I
arrived in
London
fogged in by a cold. Not by the
cold, but by a cold/flu I personally had. So for the second time in
my life, London reared up in front of me as a rather bleak prospect,
a labor to be borne rather than a joy of discovery. I felt the
obligation to see some of “the sights.” Every morning, off I
dutifully trudged, avoiding people in order to not pass my cold on to
anyone else.
Harrods
was within walking distance of my hotel, so after I was pretty much
well again, I made my way down Cromwell Road as it became Brompton
Road. (Every street in London assumes yet another name after a few
blocks, making the City an anarchy of aliases.) Mohamed Al-Fayed,
disheartened after his son's death, had sold the famous store to a
Qatar investment consortium. A guide had sotto voce told us that a
large percentage of the prime apartments above and around stores in
downtown London were owned by foreigners, principally Middle Eastern
potentates. She said
she had
no prejudice against any foreigner per se, but what she regretted was
that these flats were casual toys for outside
investors.
They were only occupied, at most, a few weeks a year when their
owners briefly touched down in the course of making their vacation
rounds. That meant most of the properties were left empty most of the
time. Indeed, as I scanned the blank windows above the street-level
stores, one-after-another, I did get a sense of London as a ghost
town.
But
in view of Harrods having changed hands, I expected – and found –
the place to have changed somewhat in layout and décor since I'd
last been to London. But the store still harkens back to Al-Fayed's
Egyptian roots. The huge golden sphinx and various Egyptian effigies
still preside over the mystical blue ascent of the store's main
escalator. You still get the feeling you are going into the ultimate
pharaoh’s Casbah as you rise through the store's levels. The famous
food court is also as appetizing as ever. I got some very tasty
salmon-avocado salad that sustained me through several days in my
little walk-up cubicle of a hotel room in the Kensington District.
None
of the rest of Harrods' offerings really tempted me though. Much of
the merchandise struck me as being high-priced
and a bit off-kilter. A simple thing such as the soup ladles in their
kitchen department serves as an example. I had misplaced my ladle at
home and thought one might be a likely souvenir to get from Harrods.
But for the exorbitant price of 30₤
or so, all they had on offer were some plastic things, streamlined,
but way too shallow for transferring soup. Almost every item I set my
eyes on seemed to suffer from the same drawback. It would have served
as a souvenir coming in a Harrods bag. It would have given you the
cachet and conversation piece of having shopped at Harrods. But it
wouldn't really have served its intended purpose.
So
generally, I felt shopping at Harrods could mean paying a lot for
relatively little. However, the real rip-off lay ahead of me, outside
of Harrods and just down the Road. As I was walking away with my
salmon salad in the green Harrods' bag it had qualified me for and
which marked me as an upper crust shopper – I indeed became a mark.
An effusively friendly young woman standing outside a Vera Vine salon
a few doors down the street stepped forward and handed me a tiny
sample packet of some lotion. Knowing this was a come-on, I was on
the verge of actually handing it back to her and walking gruffly on –
when she said to me in a lowered voice - “You're so pretty. All you
need is a little help with those bags under your eyes. We have just
the thing. Come on in. It won't cost you anything to try – right?”
Well,
I had vaguely thought of having a “make-over” while I was in
London. Talk about cachet! I could brag I got a new “do” on
Brompton Road in London. So I was susceptible to this promise of a
more limited make-over. I did have bags under my eyes. That's why I
entered the
Vine-Vera Salon
on the heels of the girl's “Come into my parlor...” Well, you
know the rest of that children's rhyme.
She
immediately started fussing and fluttering around me, clearly playing
off her script of how to “establish rapport.” She asked where I
was from, where I was staying. She seemed a little taken aback when I
mentioned what I guess is a rather seedy neighborhood in the
Earl's Court District of Kensington.
But apparently my Harrods' shopping bag overrode any such potential
reflection on the extent of my finances. The bag had already made me
a millionaire; the mention of the location of my squalid little digs
merely made me an eccentric millionaire. So she plowed ahead.
While
she elicited cheery details about life in my hometown of Chicago, all
along expressing her hopes of going there someday (“I have a cousin
who lives on the North side”) - she was prepping a syringe of
flesh-colored fluid. Yes a syringe. She eventually squirted a small
amount of the fluid under each of my eyes. Then she looked around,
apparently in desperate need of something, and finally grabbed a copy
of Elle
magazine. She started to fan my face vigorously with the open
magazine, hurrying along the drying of the fluid so I could
appreciate the amazing results.
