>>> The Lady's Shave
By staff writer NG Hatfield
February 13, 2008
David was absolutely revolted by vaginas. He slumped in the diner’s bright red leather seat and scooped scrambled eggs to his mouth with a soup spoon while he repeated his thoughts: “I am seriously, seriously disgusted by pussy,” and, “Vaginas make me so queasy,” and, “I can’t imagine what gross stuff is up there.”
“I thought you’d at least be moderate about them,” I finally said, emphasizing the word moderate as a little joke to myself. “They don’t mean anything to you one way or the other. Right?”
It seemed only logical that a gay man be neutral to the feminine composition. I figured he saw pussy like I saw a glass of water. Or, at the very least, the gracefully sexless features of a Barbie doll. Like sitting in a diner with a gay man and a beautiful woman who doesn’t want to have sex. Like feeling nothing, I guess, is what I mean.
“No. That’s not how it goes, boy.” David threw a palm in the air and made some dramatic, diva-looking face. I didn’t ask for any more explanation, but he decided to enlighten me anyway. “You know,” he asked, “how sick you feel when you think of gay men?”
“No. Not really.” I said.
David put a finger to the side of his lip and squinted, “Gay men having sex.”
“I don’t think about that.”
“Think about it now.”
“I tried to bring desire back to my libido: Personally, I’m a fan of the vagina. I winked at her. Hard.”
“Nope,” I said.
Tiffany laughed and took a sip of her coffee. I felt it odd that she had remained so silent for the conversation—considering, as David put it, she possessed and maintained a vagina—but her laugh was pleasant, courteous, ebullient. Tiffany was a well-behaved woman; she had been paying attention enough to laugh.
David frowned and went back to his eggs. “These are cold.”
“At least you have food,” I said, then immediately felt rude for it. It wasn’t his fault I didn’t have anything in front of me.
“Eggs always get cold so quickly,” Tiffany said.
I thought, So do you, bitch and continued to listen to their nebulous conversation on chicken ovum.
I didn’t notice it immediately, but as I began to hear the echoes of consciousness again, I came to appreciate just how fat our waitress was. I mean, she was obese. She waddled over to our table and I noticed that her ankles poured over her shoes and her double chin swayed like a tire swing of skin.
She asked, “You kids need anything else?“
She wore this bright orange frock, the color of road cones or warning signs. If she had a more pleasant disposition, she might have reminded me of the sun.
“Can I please, please have a coffee?” It was the third time I asked and I was desperate for something to drink. I had terrible dry-mouth, the result of drinking way too much alcohol. It was the third try; I considered it something begged for. The second time I demanded the coffee. The first, I just fucking asked politely.
She shook her withered head at me, “No. You’re too damned drunk.” Her jowls jiggled and her face puffed out in folds of wrinkles. “I shouldn’t even let you sit in here. Drunk as all hell, like you are.”
I appreciated the truth. Finally.
I realized that my crudeness wouldn’t get me the coffee, but I figured that since the waitress—a paid employee—cussed, I sure as hell had the right give it back to her: “Wouldn’t it make more goddamned sense to get me some fucking coffee so I wouldn’t be quite as fucking drunk?”
Her mouth remained the same unguarded glob of fat that had insulted me as I ranted. She was not impressed with my “fucking drunk” and something about that made her feel more like a mother. Maybe a grandmother…who smokes cigarettes and keeps the long ashes while she fries up a pancake or something. Maybe not. Still, I could tell by her reaction that the lady had produced offspring.
“No. Now if I hear from you again,” she pointed a finger close to my nose.
I noticed her nametag. Her name was Hope.
“You’ll be out in the parking lot,” she said. And to David and Tiffany, “Here’s your checks, kids. Thanks for coming to the great city of Athens. The great state of Ohio. And I hope you two enjoyed the biggest Halloween party in the country.”
She slipped the little papers under Tiffany’s plate and winked at David who said, “Yes. Oh yes we did.”
I watched Hope walk back to the kitchen. Through a porthole-sized window on this ugly black swinging door, I could see that she poured herself a cup of coffee.
Goddamnit, I thought.
The door beat open. I could see our fat-ass waitress whispering something to the cooks, these two men with mullets and grease-soaked aprons, who nodded and said nothing as they were instructed to watch me. Tackle me if I fucking stole something. Whatever.
Hope was then out of sight and the cooks stared at me from a pair of dirty, flat grills. Prisoners dressed like slovenly milkmen, I thought, in a court room named Kevin’s Diner, waiting for my crime.
Or, my verdict.
I really don’t know.
