Now There’s A Guy Who Could Use A Face Mask!
Yesterday, I had a long and excruciating trek around Manhattan, which included a lesson from Gossip Girl’s Lily Bass about why Restalayne fillers are actually very natural-looking; an epic fail moment at Barnes and Noble, where I ended up spending 25 dollars on Ronald Firbank’s horribly difficult-to-get-into “Five Novels,” one of which is called is called “The Prancing Nigger,” just because the cover made it look like something that would make me more likely to write for Texte Zur Kunst; a fun lunch with my friend from graduate school, who is antisocial and plays the harpsichord, in which he perfectly summed up this awful guy’s personality by saying, “Whenever that guy is at a party, I know I’ve made the wrong decision”; a tour around a gallery show I’m reviewing; a visit with an entrepreneur; fifteen minutes of killing time in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I had to force myself to light a candle for my grandmother’s health rather than for my own great wealth and success; and a consultation with the beauty and health editor at People magazine, who was nice and pretty.
The consultation took place at the SKII counter on the ground floor of Saks. When it was done, I was offered a 10-minute facial, which I eagerly accepted.
Now, when it comes to “beauty” stuff, I’m a complete and utter idiot. The other day, my editor sent me to get a Keratin hair treatment. I thought it was one of those deep moisturizing things, where you sat in a chair in a fancy salon, and gave you a head massage. But oh no, Keratin is a fucking chemical straightening. When the woman who did it to me saw me sitting in the chair, she was like, “Are you sure you need this?” I still didn’t really know what she meant until I left the salon, which was in the Plaza, got a glimpse of myself in a gilded mirror, and almost fainted from shock. I looked like someone had flattened my head and turned me into the adult Punky Brewster.
I should have known not to get a facial in the middle of a fucking department store, but again, mistakenly, I thought that a facial involved like some temple rubbing and maybe a few hot rocks. I’ve never gotten one before. I’m way too cheap to pay for that shit.
But, oh no, if you’re at a product counter, they’re not going to give you a fucking head rub with essential oils. They’re going to give you a facial MASK, which when they unravel from its pouch, looks like something Freddie Kruger might have rocked after he got drowned in a tub of moisturizer.
“A little scary,” the woman chuckled as she applied it to my face.
The mask covered every inch, except for the bottom of my two nostrils, and a tiny sliver of my mouth. It was cool, and sticky, and heavy. A few seconds in, it began to get very itchy.
“I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” she said, leaving me sitting there, out in the open, right next to the fucking elevator bank.
“I’m not going to have a panic attack,” I told myself, very firmly. “I’m just going to count down from ten minutes.”
I got to “2” and then realized that if I counted any higher, I would stop being able to breathe.
So I tried to focus my attention on the muscles in my face, which were now twitching uncontrollably.
For the next indeterminable amount of time, I sat there, trying to find ways to occupy my mind. I fell into a dreamless sleep. I quickly woke myself up from it. I feel into a dream. I couldn’t stay there because a group of girls walked by yapping about handbags. I tried to put myself in the shoes of a blind person, and heighten my other senses, but that was boring. I tried to listen to the conversations going on around me, but the talking just sounded like murmurs and dips. I thought about Emile Zola. I thought that the ten minutes were up no less than five times, only to find myself, still blinded, still itching, still panicking, all by myself, with no one to help me.
Just as I was about to lose it—I had at this point opened my mouth, and was taking in large, gulping breaths—the woman tapped me on the knee, and said my time was up. When she held up a mirror to my face, I saw that I had a gigantic green food sediment stuck in my teeth, and that it had been there all throughout my day, at every appointment I went to. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I asked her, accusingly.
A few harrowing minutes later —not for me, but for some tourists in Rockefeller Center who crossed my path—and I was on the subway to Lost Weekend, to meet Mr. R and Sadie Lady. I emerged from underground at the East Broadway stop, right in the middle of Chinatown.
At the top of the stairs, a crackhead old lady, a huge scab moldering between her two eyes, was beseeching Chinese men for money. “You have a beautiful boy,” she told one. “Man, you have a beautiful body. You have such a fucking beautiful body! I just need a little money for some food. Please. Please sir. You have such a fucking beautiful body.”
Miraculously, one of them stopped, and reached for his wallet. Thus, I was able to evade the junkie.
As I rounded the corner, I ran into her partner, who was standing, one arm on a telephone booth, nodding off in the middle of the sidewalk. On one foot, he wore a construction boot. The other was bare. The construction boot on that one had somehow made it’s way to the middle of the street, sock and all.
“Now there’s a guy who could sit down and have a face mask without having a panic attack,” I thought to myself. Somehow, that comforted me.
