Naked Lips and All

With apologies to Aesop, I'm going to tell you the moral at the beginning: Never, ever use your face to fib.

To frame this revelation, I moved recently. This gave me an opportunity to sift through the assorted detritus of my life, neatly packed into cardboard boxes. I re-discovered a cache of life's souvenirs in those boxes, from the occasional accolades and the birthday cards to the traffic ticket and the remnants of a broken heart. Then I came upon some packets of pictures from back before the world went digital.

I looked at snapshots stretched over a few decades of living and realized something that in hindsight should have been obvious: Throughout most of my adulthood, I've sported some form of facial hair.

Post college, it was a thick black moustache that would have made Friedrich Nietzche proud. In my early years working at Hewlett-Packard in Maryland and patroling left field for the 39ers, a competitive men's softball team in Virginia, I wore a full beard. And forgive me for digressing, but now that I look back, I don't think 39ers referred to a gold rush some place, some time. More likely, it was the average age of the players.

For the past 10 years or so, I've worn what most people call a goatee. Wikipedia defines it as "A beard formed by a tuft of hair on the chin ... In recent years, goatee has come to denote a style of facial hair that connects to a moustache."

My version is the latter, with a moustache, and I keep the whole ensemble closely cropped so no female goats or lonely shepherds follow me down the street.

All was fine until last month when I noticed something natural but horrifying: The majority of hair on my chin had somehow managed to turn itself white. Seemingly overnight, my salt-and-pepper goatee looked like I'd gone down on a salt lick. If my chin were a bag of Fritos, I'd have a surgeon general's warning plastered across it.

For weeks, I debated whether or not to do something to hide this abominable snowman's beard. In a moment of moral ambiguity, I purchased a package of a men's facial-hair coloring product. I hid it in a drawer in my bathroom and would peek in every few days to see if it were still there.

We interrupt the chronological flow of this narrative for a relevant few words about marriage. If you've been married for a long time, you often hang on -- even if it's rockier than the front side of El Capitan -- for one reason and one reason only, and it's not the kids. It's because the thought of ever having to date again scares you to death.

Women to me are like a giant ATM with a huge stack of $20 bills inside. I have a card that goes in smoothly, but I have no idea what the PIN is. I keep clacking in random sequences of numbers, but no cash ever comes out. And then the machine eats my card and spits the remains onto the sidewalk.

Don't get me wrong. I have many wonderful female friends and my camaraderie with them significantly enriches my life. It's just that if love were a lake, I'm currently standing in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats. And there are times when I miss being in love -- not being phermonal, mind you. But being really in love, when two healthy, independent people choose to be with each other.

Since we human critters are always looking for a scapegoat, I started to blame my lack of post-marriage dating success on the white in my beard. It couldn't be the fact that I'm still getting over the wounds from my divorce or that my higher power thinks I still have some evolving to do before trying to enter into a successful relationship. It couldn't have been that. It had to be all those tiny white hairs, standing upright and saluting.

So one night, I put some Lucinda Williams on, took out the package hidden in my bathroom drawer and set out to alter Mother Nature's handiwork.

I followed the directions carefully, first putting on the thin plastic gloves they thoughtfully included in the package. Then I squirted a thin line of what looked like loose cat poop from one tube into the mixing tray and then a line of chalky toothpaste from the other. I mixed the chemical solution together in the tray, using the hard plastic end of the application brush.

Then I cleaned off the mixing end of the brush, as directed, turned it around and dipped the sturdy bristles into the solution. I brushed the mixture into my goatee, chin first, until I had the whole thing covered. It took only three minutes by my watch -- which doesn't have a second hand -- and the instructions said I should keep it up for no more than five minutes. Wanting the full effect, I dipped the brush back into the glop and applied some more.

After five minutes, I stopped. I glanced briefly into the mirror and my goatee seemed to be getting darker and darker. The next step called for me to rinse off the mixture. So I turned the knob on my shower, felt the water until it was hot enough and jumped in.

Just in case these chemicals were more dangerous than advertised, I held my hands over my goolies -- like male soccer players in front of a goal kick -- to keep the rinsed-off solution away from those tender parts.

I finished showering, toweled off, wrapped a drier towel around my waist and stepped in front of the mirror. I grabbed a hand towel, wiped away the condensation and expected to see this handsome, dark-goateed man staring back at me.

I was shocked  by my reflection. This huge, charcoal-looking smudge encircled my mouth. My face looked like a child's drawing of the tramp clown, the one with the thick five-o'clock-shadow drawn in.

The goatee was dark all right -- every last hair was black. But the solution also seemed to have dyed black all the skin underneath. I looked like a middle-aged man with a Barnum-and-Bailey's fetish.

I swear if I wallked down the street looking like that on any day but Halloween, people would run inside and slam their doors. I looked like a hobo criminal who escaped from the insane asylum. Try that for a Match.com description.

I walked out to the kitchen and my cat ran away and hid under the dining room table. Oh, this will have the women flocking my way. Everyone wants to date a man who looks like he drew a goatee onto his face with a charcoal briquette.

So I lathered up my face and shaved the whole thing off. My face was as naked as a mole rat, as smooth as an ice rink after the Zamboni's passed by, as soft as the nape of an alpaca's neck.

The next day, I went to a meeting at noon. The first person I saw was a close female friend and she said, "Hey, you shaved off your beard!"

"Yes," I replied.

"How come?" she asked.

"I cannot tell a lie," I said. "I've gotten an offer to play left field for the San Francisco Giants. And they don't allow facial hair."

"Oh," she replied, thinking it over. "Tried to color it, huh?"

Crap, I said to myself. Women. Sometimes they make you just want to dye.

Comments

[Juanita from HP Rockville]

Read the hair dye story, David, and enjoyed it! I also remember your sense of humor. Keep it up.