Going Bare: Don't Try This At Home

Thanks to my fabulously devoted lover, at 40 I felt wickedly sexy for the first time in many long years. But I didn’t feel quite as desirable to him as I would like to be. Not that he expressed the least bit of dissatisfaction, but there were a few things I was self-conscious about. Like my bush full of graying pubic hair. And so I found myself, with oodles of trepidation, at the beauty salon on the main street of my quaint little town, waiting to be waxed bare as an airbrushed centerfold.

I’d made the mistake of trying a home wax-job three days before, and was now walking around with a pussy wearing a moth-eaten fur coat. I felt like those guys you see who are having hair implants. There was no way I was going to let my lover see me like this, and also no way I was going to deprive myself of our sessions of sexual bliss while I awaited its growing out.

Finding a home bikini-line waxing kit on the pharmacy shelves in the middle of winter in this northern clime with a foot of snow on the ground had proven a challenge. I’d finally found one on the bottom shelf of women’s leg-hair creams. It came in a small plastic tub and promised to be microwaveable. That my microwave oven and my bathroom are at opposite ends of my house did not deter me.

I dove in bravely. First I grabbed the scissors to clip my pubic hair down to the recommended quarter-inch. This proved dicey. I’d need to be a yogi to see the hair I could feel sprouting all the way back under the eaves of my butt. I could see it in a mirror, sort of, but how could I get the scissors back there, while watching it backwards?

I began to question the sanity of stabbing at my most delicate regions with a pair of scissors. I know there are people into just about anything, but my idea of a pleasurable time would not include descriptive terms like "bloody," "sliced," and "cold sharp steel".

I did what I could, confident my hacking trim job would soon give way to smooth bare skin and no one would be the wiser. I doused my trimmed bush with the vials of liquid which claimed to be skin desensitizers and wax-non-sticker-guaranteers, and walked to the kitchen with a towel around my waist. I nuked the jar of green putty stuff for the warning-no-more-than-twenty-seconds recommended. It remained green putty stuff, only slightly warmer around the edges. I tried again, and again. After about three minutes some blobs of liquid began emerging. I stirred it into the consistency of some slime my daughter played with in pre-school.

I dashed to the bathroom and began to spread it with the provided plastic spatula in a nice thin strip. Except it cooled as I spread, like that instant-drying nailpolish. I counted out the seconds, peeled up the far corner of the strip just like it said, and yanked.

Words can not begin to describe the pain. A piece of the wax strip came off in my hand, with some hairs attached, ripped out by the roots. The rest of the wax was a mass of goop, stuck like chewing gum on an angora sweater. With the sweater, I’d have known what to do: stick it in the freezer and then chip it off when it’s frozen solid. I wondered if I was going to have to stick my ass in the freezer. Or if I should just go sit down outside in the snow and let the neighbors think I’d gone stark raving mad.

Crying and cursing, I soldiered forth, ripping out hunks of pubic hair, interspersed with burning myself with the wax which managed to be either hot enough to crisp my skin or cold enough to refuse to come off the spatula, but never just the right temperature to spread in the eighth-inch-thick neat little line depicted on the box. Never believe anything it says on a package.

Three quarters of the way through the tub of wax, my bathroom floor a sticky puddle, my poor pussy a gross mask of red bumpy skin and patches of trimmed and untrimmed hair, my doorbell rang. My face blanched. Then a hand thudded heavily on the door. I glanced at the clock. More pounding. Whoever it was, they weren’t going away.

I quickly pulled on corduroys without undies. Mistake – I felt the fuzzy green fabric sticking to my sore gummy skin. I threw open the door, trying to look casual, only to find my next door neighbor dripping blood all over the porch.

"Did I wake you," he asked. "I sliced my hand open with the saw, and I noticed you were home."

The scent of wax and lotion rose from my crotch. His blood was seeping in to my concrete steps in a widening circle. My eyes were teary from a half hour of ripping my public hair out by the roots. The words I avoided earlier came flooding back to mind: bloody, sliced, and cold sharp steel. Sometimes life is surreal.

I dashed to the bathroom, threw gummy cold piles of hairy wax back in the box the kit had come in, swiped at the floor with an old towel, and buried them both at the bottom of the kitchen garbage can. Then I drove my neighbor for stitches and a tetanus shot, because that’s the kind of things neighbors do for each other in small towns.

Back home I inspected my handiwork carefully in my bedroom mirror. Amidst the rag-tag job were a few patches of smooth bare skin. Towards the end, I was starting to get the knack of it. But now I had no choice: this had to be finished by a professional.

Fond as I am of sex and intimacy, I hate having strangers touch me. So spreading my legs for the sweet, slightly pudgy salon girl with two pink barrettes in her hair was not the most casual thing I’ve ever undertaken. She dumped on a cloud of baby powder and dipped her spatula into a metal pan over an open flame.

I cringed, awaiting the burn, the rip, the pain. Instead, the wax was smooth and warm. She swiped it on, pressed a cloth over it, and pulled it off in one quick zip. It stung a bit, but much more closely resembled band-aid removal than kidney removal. She chatted the whole while, going zip-zip-zip. I flipped over, a few more zips, and it was done.

When she stepped out of the room, I took a quick peek in the half-length mirror, and ran my fingers over the smooth bare sexy skin. Not a gray hair in sight. I turned, admiring myself vainly. Yes, this body with its centerfold smooth pussy was suddenly removed from reference to age. It’s not that I felt younger, or even wanted to. It’s just that I no longer felt that I looked older than I felt. I no longer felt any age in particular.

The next day, my lover he didn’t say a thing. He was just sort of humming, the kind of incredibly pleasurable hum of a person completely content with his mouth full, his sparkling dark eyes peering up at me in sparkling delight.

Now why didn’t I do this sooner?