other night this friend, who keeps saying how smart and funny and wonderful she thinks I am, calls me and says she’s going to fix me up with this smart, funny, wonderful ex-lover of hers. I’ll just love him, she says. So I get dressed in these clothes that I wear when I don’t know what I’m about to encounter—clothes vaguely reminiscent of those awful white blouses I wore in junior high to hide whatever was there. This tall, unfunny, unwonderful, stupid man picks me up (I could tell at once he was stupid because he was stupid), and on our way into this restaurant he brushes against my breasts and says, “Why, shit, Jeannie was right! You do have gigantic tits!” Home, James.

  He’d have done much better if he’d insisted he was a leg man and you can see why, all these years, those other guys did.

  When a man who I don’t love and am not sexually engrossed in talks about my tits, there’s something that makes me want to pour cold water into his lap and leave a loose carton of ice cream on his car seat overnight. Legs are much less tiresome to listen to under those circumstances. However, if I’m beginning to be madly whipped into a frenzy of lust, a polite mention that I have beautiful breasts is a nice touch. And of course, after I’ve known the guy awhile and he’s proved himself funny, smart, an ace lover, and a man of distinction, then he can say any fucking thing he pleases. And only then have I found out what men were really thinking the first time when they poured me a glass of cool white wine and nonchalantly admitted their preference for legs.

  “I remember one time,” my gorgeous friend David told me after I told him I was going to write this piece, “I met this girl, Lucy Sanders” (I knew her—we’d shared a dressing room in Hollywood High together once and even then I thought it was hilarious because I was a 36DD and she was a 36DD and we’d get our bras mixed up—a truly uncommon coincidence) “and I was like nineteen and she was sixteen and there they just were, you know! . . .” and his voice softened in memories of things lust, “and I ran home, I mean ran, I pushed people off the sidewalk so I could get home in time to jerk off thinking about her tits . . .” He started laughing, “And then I asked her out and I was going to kiss her for the first time and she said something about being careful because she was swollen because of her period and I said, ‘Swollen? Where?’ And then I went into a whole thing about how now that she mentioned it I did notice she was perhaps larger than other girls but since I was a leg man myself . . .”

  I love revelations.

  So for all those years when I was having to make do with men who were a trifle triste because they were leg men and they had to accustom themselves to all this extra baggage . . . And then how they pounced when the coast became clear, and those revelations afterward that from the moment I’d come into some party they couldn’t take their eyes off my . . . But of course they had to. Because if they hadn’t, I would have thought they were pigs and brutes and you know how women are about pigs and brutes. We like them to clean up their routine in polite society at least. We like to at least know they could maintain an air of respectability if they had to.

  There are other little tricky situations that arise from big tits. Sometimes other women, a lot of the time when they’re drunk, can’t keep their eyes off them. They think you’re doing it on purpose. It’s like big guys in bars getting picked on for fights. But that’s OK, I don’t really mind about women. Deep down they know I know they can’t help it and eventually they turn their venom on their escorts for liking women with big tits and leave me out of it.

  There’s also all this having to bundle up. Whenever I go into the street, I have to cover myself with clothes that flow and drape. I cannot wear a tight anything on the street if I hope to have a moment’s peace. Suppose, for example, you wanted to go for a nice walk and look at the sunset and breathe in the air at eventide, nice idea, right? No, no, no. Not if you’ve got big tits and you’re not bundled up (Cary Grant can’t do it either).

  Putting on disguises is one of my daily tasks. “Now what shall I wear today that’ll billow around?” I say to myself, squinting into my closet. If I’m going to see friends and I have to go on the street first, I usually have to wear a coat (“Eve, a coat? It’s eighty degrees out there!”) and then take it off (sweating) upon arrival. If they’re really true friends who won’t make remarks about my tits when they get drunk enough, and if I can really be sure they aren’t going to turn on me for being Cary Grant, then I sometimes really get luscious and I try to dress like Claudia Cardinale in Cartouche or try in some other way to otherwise become a visual social asset to the proceedings.

  If I’m with a man I want to entice, then I have a special bunch of immoral things I wear for in-house functions, but only if the guy is six foot seven do I presume to wear them at large.

  There is one other problem—not a problem but a little matter of concern—about having big tits, and that is that a lot of sensitive, smart men are terrified because they’re consumed by lust and they haven’t learned the old “leg man” line. Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p’s and q’s and keeping up with current oddities—no slouch more or less—and I see them shrink from my gaze as though I were a tramp.

  Having spent the day defending myself from the slings and arrows of outrageous truck drivers and busboys, I am sometimes ill-equipped to suddenly assume an air of sensitive melancholy—and a couple of years ago I gave it up for a bad show. I mean, to be given the feeling that one is inelegant after one has just found the strategy for getting from point A to point B without having to walk past a little group of fourteen-year-old boys . . . It’s too hard and life is too short, and I want to be happy and laugh . . .

