How Did It Happen to Me?

I know I'm young. I know I'm young and getting older. The lines around my eyes are increasing and deepening. I can dig it-- I'm looking wizened, like I've done a lot of really great partying. My stomach grows more sensitive, snarling, grinding, and gassing away-- I expected it. My zits have by and large disappeared. As much as I enjoyed looking like I was reaching higher karmic forms with sporadic third eyes and the thrills of popping bloody whiteheads onto the shared mirror in the bathroom, I'm OK with their departure.




But that hair on my back. . This has gone too far.

Really body? Really?

I know it comes with the territory, and by territory I mean Gaza and the West Bank.

Rocks are to tanks what tweezers are to. . .

Why a desert people ever had to develop swarths of hair is beyond me, and conversely how my skin became as white and lustrous a full moon also defies my imagination, because who could believe anyone would ever convert? Jews have a good sense of humor; it's not that good.

And it's not exactly that I have back hair: it's that it;'s shoulder hair, a fine quilty of blond hair that fluffs off my blades like the hair tufting from a babies scalp. So smooth, yet so unattractive. Fucken babies.

Look, I'm no girly man. If the Taliban can wear thick kohl around their eyes, so can I. And if one of the Pet Shop Boys isn't out of the closet, then I can certainly go on loving disco. I am a man's man, but why a monkey man?


I recall the first time I encountered shoulder hair. Mother Dear and I were spending a quality family moment watch 'Keenan and Kel' in the early part of the mid 90s. In the sketch, Kel, a coach modeled after a drill sergeant, screamed at Keenan to lose weight. Mother Dear found particular lulz in the shoulder hair glued on to Keenan's shoulders.

Disco! Eyeliner! Glamour Shots!

Would you laugh now, ma? Would you laugh at your only boy? Your only monkey child?

When I had my mullet, it tickled me so playfully, it blew in the air. I felt like a playful Pekingese running about with my mully kite flying in the wind. Like a majestic chinese dragon.

My shoulder hair does not play. It does not flirt with my neck. Not a caress.

They say the best best about having sex with a sixteen year old in the shower is that she looks like she's twelve. When I come out of the shower, I look like a muskrat. No younger, no older. Just a muskrat.

Soon the hairs will become ingrown, then I'll be popping' em off my shoulders onto our shared mirror. Fuck you roommates! This life is COLD. A man with shoulder hair has no time to wear eyeliner. No time to dance to disco.

Or will I? Will I be like that hairy Iranian in the club? Hirsute and potbellied, my shirt with far too many buttons undone, shaking orientally to euro-house beats? My thick aromas wooing women across the dance floor. Will they tug on my tufts as they hate fuck me, finding I have no money after all? Not a cent? Not a centime of oil wealth? If I'm lucky?

Like a very hair Jake Gylenhaal to me/ Iranians and Armenians look the same to me

No.



All I'll have left is Klingon opera and effete children, horrified by their shaggy sperm donor in a society that praises the svelte, and never men who love disco.

This life is too cruel!

I have examined my friends, given massages to them at the beach, working sun cream into their hard male flesh. As I looked, carefully, only to find that I am alone this life. The indignity!

What fresh humiliations will I have to face in a world that made a handsome man so hairy?

Will I have to pop zits off my ass tomorrow?


How can I face these realities. Will I have to retain a Korean aesthetician who mocks me, calls me a neanderthar as she waxes away? Showing me the clumps of pelage, as she snickers, but inwardly crying wishing she were with men like Asashōryū. Will she shear strands from an otherwise fine specimen, despite the acne scars on my ass, despite the athletes foot, despite the moles that must be photographed and checked for melanoma, despite a Roman nose that looks not quite Roman?

Asashōryū, yokozuna, described as a Sex God by Mother Dear

When we all know I'd be better off getting my ass waxed.