The Bearded Lady is Restless

When I was a kid -- 14 or 15 -- my new friend who had just moved to town became a life guard at my town's new pool. He had the greatest line of hair that rose up from his tiny Speedo and then circled-the-wagons around his belly button. He had some chest hair too, not much, and hairy legs

How I yearned for body hair like that.

Beware, oh yee that wish and hope. For yee may receiveth.

Let's get to the point. Nearly 30 years later I am not one of those pelts posing as a man, but I am beyond what the chat lines might describe as "medium hairy."

And I am greatly at odds with my body hair. It grows, it covers. I wish it dead. Well, um, hair is already dead apparently. So, I wish it gone.

Oh I trim to length my chest and belly hair -- I am at least bereft of a hirsutely adorned back, thankfully -- and shave outright certain other body parts (think gonadal tissue).

What magnifies the repugnance for my hair is its darkness against the pallor of my flesh (I described it once in a poem as the pallor of the downward facing side of a North Atlantic flounder). Now too that fitness is months and months and months behind me and litheness with it, I have become a pasty, hairy, flabby mess. I blame the hair in that equation. Tanning is easy enough in order to banish the grey/blue which is my Caucasian. Flabby's banishment is just around the corner as the gym fanaticism is about to start anew (I can always feel addiction coming on). But the hair, well therein rests the struggle.

I turned to the technology of exfoliation once; that is I waxed once. Waste of money with my hair's metabolism. Smooth for about 48 hours. And the aesthetician almost took my nipples with one of the yanks of the exfoliating strip. I fear it turned him on. I was unable to comfortably wear a dress shirt for a week. Rub, ouch, brush, ouch. Poor wee puppy dog noses...

I did once regularly shave belly and chest (when I had a chest and had no belly) but it's an at least thrice a week activity and for someone who hates even the daily thievery of time called shaving one's face... Then there's the in-grown hair thing -- doesn't make much sense to remove the hair to replace it with a field of a million tiny puss-filled zits.

My New Friend Jen in Calgary had her legs made permanently silky smooth through the marvels of laser hair removal and encourages me at every opportunity to try that route. The ads of PERMANENT hair removal beckon like the hairless, flat belly of the hair-free-zone that is my boyfriend. Laser removal feels like it might also be cash removal

At the root of it all is the syndrome commonly knows as wanting what we don't have. My last, oh, 600 boyfriends have been Asian. Some had minor body hair but always strategically placed and in proper amounts. And among the number of Asians I have dated, the total number of body hairs would surely equal the number of hairs on one of my ass cheeks. What one is attracted to one reasonably looks for in the search for one's own attractiveness, I suppose.

Mr. Hair-Free-Zone in Korea, however, complicates my dislike of my own body hair by (claiming, at least) to like my, ah, shagginess. So, in summary and not too subtly, as his barren follicles turn me on, so do my overly fecund follicles turn him on. But he's out of the country for a while and my belly-button lint is piling up prodigiously (note: belly hair works like a hay rake to drag the fluff off one's t-shirt or sweater and deposit it in a fellow's innie BB).

As I ponder my next steps, a hairball cough rising in my throat, I am thankful that I have no shoulder hair, tufts in my ears (let's not discuss nose hair) or overly hairy feet.

As for the owner of the Speedo when I was a young teen. He's nervous still when I talk about those days in this way, and he's now one of the hairiest men alive. But that's his wife's problem, not mine.

steve