Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Prison Shower Buddy

Let’s start with the reference section.  Saturday night is the beginning of Purim, the holiday that asks the question, “Are you drunk enough?” For anyone who’s not been bludgeoned by my magnum opus on the subject, Rashamontashen, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.  Preview: read the biblical Book of Esther.  I rewrote it from the perspective of each of the four main characters.  Rash your graggers!  Turn it into a drinking game!  Or don’t!  It’s all up to you, my friend.  As are so many of life’s rich offerings. 

NOW THEN.  Let’s get into the meat of today’s offering, or today’s offering of meat.  This time, it works both ways.  And that’s the way I like it. 

Feb 11:

My previous prison shower buddy relationship started a couple of months ago. It ended this morning, when I dumped him for a new prison shower buddy. I’d better fill in some intermediate details here. I wouldn’t want y’all thinking I’m some kind of prison shower slut. I’m not even fickle. I just used the first one up, and there was nothing left to do but replace him.

A couple of months ago, when our story begins, I was in the market for shaving lotion. As a dude with a hirsute face and a clean-shorn head, shave lotion is an unguent of great significance for me. A good one makes my personal destubblification process far quicker and less onerous. A bad one, on the other hand (or head), will leave me bleeding, with patchy unshaved areas and an overall disheveled appearance. I tend to slice myself up pretty badly while shaving - a consequence of the classic combination of a rough beard, a tender delicate babyface, and a shaving style which might be referred to as “comatose hackery”: I basically go after the whiskers the way zombies go after brains, making up in enthusiasm what I lack in delicacy. So it’s not so unusual for me to finish up a shave looking like something from a slasher flick.

In my ongoing efforts to staunch the gouts of my own blood, I’ve become quite particular about my shaving products and process. First, I need to do the deed in the shower, not at a sink, for maximum humidity and hydration; also, it’s easier to clean up the gory aftermess that way. I have a decent electric shaver for dry usage, but it takes too long to get the job done and does not shave as closely; sometimes it even yanks a hair clear out of its follicle just for spite. No, it’s steel blades for me. I tend to prefer triple-blade action, if not quad - doubles dull up too fast. I like a nice heavy razor handle; it moves with more authority and gives me better control. And of course, selection of a topical unguent is always a matter of numerous complex considerations. Standard commercial foams do nothing for me but clog my razor and obscure my view of the action. Foam-up gels are no better, though they are admittedly a bit more fun. I even got a fancy specialty shavecream once; it not only clogged my razor, it also clung so tenaciously to my face I had trouble shaving it off.

No, for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, my choice, after years of painful trial and humiliating error, was hair conditioner, and specifically, the pale blue stuff that comes in a giant CostCo storebrand 2-pack. It goes on quickly with even coverage, it adequately softens the steel wool emerging from my face, and it washes off pretty easily. Okay, it also clogs the razor, but not as badly as some other products do. Cheap and almost unscented, that was the standby stuff for quite a few years.

The only drawback was that you could only get it at CostCo, which doesn’t always have everything I’m looking for every time I go there, which isn’t even that often anyway. I only needed to get the stuff once a year or so, but when I needed it I really needed it. And, not so long ago, I did, in fact, really need it. So when Kel came back from a diapers-and-seltzer run without the hefty twinpack of cool blue goo I’d requested, I was in a depilatory pickle. I had to resort to using Kel’s hair conditioner, which may be fine for her mane but wasn’t doing my skin any favors. I was shredding flesh and exsanguinating something fierce with every shave session. I was officially in the market for something new and smooth. It is thus, after all, that I roll.

In this way I found myself one morning at the jumbo downtown apothecaritopia that sits near where I de-bus on my way to work. I figured they’d have a decent selection of razoring accouterments, and I was right. A profuse and well-stocked display awaited my bleary browsing eye, with more creams, foams, lotions and facial lubes than I’d ever be able to try. After having so painstakingly identified the best shaving lotion option already, I felt that overthinking this choice wouldn’t help me make it. Every product says it’s great; most of them probably aren’t, at least not for ol’ Bloodyjowls here. I just needed to grab something that met my basic criteria and then get out before I froze up under the onslaught of commercial proliferation. All I knew for sure was that I wanted nothing I’d already tried and rejected, it should be basically odorless and low-suds, and if there was some reason to think it would treat my dome right, that would be alright with me.

