Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (20 page)

“Oh, daughter, I’ve done it again,” he would admit groggily upon waking and realizing that yet one more piano was on its way.

At the time of the pudding incident, Biddie had accumulated three pianos. A fourth was due any day.

I was not the only person concerned about this turn of events. Biddie’s addiction was giving our landlady, a pixie-size
Italian lady called Mrs. Rizzo, chronic indigestion. She had every reason to be concerned. Her building was already crumbling: Every time we banged the front door, large chunks of masonry fell from the edifice. The weight of Biddie’s burgeoning piano collection had the potential to demolish the building from the inside. Biddie’s pianos became Mrs. Rizzo’s obsession.

Our long-suffering landlady had a metal pin in her hip, which slowed her down considerably and made her seem to us as if she was part of Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks.” Despite her handicap, she managed to ambush Biddie quite successfully on a number of occasions. She would wait until he was dressed up like a Christian Dior fashion portrait circa 1951 and corner him as he tore through the hallway.

“My joists! My joists!” she would scream up at the fleeing Biddie, who in heels, was approximately twice her height. She would then stagger after her cross-dressing tenant Biddie, clutching at his flyaway chiffon panels, and chase him into his waiting taxi.

Occasionally I would accompany Biddie to his gigs. It was fun watching people screaming and applauding. I was proud of my showbiz roommate. I would do my best to insert myself between him and his pushers. But I couldn’t be there every night.

More often than not I would stay at home and hang out with our neighbors. We would while away the evening in conversation, which sounds very quaint and intellectual but was really a function of the fact that there was a recession and nobody had a television, not even Boris and Doris.

Having been born in a rooming house, and grown up surrounded by miscellaneous lodgers and relatives, I enjoyed
hobnobbing and chatting with our fellow tenants and finding out about their lives. I had my eye on an American college student from L.A. who lived on the second floor. He was attractive in a blond and Aryan lumberjack sort of way. I was a little confused by his hypermasculine appearance. Was he one of us? There were no girlfriends in evidence. Maybe he was just a nice bloke who was waiting for Miss Right to come along.

One night he tapped on my door and invited me up to share his dinner.

“Good luck, daughter! Zip me up before you go, would you?” said Biddie, who was sponging Pan-Cake onto his giraffe neck.

With an air of cautious anticipation, I prepared for what I hoped was a date. I threw on the 1920s silk satin dressing gown which I wore when lounging around the house. It was pale blue and printed with Art Deco fans in black, yellow, and pink. Very Noël Coward, you might say. Having purchased this exquisite vintage item for a mere ten pennies at a jumble sale, I was extremely proud of it.

A dressing gown for a date? Why not? What could be more normal than walking around the house in a toweling kimono, a damask peignoir, or a nice rayon robe? Dressing gowns seemed perfectly acceptable to me. Like dentures, they were a huge part of my childhood. Even though we lived on a busy bus route, my parents were frequently to be seen weeding the front yard or greeting the postman in their dressing gowns.

The evening seemed, at least from my point of view, to be going quite well. Within the first twenty minutes I knocked back most of Mr. L.A.’s Chablis. Dates are fun! I really should do this more often, I thought.

Feeling warm, tingly, and confident, I flashed a bit of leg and put my hand inside his flannel shirt. I touched his hairy chest with tentative fingers. He removed my hand.

Mr. L.A. smiled, and then, in a lengthy and caring exposition which suggested that he might have had a little too much psychotherapy, he explained to me why he had no interest in dating men who swished round the house in Noël Coward dressing gowns. The psychobabble was worse than a more traditional rebuke. If he had said, “Keep your slimy paws to yourself!” I could have handled it. All this stuff about “boundaries” and “personal choices” was making me feel even more leprous. Rubbing salt into the wound, he added that he never dated short personages.

Feeling a bit like a third-rate traveling theatrical midget, I thanked him profusely and staggered back down to our hovel.

I picked up Happy Harry and in an irate sardonic fashion began to reenact the painful conversation.

“It’s just not my scene, man . . . I’m not judgmental . . . The vibe I’m getting from you . . . ”

This was my first close encounter with gay fascism. Still wearing Noël Coward and still clutching Happy Harry, I crawled into bed and prayed for oblivion.

