Thought I’d share a chapter from my soon to be unpublished book. It’s a collection of short stories from my insane days in college where let’s just say I had money to burn and an obsession with becoming wanted by women which caused some body issues. Enjoy!
“Ladies, I Feel Your Pain” by Ethan Banville
I come from a long line of hairy French men. Hairy arms, hairy legs, happy trails galore. And balls? Don’t even get me started on them. Strangely, I never thought I was that hairy. I guess coming from a town of French, Portuguese and Italians makes you think a body hair Snuggie is the norm. I didn’t realize I had a body hair problem until my sophomore year. Having solved one much bigger problem in my life, I began obsessing about my new issue. There had to be a way to deal with this and take me from little bear to Marky Mark in no time.
My first plan was to take on the body hair with a razor. I went to town with the hairs on my back, the razor easily decimating the thin wispy hairs with only a few swipes; zip, zap, zup! I ran my hand over the area, feeling a smoothness I’d not felt since before puberty. This is what I was looking for. It was so easy. Thanks Gillette! “The best a man can get,” indeed. I turned around and started on the front. Zip, zap — wow that razor got jammed with hair pretty quick. I rinsed it out and went back to work. Zip, zap– Ouch! Damn! I guess the blade’s already dull. Lot more hair up front, that makes sense. After thirty more minutes, and three more razors, I was done. The result on the front was not so satisfying. Unlike my Marky Mark back, my front was more like Homer Simpson’s five o’clock shadow. This was a really bad idea.
As quickly as I had shaved it off the hair began growing back and itching like hell. It was like sandpaper to the touch and the situation only got worse with each passing day. Soon, my shirt was sticking to it like Velcro. I couldn’t take it so I grabbed up a new razor and shaved it all off again. Thus began the vicious cycle of razor addiction. I was at the mercy of my follicles and without even an enjoyable buzz of hairlessness. I tried so hard to break the cycle, but even if I was strong enough to hold out for the chest hair, the stomach hair would be too much and I’d end up shaving it all. I can only imagine how retarded I appeared. It was like someone put my body together from different eras. My head, modern day grunge. My chest, seventies porn star. My stomach, eighties Olympian swimmer. My legs, 30‘s movie werewolf. After a month of splitting my body parts’ identities with body hair styling, I finally got my shit together enough to hold tough and let it grow out.
Over the next few weeks I spent every hour with my torso covered. When showering, I made sure I entered and exited from behind the curtain only when the bathroom was empty which lead to some unusually long showers. Thankfully, much like the crack draining out of the junky’s system, the hair slowly grew back and the want to re-shave waned. My T-shirts no longer sticking to my chest, it was time to find another way to a less hairy me.
One night, during a commercial break from Start Trek TNG, an infomercial came on with a new way to solve my problem with body hair. Over video of hairless women’s legs and men’s smooth chests a woman spoke.
“Do you have unwanted hair?”, the pleasant lady asked.
‘Yes’, I thought. ‘Yes, I do.’
“Tired of the mess of home waxing kits?”
‘No. Wait, what? Home waxing kits?’
“For just nineteen ninety-five you can get not one, but two tubes of Shitty’s all natural hair remover. Enough to wax both legs for months to come.”
Before even hearing the rest of the pitch, I picked up the phone and started to dial. Apparently I wasn’t the only one calling, ‘cuz I was put on hold. As a didgeridoo version of The Beatles’ “Octopus’ Garden” played, I continued watching the infomercial. Apparently its creator, a plump Aussie Sheila, had been messing around with things in her kitchen and come up with something resembling tree sap that could rip the hair out by the root from any part of your body. Even that didn’t deter me. After a few more bars of musac, a lovely woman with a southern accent came on and I happily gave her my credit card.
From there the countdown started. I knew it would be at least a couple of weeks before I received it. I mean it was coming from Australia after all. So I told myself ‘good things come to those who wait’ and tried my best not to obsessively check the mail every day. Instead, I lay there at night in my dorm room, smoking grass and staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about a hairless me. With just a little help from an Aussie housewife, I soon would be the picture of perfection. My muscled and toned body revealed to the world and soon to take over Marky Mark’s place in the minds of every girl on campus.
A few more weeks passed before I opened my mailbox to find a green pickup slip in my post box. I quickly jogged around to the pickup window and presented my claim ticket. As the student postmaster dug through a large bin of what surely contained care packages, school supplies and refills of antidepressants, my heart started to beat faster. The anticipation was mounting, my stomach turned and I felt like I had to move my bowels. The postmaster returned with my package and I sprinted up the stairs to my dorm room as quickly as I could climb them.
I ran into my room, ran back out to use the bathroom, then ran back in and stared at the package in front of me. Strangely, the return address was in Texas. Thinking it must be their international distribution center, I tore open the packaging. Inside was some literature on the product, which I tossed, a catalogue of other products which I tossed, and finally the two large tubes of solution to my problem. I pulled one out and read the “Tips and Tricks.”
