(no subject)

My brother’s babysitter taught me to shave my legs when I was 12.  My legs just kept getting hairier and hairier and I kept willing my mother to notice and to do something to help me.  I had started cutting my underarm hair with her sewing scissors.  But I was scared to try shaving on my own.  And scared to ask my mom, because she seemed to be willfully blind, like she was working very hard at not noticing that I was growing up.  But Lisa took me under her wing and bought be razors and shaving cream and showed me what to do.  She was my ideal of femininity.  My mother was the kind of 80’s Wasp where the men and women dress almost the same, and both look like they might still be wearing their school uniforms from 1962.  But Lisa was plump and curvy and wore a red strapless bikini when she was helping my mother in the garden (so she could work on her tan).  She drove a beat up red Rabbit and sang along to Linda Ronstadt’s greatest hits (which I loved because it reminded me of my much played “Urban Chipmunk” tape).

But I was also pretty sure she was sleeping with my father.  It was the way he ignored me when she was around, brushed off my questions about how rainbows work to tell her dirty jokes.  And, of course, the time I saw Lisa giggling and running into my parents’ bedroom, with my dad chasing right behind her.

She stopped babysitting for us and went to get an associate’s degree in retail management.

But one morning she stopped by unexpectedly when my mother was away.  I was 13; I had lost 40 pounds and gotten a perm, and started wearing makeup and underperforming on science tests, all in an (ultimately doomed) effort to bootstrap myself into popularity.

I was in the kitchen, leaning over with my hair hanging down, trying to tie one of my mother’s silk scarves around my head.  When Lisa came in and said, “Who are you?” I flipped my hair over, and said, confused, “It’s me.  It’s Elsa.”

She laughed.  “You look so much older.  I thought you were the new girl."  Which I interpreted to mean my father’s new mistress, but which maybe just meant the new babysitter.

It was nice to have people think I was older, but it was a little unsettling.  A reminder, along with my father saying, when we were out without my mom, "People probably think you’re my date,” that I was approaching the age of the girls he dated (Lisa had been sixteen when she started babysitting for us, and my mother told me later, she had been nervous about it, it just seemed risky to have such a beautiful underage girl in the house).

The new bohemians

"Holmes’ props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses swilling their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to research and acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we can imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but specially tooled by a bespoke chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.

The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian stereotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness – the “black moods” which come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks “in the dumps”, when he doesn’t “open my mouth for days on end”. For a doctor like Conan Doyle, this would have been a recognised medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, neurasthenic ‘type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse.

…It’s interesting that, in The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings with a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but the morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps Doyle felt that morphine had rather too strong a whiff of a medical condition, where by contrast cocaine was at most a ‘vice’.

…But the great detective’s career, which ran until the 1920s, witnessed a dramatic turnaround in cocaine’s public image. Concern about its effects built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, but by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, which was also running editorials about the ‘cocaine menace’.

Doyle had been gradually pruning back the references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s “weakness”, but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the chapter by stating that Holmes had been “weaned” from his “drug mania” by Dr. Watson – an incongruous detail which lacks support in any of the earlier stories – and, furthermore, that this “drug mania” had “threatened to check his remarkable career”, an interpolation which is entirely inconsistent with the original set-up. Holmes, too, recants thoroughly, calling the hypodermic syringe an “instrument of evil”. But Collier’s were happy: Doyle’s position was explicit, even if incompatible with his original intentions, and Holmes’ cocaine habit remained in the early and formative fictions to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations."

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Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the 19th Century by Mike R Jay