(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  “Were you crying?” Tommy says. “It looked like you were crying.”

  I do not answer.

  CHESTFRO AGONISTE

  Why, exactly, did I feel 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 nasties into my ear

  5. She would pull my hair and tell me what a dirty little monkey I was

  6. I would make monkey noises and rub my raging manbat against her

  7. She would slap my manbat, but not so hard as to make me weep

  8. She would pull the wax off and it would sting in an awesome, S&M way

  9. My naked chest would look so manly that she would be compelled to lick the entire surface area

  10. 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 ominous. At the risk of getting myself banned for life from the Church of American Sanctimony, I would characterize the episode as the Guantánamo 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 googol. 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 kicked my ass sideways.

  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: 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.

  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. 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:

  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—that part really—Owwww!

  HER:

  Stop being 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 mean fucking bitch!

  We were not communicating effectively.

  The intrepid reader is, at this point, wondering when the nipple will hit the fan. Curiously, 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 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 fed up. 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.

&nbs
p; MY FIRST FAKE TITS

  What can I tell you about Vanessa Daws?

  She had a pretty, impish face, a secret cigarette habit, a bosom of astonishing—and ultimately fraudulent—provenance. She was a southerner through and through, raised on peach cobbler and good manners, elaborate in her makeup protocols. She also had literary aspirations, which gave her one unfortunate thing in common with me.

  Vanessa was the first woman I slept with during my two-year tour of duty in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I had come to study writing and alienate everyone on the face of the earth. It began like this: I walked into the office of Triad Style and saw a babe standing by the bulletin board. Triad Style was the weekly fishwrap (published by the daily fishwrap) for which I wrote freelance pieces under the nom de dork S. B. Almond. On balance, these pieces sucked ass. They were supposed to be wry accounts of various local attractions (the gun show, the monster truck show). I recall reviewing the local dumps at one point. All quite glamorous.

  Nonetheless, within the Triad Style milieu the name S. B. Almond radiated a certain tragic cachet. This meant that Vanessa had heard of me. I know this because I sucked around the office long enough one afternoon to secure an introduction.

  “So you’re S. B. Almond,” she said. Her accent was a smoky, teasing drawl. “What’s the S.B. stand for?”

  “Stupid bastard,” I said. (It was my standard line.)

  “Your mother must be proud,” she said.

  All our conversations were like this: the forced wit of the minor sitcom.

  If I’d been a little brighter, I would have figured out that Vanessa knew who I was, that she’d already done a background check and decided I was her next Prince Charming. In the event, I was astounded when she invited me for a home-cooked meal. I spent the next week in a not-unpleasant tizzy of coital anticipation.

  And I can remember driving south for that inaugural dinner, past the town of Climax, North Carolina, where I wished her to live, as this suited my slobbering poetic intentions. I remember, too, the nervous shuffle of my blood as I walked up the flagstone path to her door. She was dressed in an outfit I associated with debauched debutantes: the plunging velvet neckline, the tight mini.

  Her house was fantastic, a Southern Living demo, down to the matte-and-copper accents. As it turned out, it wasn’t her house at all. It was her mother’s, but her mother was out of town and her dad had died when she was a young girl and so it was just us two and a meal of boggling proteinous complexity. I should note my habitual diet: Apple Jacks, cheese and crackers filched from readings, Progresso soup if I was feeling flush.

  Vanessa lit candles and poured wine and praised my appetite. She ate little, drank much, and laughed politely at my horny-boy patter. The wine helped. By the time we were through dessert—some kind of viscid pudding—it was nearly midnight. I couldn’t be expected to drive home in such a state, could I?

  She led me upstairs. And I remember her pausing on the stairs to show me a photo of herself as a girl. Actually, it was a series, a kind of devotional gallery. In each, Vanessa was dressed in a leotard, flat-chested and beaming. She had wanted to be a dancer, but a bum ankle had done her wrong.

  We proceeded to the bed in the guest bedroom, shared a cigarette. Vanessa asked if I needed to be tucked in. Then we were kissing, smashing our ashtray tongues together and grabbing for the junk. The tenor of these initial moments—lunging, impatient—seemed sexy enough to both of us. We’d seen enough movies in which such hostile incompetence passed for passion. It wasn’t long before her shirt was peeled and her bra snapped open and there they were—great buoyant rondures in the Playboy register.

  They really were something to see; my limbic brain went into an immediate suckling frenzy. The problem was they didn’t feel right. Not to tongue, nor fingertip. They felt, rather, like croquet balls that had been upholstered in a thin layer of adipose and skin. Strangest of all was their appearance, the way each breast rose perfectly round from her chest, the skin so taut, all but her nipples, which drooped a little, as if suffering from poor self-esteem.

