Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (25 page)

There was only one option open to me. I would have to cure myself.

*  *  *

From Buckingham Palace to Coronation Street, every English home has one great common denominator. There is always a bottle of Harpic next to the toilet. The sight of that blue and white checkered bottle nestling insouciantly next to the plunger is as much part of British life as bangers ’n’ mash or crooked, beige-colored teeth.

Here, in this bottle, was the answer to all my problems.

“
HARPIC
—kills all known germs. Dead!”

The text on the bottle did not mention anything about curing syphilis, but that emphatic slogan—“
HARPIC
—kills all known germs. Dead!”—left me in no doubt that it could, and would.

Sunday night was bath night. Yes, dear reader, we bathed only once a week. Please don’t reproach me or look down your
nose. We were not unusual in this regard. Weekly baths were the norm, even into the 1960s. Many families even dunked their kids in the same water, à la sheep dip.

I wish I could defend this practice and direct your attentions to some fabulous upside to this grim tradition. I wish I could claim that, as result of minimal contact with soap and water, we all had dewy, translucent skin or silky hair. But we didn’t. Our skin and hair were okay but nothing special. The fact is that three baths a week would have been preferable.

Back to my willie.

As bath night approached, I prepared for my cure with anxious excitement. I made sure we were well-stocked with Harpic.

“Don’t forget to wash behind your ears!” yelled Betty as I locked the door and braced myself for what would no doubt be a historic ablution.

Based on the shrill warnings on the side of the bottle, I assumed the treatment might cause a little discomfort. I was tough. I was Betty’s son. I could handle it.

After going through my regular toilette, I readied myself. Kneeling in the soapy, lukewarm water, I unscrewed the top of the Harpic bottle. It all seemed rather baptismal. I smiled a beatific smile.

Slowly and deliberately, I poured the white liquid on my afflicted parts and braced myself. At first it felt cool and vaguely refreshing. Then my willie began to tingle. Within seconds, the tingling turned to fire and the fire to searing agony. I fell backward into the bath, sending a mini-tsunami of soapy water over the side.

Automatically, my body began to arch upward. Very soon only the back of my head and my heels were touching the bath, such was the pain. I caught sight of myself in the steamy bathroom tiles. I looked like a tortured pink fleshy version of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Surprisingly, the pain actually increased. I chomped on a loofah to stop myself screaming the house down and began to count to ten. One . . . two . . . three . . . This would give the Harpic—four . . . five . . . six—the time it needed to kill all known germs . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . 10 . . .
dead
!

Cure complete, I doused my willie under the cold tap and collapsed in a relieved and happy heap on the bathroom floor. I was saved!

Still gasping, I thought of all the sinners over all the centuries who had, pre-Harpic, died in their vermin-ridden hovels and gave thanks.

If only Henry VIII had had access to a bottle or two of Harpic, I mused to myself as I extracted loofah fronds from my teeth, it might have changed the course of history.

Yes, there was a little blistering, but at least I no longer had venereal disease. I wasn’t going to die, at least not now.

*  *  *

The next assault on my nether regions occurred five years later.

When I was fifteen a pea-size stone made its way from my kidney to my bladder. I was watching TV at the time. The pain was indescribable. I went very white and collapsed on the floor. I dug my fingers into the handmade fireside rug, which schizophrenic Uncle Ken had hooked during one of his occupational therapy frenzies.

Betty encouraged the rug making. It was infinitely preferable to the basket-making period which had preceded it. There was nothing aesthetically wrong with the trays and wastebaskets which Ken produced with such relentless ardor. They were, in fact, quite lovely. It was the endless soaking of endless bales of wicker which occupied the bathtub for days at a time and interfered with the beauty routines of the more glam members of our household.

Gradually the agony subsided. I assumed a casual position on Ken’s rug—lying on my front with my legs kicking back and forth at the knee—and continued watching
Laramie.

Anyone Jewish who is reading this will wonder why I did not call out to my parents and demand that a helicopter transport me to the nearest hospital. This is an entirely valid question. All I can tell you, by way of explanation, is that Gentiles are different. We use our stiff upper lips and our innate indifference as a shield against reality—i.e., we’re insane.

Later that evening, the aforementioned kidney stone, along with a great deal of blood and human tissue, embarked on the second leg of its journey. The pain was far worse than anything I experienced on Ken’s rug or during my syphilis cure. My nether regions were literally vibrating with agony. I decamped to the bathroom and thought about the dire predictions in that long-lost horoscope.

The evil stone traveled, slowly, very slowly, from my bladder down the length of my willie. At last, pea-sized and bloody, it greeted the outside world and plopped into the toilet.

I was now ready to break the Gentile conspiracy of silence.

I wrapped toilet paper around my private parts and staggered downstairs. Gingerly opening the living room door, I asked, very formally, to speak to Terry. He followed me back upstairs. I tried to explain what had happened and pointed at the gore which glistened in the toilet bowl.

“We should probably take the stone to the doctor. He will doubtless want to take it to his laboratory and analyze it,” I said, assuming that, as my parent, he should be the one to reach in and fish for it.

“Oh, no,” said Terry, with the air of a father who thinks his son might be developing delusions of grandeur. “The doctor won’t be interested.” With that, he flushed the toilet and made me a cup of tea.

Three days later we paid a visit to the doctor.

Again, all I can tell you by way of explanation, is that we Gentiles feel that rushing to the hospital emergency room is a sign of extreme hysteria.

