I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  In the tango, the woman always looks like a bird fluttering out of a tree, caught just in time.

  There is a scene in Dirty Dancing when the Innocent Virgin sneaks into Johnny Castle’s tent (Patrick Swayze’s bungalow), where he’s standing naked from the waist up with stomach muscles worth all of Dante. And when the Innocent Virgin asks him to dance, he does a slow ballet—which, danced by any other man of our generation, would cause kids at Saturday matinees to squeal with derision. But Swayze dances with such hot momentum and vulnerable sweetness that the whole theater comes to a full silence.

  •

  At which point lunch arrives, a salad with no feta—but I don’t feel deprived with Janet and Megan at the table and what’s going on in the rest of the room. I feel sated.

  “. . . and the dancing wasn’t dirty enough,” Megan is saying as I return to audio, “that was the trouble.”

  “Not dirty enough!” I protest. “Any dirtier and—” Well, to me it was already a porno movie. God knows to what level of degradation Megan aspires.

  I wonder if people looking at us can see what a maniac I’ve become. The waiter, apparently, doesn’t notice, because when he comes to take my salad plate, he asks if I’ll have dessert.

  By this time, Janet and Megan can hardly wait for him to clear the plates away so they can dump their purses on the table, and they’re trading blushers—which to me signals victory.

  “. . . and so when I come to New York, after the Tea Room,” Megan is saying, “you’ll take me to the sweater lady. You’ll go with me.”

  I’ve won. I’ve turned enemies into shoppers.

  And it only took one lunch.

  Janet and I leave Megan at the parking attendant to wait for her car and walk down in back to the lot where I’ve parked for free (I’m just too L.A. to hand my car over for money). Janet says, “Her hair is great, it really is.”

  But then, once Janet gets to know Megan, she’s going to find out a lot of things about her that don’t meet the eye—like how miserable she was in Boston about parting with all her clothes, until finally her sister came over with a Polaroid, took all her clothes out on the front lawn and recorded for posterity every miniskirt, saddle shoe, and jacket Megan ever owned, so Megan could come to California without feeling bereft. I’m sure Janet will understand, since she can’t give old clothes away, either.

  And Megan and Janet will have other things in common, too, including the belief that brains are everything, and if you’re not smart you’re in the way.

  It was like that in my family. When I was growing up, my father and all his intellectually intense friends could flatten you with just a whisper of contempt.

  My aunt Tiby, the one who danced with Martha Graham, was always ridiculed by my father and his friends because, in their opinion, if dancing was an art, it was the lowest one. Doing anything that involves physical exercise puts you in a good mood, and they thought the proper condition of mankind was torment and despair.

  They were so pissed off, these men, that they all married dancers and kept them home so they couldn’t move at all anymore. But most of these women grew much smarter as time went by and got depressed, too.

  My aunt Tiby, in fact, was so wrapped up in this union organizer she married that she decided never to dance again. And it was only when he moved to Seattle and divorced her that she somehow began practicing, and I actually got to see who she was.

  It was at a fund-raising benefit for Israel—and there I sat beside my father, eleven years old, all his prejudices firmly ensconced in my head, when suddenly the lights dimmed, and Tiby leaped out of the wings on wings herself—creating a giant space between her feet and the floor, a smile on her face, her arms hooked to the sky, all in black—and all at once, I knew that there was more to art than brains.

  She kept her exploding like firecrackers every time she moved. So when she was the one who said, “That Patrick Swayze can really dance,” it was the ultimate recognition. I am a complete fool for dancers and have been ever since I realized there was such a thing as physical genius, too—people who cast spells of balance, grace, strength, and instinct. Geniuses of tempo. People who can move.

  I mean, I loved my father, but eyes are eyes.

  And ever since then, I’ve never been one of those people who think critical thought is better than beauty. It’s one of the things about me Janet Wilton thinks I’ll outgrow when I come to my senses and realize New York is right and Hollywood is just Hollywood.

