Just Another Piece of the Pie

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been a compulsive hand washer. Before and after I ate, whenever I would come home from work, or after I watered my grandmother’s flower pots in front of her house with the dirt-caked hose sitting outside, it didn’t matter. Even if my hands were spotless afterwards, I would have to wash them. As it is, I’m only a single cough or sneeze away from complete germaphobia, and I sometimes find myself rationalizing that when St. Louis, Missouri, is attacked by terrorist dirty bombs, I’ll be one of the few survivors thanks to my vats of antibacterial soap and buckets of Purell.

When I was growing up, my family was big on celebrations, which I now see as perfect breeding grounds for diseases. Every month, it seemed, we would have another event planned for the birthday of a cousin or an aunt, or for some holiday ranging anywhere from the more ubiquitous Christmas or Thanksgiving to the obscure. I don’t personally know many families who come together to celebrate Columbus Day or throw Dr. Martin Luther King his own party, but to my relatives those were perfectly acceptable times for a get-together.

The scenes were pretty standard: at my aunt’s house we’d gather, twenty-some bodies crammed into a space the size of a bunker, and sit around tables set up in the spare bedroom and kitchen. Feasting was a given on these occasions; there would be in the kitchen no less than twelve dishes set up for my parents, brother, and myself, as well as my grandmother, aunt and uncle, and my unmarried or (later) divorced cousins. Most of the men would sit together, talking about deer hunting and fiscally liberal politics, while the women were left to discuss anything from the latest family gossip to who was sleeping with whom on daytime TV.

What made one particular Fourth of July more memorable was when my aunt served a blackberry pie she had handmade. She brought it into the spare bedroom where we — my mother, grandmother, aunt, women cousins, and I — sat and began to cut it into smallish pieces. She handed out plates for all of us interested and the people at the far end of the table began passing pieces my way.

My grandmother, for as far back as I can remember, has been prone to fits of sneezing. These episodes usually happen at least once every time I see her, and they always involve at least three sneezes in a row. When she grabbed the paper plate holding my blackberry pie, the fit seized her, and she sneezed onto my plate not once but three times, quick and succinct, like a burst of machine gun fire.

“Bless you,” everyone said, surprised, as if something had just exploded in the microwave.

I, however, was too mortified to say anything. After sneezing on it, my grandmother handed me the plate as if nothing had happened. Instead of taking it, I simply looked at it.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. She seemed unaware of the fact that she had contaminated my dessert with germ particles probably numbering somewhere in the millions. I’d learned about the spread of disease and the expulsion of germs through coughs and sneezes in my health class at school, and here she was, fifty years my senior, acting as if she didn’t know any better.

“You sneezed on it.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with it. It was just a tickle in my nose, and I didn’t sneeze right on it.” She reached with the plate toward me, and I took it reluctantly.

“Well, can I have a different piece? Or can I trade you?” It seemed only fair that, if this one wasn’t going to be treated like a biohazard, then I should at least be able to switch it with hers. But by the time I had finished my question, they were back talking about the soap operas they followed like religions, and I was stuck with my pie.

Looking down at it, I couldn’t help but imagine a swarm of microscopic particles squirming around the tan-colored crust, wiggling like worms and waiting to give me some severe stomach virus. I didn’t want to appear rude, and so I chopped up the pie with my plastic spoon, pushing the mess around a little on my plate so that it might look like I’d eaten some. Then I pushed it away and went to the bathroom to wash my hands.

I can’t recall if this was the first of my obsessive trips to a faucet, but it certainly didn’t help matters. Still, for someone who hates germs, though, there’s no worse place than a bathroom.

Public restrooms frighten me most, though. In fact, often times I’ll avoid using them at all, opting instead for a lengthy and uncomfortable ride home. Besides, I hate having to listen to another person’s bathroom noises or, worse, let someone else listen to mine.

