Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (16 page)

By 9.30
P.M.
we were already past the point of any restraint. Soon we had drunk everything in the house. There we were, slumped on the couch watching the mice running up the tattered curtains, with no money to go out and no more hooch on the premises.

Or was there?

With a sudden burst of optimistic energy, we both leapt off the couch and began searching every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Finding nothing but a half-empty bottle of vinegar only seemed to fuel that raging there-must-be-some-booze-somewhere conviction.

Like Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in
Days of Wine and Roses,
we went into a ransacking frenzy.

After tearing through every room in the house, we eventually hit the jackpot. Lurking under Rose’s dressing table was a bottle of Terry’s wine. How sneaky of her to hide it there!

“Maybe Rose has one of those drinking problems. Whaddya callit?” slurred Joy unsympathetically as I glugged the entire contents of her stash into two pint-size beer glasses which we had recently stolen from the pub around the corner.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. More Lou Reed. More incoherent but heartfelt babbling regarding our respective insecurities. I have a vague recollection of staggering across the street and unsuccessfully trying to get credit at the fish and chip shop.

I woke the next morning feeling very strange. My stomach ached, and my breath and clothes stank of witch hazel.

“Who used all my homemade rose-petal astringent? Were you having one of your evenings of beauty?” demanded Rose as she waved the empty bottle accusingly in my blotchy face.

Joy and I should have expected as much. It was so very typical of Rose to be making her own beauty products.

Rose was very proto–Martha Stewart, but on a tight budget. Her insane brand of creative self-sufficiency knew no bounds. Rose was the kind of girl who, given a bit of encouragement, would have pulped and perforated her own toilet paper. Sunday mornings usually found her straining sour milk through an old pair of panty hose in a valiant attempt to make her own cottage cheese. It was hardly surprising that she made her own astringent.

*  *  *

What, you may well ask, had become of my quest to find the Beautiful People? Well, in our own feckless way, we were doing our level best. Joy, Angela, Rose, and I were trying hard to live a gracious and glamorous existence.

Though negligent on all aspects of housecleaning and homemaking, we put a gargantuan amount of effort and creativity into what the English call “getting tarted up.” We might not have been the Beautiful People, but we were definitely the Tarted Up People, the Tarted Up People of Whalley Range.

From the very moment we moved in together, we turned our living room into a bustling atelier of haute couture. Angela’s bright blue sewing machine was parked permanently in
the middle of the room. There were paper patterns everywhere and a hissing iron atop a permanently erected ironing board.

The girls made mostly sassy blouses and party frocks, and I made shirts for myself out of “novelty” vintage fabrics. When her boyfriend proposed to her, Angela ran out, bought ten yards of cream crepe, and whipped up her own wedding dress. For the next two weeks we all pinned and primped around her like the Disney tweetie birds in
Cinderella.

We augmented our homemade garments with secondhand trouves acquired at church jumble sales. On Saturdays, while our fellow students charged into the town center for more anti-Thatcher demos, we headed in the opposite direction, to the suburban church halls.

There is nothing like the prospect of a good jumble sale to take your mind off a pounding hangover. Once inside we would hurl ourselves into piles of smelly and discarded clothing in search of vintage gems culled by church ladies from the houses of the Manchester bourgeoisie.

Occasionally I would find a hand-knit Fair Isle sweater or a Clarice Cliff teapot for myself, but most of my energy went toward ferreting out glamorous looks for the girls. Like a pimp who wanted his protégés to look extra-foxy, I trawled for bias-cut silk gowns, floral crepe tea dresses, forties platforms, shoulder-padded Joan Crawford suits, exotic 1950s plate-shaped hats, and fox stoles.

For us Tarted-Up People, fashion, and the wearing and flaunting thereof to pubs and discos, provided a nice antidote to dreary academic obligations. The girls and I were all psychology
majors, and none of us was enjoying it very much. We were all horrified by the scientific rigor of our chosen subject. It was agonizingly boring. I vividly remember experiencing actual physical pain during our lectures.

