Excerpt From My Book, or: I Chemical Burned My Nuts

What do this....

 ... And this....

...Have in common?

You are about to find out, friend...

... Because as some of you know, I am writing a memoir.  The majority of the book is finished, but I have had an unreasonably hard time working on the final touches.  I dare say that it is the creeping fear of rejection.  I think part of my subconscious is holding me back from finishing the book in an effort to hold me back from being hurt by editor or publisher rejection.

I am terrified of the day that I send out my query letters to some agents and I am even more terrified to have any of them read any portion of the book.  I understand that this kind of performance anxiety is, indeed, pretty standard.  So today, I figured I would approach that anxiety head on by sharing with you all one of the funnier portions of my book.  The memoir is generally morose, deeply introspective, and melancholy in tone, but there are some incredibly happy portions and some fairly funny, oddball stuff.  The following is the latter.

From the chapter whose working title is "Nair":

...

Eventually I made my way home. The walk was a long and treacherous one, but I made it back to the apartment. The place was always thrashed in those days. I had to stay drunk just so I could stand how dirty my apartment was. I didn’t clean for anyone. If V wanted my place clean when she came to see me, she had to do it herself.

One of my favorite things about her was that she would, indeed, “do it herself”.

There’s a certain horrible spot that some of us get to where we tell ourselves that we “like things dirty”, or that we are “incapable of cleaning”, or that we “throw up yellow acid every morning that occasionally looks like it could contain blood because our body is, indeed, cleaning itself”, and this absolves us from the need to clean.

There’s this certain horrible spot where everything becomes justifiable. Any and every monstrous behavior becomes “ok” behind some mask of denial. Some dishonest yet all enveloping construct of the mind makes it all reasonable.

There is a certain horrible spot some of us get to where we are sitting on our toilet taking bong hits and sipping on warm beer, and we have to make a decision: will we try to shave our genitalia, or will we pass out here in the bathroom and wake up the next morning wondering why we aren't in bed?

I got the nose hair clippers out. There was a certain auto-erotic feeling to the whole situation. I began to trim the pubes. I wouldn’t advise this to anyone. Not the pube trimming itself. That’s (of course) advisable to many. I just wouldn’t advise the trimming of pubes while you are too drunk to see straight. I wasn’t seeing double. I was seeing triple. Three limp dicks swirled in front of my eyes and I wielded three pairs of sharp nose hair trimming scissors in an attempt to clear away the bramble of the “pubic mane”.

I would not write this if it weren’t necessary. I want you to know me through and through, and I want very much for anyone who might find this tale in their hands to learn from my experience. Please, please learn from my mistake.

I trimmed and trimmed, and there were little curly hairs all over my tile bathroom floor. Maggie was just a kitten, then, and she sat in the doorless doorway of the bathroom watching me. I was ever cognizant of her movement, as my bong was sitting nearby and could easily have been knocked over by an ignorant three month old Siamese cat.

I trimmed and trimmed, and then folded and moved and stretched, and then trimmed some more. The more I moved the pubified landscape around, though, the more hair I found. Alarmingly, I realized that any reasonable grooming job here was going to have to extend farther “back and under” than just the base of the... um... sack.

I lifted, spread, and bent over in an attempt to see what I was dealing with. I couldn't see much. I am lucky I didn't tip over and break my neck.

I snipped and cut a bit, but made little headway from such an awkward position. I had to have something different. The resourcefulness I sometimes exhibited when in full-on “addict mode” surprised even me. I hobbled my drunkenness out to the front room where I had a tall dressing mirror. I pulled it from the spot where I had once, in a fit of sobriety, nicely pinned it to the wall, and I dragged it back to the bathroom with me.

I propped the mirror up against the wall. It sat slightly angled towards the ceiling, like those mirrors on the floor in a shoe store. I sat on the ground in front of it. I saw the warm 40oz bottle of “King Cobra” sitting there by the toilet. I took a swig, put the bottle down, and proceeded to put my legs as far in the air as I could in front of me, gaining me a view through the mirror of the “grundle” area, as they call it.

The grundle was much hairier and darker than the name seemed to portray, even. And it is truly a dark and hairy name.

“Terrible,” I thought in my stupor.

“What god would design something so preposterous?”

I was constantly stacking evidence against what I hoped was a non-existant deity.

“A fucking stupid spot for some hair! That's what it is!” I told the kitten, who was rubbing up on my foot. I trimmed some more, taking care not to slice through all the important stuff in that region.

