And Yet ...

  About all the downsides—the shame of being conned by the tobacco companies, the disgrace of being an addict, the suspension of one’s reasoning faculties in the face of self-destruction—I already knew. And there was a faint something about some of the terminology (“empowerment,” for example) that smacked a little too much of a self-esteem program. Anyway, I left my pack and my lighter in O’Hara’s care and for a couple of days didn’t smoke and didn’t much miss it, either. But then I hit a difficult patch in an essay I was writing, and turned again to the little friend that never deserts me.

  A bit nettled by the rapidity of my own capitulation, I tried again a month or two later at a place called New Life, in Manhattan, which practices a sort of laser acupuncture. Simple enough: you lie in a reclining chair while a laser is applied painlessly to various points on your features, and are meanwhile reminded in a soothing voice of all the good reasons to give the damn stuff up. Again, though, there was something Goody Two-shoes about it: at the end I was asked to sign a bright little card that congratulated me on becoming “a champion.” Something in me evidently resists, or wants to resist, joining any good-behavior club that will have me as a member. That evening I had dinner at an organic restaurant where everything was made out of vegetation, just to see how that would feel without a cigarette, and drank about three pints of cold sake to make up for it. Didn’t light up until well past midnight.

  Incidentally, and to give you a brief report on food intake, I have found it relatively easy to ingest smaller portions of leaner and better nosh, such as mercury-sodden swordfish. But here’s what causes me to laugh in a hollow manner: almost every diet guide that I have been shown contains a stipulation about the “size matters” element of the platter. Your chunk of fish or lamb or lean steak should not be larger than a cigarette pack or a deck of cards. That’s a terrific way to wean a guy who will go to Las Vegas to make an idiot of himself at the blackjack tables where they bring you free booze as long as you lose, all the while making detours to the nearby Indian reservation where they sell smokes by the ton.

  The other problem with giving up a habit is that you don’t exactly get to see the results, or not anything like fast enough. (I quit smoking once for several months and felt essentially no different, except for the absence of that parrot-cage feeling in my mouth.) Whereas with modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day. I presented myself at the office of Drs. Gregg Lituchy and Marc Lowenberg one afternoon, and as the sun faded over the splendors of Central Park South, my fangs took on the luster that the sky was slowly relinquishing.

  I am a proud child of the National Health Service in England and remember feeling rather hurt when, while reading Gore Vidal’s novel The Judgment of Paris many years ago, I came upon a character who was described as having “British teeth.” As Dr. Lituchy readied me with a series of numbing injections, his partner came by to have a look. He wanted to see with his own eyes, he said, that my teeth really were as “British” as they looked in the “before” photograph. I duly beamed for him, and he reeled back briefly. Having become a citizen last April, I felt as if this procedure was part of my new passport to Americanization. How reassuring it was to see the picture of a gleaming Christy Turlington in the office’s glossy press clippings, and to reflect that soon I could dazzle just like her. But the clever thing about this treatment (known as JK Veneers) is that it takes away the stains and the shame, without making you look like a game-show host or a candidate claiming that he likes being back in Iowa.

  It’s not easy to report on six hours of enforced idleness in a chair. I clicked my way through Dr. Lituchy’s massively accoutred Sonos sound system, moving from Bob Dylan through Paul Simon and then—as the screech of the drill began to mount to a crescendo—the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels. A foot masseur was thoughtfully provided to alleviate the tedium. But gallows humor is inseparable from dentistry: at one point I heard the good doctor say, as he plowed through the layers of plaque and tartar, “Good news. I’ve found some of your teeth.” When it was over, and my pearls as white as snow, I looked more British in one way, since my numb and swollen lips resembled those of a bulldog, and I felt helpless because I couldn’t hold a cigarette in my mouth or, for the rest of the evening, swallow a drink without a bib to catch the dribbles.

  This sense of a reversion to childhood was enormously increased the following morning, when I arrived at the studio of the renowned “J Sisters,” the seven girls from Brazil who have pioneered the waxing technique that bears their country’s name. The salon caters mainly to women: there was a picture of Christy Turlington on the wall, and I wondered briefly if, rather than wish to be like Christy Turlington, I secretly wanted to be Christy Turlington. (My old friend Simon Hoggart has written that it’s harder to become an ex-smoker than it is to have a sex change.) This thought was rudely dispelled by what followed.

  The male version of the wax is officially called a sunga, which is the name for the Brazilian boys’ bikini. I regret to inform you that the colloquial term for the business is “sack, back, and crack.” I went into a cubicle which contained two vats of ominously molten wax and was instructed to call out when I had disrobed and covered my midsection with a small towel. Then in came Janea Padilha, the actual creator of the procedure. She whipped away the exiguous drapery and, instead of emitting the gasp or whistle that I had expected, asked briskly if I wanted any “shaping.” Excuse me? What was the idea? A heart shape or some tiger stripes, perhaps, on the landing strip? I disdained anything so feminine and coolly asked her to sunga away.

