I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  “I could have gotten a job as story editor, but it’s worth four hundred dollars a week to me to have my freedom,” she told me. “I could never sit down inside all day like that.”

  Somehow, out in Santa Monica and even at the elegant Café California, where we went to lunch, Lisa Lyon in her workout clothes, with her sweatshirt tied around her shoulders, looked OK enough not to rock the boat. Except for her sculptured biceps, she might have been simply a tennis single from the marina or a runner from the beach. The Café California is not where I thought I’d wind up one day with some lady bodybuilder—I had thought she’d probably want to go to a health food place and drink carrot juice. But now, here she was eating an omelet and drinking café au lait just like a normal person.

  “I am a normal person,” she told me. (By this time, I was feeling that she might indeed actually be a normal person, at least the kind of normal person I usually know—the kind that every so often goes off the deep end into something.) “I mean,” she went on, “everybody thinks that to be a bodybuilder you have to be a freak, but I don’t think bodybuilding is very different from basketball. Except that in bodybuilding, the end you’re striving for is aesthetic. That’s why I think it should be taken seriously.

  “Plus, even the most freaked-out, untogether person from the street who goes into Gold’s, you know, just to see what’s happening, well . . . the discipline transforms anybody who tries it. The energy and desire inside that place are so high, and the people are so nice and understanding. I think,” she said, “you should feel free to pursue whatever you feel will benefit you. I think women should be able to have a choice in ideals of physical beauty. I mean, we’re going into the eighties, and we’re headed into androgyny anyway, so why not? Besides, how many women do you know who can do this, man?” she asked, and suddenly, when no one in the Café California was looking, she flexed her arm, and it turned into a burning-alive map in bas-relief of incredible muscles. Then she flashed me one of those hooky-girl smiles again and said, “It’s art. It’s living sculpture. Plus I can deadlift two hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

  “What’s ‘deadlift’?” I asked.

  “That’s from the ground.”

  Lisa and I know all the same people in the movie business and the art world and even in jazz (she knows the piano player who’s playing with Art Pepper, who’s married to my cousin). But she can deadlift 265 pounds. And she spends as much time as she can in Gold’s Gym getting stronger and stronger and stronger.

  This year she won the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Championship. She wants to be on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. And she means to define the New Beauty for Women. “Since I started doing this,” she told me, “I’m happy all the time. You just can’t help it.”

  But she looked out the window impatiently from the Café California into the blue skies over Ocean Park, and I remembered that as she had left Jay Silva, her training partner, she made plans to meet him later at the gym. And I thought she’d be far happier once she was working again at her machine . . . on one knee bending forward as she pulled heavy lead plates . . . with rock and roll blasting overhead . . . back in Gold’s Gym.

  Esquire

  October 1979

  THE TYRANNY OF FASHION

  QUENTIN Crisp once wrote something like this: “When you say things are better than they are, they call you a romanticist. When you say things are worse than they are, they call you a cynicist. But when you say things are exactly as they are, they call you a satirist.” George W. S. Trow’s wonderful volume of stories is a victory for things exactly as they are.

  Terrible images conjured up in these stories seem bound to linger for a lifetime in one’s brain. Images of restaurants “that had to close because of the small green snails appearing suddenly everywhere.” Or this: “Like my ex-wife, my rug wants to exist in a nonjudgmental atmosphere.”

  Part of the time, Mr. Trow writes in a terminal travel-brochure style, as when his prose attempts to transcend by cheeriness an intractable resort hotel called the Hotel Reine-American, which is located on a strip of lost-cause oceanfront property called Alani Beach. Of course, every so often, the hopelessness of Alani Beach leaks out, and we are given a slap in the face of what caused the hotel to fall apart in the first place: the “killing damp,” for example, or the “red stinging plants that have recently been afloat, clinging together in red clumps like coagulated blood.” But all the while, we’re brightly assured that “Alani Beach and the whole Alani area are more nearly alive than they’ve been for years.”

