I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  “She’s like me,” he says, “she’s shy around people she doesn’t know.”

  “You seem like a nice person, and she’s a nice person, that’s probably why everyone suggested you get together,” I remark.

  “They never met me so they couldn’t say whether I was a nice person or not, they just thought that we’d look good together or something.”

  “Well, you seemed like a nice person in Backdraft!”

  “That could be good acting,” he counters.

  “Naw!” I insist. “It couldn’t be good acting! It has to be that you’re really sweet.”

  “I know a lot of guys who are tremendous assholes who come across as good guys, and I especially know a lot of really good guys who come across as tremendous schmucks on-screen. So it’s got to have something to do with acting.”

  Since we’re talking about acting, I decide to ask him what he thinks about his career so far.

  “Well, it’s pretty boring to chart a course for your career,” he says. “When the good material comes, you just do it. I read a script last night that was pretty good. It was to play Sir Lancelot. It would be like Robin Hood.”

  “Don’t do it,” I reply. “Too sincere. You’re already the cute Kevin Costner, and Robin Hood didn’t do him a bit of good.”

  He begins to laugh, but once you start talking “career” it becomes too much for a normal person, so I change the subject. “I hear you used to work on political campaigns.”

  “In college I majored in political science, and then I went to Capitol Hill to work for Tom Downey, a congressman from Long Island.”

  “You didn’t do anything there, right? Nobody does anything in Washington.” (This was my Hollywood opinion leaking out.)

  “No!” He was very nonplussed. “I worked. You’re going to make me look like some kind of . . .”

  “Doll,” I offer, “some huge doll.”

  “Some sex symbol!” he cries, chagrined. “I hate those words! I hate the word ‘star’! I hate ‘celebrity’! I hate ‘hot’!”

  “How about charisma?”

  “That I love,” he looks mollified, “that’s credibility, respect. Not one of those flash-in-the-pan words.”

  I write down “charisma,” hoping to spell it right for his sake.

  “So when I worked on the Hill, I actually did work.”

  You might think he had parents who were politicians, but he didn’t. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother was a school-teacher turned market researcher. He grew up in a Long Island town called Massapequa.

  “We called it Matzo-pizza because it was half Jewish and half Italian. I was neither. I’m Irish. All my friends had Italian names filled with vowels.”

  “I love Italians,” I say. “They’re so beautiful. I’m half Cajun and half Jewish.”

  “That’s interesting,” he replies. (Really, if you were me, you’d have believed he thought so.)

  Sadly, I eventually ran out of tape or I could have stayed there listening to him until the earthquake came and buried us up to our necks. As we said goodbye with his eyes matching the blue Pacific behind us on the horizon, I thought that if I were Chynna Phillips. . . . Well, but who is.

  Mademoiselle

  March 1993

  THE AMERICAN SCENE

  LOS ANGELES: ANGELS WITH ATTITUDE

  Los Angeles has always been a city fueled by fame; its current underground scene, lorded over by a tight-knit group with hopes of stardom, is no different. What is different is that the club scene here thrives on two distinct—and invisible—planes. For those who wake up before sunset, a handful of hip coffeehouses, all located in West Hollywood, provide office space for L.A.’s “will-bes.” In places like Small’s, the Living Room, Big & Tall, and Bourgeois Pig, people in their twenties and thirties hang out for hours, planning their acting careers, playing Ping-Pong, and drinking cappuccino.

  At night the second layer of L.A.’s under-undercurrent awakens. Neon is over. The haunts have plain doors, no signs, no grand entrances—every place looks like a garage that went out of business. There’s the T Room, dead looking outside, vibrant red-vinyl walls within; Roxbury (on Thursdays only—deejay/party giver Brent Bolthouse’s night); and King King, which you’d swear had been boarded up.

  Occasionally you’ll see hopefuls try to gain access: A ’55 Chevy pickup glides up to Gaslight, and out hop three incredibly beautiful women. A young man tries to latch on to them. He makes it as far as the threshold and says to the door-woman:

  “I’m a friend of Brent’s.”

  “Oh?” she says. “How long?”

  “A year.”

