Low life
Bad habits
Jeffrey Bernard
Vera's replacement could have been disastrous, but, as it is, she is a very good girl called Nicky, only 23 but very willing and co-operative. This morning she brought me breakfast in bed and then helped me to have a bath. I suppose there are men in their sixties who would relish the idea of being bathed by a girl of her age, but the only dirt about me nowadays occasionally collects under my fingernails, and I can't be bothered to speculate about young women, most of whom irritate me by their skittishness and insistence on seeing life as a slice of romantic musical comedy. Anyway, I simply sat in the bath feeling slightly humiliated by it all and staring with something akin to horror at my one leg as she washed it, which is now about as thick as a matchstick.
She may have already got me into dietary bad habits We both eat baguettes for lunch, and I just cannot be bothered to cook twice a day any more. I mostly have her buy me cheese and salad baguettes, and people with renal failure are not allowed hard cheese or tomatoes. But, then, who takes any notice of hospital diets and dieticians? Since hospitals are centres for health, I wonder how they can come to terms with the fact that they are always serving up rubber-like slices of sliced bread.
Another method of slow suicide I have adopted is eating banana and walnut cake, both ingredients being killers for the likes of me. The point is that I would rather have a heart attack induced by an excess of potassium than struggle breathless to the grave because of excess fluid. Neither am I allowed shellfish, which is just as well when you consider the price of it, but I think I will treat myself to a lobster this weekend. I find it hard to believe that diets can kill, although custard cream biscuits can cer- tainly turn most of the office girls I have met into seriously ugly puddings. Anyway, Nicky has bought me a chicken and salad baguette for lunch and I hope to have an excess of red meat tonight for supper. It remains to be seen whether or not my impurities can break a £15,000 dialysis machine.
Meanwhile, hanging on by my fingertips up here in Berwick Street, I saw with some sadness this week that one of my American heroes, Tony Zale, died at the amazing age of 83. It was round about the time I left school that he and another folk hero, Rocky Graziano, had their three epic fights for the World Middleweight Champi- onship, which were, at the time, described by American sports writers as being sheer war.
The two of them fired my imagination more than any other two sporting men in the world, and I can't describe to you what a hell of a childish kick I got out of eventu- ally and not long ago meeting both of them and even getting to know Graziano a little. He died nearly 10 ten years ago.
But the first time I went to New York it was a heady and strange mix to have break- fast most mornings with Francis Bacon in the Algonquin and then to sip cocktails in a branch of Gallagher's in the evenings with Tony Zale, the 'man of steel' from Gary, Indiana. He was so quiet and charming that you would never have thought he was one of the ring's all-time greats, and the only hint that there was about him that he could do anybody some serious damage was the colour of his eyes. What they call killer's eyes. They were so pale, they were the colour of ice.
It was good to see that the obituary peo- ple in the Times gave Tony Zale such a decent piece of space. Sometimes they get their priorities right. Graziano will always be better remembered since they made the film about him, Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman. Originally, they got Tony Zale to play himself, but, nice and gentle as he was, he just could not learn how to pull his punches and apparently he really hurt Paul Newman. Too bad. Nice, though, to see a film star really earn all that money.
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