  Other times, George W. S. Trow writes in an innocent style you usually see in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker. Only this time the bright and genial prose is out to make bearable not reptile exhibits or a certain special cheese importer—this time Mr. Trow’s friendly words are out to describe Mrs. Armand Reef (who “Likes to Entertain”). Mrs. Armand Reef, a divorcée who lives on the Upper East Side and endorses products like “Body Dew” and “Ultra Vodka,” discusses who is asked to her “little dinner parties”: “To be asked to one of my little dinner parties you must have great intelligence. And wit. I value wit. I love the clever thing—the thing that just glances off the truth and circles back to something topical.” She then goes on to say, “I find that high-powered dynamic men like to humiliate easy women and that makes a party go . . .”

  There is a story called “At Lunch With the Rock Critic Establishment,” which to me—having spent my youth in the jaws of rock and roll, designing album covers and spending so much time with people like those he describes that I know he’s saying things are exactly as they are—is worth the price of the whole book. The sort of rock critics Mr. Trow describes are the ones who write three-page essays on the first four notes of the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” showing these notes as proof that the Eagles are corrupt and Too L.A. and that nobody could possibly take them seriously but teenagers. One of the members of the Rock Critic Establishment, Lester Rax, has “always stood for complete integrity,” and when a publicist tries to fool him with a band called “Traitor,” he knows the band is only hype. “This kid Calvin,” Lester says, “wasn’t he . . . didn’t he . . . do backup for Donovan?”

  “He was a child,” the publicist protests and says: “My God, you can’t hold that against him. And he was very disillusioned. He practically had a breakdown. It was very painful.”

  To have to apologize to a member of the Rock Critic Establishment for a band member because he once played backup for Donovan is exactly how things are.

  What happens when you read Trow’s stories is that you begin to see everything quite clearly. Suddenly, a fabulous place that boasts of “hotels with perfect security” becomes transparent.

  And Trow, who is himself a master of style when he writes, seems to be using it to show that style, taste, those little refinements used in everyday life to separate the elegant and delightful from the rest of us, are nothing more than “specifics.” So that having the specifically right shoes, the right shirts, the right old furniture and new friends is nothing but a collection of specific details imposed by those in fashion. And those in fashion are nothing more than bullies. Yet those who are bullied seem so eager to soak up the specifics and details of what is in style and what isn’t, that unless they read Mr. Trow’s book, they may go on and on without ever stopping to think what fashion really means.

  But once you’ve read these stories, it will seem that in fashion, bullies are all there are. Or ever will be.

  The New York Times Book Review

  April 20, 1980

  TIFFANY’S BEFORE BREAKFAST

  I’M FORCED to pause, whenever I’m going to have a nervous breakdown, and consider the single most obvious objection: I can’t afford one. I mean, if I am going to collapse, I’m certainly not going to do so unless there is so much money nearby that I needn’t worry for a moment about how much it’s going to cost to be whisked off to Switzerland for a two-week sleep cure; nor—in my nervous bre
akdown—would I want to mind the expense of a three-month convalescence somewhere in Italy—probably Lake Como—where, on my hotel balcony chaise, I could gaze upon peaceful scenery as I penned letters to concerned friends assuring them that I was OK. Unless I can afford a Henry James one, I’d prefer to postpone my nervous breakdown till next summer.

  In the meantime, I call my sister. Only my sister, these days, has been blooming with peace of mind, occupying herself totally with fund-raising for Cesar Chavez (La Causa); funds for retired farm workers’ pension homes and health clinics and education. She’s always in places like La Paz in the Tehachapis, just when I have scrambled brains and other conditions which I’m sure could be cured if I were out picking grapes for even one day rather than sighing over Lake Como.

  Oh, I nearly forgot—before I telephone my sister, if my lover happens to be nearby, I simply fly into a rage at him and then have a hot-fudge sundae and am all better. Only my lover is in South America shooting pictures and my sister is unavailable because she is ironing “There’s Blood on Those Grapes” decals onto white T-shirts for future rallies. So I am forced to rely on two other women.