Despite the lack of mutual erotic chemistry, Mr. L.A. and I continued to hang out. It was an odd symbiosis. I had a record player and no albums. We had been robbed while living next to Rita the tart. The thieves had left the floor pillow but taken all our record albums and an old radio with Braille knobs which Aunt Phyllis had passed on to me.

The Lumberjack had one single record album and no record player. It was the historic LaBelle record entitled
Night-
birds,
which ironically, featured the astoundingly great song with the line “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” We bopped along with it, safe in the knowledge that, thanks to my dressing gown and lack of height, we would not coucher ce soir, or any other soir.

As we played the album over and over, Mr. L.A. regaled me with tales of gay life in America, the discos, the saunas, the Warhol crowd. He was obsessed with a new John Waters movie that had recently premiered in Greenwich Village starring an obese transvestite named Divine. The movie was called
Pink Flamingos:
le tout New York was talking about it because, in the last scene, Divine kneels down on the pavement and eats poodle feces. I guffawed appreciatively but was secretly appalled.

I have always had an ambivalent relationship with dog feces. If my sister and I wanted to play in the backyard, we first had to clean up Lassie’s poo. This activity invariably left me nauseated and appetite-less.

Lassie was my blind aunt Phyllis’s golden Lab. A worthier and more lovely canine it would be hard to find. My sister and I were deeply in love with her. We would lay by the fire with Lassie, spooning and cuddling and playing with her silky ears. I held her paws and wrote her Christmas cards and kissed her until I got worms. And then kissed her again. When she died we were inconsolable. Despite the strength of my passion, any contact with her fecal matter would send me retching into the delphiniums.

*  *  *

One hot August night, I found I had the house to myself. Biddie was performing, so were Boris and Doris. Mr. L.A. was out looking for other tall blond Aryans. The house was quiet. I donned Noël Coward and embarked on a bit of halfhearted housework.

I started with our minibar-size refrigerator, which thanks to months of neglect, had become quite smelly. I began throwing half-eaten horrors into the garbage. At the back of the middle shelf was a large obstruction. Upon further inspection I discovered an untouched Christmas pudding presented to me by Betty Doonan nine months prior.

“You’ll need to steam it for about six hours,” said my mother, as if she seriously thought I might devote an evening to pudding steaming.

There was no point in waiting until Betty discovered it on her next visit and berated us for being a couple of “ungrateful bleeders.” Donning a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves, I started to scrape the rich brown, claylike substance out of the bowl.

I felt glad to have the substantial membrane separating my hands from the pudding mix. I never liked to touch anything slimy. As a child I could not understand those kids who insisted on eating with their fingers. Why would anyone in his right mind want to touch shepherd’s pie or chocolate pudding?

The only thing worse than touching food is touching poo, I mused.

An idea was taking shape in my head.

As I clawed and scraped at the thick mass, I could smell my mother’s cooking sherry. Mmmm! It reminded me of a butch men’s aftershave.

I continued to scrape and muse.

This pudding smelled so much better and more enticing than Lassie’s poo, and yet how similar of texture.

I had no idea just how similar until I absentmindedly rolled a handful of pudding into a torpedo shape. Good heavens! If there was ever a competition to create the world’s most convincing dog poo facsimile, Betty’s Xmas pudding would win hands down. It was much more real-looking than the glossy, caramel-colored fake doggy doo which is sold to delighted customers at joke shops the world over.

Meanwhile, in some smoky boïte on the other side of town, Biddie was taking a well-earned break from performing. He had just belted his way through “Bali Ha’i” and was desperate to remove the cumbersome revolving desert island which he wore to perform this number. He had made the Bali Ha’i hat himself from three rolls of Mrs. Rizzo’s toilet paper. He mashed the paper up with flour and water, formed it into an island shape, and then baked it in the oven. After about ten minutes it burst into flames, filling the house with horrid smoke and bringing Boris and Doris onto their landing. Unperturbed, Biddie waited for Bali Ha’i to cool. After skillfully covering the charred areas in paint, he glued a Barbie-size palm tree next to it, secured the entire thing to a revolving cake stand, et voilà! Bali Ha’i! This number was always a huge hit. Tonight had been no exception: Biddie was deluged with fans and piano owners.