  “Well,” she replies with a straight face, “I’ve been his friend for five years. Come back when you’ve known him as long as I have, and I’ll let you in.”

  DALLAS: DOWN AND DIRTY IN DEEP ELLUM

  The psychic metronome that rules Dallas ticks from the strictly conservative Right to the kind of stylized scene you find in Deep Ellum, the nickname used by black jazz musicians of the 1920s to describe the neighborhood that grew up downtown, on the east end of Elm Street, not far from Southern Methodist University. For decades Deep Ellum has attracted a mixed artistic population, but it was long considered to be on the wrong side of the tracks; by the late eighties the city government finally realized the area’s potential and began gentrification, lining the streets with elm trees and streetlights.

  Now nightclubs, health-food stores, and psychedelic shops are interspersed with older businesses—hardware stores, carpet installers, old elephant-walk bars—that persevere, like their counterparts in the Haight, the East Village, and Venice Beach. True Deep Ellumites might feel that their turf has become Dallas’s Disneyland; for others—like the socialites arriving for the Cattle Baron’s Ball or Lynn Wyatt’s occasional hoedown—it’s still on the edge. You’re sure to find them, late at night and still in evening clothes, slipping deep into “Ellum Street.”

  The compact district is a Texas-style jumble of unpredictable attractions: low-down barbecue, upscale Mexican at Eduardo’s Aca y Alla, vintage cowboy boots at Blues Suede Shoe, tattoo parlors, and piercing salons. There are also night spots like Club Dada, where rock singer Edie Brickell got her start, and Club One, where well-built guys in slave drag frolic with nearly naked dancing women, all aswirl in dry-ice fog and colored lights—a very adult sort of theme park.

  Esquire

  Spring 1993

  SAN FRANCISCO: PSYCHEDELIC PUNKS AT HOME

  We’re in San Francisco to investigate the punk revival people have been talking about, but the moment we meet our guide to the scene—a kaleidoscopic woman named, simply, Tornado—we know we’re onto something much more encompassing. Whereas punk was stripped-down and bare-bones, the situation here is more layered and eclectic. These kids—whose ages range from early twenties to midforties—are too colorful to be called punk and, in fact, vehemently resist the label (to them, punks are depressed people dressed all in black). Their look is actually a haphazard pastiche of several teen-anarchy fashion statements: grunge, rave, hippie, punk, seventies. It’s a Dead Boys II Men scene. In-a-Gadda-Nirvana. Guns N’ Roses singing punk classics on their current The Spaghetti Incident? album.

  And such a scene must naturally have its contradictions. Since dropping out is not a viable activity these days, a pierced young man might hold a job at the Audubon Society. And stressing the culture in counterculture, a would-be Nob Hill socialite may have her butler serve magic mushrooms to her guests.

  For Tornado and her friends, who earn livings as designers, hair-dressers, massagers, and caterers (shades of summer of ’69?), both style and lifestyle are a happy convergence of whatever’s in the air. “I knew when I moved here six years ago they had earthquakes,” says Tornado (who grudgingly allows that she does have a last name, Terhune). “But then, I’m not against natural chaos. I like dealing with the unexpected.” And so must anyone looking at her. Tornado herself is a natural chaos of conflicting styles: Her hair�
��s a bright red-and-yellow rave tangle, her outfit a mix of hippie paisleys and polka dots, and her black work boots smack of Seattle grunge. This former Vidal Sassoon model has decorated her crib—a third-floor apartment in a Victorian house on Potrero Hill—in a painted swirl of lavender, gold, and pistachio. And furnished it with a multitude of art, including an altar to her friends and a towering throne.

  •

  Tornado’s roommate, Rebecca Corbett (who calls herself Polywog), is another example of San Francisco’s wild style. With her multicolored Day-Glo dreadlocks, giant tattoo etched on the shaved back of her head, and Brooks Brothers pajamas, she’s as much a part of the decor as Tornado is. “I’d like to model for J.Crew,” she tells us, out of nowhere.

