Why, exactly, did I believe it would be "sexy" and "hot" to have my girlfriend wax my chest? I can offer no good answer to this question today, ten years after the event. I could offer no good answer at the time. What I could offer was a rather far-fetched fantasy, which involved (as far-fetched fantasies so often do) a byzantine set of sub-fantasies. They ran something like this:
1. My girlfriend and I would do a whole bunch of ecstasy;
2. At a certain point, she would disappear into her closet and emerge dressed like Catwoman;
3. Warm wax would magically appear in her paw;
4. She would caress said wax onto my chest, while purring nasty things into my ear;
5. She would pull my hair and tell me what a dirty little monkey I was;
6. The wax would harden, seductively;
7. I would make monkey noises and rub my raging man-bat against her;
8. She would slap me and my boner, but not so hard as to make me weep;
promotion
9. She would start to pull the wax off, viciously, with great, grinning flourishes;
10. This would sting, but in an awesome, S&M kind of way;
11. My smooth, naked chest would look so manly that she would be compelled to lick the entire surface area;
12. Some very serious fucking would ensue.
I don't suppose I have to tell you that my expectations were a bit on the high side. What still astounds me is how spectacularly wrong it all went. And this wasn't your standard sexual miscalculation. The old whip-cream-up-the-cooter-begets-monster-yeast-infection. The I'm-feeling-crazy-tonight-are-you-feeling-crazy-baby-back-sprain-mambo. The let's-do-it-in-a-public-place-Oh-Hi-Officer-deluxe. To which I say (and have said): Ho ho ho. No harm, no foul. Kids.
This was something darker, more malignant. At the risk of getting myself banned for life from Church of American Sanctimony, I would characterize the episode as the Gauntanamo Bay of sexual relations.
A few relevant notes to begin: The wax. It was not the inviting substance I'd envisioned. It was, instead, a thick, pungent glop the color of earwax. I don't know where my girlfriend purchased the stuff. But she heated it on her stove (in a recycled soup can!) to the approximate temperature of lava.
My chest. And specifically the number of hairs upon it. I have not done an exact audit, but I am going to approximate a google. I am talking about a mat on the order of Austin
Beneath a chest-waxing-as-hot-sexual-come-on lay a more problematic paradigm.
Powers. To give you the proper mental image, I should note that a friend of mine once referred to this region, not unkindly, as my chestfro. My girlfriend. She was sweet. She was gorgeous. She was, rather sweetly, rather gorgeously, a sadist. She also happened to be Cuban-American, which lent her an unresolved, self-dramatizing quality. There was a pronounced violent streak in her family. She worked out a great deal. Although she stood less than five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds in sports bra and garters, I feel safe in observing that she could have beaten me to a pulp.
Me. I was frightfully insecure, with good cause, as I was living in South Miami Beach, where everyone was 3.5 times more attractive than me. My girlfriend had made considerable efforts to remedy my chronic gawkiness: a new haircut, new glasses, new clothes. The chest waxing was, in part, one of these self-improvement projects.
And this is where the problem began, I believe. Beneath the chest-waxing-as-hot-sexual-come-on lay a more problematic paradigm: the chest-waxing-as-elimination-of-excessive-Jew-hair. Be that as it may, we went forward with the plan. She spread newspapers on the floor of her living room and put the wax on to boil and I stripped to my skivvies and practiced monkey noises.
The problems began upon application. My girlfriend removed the can of wax from the stove with a pair of tongs. I lay on my back, giggling nervously. She dipped a tongue depressor and ran it along my clavicle. I felt I was perhaps burning. She moved down to the pectoral region. I tried to be stoic about this, while also suggesting (in a hoarse whisper) that we should maybe let the wax cool down.
My girlfriend scoffed. The wax had to be hot. She regularly waxed her own legs. And, as she had informed me regally, she had had her "twat" waxed — presumably for my benefit — on numerous occasions, so anything I might have to say about pain held no sway with her. Indeed, the process was already appealing to her sadism in profound and unwholesome ways.
Let me pause here to point out a physiological fact: chest skin is really sensitive. I'm not going to put it up against twat skin (or whatever I should be calling it) but I will say that the chest, in terms of nerve endings, makes back skin seem like a hide. Even more delicate is the skin of the stomach, and specifically the strip that extends from bellybutton to pelvic bone (aka "The Highway to Hell") which, in the interest of consistency, my girlfriend decided needed to be waxed, too.
About the wax, upon drying: I had envisioned neat little strips ready for the plucking. The reality was more like a small, turbulent sea of gunk. It felt like I had a great deal of gum stuck to my chest. I smelled like a giant crayon.
But the real trouble started with the removal phase.
I was prepared for a brisk, temporary pain, of the sort one encounters when yanking off a Band-Aid. This was more like stabbing at road rash.
Alas, my girlfriend, for all her experience in the leg department, was totally overmatched by my lush chestal thicket. For every square inch of wax, there were somewhere in the area of 19,000 hairs to be yanked. That is — to put it in technical terms — a fuckuva lot of adhesive force. Add to this the fact that the wax was slippery. My girlfriend couldn't get a good grip. She eventually hacked the wax up into slices. This did no good. (There was also the problem of my conduct; I writhed a fair amount.)
The result was a bunch of half-assed yanking, which loosened the hairs in such a manner than I suffered profound epidermal trauma while not actually freeing any of the hairs from their roots. I cannot remember precisely what was said during the ensuing twenty minutes. Here is an approximation, with the yelps edited out.
I returned to the living room in my hacked-up exoskeleton.
Me: Ow! Please. Please, don't — fuck.
Her: It's almost out.
Me: You have to do it faster, really — no! Ow! Fuck! Please move to another strip, that part really — Owwww!
Her: Stop being such a baby.
Me: Please, sweetie. Please, I'm not joking.
Her: Lie still. Just fucking lie still and let me. Me: Owwwww. You fucking bitch. You fucking mean bitch.
We were not communicating effectively.
The intrepid reader is, at this point, wondering when the nipple will hit the fan. Oddly, it will not. No, we didn't even make it to the nipples, though certainly my girlfriend had designs.
What actually brought this sad ballet to a close was the initial (and final) moment of success: my girlfriend managed to tear free a single, mangled chunk of wax-and-hair. I climbed to my feet and marched to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw dabs of blood on my tortured skin.
It occurred to me at this point that we were probably not going to have sex.
I returned to the living room, encased in my hacked-up exoskeleton, and informed my girlfriend that I'd had enough. She looked at me with an expression that traveled beyond contempt, into the deeper regions of pity. "Fine," she said, and went to get Chinese takeout.
It was unclear what I should do. I was furious and humiliated. She was disgusted. We were in a fight. I considered placing a call for help, but to whom? Did the library carry a copy of Waxing for Dummies? Was there a local support group for the sadomasochistically challenged?
In the end, I found an old pair of scissors and cut away most of the wax, then shaved my chest and belly with my girlfriend's razor. And I must admit that I felt, for a few hours there, really young and hot. And gay.
Then the itching began.
I spent the next month clawing at my chest. My girlfriend and I soon broke up. But I learned a valuable lesson. Namely, that most healthy relationships should not depend on the administration of hot wax for sexual enhancement. And, of course, that the enemy of my chest hair is the enemy of me. n°
To buy Almond's book The Evil B.B. Chow ,
click here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Almond is the author of the story collection My Life in
Heavy Metal and the nonfiction book Candyfreak. His new collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, contains several of his stories for Nerve.com. To
find out what kind of music he listens to, check out www.stevenalmond.com.