Once I’m inside, the first thing I do is check to make sure that I am alone. I hate the idea of doing any business in the company of other people, and so, if necessary, I choose to wait for my privacy. This can be a difficult and lengthy task, especially if I’m at a movie theater or a concert venue where there’s apt to be more than a few fellow men roaming around. As life has taught me, people tend to be running on the same clocks, and so — much like arriving for dinner at a restaurant or stepping up to a grocery store checkout line — there are usually more than a few people needing to use the facilities at the exact same time I do.

These situations tend to allow me to showcase my tremendous good nature through noble self-sacrifice. “No, no,” I’ll say to the gruff flannel-clad man behind me or the sighing thirty-year-old checking messages on his cellphone, “you go ahead.” I’ll gesture to the urinal and, when they look at me, puzzled and slightly creeped out, I’ll nod at the occupied stall, whispering: “I’m waiting for this one.”

Once safely alone, I can take care of what needs to be done. The first thing I do is check to see which toilet is the cleanest, an awkward task because I hate to touch the stalls. So instead I use my foot and kick in the doors like an FBI agent tracking down a suspect compartment by compartment. Then, settled, I try not to linger, and I hope that there’s some kind of large-scale equivalent to food’s ten-second rule that applies to human beings. Sometimes I’ll try to keep my feet up off the floor, but when I start to teeter forward, I have to put them back down.

If this makes me sound somewhat prissy or my phobia overblown, it’s only because I hate going into the restroom with a simple need to pee and coming out with an obligation to visit my local health clinic so I can clear up a nasty case of chlamydia. I’d just rather skip it. It might sound extreme, but I don’t trust the idea of other people being courteous in their bathroom etiquette.

At a restaurant in Alton, Illinois, I went with some friends to dinner one evening a few months after my twenty-third birthday. I worked up the courage to go into the restroom and, to my surprise, it was empty.

I relished the silence, broken only by the sounds of my shoes against the tile and the occasional muffled voice of a maitre d’ voicing concerns over a loitering busboy. I entered the best stall and set about my rituals, fortifying myself against the army of germs looking to kill me. Suddenly, the bathroom door flew open and I heard heavy footsteps. I froze, and I couldn’t help but listen to him as he relieved himself at the urinal.

He zipped up, and I waited for the reassuring sound of a squeaky soap dispenser or even the simple flow of tap water over his hands, but instead I heard only his shoes against the floor followed by the door’s harsh squeal as it opened and slid shut.

Images of this nameless, faceless man going back to his seat flooded my mind. I thought of him passing by an acquaintance on the way back, maybe stopping to shake hands with an old business partner or one of the other coaches for the little league team, perhaps tousling a youngster’s unkempt hair. After returning to his seat, he would pick up his hamburger or chicken sandwich with his bare hands, rotating it as he looked for the best bite, and then going for it.

After I was finished, I washed my hands. Then before washing them a second time, I cranked out a sheet of paper towel so long it could have served as a hallway runner just so I wouldn’t have to touch the dispenser again. With my hands dry, I stepped to the door and started to reach for it. You know, I thought then, I wonder which hand he used to open this door.

I must have stood there for five minutes staring at the little silver bar that was the door handle. If I was trapped, it was only because my mind could not stop thinking about how a person could be so sloppy, so careless as to aid the side of the germs in this war of cleanliness. Eventually, once the realization settled upon me that the door would not open by my will alone, I went back to the paper towel dispenser and, using my elbow, managed to roll out a sheet about the size of the sink basin. I ripped it off and used it to open the door. I thought about throwing it back on the bathroom floor, a little slap in the face for all those who didn’t consider the other people who have to use the facilities, too. You might not wash your hands, I thought at them, but you’re not going to have a pretty bathroom to piss in either. After I thought it, though, it felt hollow, and I didn’t like the idea of littering the floor with my own trash. It felt more like a hypocrite’s response than a martyr’s.

Outside, then, I wasn’t sure what to do with the paper towel, and so I carried it, crumpled up into a little ball, to the host’s dark oak stand at the front of the restaurant.

