Low life
Twin pools
Jeffrey Bernard
Imet a very nice woman the other day who told me, 'I would like to drown in your eyes.' I'm not quite sure what that means but it is, I'm sure, very flattering unless she means that by wanting to drown in my eyes she wants a blood bath. But people do say the most extraordinary things, don't they? I can remember with some horror and embarrassment telling a couple of women in the distant past, 'I can't live without you.' As it happens I've lived quite well without either of them but at least I've never told a woman that I wanted to run barefoot through her hair. But although one makes a conscious effort not to talk crap a few drinks can bring out the most dreadful stuff. One lady has re- minded me that when I first met her I said, 'I don't want a one night stand with you. I want a thousand and one nights.' Where does such nonsense come from? Is it stored up in brain cells that one thought were dead? Does my vodka temporarily revive brain cells that it is about to kill? Apart from people in love and lust the con man and broke man come out with some awful lines. As Tom Baker said to me, if you're rich you don't have to think. You don't need lines. Pm very cautious with men in pubs who suddenly say to me, 'I'll tell you what I'll do with you. . .
But the anatomy of the love lorn is something of a mystery to me. When people say, 'You're breaking my heart,' they do in fact usually mean that you're breaking their genitals. And why did that woman last week want to drown in my eyes? What on earth is wrong with wanting 'I'm not mad about the Falklands either, but it's probably the safest place on earth for a holiday.' to drown in my ears? They are perfectly formed and in tune to Mozart. Anyway, in this bloody weather they are as blue as my eyes. Woman have got a funny thing about eyes. Windows of the soul say some poets but records of the past say I. Anyone with the soppy eyes of a gun-dog can't go wrong with ladies. Come to think of it I've got a thing about eyes too and I find people with very, very dark brown eyes, like black buttons, can be extremely dodgy. Men with very pale blue eyes, so pale that they are the colour of dirty ice, as Raymond Chandler put it, usually pack a very hard punch.
Another nasty reminder I got last week was that apparently I told a lady after she'd asked me, 'When do you want to see me again?' In five minutes and that'll be too long.' It makes you want to puke. You do realise, I hope, that if you asked someone if they thought you should compare them to a summer's day, they'd have you locked up. But I should think that Shakespeare got his fair share and if you're going to talk like this it's obviously better to address a woman than a Grecian urn. Mind you, you could drown in a Grecian urn just like you could in my eyes. Perhaps line-shooting is just the dead poet in all of us coming out. My own preference is for a bit of honesty and I very much favour telling ladies, 'Excuse me, I'd like to make you very unhappy.' (The 'Excuse me' is unnecessary and simply a hangover from an expensive but bad education.) But I don't need lines for myself any more. My friends provide them for me. It is almost a guarantee of getting the 'leg over' if they say to a woman, 'Don't have anything to do with Jeff, he's trouble/a shit/a disaster area/he drinks/goes racing/etc.' Why are they so stupid as to think that they are doing me a disservice with such disloyalty? I thank them from the bottom of the blue pools of my eyes in which hundreds of women have drowned. And to go back to this thing of people having ideas of anatomy all screwed-up, I once met a bloke who swore that if you named an almost unheard of part of someone's body to them you just couldn't go wrong. He used to say to women things like, 'You've got the most beautiful thumbs I've ever seen.' (In good summer weather elbows will suffice.) I had a girlfriend once who was strangely in- volved with my feet. They're small. Size seven. And when the diabetes and the Middlesex Hospital finally get to them think I'll send them to her. What does annoy me is that I've got some very nice scars from cigarette burns and falling down stairs but no woman has expressed a desire to drown in them so far. Meanwhile it's back to the Oxford Book of Quotations 01 search of another line to shoot. I wonder how on earth Doctor Johnson chatted someone up. 'Madam, will you dance And another thing; I'm going to a ship's , chandler to buy life belts for my eyes. .1 don't want too many women drowning tn, them. We won't be able to see the wood for the trees.
Previous page