Well,
I suppose the bags under my eyes were reduced a bit, temporarily. (I
found the effect didn't last and wasn't cumulative.) But they left me
no time to really assess the product's success. The young woman
started to snow me with the figures – bargains and discounts and
“no tax” and this and that. She finally came up with a price of
what would have translated into $775.
I
gasped and started to lunge out of the chair. (I had thought $7 would
have been more like it.) But the girl gently settled me back and
assured me, “No, no, no. That's not what you
will
be paying. You
get the discount, the special rate, the tax taken off...” She went
on and on and somewhere in the maelstrom of this heartless sales
pitch, I agreed to pay $465 for that few dollars worth of what I
suppose is Resveratol, that advertised skin-tightening product. The
girl told me to apply it on a regular schedule for two months and
voilá – I'd be a new woman.
In
the midst of this blizzard of advantage that was being bestowed on
me, the girl had introduced me to her associate, someone I had barely
noticed at first. He'd been sitting a little distance away, bending
over a counter seeming to mix potions like a medieval alchemist. Now
he turned his full attention on me. I was transferred to a recliner
where the fellow could peer down at me, examining my pores. I felt as
if I was a specimen being examined under a magnifying glass,
especially since the fellow wore thick glasses. However as he bent in
to diagnose my further needs, things reversed. I felt as if he was
the one being magnified. His wide, icy blue eyes ogled
and enlarged as he came in close. Those eyes were disturbingly
incongruous in a face that more generally appeared to indicate the
fellow had some Middle Eastern background. There were those lagoons
of blue where there should have been brown.
I
later did learn that the man came from Jerusalem. But he didn't want
to dwell on that. He too was more interested in eliciting my likes,
my wishes. He asked about my preferences in music. They could play
anything on their sound system. Again I think they were taken aback
when I mentioned Willie Nelson and country music. Another puzzling
taste for a millionaire society matron to harbor.
But
I firmly told them not to bother, that I was NOT staying. Just as
well because I don't think they would have been able to dig up any of
the déclassé Willie Nelson. However the man had already started to
slather some mud-pack over my face, so I couldn't leave. When I
protested that I was NOT paying for anything further, he clucked
disapproval. “I'm giving
this to you,” he soothed. “You don't want to refuse a gift, do
you?” This assurance was accompanied by more rapport-building and
more compliments. He asked what night cream I used. When I stoutly
told him, “None. I don't believe in clogging my pores,” he looked
at me more intently than ever and pronounced, “You very smart. You
a very, very smart woman.”
Okay.
So no lotion was to be advanced on me. But he proceeded with the
mud-pack treatment. He massaged the warm clay compound into my
cheeks, gently around my eyes, on and on. All the while, he was
issuing Mediterranean murmurings of encouragement.
Well,
I'll cut this description short, just as I was soon to be cut short.
After the mud-pack had been washed away, I made it clear I was
leaving. As I stopped at the counter to get my receipt, the man
plopped a package of the mud-pack preparation in the bag that already
contained the Resveratol syringe pack. He plopped in a few more
unidentified accessories after that and started to ring up my new
total to the tune of an additional 400₤ or so.
When
I almost literally shrieked “No, no – the eye bag remover is IT!”
- all the practiced bonhomie was gone. There was no more cajoling
conversation. He clamped shut with
a clang as cold as a cash register.
He took the mud-pack box out of the bag they'd prepared for me and
SLAMMED it on the counter. He took the “bonus” accessories out of
the bag and slammed them one-by-one down like bullets hitting plate
glass – BAM, BAM, BAM! It was a decisive shattering of all all
those previous pronouncements of “How pretty! How smart!” I was
dismissed with ultimate disdain.
I'd
been dispatched from the shop so quickly that the girl, maintaining
more of the demeanor of a high school student running for class
President – had to come running trippingly after me down the
street. There was an addendum to my receipt I needed in order to be
able to claim back the VAT I'd been charged. So I'd had been charged
tax after all (which,
come to think of it, has never been rebated despite
the forms I filled out).
So
I schlepped back to my lodgings, filled with sour reflections. All
the savings I'd made by booking a cheap hotel room had been wiped out
with this pointless purchase. I might as well have stayed in luxury
at the Connaught. Why, when there is so much honest work to be done,
work that could lift people to more joyous, improved circumstances-
why then do people waste their own and other people's lives as
telemarketers, as scam artists, as high-pressure peddlers of almost
worthless goods? Why did I always have such a bleak experience of
London? Here was London, presumably one of the most creatively alive
cities in the world, yet I always seemed to end up a beaten dog in
it. Dr. Johnson had said “When you're tired of London, you're tired
of life.” Did all this defeat signal that I was really tired of
life?