The maitre d’, a youngish woman with blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, looked at me and smiled. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

“There was a man in the bathroom,” I said, “who did not wash his hands.” It made me sick to my stomach to be saying this, but I felt it had to be done. I wasn’t one to make a scene, but this, I felt, was important.

“Was it an employee here, sir?” The maitre d’ had a look of subtle indifference, like she were wishing to just have one day where a man squeezing a paper towel into a tighter and tighter ball might not have anything to complain about.

Her question stopped me. I, of course, hadn’t seen the man. To spare myself the embarrassment of having to explain that “Well, ma’am, I was in the stall” I chose to err on the side of personal discretion. Besides, the odds were in my favor that the man was a fellow customer.

“Well, sir, there’s not really anything we can do about that,” the girl said. “If he were an employee, then, yes, we would have to talk to him about that, but if it’s a gentleman just using the restroom, it’s up to him.”

Up to him? Why should it be up to him if I get sick? I wanted to ask. I had imagined her, I don’t know, marching over to the man’s table, knowing somehow which one was right. She would plant herself before him, fire lighting her eyes as if she were inhabited by a demon, and eject him from the restaurant like a flake of dried snot. But there were more customers coming in, and the hostess, dismissing my concerns like my grandmother had done all those years ago. Turning away from me with a halfhearted conciliatory smile, she perked up and asked a middle-aged couple how they were doing this evening.

Defeated, I returned to my friends and sat down to the meal that was waiting for me. I had ordered a salad, and I was thankful for a reason to eat with a knife and a fork, anything to keep my hands, those little germ magnets, from touching my food.

When our waitress came around to ask if we were interested in dessert, she told us about our options. I thought, almost certainly, that she was going to say blackberry pie, but she didn’t. Instead, there was all the standard fare: brownies with ice cream, cinnamon spiced apples, various cheesecakes. Nothing terribly exciting.

As she was rattling off fruit-flavored toppings, though, I looked up and saw the little hallway where one of the cooks was headed to the men’s room. He stepped inside and I imagined him or one of his fellow workers in there at the same time I had been, and not washing his hands afterward. All the food he would prepare. All the people that would eat it. All the germs he might spread. I had no way of knowing any different.

My friends chose strawberry- and caramel-covered cheesecake slices, but when the waitress turned to me, asking, “And for you, sir?” I reached into my pocket, grasped a tiny bottle of Purell, and answered, “No, thanks. I’ll be fine.”

The Other Sex’s Bathroom

In life, there are many mysteries—is there a God? What happens to us after we die? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

But of all these mysteries, there’s none greater than: “What is it like in the girl’s bathroom?”

Growing up, there was much speculation surrounding the ladies room. There were rumors of couches, marble fountains, and tuxedoed bath attendants. At school, the bathrooms were always situated side-by-side. But despite sharing a common wall, there was a fantastic gulf between these two rooms. None of us guys would ever ask the girls what it was like in their bathroom. We were certain the girls had it better, and we didn’t want them to know it. Somehow, but not asking we thought we were letting them know that we too had fantastic amenities and could care less about their fabulous toilet-room.

By our very nature, human beings always seem to think that whatever they don’t have is better. This is known as the “grass is always greener” principal. I think cows are the only other animal to suffer from this envy.

I grew up and grew out of many childish things, but not my curiosity about the ladies bathroom. At 17 I was ordered to clean the bathrooms by my first boss. This onerous/odorous task was dreaded by everyone on staff at the drugstore where I earned my first paycheck. But I was actually looking forward to doing it.

Finally, after all the years of wondering I was about to find out what the ladies room was all about. Sure, I could have sneaked in sooner…but I’m not a pervert. It’s not like I want to watch women take a dump or anything. It was just a forbidden thing.

At long last, I would see if they have a chandelier in each stall or just over the sinks.

As you can imagine, I was more than just a little let-down. There were no fountains or footstools like I’d always imagined just strange metal boxes in the stalls (which I soon learned to dread whenever I was assigned cleaning detail).