I wish this had been my most pathetic moment that evening.

I became satisfied after maybe ten minutes that the grundle and the greater furry region above were as cut as they could get with just the scissors. Next, I would use the electric razor to get things really short.

I had done this before in the past on a couple of occasions. The first time, I had trimmed and electric razored, but was unhappy because A) I was paranoid that the electric razor’s “clipper” attachment, which remained stationary next to the general shaving portion, would somehow jam up with scrotum and hair and drag my privates into it, slicing me and leaving me a horribly scarred freak show with nothing to live for, and B) this method had not gotten me that “baby’s bottom” kind of shave I was after.

I had tried using a regular razor, like I use on my face, once as well, and was happy with the end result, but was unhappy with the risk of slicing and the amount of time it took to safely complete the task.

“This time will be the best,” I thought.

Nothing could go wrong.

I used the electric razor to clean up the longer remaining portions, getting back on the floor and rolling backwards in an attempt to maneuver the razor into the bottom-most portion of my butt crack. Anyone who had seen me would have probably thought that, whatever I had in my hand, I was making an ill fated effort to insert it into myself.

I sat there in that pile of hair. I saw the 40oz and the bong out of the corner of my eye. I took a big drink of the beer and I applied flame from my bic lighter to the last green portion of the bowl in my bowl. It was probably my favorite bong ever. It was simple, clear glass, but it was at least two feet tall, and heavy. The slide and the bowl were two separate pieces that fit together perfectly because they were machine cut from the same piece of foggy glass. No o-ring to get burnt and, eventually, crack and fall off. Furthermore, just above the water, where the body of the pipe became straight, narrow, and long, there were four tiny pin holes in the perimeter of the glass that all allowed air to come into the pipe at the same angle, causing the smoke to not “rise” up to my mouth like a rocket but too “spiral” up in a hypnotizingly trippy way.

The smoke spiraled up in a hypnotizingly trippy way, and as I pulled the bowl away from the slide, the smoke dissipated first, and then disappeared. I was a dragon breathing out magical smoke played in reverse. Or something.

I exhaled, turned on the shower, and pulled the Nair out of the grocery bag. I knew two things at the time: A) I didn’t need to read the directions, because I knew that I could just put it on and it would make the remaining hair fall out, and B) this was a really, really great idea. In fact, I was surprised I had never heard about this being done before. 

I had even had the presence of mind, in my severely altered state, to get the “Nair: For Sensitive Skin”. I remember the bottle depicted a woman’s smooth legs and a couple leaves of aloe.

I got in the shower and closed the curtain. I soaped up the part of my body in question, and rinsed it. I stood there staring at the wall for a while. I loved, in those days, to get as high as possible and then just stand in the shower and absorb the water. I did that for about ten minutes. Then I glanced down to the shower floor. Watching the water spiral down the drain, I was almost as mesmerized by the water as by the weed smoke, but I saw in my periphery my horribly mangled penis hair.

I figured I had better get on with it. I grabbed the Nair with the left and squirted a big handful of it into the right. I set the bottle down again, aimed the shower head away from me and toward the wall, and mushed the white lotiony substance all over the spot just above my wang-chung. The stuff was cool on my skin, and I rubbed it all over that area, and down around the base of the penis. I squirted some more Nair into the right hand and proceeded to slather it all over my balls and halfway up the shaft (although I wasn’t purposely applying it to the shaft). I rubbed it all in and moved it down past the balls, down to the grundle area.

And then: it was all over.

I sat there looking at it, realizing that I wasn’t quite sure what to anticipate. Would the hair just… fall out? Would it fly out? Should I shield my eyes, or be wearing goggles? I stared and waited. And waited. I waited for approximately one minute.

What followed was absolutely my worst nightmare.

The burning sensation probably started in a literal sense before my brain actually felt it, as a result of the alcohol and marijuana. The pain first became clear to me at the base of the shaft and that top portion of the scrotum. The pain was not unbearable right away, but within a few seconds of having first noticed it, it became more hellish than any other physical pain I had felt to date. The pain spread all over. If I would have closed my eyes, I would have been able to convince myself that someone was burning my cock and balls with gasoline and a torch, or perhaps that they had put barbecue sauce all over my nuts and wang and allowed a truck load of flesh eating ants to enjoy my pride (or lack thereof) as a meal.