“But back to vaginas,” David said. Maybe to break the tension caused by the argument with the waitress, maybe to draw attention back to himself. “Aren’t they just totally awful?”
I hadn’t forgotten about vaginas; I silently disagreed.
As Tiffany chewed the last of her English Muffin, she giggled and faked her disapproval of David’s hatred. “Hey now,” she said, “don’t say such mean things.” She licked some butter from her lip and watched me. I can’t explain it fully, but whatever sexual tension between us existed before that moment was erased by the gleaming, asexual swash of spit and breadcrumbs on her upper lip.
I tried to clear my head with a joke. I tried to bring desire back to my libido: “Personally, I’m a fan of the vagina.” I winked at her. Hard, like I had earlier in the night. Some maculated glimmer of hope.
She smiled across the weird brown ceramic of the diner’s table and prodded David with her elbow. “Aww…Little Bear…never even seen a vagina.”
Little Bear. It was a nickname I had gotten earlier that night. I hated it and the circumstances of its creation. And though the process was a difficult one, I hated her “Little Bear” enough to ignore it.
“Aww,” David repeated, “Little Bear.”
“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” I demanded. I hadn’t even thought of saying the words. Or perhaps, I hadn’t even thought of preventing myself from saying it. However, the cruelty in my voice must have created some generic air of hostility, because the entire diner went quiet and looked over at me.
David and Tiffany nodded at each other, smiled and continued talking of vaginas.
I, now completely ignored by everyone, had plenty of time to remember the hours before.
Nine o’clock. Tiffany and I were in the backseat of a buddy’s car and I was all the better for it.
“You know, sex is like Chinese food. It’s not over until you both get your cookie.” She leaned over and winked at me.
“Oh, really? I’ll keep that in mind,” I winked back.
“You should.” She lit a cigarette, sighed and started talking to my buddy Tim, who was driving.
I couldn’t quite hear their conversation; the wind from the open windows rushed in and deafened me. Usually, something like that would annoy me. But it was Halloween and I was sure as hell happy enough to ignore the sound of an air stream. Something about the appreciation of evil excited me. Something about Tiffany.
She was pressed tight against me and the window, raising her arm near a windy gap so her smoke could escape. I only glanced—a tachyon of skin—but I saw all of her.
Her legs. On each a white stalking, a garter belt. Her hips. The silky, loose end of a white negligee. Her tits, a fucking pagan miracle. I returned my eyes to the road ahead. If I hadn’t, at that moment, my night would have been ruined by a raging erection.
In the front of the hood, a few headlights passed and revealed the top of Tim’s costume. There wasn’t much thought involved in it; he had a navy blue towel over his head and a white T-shirt that had “Terrorist“ in permanent marker across the chest.
I pointed this out to him.
“I don’t need a fucking good costume,” he said, “I just want to see some tits.”
I agreed with a shrug.
David, who was in the passenger seat, scoffed.
“What?” Tim asked him.
“Nothing,” David said.
“Okay, then shut the fuck up.”
I laughed, tossed a half-smoked cigarette out and rolled up my window; Tiffany did the same and the car silenced until Tim spoke again, “I can’t wait to get drunk and see women dressed like sluts.”
This statement pretty much summed up Tim: a proud pervert and an active participant in voyeurism since I had known him. And probably before that. He was leaning over the steering wheel looking anticipatory as hell; his hand was inches away from smashing his chin as he turned the wheel; his eyes, for what I could tell, hadn’t blinked since we left. I didn’t know much about what I’d experience in Athens, but I knew that Tim really did want to see women dressed like sluts. And unlike most nights, he had good reason to believe he’d actually see them.
When we got to Athens, it was late. But thankfully, October hadn’t yet caught up with the idea that it was almost November. The wind came in smooth. A Southern breeze. The moon was bright, full, appropriate for Halloween. I could feel the power of occult eroticism. Like witches must when they masturbate.
“So what do you want to do now?” Tim asked. We were leaning on his car’s hood in the parking lot of a Burger King.
“Uh, get some alcohol,” I said.
Tiffany nodded and lit a cigarette, “Yeah, me too.”
David scoffed, as he did only when we talked about tits or getting drunk.
“Shut the fuck up,” Tim said again.
David folded his arms. He was dressed up like a cherub, he said earlier, and I figured that, as soon as I met him (the same second he explained that he was a cherub and not “just a regular angel”), he was just the typified “difficult homosexual.” Tim and Tiffany had warned me about this, asked me to keep my mouth shut. So, I did. Sort of.
“I want to listen to some music,” I said. I hoped that Tiffany bought the idea that I was relaxed, carefree, ready and willing to satisfy all of her sexual needs.