  “So you really think they’re going to let that Swayze guy play Valentino?” Janet says, getting into my car. Her green slinky outfit and purple opal lips, now in broad daylight, look like a Fabergé object.

  I start the car and pull out of the lot, onto the glorious Sunset Strip, which today, because it’s so clear and windy, is like a painting of Monte Carlo by the sea.

  The whole of Sunset Strip, in fact, looks like it’s dancing, swirling, and blowing, the way people who came here before I was born say it used to look. It occurs to me that maybe my aunt Tiby thought she could fly.

  “God, it’s great today,” I sigh, the sky so blue.

  “You really think they’re going to let him dance in another one,” she persists, though I can feel her relaxing. She misses trying to dissuade me from my harebrained schemes.

  “Look,” I say, “he’s a great dancer. And he’s great.”

  She’s glad to see that I’m just the same as always, but she wishes I’d just go home and write a short story about the way things are now and forget about wanting to see Patrick Swayze do the tango.

  But for me, ghostly lovers from the past have always been the way things are now. I can’t escape them. They slink out of the walls in layers of light, layers of memory, layers of lust, through layers of time. They burst into full-blown layers of dance.

  And you don’t become a dancer unless you think you have wings.

  L.A. Style

  May 1988

  SOBER VIRGINS OF THE EIGHTIES

  NOT THAT I like the eighties, but the sixties, if you ask me, weren’t that great, either. I mean, in the fifties, for men to get girls into bed, they had to be good lovers, to persist, to be sensual and seductive and inevitable and spontaneous and say things like “Stay away from me, I can only mean trouble.”

  When I finally managed to get myself deflowered at the age of eighteen, the man was from that earlier milieu where being a good lover was the least men could do if they weren’t going to marry you. It really wasn’t until the “sixties” began, in about 1965, when the Beatles made being cute the be-all and end-all of the man’s part of the bargain. I think it was at the party for Donovan when Jim Morrison stuck his fist through a plate-glass window that I began to realize that love and sex in the sixties was really more like a bunch of people tasting appetizers, wondering who might be good for them if they ever, in fact, decided to stay in one bedroom longer than overnight.

  To me, the sixties were . . .

  Well, I remember this guy named John who was so beautiful he looked like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, and it was impossible to deny him anything except what he wanted, which was usually, “Let’s go to Mardi Gras; I’ve got thirty-three cents.”

  “Mardi Gras?” I gasped, realizing I was about to deny him yet another thing.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “We’ll have fun. I’ve got LSD.”

  “But what if it rains?” I complained.

  “It won’t rain,” he explained.

  “But how will we go?”

  “Hitch, sell drugs,” he explained.

  I also remember going to this house in Malibu that the Buffalo Springfield were renting. I dropped by one afternoon when no one was there except this girl so gorgeous in a peach satin chemise and high heels it took me a moment to realize that what she was doing, standing there in the living room, was ironing towels.

  “Why are you ironing towels?” I wondered.

  “Oh,” she sighed, “because these guys are so beautiful, a
nd I just love them so much. They deserve the best!”

  The trick in the sixties was to grab the most sought-after member of the opposite sex and see how long you could keep him from leaving, from trying to get more than just you into bed.

  It seemed that there was no hope.

  Of course, now that it’s the eighties, most desirable members of the opposite sex give rise to dark wonderings like “If they’re so cute, why aren’t they dead?”—which for me really put a damper on sex and made me actually take up chastity for almost two years. I watched everyone I knew who used to be hot stuff either drop out from what J. D. Souther called “overboogie-related” conditions like Epstein-Barr or join “programs” like AA or Cocaine Abusers Anonymous, where they seemed to come to their senses. This created clusters of what my friend Julia calls “sober virgins,” for although none of these people were by any stretch of the imagination virgins, once they were sober, getting undressed in front of total strangers became a whole new ball game.