What is the Shitty’s Natural Gel made from?
Shitty’s Natural Hair Removal Gel has been created from all natural ingredients, such as molasses, lemon juice, honey and vinegar.
What is so different about the Shitty’s Gel?
Shitty’s is natural
Shitty’s is water-soluble
Shitty’s doesn’t require heating
Shitty’s removes hair from the roots
Hair may not come out if:
It is not at least 3-5mm long
The area is not clean and free from makeup and moisturisers (their spelling, not mine)
The area is not dried after using the cleansing wipes
Too thick a layer of gel is applied – it needs to be thin
You do not pull off the strip in the opposite direction of hair growth
You pull off the cotton strip upwards rather than close to the skin
The skin was not held taut
It all seemed quite straightforward and simple minus the spelling error. I decided not to judge the quality of their product on that. Maybe “moisturizer” was spelled with an “s” in Australia. Like “gray” was spelled “grey” in England.
Ignoring that, and other warnings in the text about possible, bruising, rashes and burning, I pulled off my shirt and readied myself for hairlessness. Taking an “applicator” (aka popsicle stick) and squeezed some of the goo on to it. It looked like the dark amber the mosquitoes were found in “Jurassic Park”, had the consistency of tree sap, and smelled like horse dung. Picking a spot on my stomach, I smeared on the goo, and placed a cotton strip on top. Pulling the skin taught as directed, I took a deep breath, then with one hand pulled back hard and fast.
“Motherfucker!”, I screamed.
My eyes tearing up, I looked down at the spot. All the hair was still there. I reread the directions, the “tips and tricks” and met all the criteria. I hoped maybe I just didn’t get it right the first time; that maybe there was a learning curve. I prepared another spot, this time on my back and doing my impression of a contortionist, ripped it off with the same result.
“Motherfucker!”, I yelped.
It didn’t fucking work! I had been taken. That god damn Aussie housewife had cooked up something in her kitchen, but it wasn’t a path to hairlessness. Apparently the recipe for deceit consists of molasses, lemon juice, honey and vinegar. With that recipe, my body hair would live another day.
A few months later, I was kicking back in my room getting a b.j. from a neighbor gal. After the act, we began conversing about body hair and methods of removal. Apparently she had hair down there and was obsessed with getting it off.
“Fuck that waxing shit. When I have money, I’m going to get electrolysis everywhere. I don’t want a hair left on me when I’m done.”
“What’s electrolysis?”, I asked.
“The only way to permanent hair removal.”, she said in a seemingly preprogrammed sales pitch.
‘Permanent hair removal?’ That’s what I was looking for.
“Ah, science.”, I said filled with glee. “They couldn’t find a way to cure cancer, but apparently the body hair war is over.”
I booted her ass out and grabbed the yellow pages from my drawer. Under “E” there was nothing about electrolysis. Just electricians and electro hydraulic machinery consultants. This so wasn’t fair. The carrot of hairlessness had been dangled in front of me for which I had the money but didn’t have the access! God dammit!
A few weeks later, I was thrilled to come across a few ads in the Boston Phoenix for places offering electrolysis. I sifted through and picked one located on the end of Newbury Street by all the high-end boutiques. I figured rich vaginas go there for treatment, why shouldn’t I?
My first appointment was a bit unfair. Unfair in that I didn’t really have a chance to make an informed decision since the woman who would be doing the process was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Petite and perfectly shaped with long chestnut hair and a smile that could create world peace. The schoolboy inside my head told me I wanted nothing more than to spend at least an hour once a week with this woman and let her get to know me as she removed my hairy exterior to reveal the Adonis within. She asked me to pull off my shirt and I obliged, shamefully putting my hairy-ness out there.
“Oh, you’re not so bad.”, she said. “Most guys who come in here are much hairier than you. Sometimes I can’t even see skin.”
I was in love. This delicate, perfect little twenty-something was telling me I wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t thought about what age does to men’s bodies. For some they sag, for others they grow hair. I was just ahead of my classmates on the fur factor. Soon they would catch up with me and feel my pain. At this point, I should have taken her opinion to heart and walked out, but I had come here with a mission; to become a hairless Adonis that every woman desired. I told her to crank it up.
“What area do you want to work on?”, she asked.
“I dunno, there’s a lot to choose from.” I replied.
“Really, I don’t think it’s that bad. If you did anything I’d lose the stuff on your back. There’s not too much and for me that’s the only thing I don’t like when it comes to body hair on a guy.”
With the decision made, I lied on my stomach as she prepared a strange looking machine with dials denoting different electronic measurements and two cables hanging out of it. She fitted a thin needle to one cable, then picked up the other that led to a short, stubby, metal rod. She wrapped a sponge around it and stuck it in my waistband.
“Helps complete the circuit.”, she said.
At that point I realized what I was about to experience. I had played with enough Radio Shack electronic play kits to know what “complete the circuit” meant. It meant that electricity was part of the process and however many volts she selected would come out the end of the needle she held in her hand and shoot into my skin. She smiled at me, holding tweezers in one hand and the probe in the other.