  Occasionally, I sit in a restaurant and I watch as a lithe, long-limbed creature with daisies embroidered on a sheer organdy blouse (beneath which she does not now, nor has she ever had to, wear a bra) enters. I see the face of the man who awaits her; it has a particularly familiar look and until lately, I couldn’t place it. He kisses her, she sits down, and he reaches over to pour her some cool white wine. And then, I’ll bet you anything, he says, “You know, even though we’ve just met, I think I must tell you right off . . . I’m a tit man.”

  Ms.

  April 1976

  NO ONIONS

  AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

  They seemed to understand that the consequence
of Archie saying “no onions” would result in an “out-of-gas” car with hearts coming up from the roof—they all knew and I caught on, but not really. I was perpetually ill at ease with how kids blandly sat through Crimes Against Nature like the first grade and I didn’t want to understand too much about Archie either because I was afraid I might become one of those kids.

  I grew up on a steady diet of comic books and movie magazines. Archie comics are the only ones I read out of a sense of duty, in the same way other kids had classic comics shoved in front of them or read them for “knowledge.” I felt obliged to learn something about America, I was living here after all, and Archie was as American and not-what-I-wanted as Mom’s apple pie. It seemed that Americans about to run out of gas were very particular not to have onions beforehand. I knew it by the time I was eight. But Veronica never knew it; she’d just sip her strawberry soda and step blithely into Archie’s car, completely unaware that hearts were about to come out of the roof in the next frame. I would never be such a fool, I thought—jaded and worldly at nine—as to let a man take me to a soda fountain and not have onions. Not an American man.

  The deal was that Veronica was ready to give Archie one kiss, period. Archie had to have more. Veronica could be persuaded to overcome her natural girlish abhorrence of kissing if Archie made sure not to have onions and ran out of gas. These Americans, I thought . . . How could she stand Archie? How could he stand her? Why didn’t he like Betty who was a regular person? How could anyone stand Reggie? Where did Jughead spring from? How could they all just casually drink Coca-Cola when one sip, and it tasted like musty trunks? How on earth could anyone eat a hamburger unless they were starving? Where was the America that had soda fountains? Did kids actually eat large slabs of raw onions on strange meat, dubious lettuce, awful mustard, and untouchable “buns”? How did Archie Comics know that the kids reading them would understand that when Archie leered “no onions,” it meant hearts?

  BAD BREATH

  From toothpaste commercials, I discovered that onions gave you “bad breath.” Why Veronica, who didn’t like kissing that much anyway, had to be seduced by “no onions,” I finally figured out. Americans went crazy about “bad breath” and sweat and in fact, from TV commercials, I learned that the only things they liked were Camay, pies, and toothpaste. They loved toothpaste.

  When I was kissing someone, like my mother or father, I loved kissing them so whatever they smelled like was fine with me. I loved kissing beautiful women with perfume on unless it was horrible like Old Lady Hard Candy perfume. My favorite smell to kiss was Harry, a friend of the family who wrote TV and radio music. Harry smelled like Scotch. I still love kissing Harry. Men who smell like Scotch remind me of him, but they’ re not him. Stravinsky must have smelled like Scotch but I never kissed him much. I kissed Mme Stravinsky and she smelled like the French Riviera in May covered with flowers, growing roses, happiness in spring, and Salems. (Now she smells like Carltons, she must have smoked Camels or Luckys when I was little, before filters and menthol.)

  ARCHIE AND ERROL FLYNN

  The first boy I ever kissed smelled like his V-neck sweater and birthdays. (It was at a birthday and we played spin the bottle and seven minutes in heaven.)

  The first illegal boy I ever kissed (no adult supervision) was ice-skating in the ancient high-up bleachers of the Polar Palace. He ate hot dogs with onions. I was enraptured; he was CUTE and one of the most popular boys at Le Conte and there he was at the Polar Palace every Friday night skating couples-only with me and necking. If only the popular kids at school could know that every Friday night for a year he kissed me. But they never knew because he never spoke to me at school, he only spoke to popular kids.

  A pirate expelled from a Birmingham, Alabama, school system came to Le Conte when “his mother couldn’t handle him.” He had burned the principal’s office down and threw a chair at the vice principal so they sent him to Hollywood to his father—a “Man’s Influence.” He took one look at his father and moved to the Hollywood Stables in Beachwood Canyon where he shoveled manure and slept in the hay. He, this pirate, devastated the Archie comic social system of Le Conte because he was Impossible. He alighted upon our American Way of Life like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. He had tattoos and I think the basic trouble was that he was Irish. The Concrete Block of cute girls and cute boys, the Ping-Pong blandness, the toothpaste popularity and Spray Net gruesome crap of the Darling just stood, with wide-open blue-eyed confusion at his “How do you do?” smile that didn’t notice them. He was polite. The guys turned into boys. All the “Oh, hi’s” in the world and best smiles from the three most cutest; blond, brunette, redhead darling adorable earth angels got nowhere. The day he got kicked out of algebra, he walked me to the middle of High Society’s segregated inviolate stair-steps, sat me down, and together, before the school, we read Mad. He laughed like Errol Flynn. I was in uncute, undarling, unadorable tears of laughter. He smelled of Brylcreem, alcohol and tobacco when we kissed in a stolen car a week later.