  Polywog trained to become a ballerina like her friends in the American Ballet Theatre, but she’s ventured too far into that other world of body modification. She’s too pierced for pliés, too tattooed to twirl in the classics. Unfortunately, the Golden Gate Bridge doesn’t span Swan Lake. But now, as a club deejay, she still gets to spin.

  Tornado takes us to the Phoenix Hotel, where bands like Nirvana stay when they’re in town. Like us, they love the tapes of frog and cricket sounds that management plays at night. And the pool with Marcel Duchamp’s name painted on the tiles. Tornado proclaims the hotel “totally the coolest.” Also on her cool list: the Sound Factory, DV8, Red Dora’s for lunch, and Club 181. And friend D’Arcy Drollinger, a composer of musicals who designs nightclub doors on the side.

  In Lower Haight, we drop in on Blake Perlingieri, who is responsible for the many extra holes in Polywog’s body. As we enter, Blake and roommate Eric Jones are up to their ears in piercing God knows what parts of their own—and their clients’ (including third roommate Bret Williams)—anatomies. “To me, body adornment is a personal experience and manifestation of internal aesthetic expression,” Blake says, “as well as a mode of spiritual discipline that escapes absolute definition.” Could he be more specific? “Culturally speaking,” he continues, “all primitive societies have done things like this since the dawn of time. It’s a basic, intuitive practice. I’m practicing a ritual. It’s a religious thing.”

  It’s also a painful thing. It hurts just to look at Blake, whose earlobes have been stretched grotesquely by the huge silver weights hanging from them. Eric’s done the same thing to his ears. Once upon a time in Haight-Ashbury, everyone was beautiful, man, groovy. Now it’s not enough to be groovy, you have to actually be grooved. The trends currently in the vanguard involve more than a modicum of pain: shamanic piercing, branding, and tattooing, and even corseting women’s waists into a Scarlett O’Hara-like eighteen inches. (“Oh, bondage! Up yours!” screeched Poly Styrene back in the punk days of loud fast rules.)

  •

  From Blake’s it’s off to a 4,500-square-foot loft where Denise Schwalbe, a hairdresser, rooms with Jeffrey DiGregorio, a self-described “artist-traveler.” The loft is a magical, almost hallucinogenic space, broken up into small Alice in Wonderland rooms. Instead of the expected Jefferson Airplane anthem “White Rabbit,” though, we’re treated to a “techno acid” soundtrack as we look around. The music seems to course through our bloodstream, and we feel almost invulnerable enough to walk the tightrope they’ve got stretched across one of the rooms. Almost.

  Nancy Eastep, another roommate, is a clothes designer whose creations are sedate enough to be sold in San Francisco’s straighter boutiques. She’s having her hair colored cinnamon by Denise. “It’ll look nice in the sun,” Denise tells Nancy when the job is finished. The sentiment is more love bead than safety pin. Just as we’re thinking about transforming our tresses to turquoise, we spot a big tabby with white paws and ask Denise if she’s ever thought of dyeing those feline feet. “No,” she says. “I wouldn’t do that to a cat.” A punk would have, in a second.

  Other days in the city bring other characters, most of them festooned in a tossed-together combination of retro clothes from thrift stores: fuzzy sweaters, plaid skirts, upgraded grunge with sequins, marabou feathers, high heels or Doc Martens, vintage jackets, coats, and shawls—a cacophony of visuals, like a big love-in on acid. And Tornado, who has The Look down pat better than almost anyone else here, is a true representative of what’s happenin’.

  So it turns out that on the long, strange trip called San Francisco, punk has only been along for the ride—a hitchhiker who left an indelible impression. But because Haight-Ashbury’s vestigial hippiedippy love trip will never completely go away, it’s had a severe effect on its black-and-white passenger—punk got colorized.

  Esquire

  Spring 1994

  A CITY LAID OUT LIKE LACE

  “BRET ate potato chips and peanut butter for dinner last night,” my friend Ajay said. “I ate Ben & Jerry’s English Toffee Crunch ice cream, a whole pint, in bed until I achieved a state of mellow remove.”

  “The remote control to nothing,” my sister said, recalling what another friend had remarked when she saw all the television and stereo equipment lying in wreckage and all that she could unearth was the remote.