  And everyone in the world went to the gym. Suddenly, men I always thought of as wispy poets had shoulders as if there were no tomorrow. And flat stomachs, Bruce Springsteen arms, and cute rear ends. And women I knew who had regarded having to park a block away as a hardship were suddenly talking about people called “trainers” coming to their homes three times a week and Palotti machines in their guest bedrooms. I myself got leg weights and went hiking around the Hollywood Hills, wondering if this was better for me than closing down the Troubadour every night.

  In the meantime, I had taken up ballroom dancing, thinking that it was a good way to spend time with the opposite sex up close without having bodily fluids change hands. But the trouble with doing the tango, I discovered, was that it makes you sort of more sexy and languorous and in the mood than something old-fashioned should do.

  Doing the tango made guys who had been “just friends” suddenly look like hot stuff. I rethought my position with one man in particular whom I had always considered too short, and I took him to bed. The truly weird thing about it was that after all those years of men who were my type being all wrong, the one I thought was all wrong was the best. Here was this man who’d been waiting and waiting and waiting, and he actually was this brilliant, fabulous lover.

  In some sad way, I realize that I have AIDS to thank for my current amazing grace—since without the dread fear of death I would never in ten thousand years have slowed down enough to notice someone who I thought didn’t go well with high heels. But then I remember this photograph of Igor Stravinsky and his beautiful wife, Vera—he so tiny and intense, she so overblown like a rose in summer. She always wore high heels, but then women in those days, I sometimes think, were born with character, whereas some of us have character thrust upon us.

  But now that I have it myself, I can actually see how love and sex might have something to do with each other, rather than what I learned in the sixties: that sex was something two people did until one of them thought he’d fallen in love with someone else.

  Now all I want to do is iron his towels. In a chemise and high heels.

  The great thing about the eighties is that if you’re still alive, there’s hope. That, anyway, has changed.

  Smart

  Fall 1988

  ATTITUDE DANCING

  IT USED to be that if a place were the hippest and innest and most likely to attract major beauties and stars of our generation, like Helena’s when it opened three or four years ago, you couldn’t keep me out. I mean, I’d move there. Nothing makes me feel worse than knowing I’m missing the right party.

  And yet I’ve never felt that way about Helena’s. In fact, I have never even been to Helena’s. I mean, I don’t even know where, downtown, it is.

  All I know about it is that it was a huge triumph the minute it opened and that everybody who’s anybody living in Los Angeles or anybody from, say, New York who’s attempting to see what’s really going on in “this town” wants in. But even the few times when that great Christian Ed Begley Jr. offered to take me to Helena’s, I never lashed myself to his side securely enough to wind up there. It’s as if I have an aversion to seeing Helena if all she’s going to do is run a nightclub. I mean, why would anyone, in my opinion, go see Helena if she’s just going to stand there?

  You see, I have already spent my passion for traipsing after her. There were days when I would show up anywhere I knew she might be just to watch her move. I was in love with her body, her eyes, the rose tattoo on her shoulder. . . .

  The first time I saw Helena I was just sixteen. My mother and some of her friends dragged me to this peculiar event in Laurel Canyon—an event that entailed paying $2 to go to a party to enable some girl to get her car fixed. Or a new car. Or something to do with a broken car, a girl, and money.

  “There’s going to be music,” my mother said, “and dancing. You’ll be able to see Satya dance.” Satya was this Hindu Brahman from Delhi who ran a restaurant half a block from Paramount, and he was famous in India for his dancing. And since all you ever had to say to me was that someone great was going to dance and I’d be there, I overcame my terror at being seen with my mother and went.

  There were maybe a hundred people in this abandoned house in Laurel Canyon on Kirkwood. It was not a Hollywood crowd—but then in those days there was this sort of beatnik/cultural mixture of people who cared about something other than the movie business (while waiting to get into the movie business, if you see what I mean). There were old cars parked up and down Kirkwood, and from outside I could hear a Greek band.

