Salk’s iconic portrait, in which his profile is seen holding a syringe or container with, presumably, a dose or two of his polio vaccine, flashes through whenever I lift a container of Gilette gel deodorant and twist its base to raise a sufficient dosage of the product to apply to my pits for a day of no underarm body odor. It is the lifting of the container and the way I hold it to the light from the window so I can adequately see and assess the quantity of gel that reminds me of Salk’s posture in one of his posed portraits. I imagine myself calculating a medically accurate amount of deodorant gel in the same way Salk or other virologists determine vaccine dosages.
The other face that blasts into my mind, that of Jack Welce, appears every time I pick up a roll of toilet paper and/or wipe my ass after shitting. Welch’s countenance has come to mind at these moments ever since I read details about his extravagent retirement package. It was financially absurd but so too was how the details of his settlement went all the way down to how many rolls of toilet paper he should expect to have at his disposal at any time, any day, at any moment. That just fascinated me that any human being should be so spoiled in life that they had never, ever, need worry about having sufficient resource and material to wipe their ass.
By comparison I imagined all the stranded loners of the world, at any moment in time, any place one earth, suddenly finding themselves in that naked, altogether nude place of alarm when relieving themselves is followed by a horrible moment of vulnerability and shame. Who do I tell? How do I contact anybody from here? I can’t just get up and walk away with a soiled, shittened asshole…
Those are just two faces that blast into my mind virtually every day at about the same time. Certainly there are others. Faces are amazing creations, are they not? I don’t know if it makes me superficial (and I don’t care if it does) but my perceptions about some people around me changed drastically when their masks finally came off. What a difference a mouth makes. What a difference an unexpectedly Rolly Fingers moustachio makes on a guy I would have thought had no facial hair whatsoever. What a difference it is seeing a woman’s missing two front teeth. GIven her lisplessness I never would have imagined that.
I have been left asking what some people look like. I remember last summer’s moment, when I felt both ambivalent yet interested to know what this very flirty woman’s face looked like. When she finally took off the mask it was like she took off her shirt. What a beautiful woman under that face covering. If it makes me superficial then so be it but my attitudes about this woman changed completely at that moment. I had regarded her as silly, flighty, and probably half my age. All that was indeed true but the attraction led me to amek yet more bad decisions which, fortunately, I got away from unscathed.
But that moment of reveal, the letting free of her mouth and face, it seemed to open my mind to the inevitable sequence of events that made the removal of her mask only the first article of attire to be dispensed.
But that face. I’ll never forget how sweet and beautiful it was in that moment of revelation.
SO many other faces in my mind. Faces captured forever in moments of anger, alarm, orgasm… I knew one women, briefly, who would PMS like it was her job. She could get incredibly white hot angry over absolutely nothing. Even getting what she wanted was not enough to sooth this savage.
She was also a snot machine. I never thought much of it when she would go off and blow her nose twenty times a night. I thought it was kind of cute.
But mix PMS and the snot factory and you get something I don’t think you’d find even in the gnarliest horror flick.
She tried to cry but couldn’t make tears. So she stood in place, face locked in torment and torture, her head so full of rage and coarsing with poison that she failed to be aware that pencil-length sticks of snot were coming out of her nose. By the time I saw this they were 6 inches long and still growing.
I remember their firmness because I, fearing her head might explode from all this snot, reached for a roll of paper towels and covered her face with a few sheets. This brought my hands in contact with the snot sticks through the paper towels, not direct contat, but it was enough to detect that thesse pencils of snot were quite firm in texture.
It was so fucking disgusting, a face I can never forget, from a woman I’d otherwise be able to erase altogether.