Having finally lost its mystique, I quit obsessing about the ladies room and moved onto other things. I hadn’t thought about my bathroom curiosity in quite a while, when I met a lady in the men’s room at Sam’s Club a few weeks ago.

It was a bright, sunny day. I’d gotten dehydrated and decided to drink a liter of water just prior to going shopping with my wife. By the time we made our way to Sam’s (that Mecca of American over-consumption) my bladder was ready to burst. So I ran inside and made bolted for the restrooms. Without being too disgusting (which, in a post about bathrooms is pretty hard), I went in and “got down to business” at one of the urinals.

While I was “getting down,” this elderly black woman shuffled into the men’s room and began examining every nook and cranny. Now, at the risk of sounding (and perhaps being) racist, I’m going to come clean and say that I thought this woman was Rosa Parks. I know that’s fucked up, but when you’re peeing and an old black lady comes shuffling in, you aren’t really thinking straight. For some reason all I could think was, “Oh God! I can’t tell this poor woman to get the hell out of here…I mean for cryin’ out loud, she’s been through so much!” She was wearing this little getup that looked right out of the 1950’s. Her gray wispy hair was mostly pulled back, but a few stray strands were flying wildly around her head. She was also wearing those panty-hose socks. You know, the kind that makes a woman look likes she’s wearing panty-hose. Those things never seem to work, because every woman I see with them on always has them all bunched up around her ankles.

As I stood there, holding my dick and thinking about the best way to let this woman know she was in the wrong place—she was busy checking each stall. At first I thought she was looking for a child (or perhaps an invalid husband) who’d gone in to use the facilities and hadn’t reemerged. But it soon became obvious that this was not the case.

She was talking to herself. Not quite mumbling, not quite whispering…something in between. I thought she was on the phone but she wasn’t—she was just confused. You see, in her mind she WAS in the ladies room.

The strangest ladies room on Earth.

For all you women out there who’ve not been in a men’s room, let me de-mystify it for you. The only difference between yours and ours are the urinals. They put them closest to the door (so we can shoot-in and shoot-out), so it’s very obvious that you are in the men’s room the moment you walk through the door.

And yet, despite walking past the row of gleaming white urinals (and yours truly), this old lady decided that she was STILL somehow in the right room. Once she’d reached the last stall in the row, I’d finished my business and was trying to figure out what to do. I headed over to the sinks and just stared at her. I can only assume that she’s one of these “picky” people and that she was trying to find the “best” toilet for whatever business SHE had to attend to.

“Uh, mama,” I said unable to just wash my hands and leave. “Are you alright?”
She turned around, startled that there was a man in the room.
“Well this is the strangest place….”
“You’re in the men’s room,” I told her. “That’s why there are all these urinals.”

She looked at me as though I’d slapped her. I suddenly felt very guilty, like maybe I should have just washed-up and left her alone.

“Well wait till the girls here about this!” she shouted, then shuffled out of the room. “Oh boy…” she muttered as she passed me.

Bathrooms are all the same--there’s nothing glamorous or wonderful about them. Of course, the only way you’ll ever know is to go and see.

The First Drink

My first drink came when I was fifteen, from an open bottle of wine that I found hiding in our refrigerator. My mother had placed it there, I would later learn, for a new recipe she was trying to make, but at the time none of that mattered. I discovered it after coming home from school, and any notions about marching to my room to do homework were replaced with the question, How can I get a drink of this?

My mother worked from home, running a daycare out of our living room and, later, our garage. Being saddled with anywhere from five to twelve children, she rarely left the house during the day, and so I knew that there would be no way of getting to the bottle safely. As I stood holding the refrigerator open, my mother walked in the kitchen, and I had to slam the door to avoid her suspicions. The contents of the refrigerator rattled like change in a dryer as she looked at me, and I darted, mouselike, to my room at the other end of the house.