  “She’s going to dance,” someone told my mother.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The girl whose car it is.”

  Satya danced first (to a record); there was a red dot on his partner’s forehead, a black one on his, and greasy black eyeliner on both. They were really very silky and yet all corners—Indian dancing is all knees, elbows, and heels—but the crowd was really buzzing and humming in anticipation of the girl whose car it was. Then a wild note from the oud pierced the air, a feeling of “at last” hit the crowd, and from the kitchen, through wretched torn curtains, a blinding flash of red began tornadoing out into us. People leaped backward.

  The girl had this black hair that came down to her waist like a cartoon cloud; she had this white skin on a body so taut and undulating that the red chiffon skirt had trouble keeping up; she had little cymbals on her fingers, clashing against the dreariness of the day, clashing away. Her face was covered by the red veil, but her eyes were mad with remembered violations, unmet complaints. The oud was going wild with inspired lust. Slowly, the veil fell away, and I just about stopped all bodily functions. The girl was looking at us with such naked contempt it was an art form. She was a reason to give up paradise.

  Then she stood on the balls of her little white feet, lowering herself backward until her hair spread out behind her on the floor like Ophelia floating downstream—only this was an Ophelia who would have spit at Hamlet. She was a snake, a fire snake—the snake that’s gonna get that eagle in the flag of Mexico, just when it thinks the snake is dead. She was like that line from the old Coasters song “Down in Mexico,” where suddenly the lead vocalist’s voice breaks in half and he moans, “. . . and then she did a dance like I never saw befo’.”

  And suddenly that moment in Laurel Canyon was filled with money. Money cut through the air like soft gray-green leaves—mixing with the dry leaves of fall. Helena stuffed bills into her costume, but she didn’t stop. I, who had $3, gave her $3. The air was hot and filled with money, oud music, retsina fumes, people hypnotically chanting, and Helena’s contempt—Helena, the violated Medea ready to kill her children on a matter of principle. The Medea who gave her husband’s fiancée a cloth that turned into flames when the girl put it on. The Medea who killed her own brothers to help Jason escape with the Golden Fleece. The Medea who, after killing her children and making Jason pay, was sent a deus ex machina to get her away from Corinth. The Medea who escaped to Athens, where
she married a king named Aegeus and caused a lot more trouble.

  Helena was everything every tragedy of Medea has ever been—but she was alive, a girl in Laurel Canyon, getting her car fixed. And if this took mesmerizing us into cosmic shock, then so be it.

  Helena’s dancing so overwhelmed me with awe and happiness that when I heard later that she was at a place on Hollywood Boulevard called the Greek Village, I dragged every date there and made him pay clip-joint prices so I could see the girl move. The same oud player and band were there, and as far as I was concerned, this was it—even though people in the clip joint on Hollywood Boulevard didn’t get it the same way they did in Laurel Canyon.

  I heard later that Helena was married to the oud player, and once, when I was doing my sheets at a laundromat on Bronson, I saw her there—with the oud player—doing laundry.

  “Oh,” I said, “you are the greatest dancer.”

  She acted as if this compliment were ruining her day; what was she supposed to do—thank me? She just shrugged and threw stuff into the dryer. It was perfect.

  Then, suddenly, Helena was in the movies. She scared people to death in Five Easy Pieces, talking nonstop in the back seat. And when she played that mean bitch in Kansas City Bomber, trying to do in Raquel Welch, I hated seeing it because people who saw her might have taken this for the real Helena, rather than the one in the red costume. But when she decided to take the roller-skating thing into society, renting the Reseda Roller Rink and inviting enough of the right people to make all the wrong people sick with envy (I got invited, thank God), her skating was so gorgeous that I felt relieved. No one who saw her skate—her discipline and passion and beauty—could mistake her for anything but what she was: an artist. The art of motion. Medea on skates.