  Predictably, after the Mad lunch, on my way to class, the guy from the Polar Palace struck up a conversation. I looked at him, his cute popular casual face, and I decided he was a coward. I never kissed him again. Unlike the American Veronica, I had not noticed the onions on his hot dogs during the year he kissed me on Friday nights. I did notice he was a fraidy cat and hoped he’d burn in hell. I hoped they all would. (When Robin Hood got out of jail a couple of years later and came to visit me we still fell on the floor laughing with each other, but I was still a virgin—my major flaw—so after many Irish evaluations on the “Silliness of Virginity” not working on me, he shrugged and left me to my own devices like I deserved. I was left back with the toothpaste crowd.)

  GARLIC AND DORIS DAY

  After junior high, everyone smelled like beer and pizza, especially me. “You’ll have to marry an Italian, dear,” my mother told me one day, “the way you eat garlic.” Garlic was not in Archie comics because they were too American to have garlic. Veronica needn’t smell onions—though she’d probably heard of them—but she certainly was not to be subjected to the dreadful vulgarity of garlic. I loathed Veronica and starting when I was eight I wanted her to take her pearl necklace and strawberry soda and shove it; she was rich, they lived in a mansion, poor Betty didn’t stand a chance. Betty was the only one I felt deserved mercy, but Betty wanted Archie. And surely it would be more merciful for some pirate to clear things up for her. There were no pirates in America.

  As I grew older, Doris Day and Rock Hudson carried on the onion tradition. You can easily imagine her not-quite-thereness as Rock, in a soft aside to the waiter, says, “No onions,” after she’s just said, “Two hamburgers please.” After he doesn’t order onions, we know he’ll stop at nothing to get into her pants. And she, like Veronica about kisses, simply won’t have pants gotten into; she may perhaps not mind being kissed once or twice, but he’s going to have to marry her for pants. She smelled like lipstick and Camay and he smelled like clean money. No onions anywhere.

  Then everything fell completely to pieces, thank heavens.

  Dennis Hopper got rich, Doris Day collected dogs, and her son employed a full-time bodyguard and never ever went out again into America. Life folded, Edie Sedgwick stuck her head into a toilet for Art, the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and tore girls from the path of pearls and virginity, heroin and alcohol became outré among intellectuals, and ladies and gentlemen . . . the Rolling Stones. Ozzie and Harriet, toothpaste, and running-out-of-gas just couldn’t hold a candle to a fifteen-year-old meth girl asking for “spare change,” if you kissed her you’d get hepatitis or suicidally depressed. If you ate hamburgers you’d get poisoned. If you ate anything, it turned out, you’d get poisoned. Everything in the whole world had been quietly poisoned while Archie was worrying about onions.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  I’d forgotten all about onions, myself, once everything fell completely to pieces until a few months ago. It was an article about Elizabeth Tayl
or in Cosmopolitan. She was in Russia making The Blue Bird and of course she’d brought her dogs along as well as the poor used car salesman who’d figured who was he to wonder at God’s mysterious intentions when Elizabeth Taylor picked him. Elizabeth held the interview in her Russian hotel suite and was in a good mood. She ordered caviar for the interview and acted human which was a change from the last time the interviewer had seen her when she’d acted like Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth told the interviewer that she had recently come across the simple pleasures of being human, shopping, etc., and much to her amazement, she liked them. She liked being “just a woman” (or something) and going for drives in the country. Meanwhile, the interviewer had been forewarned not to talk about RICHARD and the used car salesman sort of lurked in the shadows as Elizabeth rambled on about her New Life. Elizabeth is not stupid. The impression a clever reporter would receive from having Elizabeth Taylor be nice to them and be human is that Elizabeth Taylor is enjoying life without RICHARD and has discovered a girl can have fun without RICHARD, simple pleasures like drives in the country take precedence over RICHARD and besides, there’s the used car salesman.

  Everything was going splendidly. The clever reporter was totally engrossed and believing it. The caviar arrived. Elizabeth made a graceful gesture of “go ahead,” the lurk from the shadows stepped forward for a cracker, and Elizabeth—being human to perfection—spread caviar on a piece of cracker, continued about how nice Russia was, and . . . But it couldn’t be . . . But it was! Elizabeth Taylor who was “so happy living a normal life with the used car salesman,” sprinkled onions on her caviar!