Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints Read Online Free Page A

were paying an extortionate rent in the hopes of finding ourselves Beautiful People–adjacent. Instead of the Beautiful People, God had sent us Rita.
    Mop-headed Rita, with her black roots and split ends, waswhat Doreen Biddlecombe would have called “a sorry sight.” She was a petite, badly preserved, bitter, thirty-something, exhausted white female. Though she looked tragically depressed, I can’t really comment with any conviction on her moods or feelings since she was profoundly unfriendly and showed no interest in becoming chummy with us.
    This was really quite stupid of her. Biddie and I worked well with stylistically challenged females. We would have taken an enthusiastic interest in tawdry Rita and restyled her hair and found a way to make her feel special.
    We would have invited her over for some of Biddie’s Findus frozen “boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce.” Scrambling to subsist without Doreen’s home cooking, Biddie adopted this dish as his main source of protein. (On one memorable occasion he incurred a small but nasty cod-butter burn on the forehead when one of the aforementioned bags ejaculated unexpectedly. It was his own fault: he was trying to bite it open after being unable to locate a pair of scissors.)
    Effortlessly, we would have become Rita’s willing confidants, commiserating with her about the impenetrable psyches and uncouth, stinky ways of the male gender, a subject with which we, as fresh-faced twinkies, were just beginning to grapple.
    After some hot, greasy cod and girly chitchat, we would have dressed Rita in groovy vintage crepe dresses stolen from jumble sales and then dragged her off for a promenade down Portobello Road. We would have told her with relentless conviction how amazing she looked.
    Rita needed us. Her personal style was a disaster. With herwhite plastic footwear—sling-back stilettos or shiny vinyl boots—and her red patent plastic minitrench, she was not only tacky but astoundingly unfashionable. We marveled at the archetypal sleaziness of her look. Clearly, she had no idea what a floor pillow was. She was not one of the Beautiful People. She was one of the unsavory people.
    Every evening Rita would sally forth in her démodé finery with an air of what can only be described as the very opposite of perky optimism. As we watched our monosyllabic neighbor lurching off into the drizzle, we wondered if she would come back in one piece.
    She did.
    Like a battered old homing pigeon, Rita somehow always managed to find her way back to her roost, and because of the intimacy of our living conditions, we were always acutely aware of her return.
    The noise was specific and distinct: It was the noise of an inebriated prostitute trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to insert her key in her own front door. This scratchy, irritating cantata went on for about five minutes and was accompanied by Rita repeating the phrase “Sod it!” and, if there was a man in tow, making all kinds of depressing double entendres about not being able to “get it in the hole” et cetera.
    If we were feeling philanthropic, we would put her out of her misery and open up the front door, for which service we received no thanks from grumpy Rita. Kicking the front door closed with the thick heel of her white boot, Rita would then stagger toward her own apartment door, where the key-insertion shenanigans would begin anew.
    This interminable racket was, however, only a warm-up. Once inside her abode, Rita took center stage and the real performance began: throat clearing, the unzipping of boots, smokes and coughs, slaps and tickles, unapologetic belching, and the sound of someone peeing in her own sink (we did that too) were all clearly audible.
    After some desultory grumbling and mumbling, usually about money, the copulating would start. There is no way to describe the horrifying, apocalyptic Wagnerian symphony of noises which would erupt once our neighbor began to service her clients. Suffice it to say,