Meanwhile, chez nous, I was quivering with a mixture of excitement, mirth, and revulsion. I thought I might burst. The object of my attention was now sitting in the middle of a large expanse of Mrs. Rizzo’s white linoleum floor.

I had fashioned two or three handfuls of pudding into an exquisitely accurate reproduction of dog poo. It looked exactly like one of dear old Lassie’s deposits. I then placed my little sculpture directly in Biddie’s path. He would be bound to see it as soon as he walked in, even if he was plastered. I did not want him to slip in it. He was a bit accident prone and quite likely to fall and crack his skull on the nearest piano.

I stared at my creation with a mixture of horror and excitement. This would surely be the greatest practical joke in the history of our relationship. People might think of Biddie as the vivacious one, the bubbly showbiz entertainer, but when push came to shove, it was I, his shorter, less scintillating roommate, who had come up with the craziest gag of all time.

Suddenly, one turd rolled mysteriously away from the main cluster. Had the spirit of Lassie entered the room? I was about to restore it to its former position when I realized that this new spontaneous configuration had only added to the overall verisimilitude of my poo facsimile.

I turned out the lights and leapt into bed to await Biddie’s return.

He did not come home.

I nodded off.

Two hours later I was awakened by the slamming of a taxicab door. I could hear Biddie dump his suitcase full of hats on the front doorstep. Eventually he found his keys and, with the urgency that only a homecoming transvestite in a rough neighborhood can understand, dived through the open front door and slammed it behind him, precipitating another masonry fall.

The evil anticipation of the practical joker returned to me through the fog of sleepiness. With darting eyes and baited breath, I waited for the inevitable bloodcurdling scream.

“EEEEEEEEE!!!!! Oh, my God! Daughter! Wake up! Was there a bloody dog in here?”

I clicked on my light, squinted across the room, and addressed my begowned roommate. “Get a grip, daughter. What the hell are you talking about?”

Biddie was pointing a long, cocktail-gloved finger at the offending object, which spotlit on Mrs. Rizzo’s white vinyl, was impossible to miss.

“Is it really poo?” I asked with genuine concern, leaping out of bed and belting Noël Coward around me. “Let’s take a closer look.”

Adopting a Sherlock Holmes–ish air, I got down on my knees and sniffed. “Odorless excrement! How unusual. We may need to get it analyzed.”

“It’s shit, you idiot! Get away from it,” advised Biddie.

“Let’s try and keep our heads, shall we? There’s only one sure way to find out,” I said authoritatively. Gingerly, I picked up an hors d’oeuvre–size portion.

Biddie screamed.

I raised the poo to my lips.

Biddie gasped.

I nibbled with a concerned, connoisseurial air.

Biddie screamed again.

Slowly I began to masticate the pudding/poo, accompanied by more neighbor-rousing screams from Biddie.

I was starting to feel slightly sick.

“Want to try some?” I said wanly.

We then stared at each other for about three seconds, which doesn’t sound like a really long time but is, especially when you have a mouthful of faux poo.

I then spat the pudding into an old tissue, which I found in Noël Coward’s pocket.

Where were the peals of laughter? Where was the thigh-slapping acknowledgment of my genius?

There was nothing. Only the ticking of Mrs. Rizzo’s reproduction Victorian hall clock.

My carefully contrived practical joke was so unfunny that all we could do was stare at each other. Biddie was not amused. Or appalled. He was strangely indifferent. As was I. Even Happy Harry was a no comment.

The brilliant stunt which I had anticipated would keep us rolling in the aisles for months had not only fallen flat. Somehow it had never existed.

“Christmas pudding! You are naughty. Make us a cuppa,” said Biddie and began scraping off his maquillage. I cleaned up the torpedoes of pudding and flushed them down the toilet.

Almost immediately we moved on. Biddie regaled me with the highlights of his evening. He had met a fabulous couple who’d bought him pink champagne and had oh so generously offered him their old upright piano. He told them he would have to think about it. I enthusiastically applauded these attempts to kick his addiction.

Then we had a nice cup of tea, after which I went to bed and dreamt of Lassie.