  I couldn’t figure it out. Were her pectorals really that toned? Did she have calcium deposits? I put the question aside for the sake of our unfolding sexual drama, which now proceeded to the damp lower regions and culminated in a panicky, partial fuck session, our bodies striking quick blows that knocked the breath out of us. Every few minutes, Vanessa informed me that her womanly virtue was in question, she wasn’t just going to fuck me like that, in her mother’s bed (we’d relocated), then she bit my shoulders and fucked me some more.

  How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she?

  I don’t remember. It is the hallmark of such doomed affairs: The sensations—ecstatic as they might be—have no emotional grounding, and one is left, years later, with a residue of peculiar detail. I do remember waking up with bruises on my shoulders, pale purple gnaw marks, and I remember strutting around for the next few days wishing it were summer so I could wear a tank top that would announce to my classmates the sexual abandon to which I might inspire a woman.

  Instead, I arranged to meet her at the local dive bar. She showed up in a gauzy top that left no doubt as to her size, shape, and miraculous heft. The other guys in my program were stunned, and I was full of that heady pride that permeates guys who have not quite discerned that they are fucking for the esteem of other guys.

  I managed to cajole the one fellow who could stand me into coming back to my place, which meant he got to watch me and Vanessa neck, poorly. So this was nice. I had myself a trophy. She dressed well and flirted like a champ and tolerated my anxiety, which I suspect she confused with ambition.

  The problem was those tits. I couldn’t get past them. They were so big and so hard, so pushy for worship. But touching them sort of freaked me out. This wasn’t any sort of political issue, merely an intuitive, tactile objection. It felt wrong to be groping at something inorganic. I’m sure we could trace this back to the fact that I was never breast-fed as a baby. But the truth is I’ve never been much for tits. In the end, they are secondary sex characteristics that have been elevated to fetish objects by our motherless consumer culture.

  Vanessa didn’t see it this way. She wanted me to regard her breasts with the reverence they deserved. They must have cost her (or someone) plenty, because I could never find any scars on the underside of them; I spent hours looking.

  There were other problems. Conversation, for instance. Vanessa fancied herself something of a small-town rebel. She had all these ideas about herself. She was going to become a major magazine writer, head up to New York City. I was mixed up in all this—the restless Yankee novelist who would serve as her getaway driver. But the more she recited these dreams, the more hollow they sounded. Plus she had a flat ass and couldn’t give head worth a damn.

  And what of me? I was convincingly furious, but not in any compelling way. I sucked in bed, too.

  We began to bicker.

  I would assail her with my pathetic little list of enemies and plunk my elbows on the table and Vanessa would lecture me about manners, how they were in place to help people feel more comfortable. She had the whole Southern passive-aggressive thing down to a science. She had a favorite saying, too: Fake it till you make it. All I could think about was her hooters.

  Within a month, we had hit the skids. We needed booze to bear one another, and started meeting up late, after a few drinks. The term “fuck buddies” might apply, except that we weren’t buddies. Our physical relations took on a cruel velocity. I called her once, toward the end, stoned out of my mind during a snowstorm. She was drunk and I was such a gentleman that I made her drive to my place. A little later, Vanessa climbed on top of me and pretended to enjoy my cock. She smirked and stage-whispered her dirtytalk. Then she took my hands and placed them on her breasts and my palms met that strange buttressed flesh and I thought of the photos of her as a lithe teen, spinning on her toes, how lovely she had been, how unadorned, and snowflakes floa
ted down past my window and she saw the disappointment in my eyes as I gripped those sad saline mounds.

  It would take a few more weeks for us to exhaust our shame, and a few more weeks for her to take up with a classmate of mine, which is about what I deserved. In my single surviving photo of Vanessa—taken on one of those chilly winter evenings when we were still enamored—she is dressed in black, grinning gamely from beneath the brim of a bowler hat. Her rack looks great.

  HOW TO WRITE SEX SCENES: THE 12-STEP PROGRAM

  Every single time I go to a party, or, at least, like, once every fifty parties, someone will approach me and say, “You sure do write about sex a lot, Steve. Any advice?” I usually tell them that I don’t write about sex, I write about desire and heartbreak and I can’t believe someone as intelligent-looking as him/her would reduce my art to lurid gymnastics. Then I ask for money.

  This never works.

  Thus, in the general interest of preventing more bad sex writing from entering the cultural jetstream and absolutely free of charge, I offer my 12-Step Program for Writing Incredibly Hot Sex Scenes:

  Step 1

  Never compare a woman’s nipples to:

  a) Cherries

  b) Cherry pits

  c) Pencil erasers

  d) Frankenstein bolts

  Nipples are tricky. They come in all shapes and sizes and shades. They do not, as a rule, look like much of anything, aside from nipples. So resist making dumbshit comparisons. (Note: I am guilty of the last.)

  Step 2

  Never, ever use the words penis or vagina

  There is no surer way to kill the erotic buzz than to use these terms, which call to mind—my mind, at least—health classes (in the best instance) and (in the worst instance) venereal disease.

  As a rule, in fact, there is often no reason at all to name the genitals. Consider the following sentence: