That time I went to CA for a wedding and bought makeup for the first time

I don’t know how I’ve spent all this time in CA without talking about death. Weddings always remind me of death. Perhaps that’s because everything reminds me of death. I read somewhere recently that the most commonplace thing that a writer can muse on is death. I have a horrendously short memory, which means I tend to take the latest thing I’ve read as Gospel, largely because I’ve forgotten everything else that has come before. As such, I’m trying not to write about death as much. I think the quote may have been from Borges, but I also know that he’s written multiple times about infinity and at least once, and amazingly, about immortality, so maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was written by someone who was dying.

                I sleep about 4.5 hours before my body wakes me up because it’s seven AM on the east coast and it’s time to eat and go to the bathroom. It’s these small, insistent reminders, hunger, toilets that belie that feeling or dream that we are all spirit imbued by soul. If we are, then we are still trapped in these very hungry, very tired bodies. I get up and eat breakfast in the dark at my dad’s old wooden table, where I’ve memories of eating my first bowl of Lucky Charms in the company of siblings who live thousands of miles away but who were once only a chair away. You see, everything is always about loss. Perhaps when I think of weddings, I think too of partings, how they say, till death do you part.

                For some reason, it takes me hours to get back to sleep. I roll around in the double bed, making a mess of my sheets and periodically checking my phone to see how much time has passed. When I finally sleep, it is short and hard. I wake up to a pool of drool large enough for a goldfish to swim in.

I take a warm shower and start to shave. I’m clean-shaven about twice a year, and I’ve decided that my friend’s wedding, a man I’ve known since he was five, will be one of those occasions. I’m using a disposable razor for the occasion, and though I think I remember all the nuances of shaving, it becomes clear about halfway through that my face has quite forgotten. In the mirror, I notice some unsightly razor burn coming up, and I also notice that underneath the overgrowth of beard that I’ve been letting go, an area on my chin and some on my upper lip have formed rashes shaped like Missouri and West Virginia respectively.

I am not, I think, a vane person. Though, in fact, I am a vane person. I just mean in the context of knowing other American 21^st century human beings I’m not a particularly vane person. which means, of course, that I am in fact, rather vane, but I attribute this vanity to the culture rather than to any personal failing, or at least the proliferation of reflective surfaces and venues to post pictures. I suspect that it was much easier to go around with a rash on one’s face when there was no mirror to confirm one’s shortcomings. I point the rash out to my dad, though he says he can’t see it. I suspect that he’s going blind.

“Look,” I say, “my friend is paying a large sum of money for me to appear as a bit actor in these pictures, and I’m not going to mess it up by having large splotches of red on my face.”

It turns out that all of the pictures are taken from far away, and that my face needed no touching up, but I appreciated the fiction I spun for myself to justify the vanity.

My dad concurs, though I know that underneath his concurrence is the thought that I’ve probably spent too much time taking selfies in the bathroom mirror.

When I get downstairs, I tell my dad that I’m going to the coffee shop. He says he’s sorry that he doesn’t have coffee that I have to wander the streets in search of it. The thing is, I don’t drink coffee every day, but I do love to drink it on vacations. I want to wander the streets in the warmth or the chill, perhaps I’ll stumble across someone playing a violin in front of a church, or find a small shop where they sell Parisian style baked goods, though I’m in America for this trip, on the outskirts of a city, so instead I’ll hop over a plastic bag or two of fast food and ignore the mouth-watering pictures of hamburgers painted on the windows. Except, none of that really happened that day, that morning, I drove away in the car without saying a word and called him from the store.

                At the shop, I get a small coffee and a ham and cheese croissant. The croissant tastes exactly as it should, rich, soft and warm. I do not know if I should pass the homeless man on the street on the way to get a second breakfast without thinking much of it. I think that we all should be sitting on verandas overlooking the sea while eating pastries. It seems my wishing that the world was so does precious little good.

                The truth of the matter is that I’m eating the croissant in the car and am in a hurry. I call my dad from Albertson’s to let him know that I’ve gone.

“Where are you?” he asks,

“I’m at Albertson’s. Do you need anything?”

“Why?”

Pause. “I’m looking for makeup.”

I go the idea from my brother. I kid you not. The thought would never have occurred to me, but he was out last spring to give a talk to 200 or so people and had some sort of blemish on his face that he decided he needed cover up for. Up until then, it hadn’t really occurred to me that this was an option for men, but as I stared in the mirror at the splotches on my face, I knew what I had to do. I’m no fool, and I quickly discerned that all they had at Albertsons’ was makeup removal stuff.

I drove down the street in a hurry and stopped at a Lucky’s and headed straight for the makeup section. Within moments, I had identified precisely the sort of thing that I needed, though I wasn’t sure if I wanted a liquid, or a solid, whether I needed heavy duty or light duty, or what the hell any of this would actually look like. My heart was beating fast as though I was trying to pick out a dirty movie or doing something illicit. I pulled two packages closer to me, trying to discern exactly what type of makeup was the best and managed to knock them on the floor. As I was bent over, trying to pick them up, a nice saleswoman dropped by and said, “Do you need some help?” I told her no, and felt indignant that she would have asked.

I eventually settled on something from Cover Girl of Maybeline and scanned the store for one of those self-check machines. Luckily, they had one, and I was able to purchase the equivalent of a Hustler and slip out the door. In the car, I peered once more at my face. I had made a good decision.

Back at my dad’s I stood facing the mirror and unscrewed the cap. How much are you supposed to apply? I settled on half a rouge stick or whatever they give you with those things, and applied it liberally. It turns out that when applied liberally makeup doesn’t actually look all that good. Sure it covers up the spots, but it does so only by replacing them with brown splotches. I let them sit for ten minutes, trying to decide if it was better to have brown or red splotches before attempting to rub it in, and I have to tell you now that makeup is magic. The redness disappeared and what was left was only a trace of extra color.

From there, it was a quick touch up in the bathroom, toss on a suit.

“We didn’t iron that,” my dad says. I’d told my wife before I left that I distinctly remembered my father ironing things while we were growing up. When I ask him, he says that he never ironed his shirts.

The suit is only slightly rumpled, which is par for the course for me. I head back down the freeway, turn on my satellite radio station and listen to the sound of Katie Perry singing “Roar,” and I picture the kids in the hospital beds, making up a dance to this song, and I think of weddings, which are really all about death and for the second time in two days I find myself looking past the freeway, to the sky beyond, strung with clouds on clotheslines, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this strange gift that is being a thinking, seeing, feeling, human being on this earth. It is strange that to have it happening again so quickly, as I am, by nature, morose, but something about the slant of light, the foothills in the distance and the wind rushing in through the partially open window remind me of the gift that though I love other people so much, I am reminded the most of when I am alone.