This was after my junior year. I went down to New Orleans to tend bar and fail to process the loss of a girl who cited my lack of interest in applying to business school and said, quote, "You're so Ikea; I'm so Pottery Barn," by way of breaking up.

Marcel, the palm- and card-reading third-generation psychic who worked afternoons behind a beaded curtain at the back of the occult supply boutique adjoining my vaguely undead-themed bar, described this ex of mine as a synthetic girl, which I took as some sort of psychic shorthand for her spray-tanned, strip-waxed, bottle-scented, machine-shaped body, her head full of touch-screen spreadsheet dreams.

Marcel sucked on the rim of his pentacle necklace and laid out a Tower, inverted, a series of staves sprouting shaggy leaves. She's not really your type, he told me, and I thought both that psychics sold the obvious at a hell of a markup and that, more than anything, I wanted to be her type, make that glossy posh evolution beyond the mammalian, which is, of course, how the whole process of hair-removal began.

The trickier parts are the outer edges of the hands, around the knobs of the ankles, the armpits with their cross-hatched growth patterns, then the scrotum, obviously, but also those few coarse hairs toward the veiny base of the shaft and, harder still, the flat hairs along the fold between the groin and the top joints of the thighs...

Despite the rush of self-confidence when hitching my leg on the tub rim, spreading my ass cheeks to plane across them with a plastic safety razor, it was a cheap fix, temporary perfection. I always ended up as fallible as before, and as bashful.

By August, for instance, I totally crushed on Luna, this cute local witch who did occasional black onyx scryings at the occult place but mainly just looked bored and nothing like my ex, picking at her thick tendrils of dreads or the metal rings through her lower lip. She dressed in black slip dresses and boots with fascist accents, but it was all her hair that hooked me, those mounds of coiled dreads and the bushes in her armpits.

The witches and psychics and their friend the fish taco bike delivery guy would all come over for cigarette breaks to my bar, and I spent weeks working up the nerve to eventually gesture toward something like flirting with her, which in the end just involved me telling her that, yes, I was on chemo, attempting a hard recovery. She gave me a bean-sized green crystal, for healing, and a sympathetic kiss where my eyebrows used to be. I could smell nutmeg between her breasts.

Marcel, rolling his eyes back, told me I was a coward, which hadn't come out in the card reading. He said I now deserved cancer, which seemed excessive, though a few nights later I felt cursed enough, at a Laundromat bar, when Luna showed up, dancing to the rhythm of the washing machines and telling everyone that she was high on herbal ecstasy.

At some point she started making out with the bartender, a shirtless guy named Dog, who had a dog face tattooed over his human one, and I, nursing a fiery prickle up my limbs, crotch, and lower belly, went home and splayed out naked in bed, fingertips scanning for unruly, organic traces, the sandy rise of stubble or the stray, unmowed strand.

Later, reborn raw and gleaming from the blades, I masturbated to the furry notion of her, imagining us as opposites, odd twins, spooned together, all her hair pressed back against my streamlined, Teflon flesh, the surface of my fresh and, so I wanted to believe, ever-improving, perfecting skin.

DON'T GO BACK TO BRIDGEPORT

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