I was instantly sober. Perhaps not in a scientific sense of the word, but I felt suddenly as though I hadn't drank or smoked a thing. I screamed, and moved the shower head away from the wall and directly onto the Naired skin. The shower water was still hot, though, and immediately multiplied my pain by approximately seven or a eight thousand times. I looked down quick to make sure I still had everything I was supposed to have, and then I screamed again and began to choke up tears. I turned the adjuster so that the water would be as cold as possible, and waited for it to get that way, which took about five seconds. It felt like it took five days.

My hand sat there in the stream of the water and the instant it ran cold I moved my body back in line with the water, and looked down again. I didn’t want to look down. I was afraid that I would see red holes burnt into my sack. I was afraid that my testicles were going to fall out of my body through holes burned into my skin by a women’s hair removal product. I was afraid they would be dangling there in a stream of blood and shredded skin.

I was afraid to look, but had to.

“Oh shit!” I screamed. The Nair was still all over me, and I realized that maybe I should have been looking the whole time! I had put a lot of it on, and it wasn’t just running right off my body with the water as I had imagined it doing while I was averting my eyes from my wang-chung. I grabbed a wash cloth and began dabbing it off. Each time the washcloth, ever so gently, grazed the burning skin, furies of acid and fire shot up through my spine into my brain like lightning bolts of Auschwitz and dead puppy sadness.

My brain translated these messages into a verbal format: “Fuck!!!!!”

I screamed at the top of my lungs. All of my neighbors would have heard me.

The pain was overwhelming. My vision began to blur (more so than it already had been) and I became desperate. I pressed the lever on the bathtub faucet to allow the water to come rushing out of it. I hit my knees before the faucet, now fully crying, my brain and body screaming at me to kill myself.

“End it now, you worthless fuck! There is no life after this kind of pain!” my brain said.

My brain had said this exact thing before, on many occasions, but at that moment it was so much louder than I had ever heard before.

I had a brief vision of myself with a badly scarred set of genitals, never able to get laid again.

I milled the vision in my head over for a fraction of a half of one second before I realized that I didn’t care. I had hit my knees to the bottom of the tub hard and had scooted close to the faucet sticking out of the wall. I would have traded all the pussy in the world at that moment to have the pain end as I thrust my pelvis into the waterfall of freezing cold water coming out of the spout.

“Please God. Please!” is all I could say. Over and over I appealed to God.

Out loud, sometimes screaming it: “Please, God!!!”

Interesting that suddenly God was real.

I sat there crying as the cold water ran over my throbbing package. I felt like someone had dipped me in battery acid. I bawled.

I wonder what Maggie thought. I wonder what the neighbors thought. After five minutes with my burning cock sitting there in that stream of water, I finally sat back on my heels, dizzy from the alcohol and from the pain. I sat back and looked down to see the damage done.

The balls and the penis were probably twice their normal size. They looked like red Play-Dough. They looked like pounded raw beef, or something. They looked brightly colored. They looked like the goddamn definition of human pain and suffering. I carefully (oh, so carefully) pulled my penis up with a couple of fingers so I could get a better look at the scrotum. It felt as if my penis had been sewn to the top of my balls and they had healed together. It felt like they had healed together and that I was pulling them violently apart.

Thank God. There were no holes in the sack. I wasn’t visibly bleeding. I was going to be ok, I thought.

“I am going to be ok.”

I said it to myself a million times.

I thought this, and my body shuddered out the last few sobs and the tears began to stop flowing from my eyes. The pain was still amazing, but it was dissipating rapidly.

I don’t know how women can use that product. Anywhere. Anyone who uses Nair is insane.

I got out of the shower, grabbed the bong and a bottle of that cheap paint thinner vodka out of my freezer, and wandered to my bed to chemical myself to sleep. I took a few hits and watched an episode of the Simpsons. Just before I turned off the light, I glanced down. My shit was all red and puffy. That was bad enough. But the kick in the teeth is this: when I looked down, I could still see hair all over it.

Son of a bitch.

The whole experience might not have been so painful if not for that fact. It looked hairy in patches all over. My cock looked like a chemotherapy patient who was just starting to lose the last of his hair and who was reacting badly to the radiation. Perhaps a chemo patient who had been left in their chemo microwave too long.

It took me several days and a couple hundred dollars worth of booze, weed and Percocet to get over that pain.

Today, I don't shave.  

... 

Ok, y'all.  Tell me what you think. :-)