I sat on my bed for a while, unable to do my homework or even focus enough to watch television. My few years at my mother’s church taught me that basically anything I might want to do or try — drinking, cursing, reading anything other than the New or Old Testaments — would send me to Hell, and so I found it odd that my mother would have such a thing sitting there, open and unapologetic. I entertained wild hopes that she had woken up, as if from a dream, and that the reign of Jesus Christ was over.

Though I’d never really had a desire to drink before, now that the chance was here, easily accessible, my curiosity had the better of me. Imagining it as some kind of rite of passage, or at least something sophisticated, I felt I was entitled and that I should become accustomed to it for when I traded in small-town life for something more cerebral. So I went back to the kitchen.

More or less a single room, our kitchen and dining area were separated only by an open entryway about five feet wide. From our dining room table, it was impossible to miss anything going on in the next room. It would be particularly hard to miss one’s teenage son trying to sneak alcohol from the refrigerator. This, of course, was where my mother was sitting.

I froze once I realized she was there, and I had to kick-start my legs to get moving again. Otherwise, I might’ve stood there, in her full sight, for what might have been the better part of a day, shuffling my feet and asking idle questions like “What’s for dinner?” or “How was your day?”

She smiled at me, and I forced one back. I thought that maybe this was a trap, some kind of trick she had gathered from one of the radio station call-in shows she sometimes listened to, or from the Christian television programs that talked about how you could pull your children’s cell phone records or find out if your kids were looking up pornography online.

“I’m thirsty,” I said, pushing to sound like I had been hiking through a desert for the past eight hours rather than doodling though math class and daydreaming about the boys in gym class. I even coughed, dryly, as if that proved everything.

My mother said nothing, further cementing my belief that opening the refrigerator would have deadly consequences. But there was no backing out, so I stepped forward, opening the door to let out a wash of impossibly bright light. I squinted against it, and in reaching for a can of soda I accidentally brushed the adjacent bottle with my hand. I didn’t pause, though. I thought that if I stood looking into the fridge for too long my mother would know that I knew about the bottle, that she would know I desired it. “And what do you think you’re doing?” she would say from her place at the table, in that particular voice available to all mothers, the one that seems like the voice of God, only scarier.

I pulled out the soda and shut the door.

On my way out of the kitchen, I stole a glance at the figure leaning over a notebook, one hand tapping soft keys on a calculator next to her, and, counting myself lucky, I returned to my room.

The unwanted soda sat open and mostly full until after dinner. The recipe, for something like a tenderloin or a roast, wasn’t much of a success, and the soda helped to wash away the residing flavor. The wine still called for me, though. In my mind the bottle’s call had all the subtlety of a child screaming in my ear, and trying not to think about it only made me want it more.

My parents settled into the living room together, and despite my knowledge to the contrary I imagined them laughing, clinking together glasses full of rich red liquid. I didn’t like the idea of being excluded. Though my first attempt had been a failure, I was determined to try again.

Our bathroom was next to my room, and so I snuck in and grabbed a tiny paper cup from the dispenser my mother kept by the sink. My mother would hear me if I had to rummage through the kitchen cabinets for a glass, so this would have to do. As I made my way down the hallway, avoiding the spots in the floor I knew were prone to squeaks and groans, I arrived in the now-darkened kitchen.

The linoleum was cold on my bare feet, and the sounds of the TV filtered in from the living room. I felt like an agent from a spy movie, and it occurred to me that if I were to engage in any sort of espionage, it wouldn’t take long for someone to spot me. As it was, I stood before the refrigerator sweating like I’d just run a marathon, and I had to remind myself every few seconds to breathe. Had she stepped in the room, my mother would have thought I’d been swimming, though we didn’t have a pool.

Grabbing the refrigerator door with my free hand, I pulled, trying to use just enough force so that it would open without making a sound. I had to try three times, but finally it gave.

There again was the bright light, and the remnants of my churchgoing guilt made it seem like the light of Christ was shining upon me, heavy and judging, so much so that I had to grab the bottle and yank it free. I paused, thinking that if my mother didn’t catch me here and kill me, that I might be the first person at fifteen to die of a heart attack. But neither she nor my father came.