None of us had read the prospectus very carefully before applying to Manchester University. We naïvely thought we would spend days interpreting each other’s dreams and comparing Jung and Freud. I had additional expectations: I anticipated finding out why my family was insane and how to avoid a similar fate. Much to my annoyance, we hardly even touched on personality disorders, never mind mental illness.

We spent our days measuring and analyzing instinctive behavior as if it was a complicated disease like lupus. Human foibles were regarded with suspicion, so most of our studies centered on vermin. Instead of studying people, we studied rats—pretty white ones with pink eyes—and then we applied advanced statistics to our observations. Our team of all-male professors and teachers actively discouraged us from reading or discussing anything philosophical or amusing or insane or camp.

One day Rose found at a jumble sale a textbook on the origins of psychosis. A quirky, riveting tome like this would never have found its way onto one of our reading lists. It was much too interesting, and there were photographs! Of people. Mad people. This was more like it! We pored over it as if it was illicit pornography.

As I leafed excitedly through this book, I came upon a picture of a tubby, catatonic schizophrenic lady sitting on her bed with her head wreathed in dish towels.

“How you is she? You’re always doing that!” said Angela with a chuckle, sending a chill of panic down my spine.

Instantly I had a raging anxiety attack.

Angela was right. I had developed an unconscious habit, while lounging chez nous, of wrapping stuff, like towels and scarves and even cushions, round my head. Even in warm weather.

Rose’s book said that people went bonkers in their late teens or early twenties. Maybe my one-way ticket to Narg-ville had finally arrived, but with a difference. I had never before considered the possibility that I might become a catatonic schizophrenic. I had always thought that, when I eventually went gaga, I would be upholding the fine family tradition of paranoid schizophrenia.

My anxieties quadrupled when I found out that our entire psychology class was scheduled to make a field trip to a mental hospital.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” said Angela as she stitched a new frock for the occasion. “Finally we’re going to study people instead of bloody rats!” But I was suspicious. The trip was very unexpected and clearly at odds with our curriculum. Maybe they were planning to drop me off.

I attempted to defray my anxiety by getting tarted up. I donned a pair of extra-wide Oxford bags, a navy and white satin jockey jacket (homemade and copied from a Mr. Freedom design), and ladies’ cartoonish sandals. These shoes were styled like kiddies’ footwear but sized up and fabricated in metallic blue leather. Very Elton John.

*  *  *

The lunatic asylum was everything I might have imagined. The grim Victorian Gothic façade soared ominously against the leaden sky. Narg-like women cowered under windblown trees, while Ken-like men and their uniformed attendants shuffled along tarmac paths looking like something out of
Night of the Living Dead.
Angela, Joy, Rose, and I started eyeballing the more attractive males.

Our professor then broke the news that we had not come to hobnob with the inmates. Our destination was a clinic where doctors treated their patients with
aversive conditioning.
We had been studying the effects of aversive conditioning on rats. Would they still go for the food pellet even if they got an electric shock? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Me and the girls had also been studying the effects of aversive conditioning at home on our own rodents. We allowed them to nibble at morsels of Rose’s cheese and then whacked them with a jumble sale badminton racket. Many of them seemed willing to brave the badminton racket for the possibility of a nibble of Rose’s cheese, a testament to the flavor and quality of her dairy products if nothing else.

“We treat everything from phobias to homosexuality,” announced the doctor once we were inside the grim Orwellian clinic, causing me to wince slightly. We were then shown slides of bare-chested California surfer types with tousled locks. I instantly fell in love. Not only were they beautiful and tanned but they seemed so shockingly carefree and happy, happy, happy.

Not wishing to appear sleazy, I redirected my gaze. There, illuminated by the glow of the slide show, were the chairs into
which the patients were strapped while electricity was applied to their various parts. It was all very
Clockwork Orange.

I couldn’t help wondering why any gay personage would opt to come to a grim loony bin and submit to this kind of torture, as opposed to, for example, going to one of the fab local discos, drinking a lot, and then picking up a hairdresser or even an insurance salesman.

Since moving to Manchester, I had achieved some modest success in the dating department. Upon first arriving, I met a part-time circus acrobat who sold bags of Dolly Mixtures (Brit candy) off a barrow in the open-air market for extra cash. It did not amount to anything, but I took it as proof positive that there were pleasant, interesting young men to be dated. One just had to be patient. The life of a poofter, though not without its emotional whoopee cushions and discriminatory aspects, was certainly not dire enough to throw in the towel and get yourself electrocuted.

The doctor explained that it was not possible to embark upon a course of aversive conditioning without first identifying the criteria for successful treatment. Without these benchmarks it was impossible to tell if the electric shocks were working.

“For example,” said the doctor again, focusing his spiel in my direction, “in order to cure a man of his impulse to wear ladies’ garments, it is first necessary to identify a series of behaviors and designate them as either feminine or masculine.”

Angela and I started nudging each other. I giggled nervously.

The doctor continued in his hauntingly flat monotone. “At
one end of the spectrum would be such things as wearing lipstick, at the other, smoking a pipe or growing a mustache.”

Dr. Strangelove continued, “The transvestite who desires to be ‘cured’ is shown pictures of himself dressed as a lady and simultaneously given electric shocks. The success or failure of the treatment is measured by tabulating changes in the number of subsequent masculine and feminine behaviors.”

By this point I was starting to feel a bit indignant. Why would any self-respecting cross-dresser subject himself to this ridiculous ordeal? And why was Dr. Strangelove torturing these poor souls instead of encouraging them to simply throw on a frock and join the other bespangled trannies down at the Picador, a local club owned by the outrageous Foo-Foo Lamar.
6

The evil doctor admitted that the treatment, because it was dealing with the foibles and complexities of human beings, was not perfect. (Subtext—You losers should just stick to studying rats and mice because people are simply too weird.)

“Establishing criteria in these areas of human behavior is an innately flawed process,” he continued.

The cross-dressers’ criteria, in particular, were apparently fraught with problems. “We have found that there are very few behaviors which are either exclusively male or exclusively female. There are normal, healthy women who smoke pipes, and there are fully functional males who dye their hair or even curl their eyelashes.”

The room went very quiet. At this point not just the doctor but the entire class seemed to be staring at me.

He went on. “There is, however, one activity which is completely and utterly exclusively female and which normal, healthy men never ever, ever, ever do,” boomed the glaring doctor. “I am referring to
the painting of the toenails.
”

With a curt “good day!” the doctor concluded his talk, banged on the overhead fluorescent lights, and swept out, leaving the entire class staring in the direction of my trendy sandals.

Now, with the lights back on, everyone could see the metallic red glow through the perforations over my toes. Yes, I had broken down the last taboo. I had painted my toenails.

Angela and Rose had painted their toenails too. We were all beautifying ourselves in preparation not for the loony bin but for a much-anticipated end-of-term jaunt to nearby Black-pool. The bottle of polish had been sitting on the coffee table on Rose’s psychosis manual for an entire week. It was just too tempting.

At this point, our tour disintegrated into a German Expressionist nightmare. The whole class hooted at me, pointing and screaming with laughter. I could not get out of that loony bin fast enough.

After a few vats of cider, the feelings of embarrassment began to recede. It was actually quite nice to be the center of attention.

*  *  *

A week later our train arrived in Blackpool, the Coney Island of England. The seafront was packed with loudmouthed daytrippers who scarfed down whelks and guzzled beer and wore
hats that said “Kiss me quick.” They were all terribly common.

And so were we. Thanks to a couple of flagons of Devonshire’s finest consumed on the train, Angela, her boyfriend, Rose, and I were feeling excitable, happy, and quite plastered. Joy was not with us: she had stayed in Manchester for an important darts tournament.

Lubricated by more booze, we could not help but enter into the spirit of things, enjoying the rides and braying at ourselves in the distorting mirrors. It wasn’t long before we got that ravenous I-could-eat-a-whole-box-of-cereal hunger which afflicts excessive drinkers.