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

it was loud, and the thin skin of Masonite which separated our two abodes, rather than acting as a sound barrier, merely amplified the erotic activities of our white-boot-loving neighbor.
    Maybe she was really enjoying it, or maybe she was just hell-bent on making her clients feel like they were performing well, or maybe she was screaming at the agony of her life. Whatever the case, this was the one arena in which Rita allowed herself to be operatically expressive.
    “Sounds like someone’s fucking her with a floor lamp,” remarked Biddie in his Happy Harry voice, after we had once more been roused from slumber by Rita’s primal howling and wailing.
    More often than not, the plumbing would get in on the act, banging and screaming and gurgling along with Rita. There was no way that we, even if we were completely drunk, could ever sleep through this auditory onslaught.
    Corpselike from exhaustion, we lay side by side under our respective stained and threadbare candlewick bedspreads,silently praying that the cacophony would subside at some point before daybreak.
    Thanks to the telepathy which comes from long-standing friendships, I knew we were both having the same thought. Maybe Doreen and Cyril were right. Maybe we should have stayed in Reading at our safe suburban department store, where the motto was “Never knowingly undersold” and nobody knew what it meant and everyone thought we were special. The smiling faces of the good people in Soft Furnishings and Clocks and Watches wafted through my sleep-deprived consciousness, beckoning me back to Reading and a simpler, more wholesome life.
    Rita’s screeching finally subsides.
    The sodium streetlights flood our domestic squalor, silhouetting the floor pillow, making it look a bit like Ayers Rock, and casting a pall on our demented quest. On top of the wardrobe sits Happy Harry, who by now has come to personify my impending madness.
    Will we ever find the Beautiful People? Will I go stark raving bonkers in the Malaysian Simulator? Stay tuned.

CHAPTER 2

FUN

    P overty is vastly underrated.
    In the 1950s, my parents were broke. Despite the lack of cash, Betty and Terry remained glamorous. When their favorite shoes wore thin, they inserted slivers of cardboard into the soles and continued to wear them.
    During most of this decade, my family and I lived on the top floor of a dilapidated rooming house in Reading. Ours was a two-room flat with no kitchen or bathroom. Betty, wearingspike heels, carried our water up the stairs in buckets. This did wonders for her already shapely legs.
    Terry, who also had good legs, was unemployed at the time. While Betty pounded the streets scrounging clerical jobs, Terry whiled away the hours teaching himself Latin. His goal was to gain entry to the University of Reading, where Latin was an annoying and archaic requirement. It was during this period of leisure that my dad became our personal couturier, hand-sewing little outfits for me and my sister, Shelagh.
    Terry was exceptionally versatile. His skills extended way beyond dead languages and sewing. During this rooming-house period, he also designed and constructed most of our furniture. He scrounged orange crates from the local greengrocer and transformed them into chicly minimal occasional tables. They really were occasional, in the very strictest sense of the word. Most of the time they were orange crates, but occasionally they were tables.
    Terry’s skill diversity was equaled by the diversity in his own personality: sometimes he was very butch and sometimes he was quite fey. More often than not, he was both. He was the kind of bloke who could repair his own motorbike while listening to Maria Callas on the radio and weeping. He loved women, but he was never one of the guys. With his taste for ascots and opera and Latin, he was the ideal parent for an emerging invert such as myself.
    Betty and Terry always referred to this cardboard-in-shoe period as the happiest time of their lives. Why?