(Not That You Asked) (12 page)

The cashier is a girl named Becca. I attempted to scam on her freshman year. She says hello to Tommy.

We are heading for the exit when we hear a commotion behind us. A large black man is sprinting past the registers. He is shouting something I can’t quite make out. During one of those wonderful racist half-seconds to which white people are so dependably prone, I decide that he must be an armed robber. Then it becomes clear that the guy is actually store security.

“Wow,” I say. “Someone is totally busted.”

Tommy nods.

We are rapt now, watching this guy sprint across the store. There is nothing more pleasurable for teenage boys than watching someone else get busted. It is not until the guy leaps past the register nearest to us that it begins to dawn on me: I am rubbernecking my own arrest.

“Don’t move, don’t even
think
about moving!” the guy shouts, and I say—oh, Christ, I have no idea what I say. I do know that I am
not moving.

“Please take the products out of your pants,” the guard says.

“What?” I say.

“You heard me.”

Tommy shakes his head. He is muttering
dude
in a manner that is both sympathetic and deeply contemptuous.

I reach into my shorts and take out the ribbed condoms.

“The other one too.”

“What other one?” I say.

The guard glowers down at me in a bored way. He has all day.

I pull out the Sta-Hard Gel and hand it over.

“Why did you steal these things?”

I say nothing.

“Do you have any money?”

“No,” I whisper.

“Does your friend?”

Tommy nods.

The guard looks at both of us. He seems confused by our incompetence. He tells us to stay where we are and walks over to Becca’s register and inspects the items I have stolen. The entire store—this is a big store, with a dozen registers—has come to a standstill. The guard could just hand the items to the cashier, but this is his moment in the sun. He has captured a criminal. He begins describing them for Becca, like they are suddenly doing inventory.

“Trojans. Ribbed. Twelve-pack. Got that?”

Becca nods.

The guard looks at the little tube in puzzlement.

“What is this stuff? Stay-Hard Gel?”

He is speaking loud enough for everyone to hear him. But what strikes me is how he pronounces the first word (correctly). I have been pronouncing the S-T-A phonetically in my head and wondering what it might stand for.

“What’s the total?” the guard says.

Becca informs him.

He turns to Tommy. “Do you have enough money to pay for the condoms and the Stay-Hard Gel that your friend attempted to steal?”

Tommy nods.

The guard shakes his head. “Come with me,” he calls out. “No, not you. Just the assailant. You pay for the items.”

He leads me (the assailant) across the store and to a backroom. We climb some stairs to a little office and begin the formal interrogation.

“Why did you steal those items?”

“My girlfriend needed me to get condoms. I didn’t have the money.”

“But your friend had money.”

“I know. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“I understand you got yourself a little lady, you need protection. But you got to pay for that stuff. You know that.”

“I know,” I say. “It was stupid.”

“You got to be
responsible.
”

“I know.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen. You should know better.”

“I know,” I say. “I
should
know better.”

The guard nods, which I mistake for impending clemency.

“I gotta call your parents,” he says.

This has not occurred to me.

“My parents are out of town for the weekend,” I say.

Oddly, this is true. My uncle is in town, “supervising” us.

“I gotta call your house anyway,” he says skeptically.

This is the worst scenario of all, because either Mike or Dave will answer the phone, and when they find out it’s someone from Long’s Drugs they will immediately sniff out the situation and the one who answers the phone will pretend to be my uncle, or will promise to fetch our uncle, then hurriedly explain the situation to the other brother, who will assume the role of my uncle on the phone. Thus the full story will emerge (caught shoplifting, Sta-Hard Gel), and my penis—tiny, ineffectual—will climb up inside my body and refuse to come out ever again.

I am close to tears now. My body slumps forward. I begin begging. This goes on for several minutes. My voice is shaky. I am offering him my misery. I am saying to him:
Don’t you get it? I am my own worst punishment.
It feels like the logical culmination of my teenage years: to be so exposed before a stranger with a plastic badge.

At a certain point the expression on the guard’s face softens. He shakes his head slowly and tells me he’s going to let me off this time, though I am banned for life from Long’s Drugs.

I begin slinking toward the door.

“Why you wanna steal that stuff anyway, man?” the guard says suddenly. “That’s like putting Ben-Gay on your equipment.”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” I say.

“You a young man,” he says. “No need for that. Just do it once, then come back for seconds, you understand?”

“Yessir,” I say.

I walk down the stairs bursting with gratitude. I have just received the most useful sexual advice of my life to date.

Becca waves as I exit the store.

Tommy is waiting for me out front. “That looked rough,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“We could see right into that guy’s office, dude.”

By turning on the light, the guard had transformed his one-way mirror into a full-length window, through which, as Tommy enthusiastically informs me, the entire population of the store watched the unfolding drama of my non-arrest.

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

I do not answer.

CHESTFRO AGONISTE

W
hy, 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: