AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
They seemed to understand that the consequence of Archie saying “no onions” would result in an “out-of-gas” car with hearts coming up from the roof—they all knew and I caught on, but not really. I was perpetually ill at ease with how kids blandly sat through Crimes Against Nature like the first grade and I didn’t want to understand too much about Archie either because I was afraid I might become one of those kids.
I grew up on a steady diet of comic books and movie magazines. Archie comics are the only ones I read out of a sense of duty, in the same way other kids had classic comics shoved in front of them or read them for “knowledge.” I felt obliged to learn something about America, I was living here after all, and Archie was as American and not-what-I-wanted as Mom’s apple pie. It seemed that Americans about to run out of gas were very particular not to have onions beforehand. I knew it by the time I was eight. But Veronica never knew it; she’d just sip her strawberry soda and step blithely into Archie’s car, completely unaware that hearts were about to come out of the roof in the next frame. I would never be such a fool, I thought—jaded and worldly at nine—as to let a man take me to a soda fountain and not have onions. Not an American man.
The deal was that Veronica was ready to give Archie one kiss, period. Archie had to have more. Veronica could be persuaded to overcome her natural girlish abhorrence of kissing if Archie made sure not to have onions and ran out of gas. These Americans, I thought . . . How could she stand Archie? How could he stand her? Why didn’t he like Betty who was a regular person? How could anyone stand Reggie? Where did Jughead spring from? How could they all just casually drink Coca-Cola when one sip, and it tasted like musty trunks? How on earth could anyone eat a hamburger unless they were starving? Where was the America that had soda fountains? Did kids actually eat large slabs of raw onions on strange meat, dubious lettuce, awful mustard, and untouchable “buns”? How did Archie Comics know that the kids reading them would understand that when Archie leered “no onions,” it meant hearts?
BAD BREATH
From toothpaste commercials, I discovered that onions gave you “bad breath.” Why Veronica, who didn’t like kissing that much anyway, had to be seduced by “no onions,” I finally figured out. Americans went crazy about “bad breath” and sweat and in fact, from TV commercials, I learned that the only things they liked were Camay, pies, and toothpaste. They loved toothpaste.
When I was kissing someone, like my mother or father, I loved kissing them so whatever they smelled like was fine with me. I loved kissing beautiful women with perfume on unless it was horrible like Old Lady Hard Candy perfume. My favorite smell to kiss was Harry, a friend of the family who wrote TV and radio music. Harry smelled like Scotch. I still love kissing Harry. Men who smell like Scotch remind me of him, but they’ re not him. Stravinsky must have smelled like Scotch but I never kissed him much. I kissed Mme Stravinsky and she smelled like the French Riviera in May covered with flowers, growing roses, happiness in spring, and Salems. (Now she smells like Carltons, she must have smoked Camels or Luckys when I was little, before filters and menthol.)
ARCHIE AND ERROL FLYNN
The first boy I ever kissed smelled like his V-neck sweater and birthdays. (It was at a birthday and we played spin the bottle and seven minutes in heaven.)
The first illegal boy I ever kissed (no adult supervision) was ice-skating in the ancient high-up bleachers of the Polar Palace. He ate hot dogs with onions. I was enraptured; he was CUTE and one of the most popular boys at Le Conte and there he was at the Polar Palace every Friday night skating couples-only with me and necking. If only the popular kids at school could know that every Friday night for a year he kissed me. But they never knew because he never spoke to me at school, he only spoke to popular kids.
A pirate expelled from a Birmingham, Alabama, school system came to Le Conte when “his mother couldn’t handle him.” He had burned the principal’s office down and threw a chair at the vice principal so they sent him to Hollywood to his father—a “Man’s Influence.” He took one look at his father and moved to the Hollywood Stables in Beachwood Canyon where he shoveled manure and slept in the hay. He, this pirate, devastated the Archie comic social system of Le Conte because he was Impossible. He alighted upon our American Way of Life like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. He had tattoos and I think the basic trouble was that he was Irish. The Concrete Block of cute girls and cute boys, the Ping-Pong blandness, the toothpaste popularity and Spray Net gruesome crap of the Darling just stood, with wide-open blue-eyed confusion at his “How do you do?” smile that didn’t notice them. He was polite. The guys turned into boys. All the “Oh, hi’s” in the world and best smiles from the three most cutest; blond, brunette, redhead darling adorable earth angels got nowhere. The day he got kicked out of algebra, he walked me to the middle of High Society’s segregated inviolate stair-steps, sat me down, and together, before the school, we read Mad. He laughed like Errol Flynn. I was in uncute, undarling, unadorable tears of laughter. He smelled of Brylcreem, alcohol and tobacco when we kissed in a stolen car a week later.
Predictably, after the Mad lunch, on my way to class, the guy from the Polar Palace struck up a conversation. I looked at him, his cute popular casual face, and I decided he was a coward. I never kissed him again. Unlike the American Veronica, I had not noticed the onions on his hot dogs during the year he kissed me on Friday nights. I did notice he was a fraidy cat and hoped he’d burn in hell. I hoped they all would. (When Robin Hood got out of jail a couple of years later and came to visit me we still fell on the floor laughing with each other, but I was still a virgin—my major flaw—so after many Irish evaluations on the “Silliness of Virginity” not working on me, he shrugged and left me to my own devices like I deserved. I was left back with the toothpaste crowd.)
