Falling Prey in a London Fog

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.