“I’m gonna start you out slow. So you can get used to the pain.”
Now I had been alive for nineteen years at that point, been a skateboarder for ten of them, and I had felt pain. Pain from bruises, cuts and broken bones. I had even felt the pain of getting a tattoo. There was one thing I was pretty sure the whole world would agree on; pain is not something you ever get “used to.” She pushed down on the foot pedal and a warm sensation starting quickly building at the follicle site to what could only be described as something Dick Cheney would recommend for use in terrorists interrogation.
“How was that?”
“Not too bad.”, I said through a forced smile.
“Good, she said, then we can turn it up and get some real work done.”
My balls crawled up in my stomach to hide as I gripped the sides of the table and endured an hour of pinpoint pain all over my back. When it was finished she held a mirror for me to check out her work. It was amazing. Sure I was covered in red bumps and my back looked like a fifteen year old’s forehead, but now there were two small hairless spots. It was exactly what I wanted for the other ninety-nine percent of my body. Like a mother twelve months after childbirth, I had already forgotten about the pain and decided to book another appointment.
I pursued this route for the next couple of months. Meeting with my torturing beauty and losing hairs one by one. Although it seemed to be working, it just wasn’t working fast enough. She had to remove one hair at a time and there were thousands that needed the old heave ho. At the rate things were going, I’d be going to her for the next hundred years before I’d obtain the results I needed. I quickly lost faith in the new technology and began looking for another solution.
A few weeks later I was hooking up with a freshman girl and was intrigued to find when I put my face between her legs that she had no hair on her vagina. No stubble, no anything. I had to stop and ask her how old she was. “Oh, I’m eighteen.”, she said smiling. “I just got waxed yesterday. Got it all taken off. They call it a Brazilian.”
I couldn’t believe it. Waxing was something I had never pursued. Mostly because of my debacle with the Aussie woman’s home hair removal kit. This, on the other hand, obviously worked. There wasn’t a hair in sight. At that moment I knew what I had to do. Screw the shit out of this girl and get the name of her waxer.
The next day I called first thing in the morning and set up an appointment. I told the woman on the phone I wanted to come in asap to have my entire body waxed. After a brief pause, she spoke.
“Did you say your ENTIRE body?”
“Yes, ma’am. I want it all off.”
“Um. Okay. How tall are you?”
An odd question I thought, but surely she’s a professional and it must serve some purpose to have that number to plug into some mathematical waxing equation. I told her my height and she told me I’d need about an hour and a half and that it would cost a hundred dollars. After spending almost a thousand dollars on electrolysis, it seemed like quite a deal to have all my hair removed for a hundred bucks. That afternoon I hopped on the C train and went to the waxing spot.
It was a peaceful place; many beautiful coeds coming and going. I noticed I was the only man there, but I didn’t care. Most of the girls in the place looked like Boston University girls and I never had much run in with them. For all they knew I was there for a pedicure. That would just mean I was gay, not a crazy dude obsessed with body hair. An older woman appeared in the back doorway and motioned me to follow her. We walked down the hall and entered a room with a massage table and what looked like a hot plate with a can of honey on top of it.
“Welcome to the house of pain.”, she said.
My balls crept into their cubby hole.
“House of pain?”, I asked.
“Let’s start out with a tough spot, see how you handle it.”
She dipped a tongue depressor in the pool of hot-plate goo and smeared it on my leg. It was warm and sticky like the floor of a movie theater in July without air conditioning. She took a long strip of paper, then rubbed it in, like she was plastering a cast.
“One, two—“ RIP!
The pain was, well… Whereas the natural method just unsuccessfully pulled on the hairs and the electrolysis was local to one spot, this pain was like a combination of both covering a large area with surface and pinpoint pain. It was like biting your tongue, scraping your knee and getting kicked in the balls all at the same time. That said, the results were astounding. I looked down at my leg and saw a three by eight inch rectangle of smooth, bare skin amongst a forest of hair.
“How was that?”, she asked.
“Amazing.”
The next hour was filled with the greatest pain I’ve ever felt. I’m now convinced that if every CIA agent went through a full body wax, we’d never have to worry about them crumbling from torture. By the time she was finished I was hairless, red and exhausted. I stood up and looking the mirror, I smiled. I was a hairless Adonis, ready to take my place on the Calvin Klein billboard.
The next night I hooked up with that freshman again and showed her the new me. At first she seemed to be a bit confused by it, but after kissing hairless me from head to toe she said she quite liked it. We screwed for hours in a hairless bliss, then fell asleep, skin against skin.
My life less hair was a short one. A week or two later I began to notice re-growth. First a spec, then some stubble, then the itchiness began. This time it wasn’t just my chest and stomach. It was my whole body! I was entering re-growth hell. The waxing had worked, but only temporarily and damn if I was going to go through that again. All I could do was lie back, scratch and pray that by the time all the hair grew out, science would have something quick and permanent to offer.