GARLIC AND DORIS DAY
After junior high, everyone smelled like beer and pizza, especially me. “You’ll have to marry an Italian, dear,” my mother told me one day, “the way you eat garlic.” Garlic was not in Archie comics because they were too American to have garlic. Veronica needn’t smell onions—though she’d probably heard of them—but she certainly was not to be subjected to the dreadful vulgarity of garlic. I loathed Veronica and starting when I was eight I wanted her to take her pearl necklace and strawberry soda and shove it; she was rich, they lived in a mansion, poor Betty didn’t stand a chance. Betty was the only one I felt deserved mercy, but Betty wanted Archie. And surely it would be more merciful for some pirate to clear things up for her. There were no pirates in America.
As I grew older, Doris Day and Rock Hudson carried on the onion tradition. You can easily imagine her not-quite-thereness as Rock, in a soft aside to the waiter, says, “No onions,” after she’s just said, “Two hamburgers please.” After he doesn’t order onions, we know he’ll stop at nothing to get into her pants. And she, like Veronica about kisses, simply won’t have pants gotten into; she may perhaps not mind being kissed once or twice, but he’s going to have to marry her for pants. She smelled like lipstick and Camay and he smelled like clean money. No onions anywhere.
Then everything fell completely to pieces, thank heavens.
Dennis Hopper got rich, Doris Day collected dogs, and her son employed a full-time bodyguard and never ever went out again into America. Life folded, Edie Sedgwick stuck her head into a toilet for Art, the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and tore girls from the path of pearls and virginity, heroin and alcohol became outré among intellectuals, and ladies and gentlemen . . . the Rolling Stones. Ozzie and Harriet, toothpaste, and running-out-of-gas just couldn’t hold a candle to a fifteen-year-old meth girl asking for “spare change,” if you kissed her you’d get hepatitis or suicidally depressed. If you ate hamburgers you’d get poisoned. If you ate anything, it turned out, you’d get poisoned. Everything in the whole world had been quietly poisoned while Archie was worrying about onions.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
I’d forgotten all about onions, myself, once everything fell completely to pieces until a few months ago. It was an article about Elizabeth Taylor in Cosmopolitan. She was in Russia making The Blue Bird and of course she’d brought her dogs along as well as the poor used car salesman who’d figured who was he to wonder at God’s mysterious intentions when Elizabeth Taylor picked him. Elizabeth held the interview in her Russian hotel suite and was in a good mood. She ordered caviar for the interview and acted human which was a change from the last time the interviewer had seen her when she’d acted like Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth told the interviewer that she had recently come across the simple pleasures of being human, shopping, etc., and much to her amazement, she liked them. She liked being “just a woman” (or something) and going for drives in the country. Meanwhile, the interviewer had been forewarned not to talk about RICHARD and the used car salesman sort of lurked in the shadows as Elizabeth rambled on about her New Life. Elizabeth is not stupid. The impression a clever reporter would receive from having Elizabeth Taylor be nice to them and be human is that Elizabeth Taylor is enjoying life without RICHARD and has discovered a girl can have fun without RICHARD, simple pleasures like drives in the country take precedence over RICHARD and besides, there’s the used car salesman.
Everything was going splendidly. The clever reporter was totally engrossed and believing it. The caviar arrived. Elizabeth made a graceful gesture of “go ahead,” the lurk from the shadows stepped forward for a cracker, and Elizabeth—being human to perfection—spread caviar on a piece of cracker, continued about how nice Russia was, and . . . But it couldn’t be . . . But it was! Elizabeth Taylor who was “so happy living a normal life with the used car salesman,” sprinkled onions on her caviar!
The used car salesman who had been watching her carefully, buttered his cracker with caviar, and AFTER she sprinkled onions on her caviar, he sprinkled them on his.
Now . . . The clever reporter was baffled. How could this be? How could a woman just sprinkle onions on a cracker without first making some kind of eye contact with her lover.
One lover simply doesn’t go ahead with onions. Especially if, as it turned out, he had to watch to see what she would do before he could feel free to have onions. A woman who eats raw onions, in Western civilization, doesn’t care what she smells like. A woman who doesn’t care what she smells like is not in love with anyone present. And that meant, as far as the reporter was concerned, that something was wrong.
What was up, it turned out, was that Elizabeth Taylor, at the time of the interview, was having secret negotiating long-distance phone conversations with RICHARD. The used car salesman was sent out to walk the dogs. RICHARD was in Switzerland and Elizabeth was in Russia, eating onions.
By the time the piece was written, the reporter was, happily, no longer baffled. RICHARD and Elizabeth were remarried. (The used car salesman was banished, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away Elizabeth Taylor.) And everything fell into place; it resolved itself. No longer did the clever reporter feel a sense of thwarted strangeness—Elizabeth’s human act, brilliant as it was, had instantly collapsed when—without looking at her lover—she brought to her perfect lips, onion.
LIFE WITHOUT ONIONS
And so, it seems, that even now, with the world in pieces around our ears, the air, water, and food poisoned, the American Way of Life out on the street—dirty, no toothpaste—Elizabeth was totally transparent in the midst of her human routine. All that’s left of the soda fountain America is that if you eat onions in Moscow, your lover is in Switzerland.
My lover now is supremely clean. He told me I’m not the only one to complain about his unearthly odorlessness. It’s fairly creepy but I adore him so I try not to smell like anything either and wouldn’t touch an onion with a stick. Except if he’s going to be out of town for a few days, I bring them out of the closet—them and garlic—and . . . well, you’d be surprised. When he comes back I act like nothing’s happened and so far, I’ve been able to be Archie to this ridiculous Veronica in my heart. He must never learn of onions . . . not from me, not my onions. I’m not the only one, either, who thinks he looks like a pirate—one friend thinks all he needs is a patch. I myself wonder about Brylcreem. But I wouldn’t press my luck, even though I’ve seen them do it since childhood when I imposed a steady diet of comic books and movie magazines upon myself to deal with Americans. I live here, after all, and I know all about “no onions.”
Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing
December 1976–January 1977