  Here’s what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this “wide stance” position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper hand job. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened. Ms. Turlington doesn’t have this problem. The businesslike Senhora Padilha daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy. . . . Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.

  Small talk is difficult under such grueling conditions, but I am ruthlessly professional and managed to keep my end up, so to speak. “What sort of men come here?” “Those who are preparing for hemorrhoid operations.” Oh, great. “And those from Wall Street who sit too much and get their behinds irritated.” Uh-huh. “Also many who are urged by their wives and their fiancées.” You don’t say. I also gather, though this wasn’t part of the pitch, that male porn stars get the wax in order to enhance their profile on video. By this stage, I thought I could tell we were drawing agonizingly near to the close, but I was wrong. Boy, was I ever wrong.

  You ladies will know what I mean by the stirrup position, which I was now unceremoniously instructed to assume. That’s to say, I braced one leg up while Ms. Padilha braced the other. And she does this for a living. To be Dr. Lituchy and to spend every day up to your elbows in other people’s oral cavities would be tough enough. But this . . . And wait: surely you can’t be serious about putting . . . Oh Jesus. I was overwhelmed by a sudden access of lava-like agony, accompanied by the vertiginous sensation that there was no there there. Stunned into silence, I listened slack-jawed as she told of her plans to expand into the London market, and to fly to Dubai to demonstrate her technique. To call this a “growth industry” might be a slight mistake: the J Sisters will not rest
until every blade has been torn from every crevice. Tomorrow, the world. But today, your humble servant. And my only question was: “Where’s the rest of me?” We did not take a “before” picture, so with your indulgence I shall not share the “after” one. The total effect, I may tell you, is somewhat bizarre. The furry pelt that is my chest stretches southward over the protuberant savanna that is my stomach, and then turns into a desert region. Below the waist, a waste. I suppose I could have had the whole torso denuded, but then I would have looked even more like a porpoise than I already do.

  My divine editor and friend Aimee Bell had sweetly come along to lend moral support, which turned out to be the only kind I didn’t need. She told me later, over a healing and sustaining lunch, that the J Sisters staff had been surprised by my failure to yelp or cry out, so I suppose I can be prouder of my British reserve than I was of my British teeth. And I have a new nickname for my porn-ready but paradoxically still-wincing courting tackle: “Smooth Operator.” How long, I ask myself idly, will this last?

  Il faut souffrir pour être belle, as the French say. Without suffering, no beauty. As I look back on my long and arduous struggle to make myself over, and on my dismaying recent glimpses of lost babyhood, I am more than ever sure that it’s enough to be born once, and to take one’s chances, and to grow old disgracefully.

  (Vanity Fair, December 2007)

  On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part III

  Mission Accomplished

  IT COULD BE argued that those who seek to make themselves over into a finer state of health and physique and fitness should not put off the job until they are in their fifty-ninth summer. As against that comes the piercing realization that, if you have actually made it this far and want to continue featuring in the great soap opera of your own existence, you had better take some swift remedial steps. It was all summed up quite neatly by whoever first said that if he’d known he was going to live this long he’d have taken better care of himself.

  Then there’s the question of whether you want to feel good (or better) or whether you want to look good (or at least a bit better). Having tried everything from body wraps to Brazilian bikini waxes, I rather suddenly became persuaded that all cosmetic questions had become eclipsed by the need to survive in the very first place. In short, I became obsessed with the imminence of my own demise.

  Even as I was sampling the luxury spas and the follicular torture chambers of the nation, I was doing an extended promotional tour for a book of mine that for one whole week was number one on the bestseller list. The tour became a biggish deal, and I spent quite some time on the road with my young friend Cary Goldstein, prince of publicists as well as a highly gifted commissioning editor. He got me from airport to airport and from studio to studio, and in the intervals could match me pretty well as a drinker and smoker, while utterly outclassing me in his strange, hypnotic appeal to women. Fueled with scotch and above all with nicotine—an Irish newspaper described me in this period as taking “rare oxygen breaks”—I managed a series of epic eight-day weeks on the road, and the grand memory of it will always linger. Except that I became abruptly and horribly convinced that there would be no fond memory upon which to dwell. A voice began to speak insistently inside my skull: You aren’t going to live to spend a dime of these royalties. As if to ram the same point home, the foul taste in my mouth from cigarettes, which already called for brushing my teeth and rinsing my gums several times a day just to gain some relief from the squalor of it, began to feel more and more corpse-like. I was thinking about death all the time.