“Yeah,” she said, “Music is nice.”
Tim spun off of the hood, “But women dressed–”
“Like sluts. We know,” David said. Before Tim got a chance to scold him for talking out of line, the gay man got up and ran like he was flying. Flying on the ground into a swarm of people. Some watched him and a few welcomed him into the crowd with an irregular round of applause.
I saw children in devil suits walking down the road followed by a few college girls in lingerie. A father, dressed as Batman and his son as Robin were sitting on a street corner near a yellow fire hydrant looking more homosexual than David did in his angel—I mean cherub—suit. A girl was crying and the painted whiskers of her cat costume ran down like a diluted black mudslide from her cheeks. She was taking sanctuary under a boutique’s plastic awning and screaming, “You bastard!” into her cell phone. A Christian youth organization was scampering around like small dogs, trying to recruit people to join a root beer party. They kept shouting in my direction, “We’ve got a frickin’ keg of root beer!”
A frickin’ keg of root beer? How deliciously futile, I thought and smiled.
One of the girls from the youth group sauntered up to Tiffany, David and I. Evidently, she figured that my smile was directed at her. This made her pleasantly confident.
“Hi, I’m Yvonne.”
She was a good-looking Christian girl. Brunette. Dressed conservatively from head to foot. A buttoned-up white blouse covered all the right areas and something about the contrast to the other women made her pretty fucking sexy.
“I’m doing a survey,” she said.
“Okay. How can I assist you,” I said, winked.
Tiffany looked away.
“Are you in college?”
“Yep.”
“Do you plan on drinking tonight?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, just one more thing,“ she said, “give me your life in three words.”
Three words, I thought and once I got the answer, I couldn’t keep the grin from my face.
“Totally,” I said.
“Mhm,” she wrote it down on a little, fat, pink notebook.
“Fucking. Awesome.”
As Yvonne left us, I knew that I had scored major points with Tiffany. She laughed and grabbed my arm very firmly as we marched forward, through the multitudes of plastic, lace and skin.
Though at first the crowd was immense—throngs of people swaggering shoulder to shoulder in the man-made valleys of flat-faced buildings and shitty streets of Athens, Ohio—by one in the morning the girls dressed like sluts had headed into the frat houses and/or barricaded parties.
Two straight men, a girl and a gay dude, was not a beneficial guy-to-girl ratio for them, so, none of the parties’ owners let us join their celebrations. We gave it another try. And then another. Then another. Finally one dude, this middle-aged guy dressed up like a Roman Gladiator, let us into his place.
Tim and I paired off, drank hard from a keg for about an hour, got a decent buzz, and started fraternizing with some girls from Michigan. These two blondes from Detroit.
I figured that if I wanted to get in with Tiffany later that night, my best chance would be to appear as attractive as possible when other women were around. I was to ignore her, basically.
I had picked my blonde and Tim had picked his and there seemed to be an agreement as to who got who in the potential scenario of us getting laid. I felt brazen and started making jokes. Drunk jokes, of course. But they were working. I saw a pothos on the Gladiator’s coffee table and commented on it, “What the fuck is a plant doing here?”
My girl giggled, so I figured I’d keep going with the plant jokes. “Yeah, if I had a plant…I think I’d name it Robert.”
“Robert?” she asked.
“Yeah, Robert Plant.”
I could tell by her scowl that she didn’t get the joke. But Tim enjoyed it. He coughed up some beer and gave me an emphatic high five. He screamed, “TANGERINE! TANGERINE!”
I figured I’d cut my losses with the girls from Michigan; I moved to another group of girls, near a different set of plants.
Tim kept screaming Zeppelin lyrics.
After ten minutes or so, I heard a shout from across the place. Tim had spilled a pitcher of beer on the Gladiator’s floor and proceeded to mop it up with his Terrorist towel.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I heard the Roman thug ask Tim.
Tim looked up from his knees and stayed in character, “Jihad!” then, “Nobody’s fault but mine!” And he laughed like hell.
“What are you on?” Gladiator asked him.
“I’m just a fool in the rain.”
“Get out of my house.”
“I guess we should hit a bar.” Tim looked in the rearview for a place to back out of our spot. He had calmed down considerably since our walk back to the car and I think everybody was happier for it. Though, now our car was stuck. It was about three in the morning and the Burger King was fucking packed.
“I’m down for a bar,” I said.
Outside, a chubby girl in a white bikini—which translates into a fat girl—was licking mayonnaise off her knuckles and raising a Double Whooper over her head, like a trophy, to her friends.
“Where can we go?” Tim asked.
“Anywh–” I stopped, realized we were much more limited than that.
“But how old are you?”