“Well, I certainly hope you kept the stone so that we can analyze it in our laboratory,” said the doctor, who like many of his profession at the time, smoked cigarettes during consultations.

“
He
flushed it,” I said, glaring at Terry.

“Since you did not have the presence of mind to keep the stone”—puff, puff, glare, glare—“I have no way of knowing what caused it. The only advice I can give you is to drink lots of rhubarb juice. Next patient!”

To this day, I make a point of reminding Terry about this glaring example of parental laissez-faire at least once a year.

“Have some more rhubarb juice” is his usual reply.

*  *  *

A furious gust of wind the enters the room and blows the pages of the calendar forward, ever forward. Seasons come and go. Hairdos change. Gauchos come and go, as do culottes. The pages eventually stop turning.

It’s 1977. The year that Elvis died. I am twenty-five years old. The siege of the nether regions continues unabated.

I am standing, legs spread, in the show window of City à la Mode.

This store serves the needs of secretaries in the financial district of London. Serviceable, staid fashions are sold upstairs, while lingerie, foundation garments, stockings, and tights are sold downstairs. At lunchtime the store is overrun with shrieking office girls buying essential and nonessential garments. The rest of the day is quiet.

The sales staff of City à la Mode alleviated the tedium by feuding with each other. The upstairs ladies directed a white-hot hatred toward the basement ladies and vice versa. I have no idea why. When shipments of panties and brassieres arrived, the upstairs ladies would hurl the boxes downstairs without any warning. Bundles of hard plastic hangers were also used as missiles. Nobody seemed able to remember what had started this conflict. It was just one of those nasty tribal things. Whenever I read about massacres like the one in Rwanda, I always think of the ladies of City à la Mode.

I was a freelance window dresser, appearing once a week on this battlefield and vastly relieved not to be involved. From my vantage point in the store window, it was all very entertaining.

My main responsibility was to change the merchandise in the show windows. This is more complex than might ever be
imagined. To strip and redress a mannequin, it is first necessary to remove the wig, especially if the wig is large. My City à la Mode wigs were not large. They were gigantic. No muumuu, no matter how enormous, would ever fit over them. These massive, lacquered, crinkly confections were styled in a manner which is now associated with cheap girls from New Jersey (think Joan Cusack in
Working Girl
) but was new and groovy at the time of the incident.

Wig removal, though not brain surgery, was no mean feat. Two sturdy steel pins anchored the wig to the mannequin’s head. These pins slid into two dense cork inserts, which were embedded in either temple. The pins were extracted with pliers and reinserted with the aid of a small hammer. Every time I reattached the wigs, hammering the two-inch pin into the mannequin skull, I thought of Narg and her lobotomy.

The wigs were by no means the most complex part of the procedure. Changing the panty hose presented the biggest challenge. The fiberglass legs could not be brought together with the ease of human legs. A tremendous amount of strenuous yanking and stretching was required. Before one could even begin to remove the old pair, the mannequin in question had to be lifted from her baseplate. Screwed into that baseplate was a seven-inch rod. This rod disappeared into the foot and stabilized the mannequin. These projectiles are the bane of a window dresser’s existence because they are always getting lodged inside the feet.

When dogs are stuck together a bucket of cold water will often effect a separation. With mannequins there is no such miracle cure. One has to grab the girl under the crotch and pull her in a vertical upward direction.

It helps to be tall. I’m not.

I had been struggling with one particular mannequin, much to the amusement of passersby, for about ten minutes. Frustration set in. I decided to employ brute force. I grabbed and yanked with all my window dresser’s might.

Twang!

A nasty, painful sensation clutched at the right side of my groin. I had popped a hernia.

Three months later, after wading through the British health system bureaucracy, I was admitted to hospital. In preparation for the operation, I was wheeled into a tiny room by a rather suspect old geezer whose job it was to shave male patients before surgery.

“I like a lad with smooth skin,” he said with a friendly leer. “So much nicer than those half-witted tarts you see dancing about on the telly.”

He took a keen interest in his métier. In fact, I cannot recall ever seeing anyone enjoy his occupation more. Here was somebody whose job fit him like a glove.

There would have been no point in complaining about the old fellah and getting him fired. The hospital human resources department would then have had to undertake the momentous task of finding someone who was willing to spend his days removing hair from an assortment of nether regions. Given the unappetizing nature of the work, it seemed best left to someone who had a special interest.

After the operation, I was placed in an open ward with about forty-five co-postoperatives. Many had undergone leg amputation as a result of diabetes and thrombosis, and were
being driven crazy by phantom limb pain and itchy stumps. I was in this ward for an insanely boring ten days and passed the time chatting to these Long John Silvers, lighting their cigarettes, and obligingly scratching their stumps with a cane back scratcher.

The surgeon came by one day and found me pushing one of my new wheelchair-bound friends—an ancient working-class gentleman with no teeth and droll wit—round the ward à la Grand Prix. Our jolly jape occasioned a public reprimand.

“You better be bloody careful, young man,” said the outraged doctor, addressing me. “I sewed plastic mesh into the wall of your groin to hold your guts in place. If you exert yourself, you will sieve your own intestines and make them into foie gras!” With a bang of a rubber door, he was gone.

“Oooh! If it’s not one thing it’s another,” said my fellow patient, and we returned sheepishly to our respective beds.

*  *  *

It’s been a while since anything nasty happened
down there.
Rest assured, the minute any fresh catastrophe afflicts my nether regions and threatens my mortality, you will be the first to know.