  So I am grateful to my colleagues at Vanity Fair for the witty “tough love” initiative that began this process. I quite understand that their main motive was not to have to go on looking at me the way I was, but the application of cosmetic and camouflage also had some unintended consequences. For instance, having acquired a new set of gleaming white gnashers from Dr. Gregg Lituchy, I had an incentive not to turn them as yellow and brown as their predecessors had been. I signed up for a couple of antismoking procedures, at the magazine’s expense, in the vague hope of kicking my worst habit, and felt the usual self-hatred and irritation when I was back to smoking within a few days, if not hours, of having quit.

  However, I think that the Allen Carr antismoking course must have “worked” subliminally, because a few weeks after resuming smoking (and thus having a grinning death’s-head as my hourly companion) I woke up one October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, where I’d gone to do a book signing, and knew that I was going to throw my smokes into the loo and my lighter and matches out of the window. Which I thereupon did. The following day, I was back in Washington and being interviewed for the “Lunch with the FT” feature that the fine Financial Times runs every weekend. All the conditions for a relapse were perfect: my interviewer was a smoker, the day was lovely enough to permit us to sit outside with ashtrays on the table, the food was the rich and spicy and perfect cuisine of the Bombay Club, off Lafayette Square. And I didn’t even ask for a puff. I was so proud of having this fact reported in the FT that I left the paper lying around where my antismoking daughter—whose complaints had also tipped the scale—might see it.

  But now welcome to the world of the unintended or unforeseen consequence. I have or had another bad habit—that of biting my fingernails—that is even older and more deep-rooted than my nicotine dependency. I’ve been chewing away since I was eight, in other words. But once Dr. Lituchy had whitened and straightened and bonded my teeth, I no longer had the crooked and jagged snaggle-fangs that enabled me to get a purchase on my fingertips and to work the jaws in that nice crisp and crunchy action that makes all the difference. All of a sudden I was buying nail files at the pharmacy and buffing away at oval extremities that for the first time in half a century looked as if they belonged to a human. (Tiring of this rather feminine activity, I now go to a gay Vietnamese manicurist in my hood and fight to keep the expression “hand job” out of my mind as he fusses away over my paw-like mitts.)

  Anyway, just as there are uncovenanted side benefits to major dental work, so there are things about quitting the smoking habit for which nobody prepares you. Did I have any idea that I would indulge in long, drooling—nay, dribbling—lascivious dreams in which I was still wreathed in fragrant blue fumes? I’m embarrassed to say that almost no nocturnal reverie has ever been so vivid or so actual: had the damn ciggies come to mean that much to me? I would wake with the complete and guilty conviction that I had sinned in word and deed while I was asleep. (In bold contrast, the morning mouth felt much better.)

  Then there’s the short-term memory loss. I might have been due for this anyway at my age, but my recall for names and faces and facts, and for things from early education such as historical dates and verses of poetry, had been holding up pretty well. Abruptly I was suffering intermittently from what a friend once called “CRAFT syndrome.” (The acronym represents the words “Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing.”) A visage would loom up at a party, or a literary reference would be on the tip of my tongue, and my recognition of the first or recollection of the second would dissolve like a ghost at cockcrow. This was bad enough in itself, but I also began to realize that I cared less. What the hell will it matter in a few decades whether I can put a name to this face, or an author to this snatch of verse? Along with the mild loss of function, in other words, came an access of the blues. My friend Darryl Pinckney put it very well and very bleakly when I told him that I was being visited as never before by low-level depression and mild but persistent anxiety. “That’s to be expected,” he said. “You are in mourning. Maybe even grief.”

  The Allen Carr seminar had taught me to tell myself that quitting the habit was not losing a friend but rather slaying an enemy, and I had tried hard to remember this mantra. But one doesn’t get over a love-hate relationship with mere platitudes. All I can say for sure is that—while my terrors now are minor when compared with the miseries of a year ago—the old terrors were then, whereas the current angst is now.
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  From the heavy to the light: my colleagues in the looks department at VF decided that my hair could use some work, too. The problem here is that of a tobacco-colored top, more or less doing the job of covering the domed scalp while suffering lately from some forehead encroachment. And very fine: unmanageably so, in fact, with a double crown that makes it near impossible to style. Wash it, run a brush and hand through it, and the day can begin. Two efforts have been made to improve on this. My wife’s hairdresser, Dennis Roche, who cuts and blow-dries Georgetown, recommended a “Brazilian keratin treatment.” (I had an immediate flashback to the ladies from Brazil as they waxed and ripped my groin.) And it was decided that I should have my locks sculpted by none other than the great Frédéric Fekkai.