  Ginny, the oldest of my friends, is helpful because she’s a list maker. Instead of letting everything all over fall apart in your brain, Ginny lists the words and eliminates some, and, as though by magic, the world stops trembling, quiets down, life can go on. Only Ginny is in Japan with her handsome sexy boss eating sushi, and when I find out how much it costs to call Japan and the length of the list. . . . Besides, I probably wouldn’t be able to hear her.

  That leaves Tina. Now Tina and I always—well—get together for my nervous breakdowns. The great thing about Tina is that she has suggestions. I hate it when you call someone and say “My God, what am I going to do?” and they say, “Gee, uh . . . have you looked in the TV Guide?” Tina is never dreary.

  Once, for example, after I’d not eaten for three days and was seeing everything twice, like Joseph Heller’s soldier in white, Tina said, “I’ll come right this minute, honey, what you need is red meat.”

  Now everyone knows that you don’t need red meat ever, especially after you haven’t eaten for three days, but Tina came in her white car (forever, in my mind, an ambulance) and whisked me to a place which whisked this red meat before me and Tina would not let me so much as go to the ladies’ room until I finished every last bite. Despite her unlikely remedy, I recovered so fast that I began seeing everything just once by the time we were back at my place. I was so enormously impressed by how fast she’d gotten her remedy in front of me, how seriously she’d taken my declaration of collapse. But then Tina has always been a Real Friend.

  “Tina, Tina . . .” I called last night, “. . . oh, I’m so glad you’re home! I’ve gotten in too deep, I can’t do anything. I’ve . . . got ants and no money! I am having a nervous breakdown just thinking of these things. I’ve got ants, Tina. Ants! But I can’t . . .”

  “Oh, honey, what you need is something to eat,” Tina said.

  So we met at Nickodell’s, a thirties Hollywood restaurant which has stuff like “turkey croquettes” on the menu, it’s so Mildred Pierce. Nickodell’s—it’s sort of the only place in L.A. you can go without accidentally bumping into an alfalfa sprout. It makes you feel grounded. It’s a good place to discuss your nervous breakdown.

  “Shall I pick you up?” Tina had asked.

  “No . . .” I’d said. I shall never again be that shaky, I hope, as to have to be driven in her ambulance.

  It wasn’t just the ants, you see. It was that in a burst of some inner will to let go of the railing and drop into the snake pit, I said, “yes,” I’d just love doing all these projects. I’d allowed my lover to talk me into going on a five-day publicity junket near the Cook Islands—to a place called Rarotonga—a place I’d subsequently write about for two magazines that I’d breezily telephoned and convinced it was a wonderful idea. Since I hate traveling, why did I do that? One of the magazines would want an In-Depth, encyclopedic inventory of this place or else I’d be rejected, which is just about worse than ants. I’d also known all along that any moment now a gigantic reedited six-hundred-page manuscript of my new book was going to land on my head from my editor who’d expect me to be thinking of the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book so help me God, until it was finished or I died, whichever came first. In the meantime, I was to write a piece for a local magazine about an old haunt of mine, a place the magazine wanted me to sort of sneer at but which practically made me burst into tears of past desire just remembering all those nights. . . . And then there were these ants!

  “Well,” Tina said, “you pay for the dinner on your card and I’ll give you cash and you stop off at Ralph’s supermarket and get ant poison if all that’s between you and the ants is no cash. Why didn’t you get cash from the bank on Friday?”

  “Because on Friday, I couldn’t . . .” I moaned. On Friday, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t put my shoes on on Friday. How could I get to the bank?

  “Now,” she said, ordering another carton of milk, “about Rarotonga.”

  At one time, Tina had been the secretary of a very responsible, very respected American author whose reputation was flawless and whose literary career was unstained by mad Rarotonga-like insanities.

  “Whenever he’d got himself on overload . . .”

  “He got himself on overload? Him?” I mean, my image of him was a majestic master of evenly spaced considerations, calm voices, clarity and peace of mind.