Given these parameters, I chose as efficiently as I could - a tube of goo for “Bald Guyz,” per the product title. I didn’t know how good it was but the tube wasn’t so big that I’d wind up living with my mistake, if I’d made one, for too terribly long.

The next morning, I cracked open the tube and slapped a handful on my shower-soaked scalp and face. First impressions were favorable: barely scented, clear, slick without being goopy, and a good viscosity that spread quickly and smoothly without getting too thick to be effective. Subsequent impressions bore out the initial ones - shaving was easy, the blade didn’t stick or divot, and the stubble rinsed right off the blades exceptionally quickly. I was mostly sure I had found a winner, except for one thing: I didn’t like the way it was looking at me.

The tube is a vibrant blue color which I associate with police cruisers in Philadelphia. The product title is boldly emblazoned in white lettering across the top of the package, the lower portion of which depicts what I can only imagine the manufacturer considers to be an iconic user of this product: He’s a beefy, thick-necked, broadshouldered white dude, head bereft of all hair save eyebrows, reedy mustache, and a chincap goatee. He’s shown from mid-chest up in a grey t-shirt that strains to contain his turgid bulk, and he’s grinning out at the world with toothy enthusiasm. Superimposed over the bottom of this image, in black numbers, is the volume of the tube, depicted in both metric and English measurements that spread across his massive pectorals. It had reminded me of something when I picked it out in the store, but in my efficiency I hadn’t dwelt on what. Once I was standing in my shower, though, stark naked, dripping wet, and clutching my blades, I figured it out.

In my shower we have a soap caddy stuck to the wall for push-button dispensation of soap and shampoo (for those who use such stuff). My razor sits atop the caddy together with a small mirror wherewith I can see how badly I am cutting myself up. My new tube of shavegoo went there too. It’s high enough on the wall to leave the gootube product model just a little above my eye level.

So, I look up in the shower and see a big guy in a grey t-shirt with numbers on it, bald and leering at me.  Hmm.  I think I remember this from Escape from Alcatraz, and in that movie it didn’t turn out well. If I were Clint Eastwood I’d have been forced to jam a bar of soap down his throat. But - brace yourself - I’m not Clint, nor any other sort of Eastwood. I didn’t feel like picking a fight with my tube of shaving gel. I just delicately turned him to face the wall and tried to ignore him. But I really couldn’t. I knew he was there, smirking at the steamy tiles. Often enough I’d forget to put him back properly oriented away from me, so I’d see the corner of his eye out the corner of mine.  That was almost worse. It instilled a paranoia, as if he were just waiting for me to turn around to loofah my glutes or something, so he could pounce on me like some overaffectionate inmate looking for a special bathtime friend. That is to say, he wanted to be my prison shower buddy, and I could be his prison shower bitch.

But weeks passed without untoward bathtime incident. Eventually I grew inured to his hungry smile and biker-gang styling choices. Every time I got into the shower he was there waiting for me; every time I left the bathroom I knew I was turning the lights off on him, leaving him leering vapidly into the darkness. He was a creepy guy but he was two-dimensional, and anyway the shaving gel was a good product.

As slowly as I worked my way through the tube of goo, so also did I slowly come to an accommodation with my prison shower buddy. He stopped making me think I was one dropped bar of soap away from a fearful rogering. I got used to him hanging around. I never grew to like him much, but I did learn to view him with mitigated anxiety.

My reconciliation with the burly bald bomber in my shower pretty much tracked my gradual exhaustion of the lotion I was squeezing out of his lower end. By the time I’d emptied the whole tube, I felt fairly committed to the product, and I’d also learned to ignore the grin of my prison shower buddy as easily as I ignored the alarm when I hit the snooze button upon awakening - as something that was there but not meaningful, a deferrable reality. When it came time for me to toss the empty tube, his broad smile held no dread for me as it beamed up impotently from the garbage bucket. When I went to replace it, I didn’t think twice before getting another identical tube, with an identical shower buddy smiling out at me from it. He’s up on my soap caddy even now, waiting patiently for me with his carnivorous smirk. So now when I take that tube in hand at the time and place of my own choosing, I can’t help but ask him, only semi-rhetorically: Who’s the bitch now, Bitchy McBitcherstein? But of course I say it only to myself. I wouldn’t want to antagonize anybody.  I am a bleeder, after all.