Photo by Xanadu Xero
TO MY FUTURE GRANDCHILDREN: Hello Sweetpeas! I LOVE YOU!
Today, Grandma’s going to tell you all about her schnozz in case one of you is a faabulous gay squealing, “Grammie, what the fuck?”
Ready? Comfy? Okay!
ONCE UPON A TIME IN A STRANGE EXOTIC LAND… Grammie was fourteen, a freshman at Beverly Hills High School. Really!
Sometimes, Great-Grandma would pick me up at day’s end, but more often it was our lisping, gay, black houseman with the one long nail, who the year before had drunkenly ‘lost’ one of our cars.
I often saw Jack, Warren, Roman, Nic Roeg (dead dickheads) chat up jailbait on the lawn while we waited for our rides. With Warren’s full-time Beverly Wilshire Hotel suite mere moments away, he was a natural to host tea time socials!
No one ever told the Celebrity Pederasts to leave. Police would wave as they drove by.
They never approached ME.
No boys did. Skulking was Grammie’s wont back then (as now) in her favorite T: >BULLSHIRT<.
One special afternoon Great-Grandma fetched me in her gorgeous 1971 280 SE (that eventually became mine, but my ex, um, Grandpa kiped it) bursting with a surprise!
We were going - that very second - to show my nose to a plastic surgeon! (Plastic surgery BFD not yet volume business.)
THE VERY BEST ONE!
I already wasn’t allowed to have short hair because of my nose, and some jerk called me Barbra Streisand, but I disliked so much else about me that my nose didn’t really stand out (haha.)
I never said I wanted a nose job.
But then again, maybe NOSE was why boys didn’t like me, not the skulking per se.
That wasn’t Great-Grandma’s first stunt, by the way. Two years before that, I got a twin set:
A) My since birth blankie “disappeared.” “Must have been thrown out” Great-Grandma said but it was not in the trash. “Twelve’s too old,” the chaotic refrain - my father’s, hers, then, hoping to be loved, mine.
B) My first *surprise medical visit* to a UCLA research clinic, to stop my growth.
At 5’6 I was plenty tall Great-Grandma said, if I want my choice of husbands. “Men don’t marry giraffes.”
I half thought I’d hallucinated B) until I befriended a woman raised in B.H. who’s mother made her go too.
“I’m going to give you the Cadillac Of Noses” crooned Dr. Morey Parkes as if Mel Brooks wrote the part. He must think there’s just one model, thought I, cauz 500 girls at school had already been hacked by him - little boxes, all the same. Perky.
A word that I knew, even then, would never describe me.
Dr. Snazz did not give me a little box, it’s possible he didn’t give me anything at all.
Story was he stocked O.R.s with Cadillac Recipients, gave them a ya shayna punim kiss gliding to the next sweet-sixteener once she drugged out. He ‘supervised.’ TOP CHEF!
Hark, hark! The Pharmaceutical Coke Years!
Anywho, new nose crooked, vales of tears. My Dad grabbed VOGUE, and pointed out models with bad nose jobs. Nose slowly collapsed (sans coke.) Another Master Surgeon fixed it ten years hence. Nose collapsed (but before Endgame it looked GOOD.)
CUT 2 CHASE the above is three years old. Not thrilled with the tuber references but New Master Surgeon said it “had to be that wide” because of blah blah. Motherfucker.
OF COURSE THE *O. HENRY POINT* IS:
It doesn’t look much different from when it started out.
(author’s note: overexposed for a reason)