I unscrewed the top of the bottle, and under the blazing light of our Christ-filled refrigerator I poured myself my first drink. I didn’t take much out of concern that I would be stumbling around my room if I had a full paper cup’s worth; bad enough was the fear that my mother would notice the missing amount and trace its theft back to me.

Returning the bottle to its place in the chaos of our fridge, I adjusted it back exactly as it had been. The cup felt like a feeble relic from sometime long ago, and I held it gently as I traced my steps back down the hallway.

The wine, more purplish than red, sat on my desk for a few moments as I willed myself the courage to take the final step. In the back of my mind were those regular injections of guilt from years listening to stories of sinners and the threats of damnation. Finally, I took the paper cup in my hands, lifted it to my mouth, and tilted it back so that the liquid flowed.

I swallowed quickly, and the wine — something cheap and bitter — left a terrible aftertaste, and I wondered if in my urgency I had instead poured myself a cocktail of grape juice and pickle brine. I felt disappointed. I wanted to enjoy it the same way that, later on, I would imagine enjoying opera or theater before actually subjecting myself to them. The idea of wine, I realized, had been the attraction, and the fruits of my efforts tasted disgusting.

The next day, the bottle was gone, and when my mother brought it up at dinner, saying that she noticed some of it was missing, my father and I each shrugged and feigned our innocence. My brother, only ten years old and still believing it to be bad, wouldn’t have touched it with a stick, and so he was guiltless and safe. I envied him that, and so I began planning ways to kill him. My dad eventually copped and said, “Well, I tried just a little,” but I remained silent.

The guilt felt heavy, but the thought of my mother angry and disappointed kept me quiet. Worse though was the sense of smallness, the feeling that I had made some dimwitted mistake at a party, like a peasant still yearning for culture. I had hoped that the wine would elevate me, elevate us, from our lowbrow spirituality to more intellectual places. But here we still were, a house of evildoers, our deeds hesitantly overlooked, living with the saint.

While nothing afterward changed much, what made the aftertaste and the anxiety and the shame all worth it, though, was the brief look in my mother’s eyes, a confession, I thought, of her own humanity. It was only there for an instant, almost unnoticeable, but it leveled us out and made her feel closer: just a glint of devilish glee, free and unhindered, as if she had stepped down from her Christian pedestal and, facing the harsh light of the refrigerator, taken a quick trip to the dark side to drink with the sinners.

Drama Beard

I still remember the first time I saw the movie AWAKENINGS with Robin Williams. I’m a little fuzzy on the chronology, but I think this was before DEAD POET’S SOCIETY. And if I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter—I saw AWAKENINGS first.

Williams plays a doctor who uses an experimental drug therapy to “un-freeze” these people afflicted with a neurological disorder that has literally locked them inside their own bodies. Now Robin Williams is a funny ass guy, and yet the whole time I found myself riveted by his serious dramatic performance.

What the hell? What’s the difference between say, GOOD MORNING VIETNAM Williams and say, AWAKENINGS Williams?

Two words: Drama Beard.

Ah, the Drama Beard. Could there be an easier way to be taken seriously? I don’t believe there is. I recently saw LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and noticed that Steve Corell used a similar method of escaping his comedic roots. If you’re a comedian and you want to tackle a dramatic role, the best way is with the drama beard.

The equation is simple—your face is funny so cover it with a shit-load of hair. Also, other than George Carlin (RIP George) can you think of anyone with a beard who IS FUNNY? I can’t.

Biker dudes have beards—not funny.
Santa Clause has a beard—not funny (or real).
Charles Manson wore a beard—definitely not funny.
Fidel Castro has a beard—not funny.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my case.

Having a beard means you’re not funny. You’re a serious, introspective thinker. While wearing a beard you’re so busy being serious that you don’t have time for trivial things, like shaving.

In an effort to boost my own seriousness, I’ve grown my own “drama beard.” So far I feel MUCH more serious.

Rather than cracking jokes and making witty observations, I find myself in serious contemplative thought. Of course, what I’m usually thinking about is my beard—and what’s gotten into it.


Mostly food, drink, and spit.

Beards are a magnet for food, drink, and spit (hence forth know as FDS). When eating, people don’t realize that small particles of food (called “crumbs”) often run down their faces. The man with a drama beard is acutely aware of these crumbs, however, because as they bombard his chin, and they become encrusted in the hair.

If there were any doubt about the effectiveness of the drama beard, let me assure you—I don’t laugh AT ALL while eating. Instead I’m constantly wiping my mouth, like I was an old person or a baby.

The drink part of FDS is mostly localized to the moustache region of the drama beard. When taking a big swig of water, I can feel the ‘stash absorb some of what I’m trying to drink (giving me what I like to call “wet stash”). Basically you’re forced to wring your face out over a sink after you’re drinking (unless you use a straw, but no man with a drama beard uses them—they’re just a little too humorous, and humor is NOT what we’re going for).

Spit is similar to drink in this equation. I don’t know about you, but my body produces enough spit for my own personal needs, as well as the needs of a small Nicaraguan village. I’m a talker. I like talking, and sometimes I get a little excited…and suffering succotash (as Sylvester the Cat would say) if that spit don’t come flying outta my mouth on occasion.

I know this is gross.

I know this probably makes a lot of people’s stomachs churn (my own wife detests my spit). And when I’m sans-drama beard, when these little “spit episodes” occur, I apologize and we all just move on.

BUT when you’re wearing a drama beard…things are more complicated. As spit is both very similar to water and food crumbs, it is both captured by the hair (like food) and absorbed (like drink). You have no idea how many times people have come up to me and said “what the hell is on your face?” 99.99% of the time it turns out to be spit, which is bad but not TERRIBLE so long as it’s MY SPIT.

But alas, this is not always the case. You see, the very instrument that is so adept at catching and holding MY SPIT is also very efficient at catching and holding YOUR SPIT.

I think the less said about this the better.

With all these pitfalls you can see why the bearded man is so damn serious. As you can imagine there are things we just can’t do—like work in cafeterias or chew gum. Imagine trying to be funny when you know that you can’t have any Double Mint.

The Drama Beard is one of the oldest acting techniques known to mankind. It has been utilized by jesters and other funnymen trying to go “straight” for centuries, and God willing it will continue to be used far into the future.

Think about it.

Real Exercise in Junior Year

I go through phases of wanting to get in shape, to become the lean and mean machine that I am certain resides underneath my soft, pale exterior, but I’m always too lazy. Every few months I’ll catch in the bathroom mirror a glimpse of myself that seems to leer at me, reminding me of the fact that I might as well give up my day job and go to work as an infomercial actor whose recurring gigs involve unflattering lighting, little or no makeup, and standing shirtless for a snapshot that will read: BEFORE. The thought horrifies me, and I tell myself all the things we tell ourselves: I’m going to start exercising again; I’m cutting out all the sugar; and that, if all else fails, bulimia can’t really be that bad. Holding strong at first, my resolve fills my head with images of produce and vegetables, of sweat-drenched hours spent on a workout bench. I’m doing laps in a pool of no-fat yogurt, or pumping iron with chickpea weights attached to a green bean bar. Protein will become my best friend, and — what the hell — why not just drive to the gym and sign the membership contract now?

All this before I’ve even left the bathroom.

Once I do leave and my reflection is no longer there, things aren’t so simple. Through years of practice, I’m well versed in the arts of overindulgence and sloth. My changing schedule and adolescent sleeping habits make it all but impossible for me to eat the right food regularly, and my lack of motivation for making my own meals only ushers me like the glutton I am to the quick fix of fast food. Exercise is incidental, the byproduct of more pressing concerns. My job in retail, say, or the thirty-four-foot journey I embark upon to fetch another drink from the kitchen.