Tiffany looked at me from the rigid corner of Tim’s car. The fat girl tapped on the window.
“Eighteen.”
“You’re only eighteen?” Tiffany asked. She seemed insulted.
“Yes?”
“Well, I’m hitting a bar,” Tim said, “I’ll take you kids to a motel.”
I figured Tim knew about my age. Through his pursuit of pussy, I was genuinely fucked for the evening. Nevertheless, I remained hopeful for the possibility of touching the places that were covered on Tiffany‘s body.
Four in the morning. She was spread-eagle on the motel’s dirty bed, said, “Come over here,” and winked at me as she had before.
I realized then that I was lucky enough to get by the age difference: she was 24, I was a young adult, too. What did it matter? Raw sexual energy knows no boundaries!
I walked as suavely as I could up to the edge of the bed and stared up her long legs. I removed my shirt. Maybe, a bit too emphatically. I don’t know. Because once it was off, I could see that Tiffany was laughing.
“Aww, Little Bear!” she laughed like hell.
“Goddamnit!” I said.
“Little Bear!” she repeated.
I heard David, in the room adjacent to Tiffany’s, screaming it too, “Little Bear! Little Bear!”
Infuriated. Incensed. I felt an anger well up in my gut and through my arms. I could’ve punched her, the wall. I don’t know.
I put my shirt back on and started ripping the plastic caps from the little bottles of liquor that Tiffany kept in her overnight bag. She didn’t protest; she was too busy laughing.
I looked out the diner’s window into a parking lot. I couldn’t feel shittier than I did at that moment. And I only know this now because I have yet to feel that shitty.
Little Bear.
Aside from the Buick that would get me home, two Fords and a Sunfire were sitting in the early morning dark looking strangely attentive. A thin layer of frost glazed their bodies and windshields.
Little Bear.
I looked away from Tiffany and David and began tapping a pepper shaker on the counter to the rhythm of some old Civil War hymn.
“Hey,” I said, “are you going to pay those fucking checks or what?” I realized that I was now obviously angry; I was openly trying to drown out the stupid conversation, to get out of Kevin’s Diner. I was embarrassed, but pissed enough to drown it out.
They kept going on about how strange it was that David didn’t like pussy and how funny it was that Tiffany was getting “defensive” about it. It was exhausting, if only because they were doing it to spite me.
I got tired of the taps and the hymn and sat thinking about the nickname itself. I had made it a pretty long time without confronting the issue.
Little Bear.
Little Bear.
I thought about sleeping in my car before I headed back to Morgantown. But just then, I wanted to drive home. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, forget about the night, the nickname.
Little Bear.
I decided that if I drove home, I wouldn’t be able to sober up in time. I just needed a caffeine buzz first.
For kicks, I thought about asking Hope again. But she was sitting—I might even call it laying—in a booth across the place, talking to some old guy who was equally fat, sweaty, and angry. Maybe, I thought, her boss. Maybe, her husband. Maybe, as I’ve been told, there is little difference.
I don’t want to risk it, I thought. Then, Little Bear.
I got up from the red leather booth.
“Where are you going, LB?” Tiffany asked, laughing at her clever twist on the moniker.
I didn’t answer. I only walked through the diner’s swinging door, grabbed a black porcelain mug from this silver rack that held them all by their handles and started pouring coffee from a squatty glass pitcher.
The cooks disobeyed their orders just then. I don’t know why, but when I saw them watching me from above the dull luster of the grills, they seemed genuinely impressed.
The cook on the left tossed a country fried steak, sizzling, on a plate. The other dumped some mashed potatoes beside it. They didn’t say anything until I had finished pouring and set the pitcher back on its hot plate. Then, the skinnier of the pair came up to me as a father or a funeral home attendant might and patted my shoulder. He asked me, “Sugar or cream with it?”
I said, “No thanks. Just need this.”
The other guy gave me a saucer from a stack on the counter. He smiled and told me, “Send my regards to that angel. Suckin’ face with that hottie in lingerie out there.”
I looked back through the porthole. Tiffany and David were kissing like drunken high school kids. His effeminate hands smoothed over her back and tits. Her hands grabbed the gelled locks of his hair, rubbed the stubble that had grown in below his halo. Their lips touched, not quite right at all.
Hope shared the moment with her husband. Or boss.
The scullions, with smiles and hard-ons, fried up eggs and wiped the grease from the skillets on their aprons.
I looked down. My right hand, a fist around the grip of the mug, began to feel as if it was shrinking. The tired humidity rising up from the grills pressed on my face and arms. I knew it then: the gradual impact of grief is a charming introduction to manhood.