  “Oh, he’d always do that,” she said. “I mean, he’d wind up throwing all the dishes at the kitchen door, he’d be so furious at the holes he’d walked into himself, eyes wide open. . . . Anyway, what he’d do was, he’d write these notes—on Tiffany notepaper with the engraved monogram—about how he’d simply gotten some ‘unexpected unavoidable thing,’ how he’d be ‘so happy in the future to work with the editors’ or whoever and how ‘if there were anything he could do to help. . . . ’ It was the Tiffany’s, of course, it just killed ’em.”

  “The Tiffany’s?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, “you go to Tiffany’s and you go to their stationery department and you order yourself this engraved notepaper with your name and address and all on the envelope . . . I’m telling you, it’ll have you out of Rarotonga in two seconds. And they’ll think you’re responsible.”

  On my way home from Nickodell’s, I bought the ant poison and brought their march to an abrupt halt. I then lay down upon my bed and thought about Tiffany’s and stationery and life, and how much calmer it would be having my own stationery than causing all that commotion collapsing in front of editors. Besmirching my reputation.

  Not pausing for breakfast, I was at Tiffany & Co. at 9:45 the next morning. Before the place opened, it looked as though only stone could be behind those doors—the doors to Tiffany’s in Beverly Hills are every bit as enormous and twelve times as forbidding as the Gates of Paradise in Florence. But at ten, you hardly saw these gigantic gates as you floated into several large and well-lit rooms of silver, porcelain, and diamonds.

  “May I . . . ?” asked a man in charge—who was used to seeing people in jeans and shirts with paint on them—this being California—entering Tiffany’s and knowing what they wanted.

  “Stationery,” I said. And I was led to the special stationery lady who was also absolutely blind to how L.A. I was and how Fifth Avenue she and the store were.

  For about an hour, we went over just exactly what it was I had in mind. I didn’t know. I mean, I knew I wanted this paper to write notes to editors which would make them think I was a fine upstanding bastion of the community, but on the other hand, the papers were so beautiful, I wanted them all. Only all I needed was one simple card and one simple envelope. And the stationery lady eventually extracted this information from my reluctant lips. Just exactly what it was I had in mind was too tangled; she would, instead, give me just what I needed.

  “So you need one hundred cards and one hu
ndred envelopes,” she decided, “to begin. Afterwards, if you decide that you want more, we will have your information, the die, and you will be able to reorder whenever you feel it necessary.”

  So she got me with sanity on the amount and the size. But on color, she lost. Of course, what I ought to have gotten was “Ecru-White Kid” with black engraving or, at worst, dark green or brown script. What I ended up extracting from this valiant woman was a sort of buff-peach, a shade only lately introduced into the line. In the line only two months, in fact. (The other new color was ribald Shocking Pink, a jet-set color.)

  And if it weren’t bad enough that my first venture into Tiffany stationery was cards of buff-peach, it turned out that the color of the engraved script I wanted was turquoise.

  Her frozen downcast eyes immediately told me I was never going to get by with anything so demented as turquoise.

  “Well . . .” I sighed, scanning the chart—I didn’t want proper brown, proper forest green, proper dark gray, “how about red?”

  “A deep red,” she reluctantly agreed, ready for me, “here . . . this might look very nice with that color paper.”

  The red she pointed to was this sort of proper maroon. I didn’t want proper maroon. I wanted bloodcurdling scarlet. I submitted to proper maroon for a whole five minutes, until I realized that I wasn’t even getting turquoise, this was costing $100, and I wanted blood-curdling scarlet! So scarlet it was. She had to bow to my demand—after all, I was a customer and this was Tiffany’s—and after advising the customer three times upon the simple goodness of maroon and getting a cool insistence upon bloodcurdling scarlet . . . what could she do?

  “Maybe next time,” I told her, “I’ll get the darker red.”

  “Well, if you like the color you have chosen . . .” she said. “Perhaps—who knows—at any rate, it will certainly be original.”

  “Next time, I’m getting the turquoise,” I was thinking as I flew down the street of Beverly Hills, dressed in my jeans and sandals and shirt with the paint on it, composing demure but conscientious little scrawls about why I’d never be able to write about Rarotonga, although “perhaps in the future. . . .”