I cannot help but like the ease of this lifestyle. But at the same time, pressing my face into the lukewarm circle of a heat lamp cheeseburger, special sauces circling my mouth like I’ve just savagely devoured the cow, I hate the shame.

Real exercise became a part of my life in high school. At the beginning of each semester the gym class would separate into two groups: one, the regular physical education students, would play games like volleyball and basketball, maybe football if the weather was nice; while the second would remove itself to a separate building entirely. My first couple years were spent attempting to avoid any contact with a basketball, whiffle ball, or anything of the sort.

Preferred days were spent playing volleyball, where one could, if timed right, adequately feign his attempts at sportsmanship without managing to fuck everything up for the other players. Besides, most of them were girls and so impressions about my manliness were superficial. Workout Wednesdays, as they were called, instructed us on basic calisthenics and made us jog around the gym. This required little coordination, and thus, I was good at it.

My junior year, though, I was tired and chose to try the only other option I had apart from suicide. The weight lifting program, I thought, would be a welcome break from the rigors of trying to make dodging a ball look like just another part of the game — especially when the activity was something like basketball, where anyone not helping score points for his team was viewed as the enemy and placed at the mercy of the more competitive boys. And, two of my friends were joining the weight lifting program, so I figured that if I failed at this, too, at least I would have them.

The first day, we marched in our gray t-shirts and unflattering green shorts through the cafeteria and outside, arriving at a square metal annex nestled into the L of the school’s north and east wings. My first glance of it gave me a panicked thought that the box was some sort of modernized torture chamber — something artless and unobtrusive so as not to raise suspicion. Inside, though, the place was much too drab for anything so extravagant. The single room, not much bigger than what cottage-dwellers might describe as “a little cramped,” was bathed in grays and blacks and reminded me more of a shed than anything else. Though the equipment the room held was frightening in its own alien way, the startlingly inappropriate lyrics to “Pimp Juice” coursed through the air as someone switched on a boom box and everyone set to their own devices. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all, I told myself.

Our instructor, a squat, bouldery man named Mr. Hanslow, gathered the new members of the group and explained to us the rules of safety and how things would run. After demonstrating the equipment, he assigned each of us a cheaply bound booklet in which we were to track our progress. After each weight lifting session and bout of cardio, we were to record our stats — he used the words “repetitions” and “sets,” which were as foreign in this context as the machinery surrounding me might seem at a restaurant buffet. Participation was required, he said, but it was also most of our grade. As long as we did the work, things would be fine. We could talk while we worked out, listen to music, and for the most part go at our own pace. It was not heaven, but it was at least a hallway’s march away from hell.

Over the next year and a half, I did as little as possible to exert myself. I never lost sight of my goal, which was pure and simple survival. Coming in first had never been my ambition. Not that I would’ve been able to had it been my desire. Looking at the boys and girls around the weight room, one could not help but recall images from a television show involving male bodybuilders and large-breasted women running in slow-motion on a beach. My presence was like an error, as if one of the crew, breathless and befuddled, had wandered into shot.

I would watch the others sometimes, wondering what it must be like to never have to worry about squeezing into a comically large pair of pants or look for t-shirt tags with more x’s than a late-night pornography film. And so I began to work. Not just to get by, and not to be the best, but with the goal of actually getting somewhere. I slid extra weights onto my barbells. Laps around the outdoor track were recorded with fewer and fewer seconds. Things were hard and I hated gym class for it, but I was relieved that the order and the necessity of it forced me to action.

The daily routines must have done something; I left high school skinnier than when I started. It might have been simple genetics, but I choose to believe that what exercise I got there helped me in some way. That, and I like the thought of having achieved something.

That memory comes back to me those days when I catch myself in the mirror, my image pink from the heat and surrounded by steam. And even though I know deep down that it may never come around again, I hold onto the memory of the high school boy I was and the dedication of sweating away my imperfections, repetition after repetition, set after set.