Most
of all though I reflected on why, why, I so often allowed myself to
get taken by such hucksters. A few years before, I'd paid five-times
any reasonable price to have some laminate flooring installed. After
that, I had sworn that I would never
buckle to any sales pressure again. And here I was, with my $465
syringe of eye cream. I could even more readily sympathize with
people who confess to crimes they didn't commit under pressure from
insistent, insinuating detectives.
Why
didn't I have the strength to stand firm against these cheesy
blandishments? I rationally knew from the first moment that I'd
fallen in with a ruthless grab for money. So why didn't I, Nancy
Reagan-style - “Just say 'No!'” - to all of it?
Well,
like so many of us, I get intimidated. Perhaps I, more than most
though, always have the specter of the Holocaust, of all Holocausts,
hanging in front of me. I have a sense of how a congenial neighbor
one moment can transform into a vicious tormenter the next, if you
show the slightest divergence from what they want and expect of you,
if you give the least little hint that you are not really “one of
them.” Whenever I think I might be paranoid, exaggerating this kind
of danger beyond all bounds, I recall how the son of a friend of mine
was cruelly ostracized from his school group because his father had
sent him with lunch sandwiches on whole wheat bread – instead of
the then-peer-approved white bread. At the time, I couldn't believe
it, but I've gotten older. On such small infractions hangs the
fellowship of the pack.
Although
I often suspect such grand justification is really hiding what's just
plain cowardice on my part. I'm simply too week-kneed to stand up for
myself. But in any case, I don't think intimidation necessarily plays
the largest part in my being rooked any number of times.
Some
people no doubt get taken because they want to impress the
salesperson. They don't want to lose face when the pitchman slyly
implies that the goods he's peddling are likely to be outside the
range of what his mark can afford. No, for me that isn't a factor.
I'm perfectly willing to admit I booked the cheapest room I could
find in London, that I drive a 1984 Toyota, and that almost
everything in life, financial and otherwise, is in some sense “beyond
me.”
For
many it's a matter of being liked. They don't want to lose the faux
friendship that the salesperson has fabricated. They don't want to
prove themselves unworthy and rupture that bond that they've
convinced themselves has been formed. But again, I don't think such a
motive played a big part in my case. I knew from the first moment
that there was no friendliness there, much less friendship – that
there was not even any liking that could transpire between us. I
would go back home and never see them again. So it didn't matter.
But
I've come to believe that the real motive for my buying something
that I don't want and that I deep-down know isn't any good – is
actually the reverse of the above motive. Instead of my doing it in
order to be liked – I do it in order to like. I do it in order to
continue feeling positive about these other individuals. I try to
hang onto some hope that they are actually trustworthy, sincere
people and that it actually would be in my best interests to buy that
product they are advancing. I want to prolong that moment of
self-delusion. I want to maintain some shred of belief in the
essential goodness of others. And so I rush into a “Yes, Okay,”
even though I know rationally that I'm faced with a cold, calculating
machine. But for that moment I want to blind myself to that truth. I
want to approve. I want to say “Yes,” not only to their product
and to them, but I want to say “Yes!” to the all of it. I want to
be able, in that moment, to render a large affirmation of
all of life.
It's
probably the same with all those Academy Award winners who gush out a
long list of “Thank-you's” to everyone who worked on the movie
with them. In actuality, the movie set had likely been riddled with
back-stabbing, up-staging, grand-standing, temper tantrums, and every
kind of ill-will and misunderstanding imaginable. But
in the moment of their triumph, buoyed into positive energy by their
victory as high as if they had just drunk a double Starbuck's latte –
the world seems a bright and shining place to these winners. They
want to capture and hold onto that moment of ebullience. And
suddenly, the list of people they felt obligated to thank becomes a
list of people they sincerely see in a glow of beneficence. They see
nothing but good intent and themselves as the recipients of
miraculous gifts of generosity. They want to affirm everyone's
goodness in this best of all possible worlds and to stamp the moment
as a moment of grace with their overflowing gratitude. They want to
issue a cosmic “Thank-you” - a cosmic “YES”
So
I
have, not an Academy Award, but
a $500 syringe (not a tube mind you) of eye lotion on my dresser in
Chicago. It sits there, too expensive to throw away, too ineffective
to use. It sits there, a thing that vaguely tainted my time in London
and that now vaguely taints the atmosphere in my bedroom. It's a
reminder of my perennial inability to rebuff what should be rebuffed.
It sits there – and I still have bags under my eyes.