  I myself was knocked conscious by my great old Rudolph (Rudy) Valentino book, a collector’s item given to me by my old boyfriend Dan, who, in 1971, was here for another earthquake and left L.A. because of many things, earthquakes being one of them. This book was on a shelf, unsafely, at the foot of my bed, and thus I was Rudy awakened.

  My friend Ajay and I decided that if we had to live in a tent city, we hoped it would be in Roxbury Park (in Beverly Hills where they have the croquet games). “It would be catered by Wolfgang Puck, the blankets would be handed out by someone from Giorgio’s and the water would be some Ramlösa or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and you could barbecue with mesquite.”

  Though it was all coming back to me—what they tell you at the Red Cross earthquake preparedness class, which my friend Caroline and I had signed up for after the Oakland earthquake jitters had captured our imaginations. What they tell you is that the kind of food everyone wants in a disaster is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or peanut butter and anything. Peanut butter being one of the great safe foods you can store for years—it keeps so well because of the oil. And peanut butter being most people’s idea of comfort.

  It has become common to be a disaster victim (courtesy of CNN, which always has as many orange flames as possible, scaring my friends from coast to coast). It’s even more common to freak out from the disasters of others (also courtesy of CNN). But in spite of everything, what happened during the riots—that feeling of complete anarchy—was a lot worse than this earthquake. Because this time, for one thing, our police chief and mayor are on speaking terms. It was during those riot days that we learned that you could phone out during disasters but nobody could phone in. So you had to call all your friends and say, “Reports of our death have been edited by CNN to make things look worse than they really are.”

  What people take from their houses or apartments, given fifteen minutes before they run for their lives, are family photographs, underwear, and their pets. Which makes you think, maybe we don’t need all that much stuff after all.

  And what we learn is that people shouldn’t live in certain places. New York in the winter; L.A. during earthquakes, riots, floods, or fires; the Midwest when the Mississippi overflows; Florida and Kauai during hurricanes and various other places for various other reasons.

  A very brilliant and gallant millionaire I know who made a fortune from computers, Jerry, moved a couple of years ago to a chalet in Sun Valley, which he believed would be a better place to raise his child and live with his wife than horrible L.A. with all its bad publicity in reality and fiction. However, recently I saw him at one of those Sunday brunches I often go to and asked, “Jerry, you’re here on business?”

  “I’m not here on business,” he said. “We moved back.”

  “You’re back?” I said. “You moved back?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My brain died. I need actio
n.”

  But of course with L.A., the reason this place is so nice is the reason it’s so temporary, like lace. Yesterday I drove out to the Valley, to Sherman Oaks, where places I used to like going to are now ground down, shattered, have huge strange cracks in them, and otherwise seemed shaken to their cores. (“Oh my God!” I said over and over and over.) The reason so many people love this place, the weather—hot desert by the ocean—is the reason for the fires, for the floods that come raining down, for the earthquakes that aren’t done tearing up our coastline. The reason they came here long ago to make movies, the reason (among others) Rudolph Valentino could become the world’s first sexy male star—the way he looked riding a white horse through the desert in a sheik outfit with his noble handsome face and liquid brown eyes was that the desert nearby could be the sandy terrain with the palm trees in the background that so set off this story of Arabian nights. A story that couldn’t be shot really in any other state but just here, where everything was laid out like lace at the edge of an ocean.

  If we live here, we should, like the sheik, live in tents, ready to pack up and go at any time. My friends and I decided last night at dinner, the thing to have is a rubber house—something that bounces during earthquakes—with rubber plates. And rubber freeways. Not that I ever drove on the freeways anyway, since, to me, they’ve always been much too scary just on an average day with average bad citizens, one to a car.

  In a few months, when this all settles down, what people will realize is that this weird new subway they built to take people to downtown L.A. held up so well—we hardly heard it mentioned. Perhaps people in Los Angeles will finally become good citizens taking the Metro Rail.

  My brains are still scrambled but perhaps this is what we needed here: earthquake preparedness. Diminished attachments, happiness to be alive and have your friends alive, and peanut butter.