JUST ADD SOAP AND WATER: Of Lucky Shaving Brushes and Being a 21st Century Drifter

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It first hit me, right between the eyes, while shaving one night.

I was standing over the sink, staring blankly into the steam-covered mirror in my tiny bathroom. It was early evening, and the sunset painted my entire apartment different shades of orange, violet, and auburn.

I stood there, rolling the tips of the boar's hair bristles across the handmade herbal soap, the sounds of the brush handle gently tapping the sides of the mug.

Lightnin' Hopkins' voice bellowed from the stereo in the bedroom.

Man, I said to myself, you're as old-fashioned as rye whiskey and water.

For some odd reason, that made me laugh. I went right back to singing along to the stereo, snickering as the water in the sink steamed and the soap bubbles tickled my chin.

Yes you know my mama told me, the day that I left the door/ She says you gonna have bad luck son, and I don't are where you go / I said just bring me my shotgun, boy you can bring just one or two shells / Yes if I don't get some competition, you know there's go to be trouble here...

* * * *

Yes, I shave with a brush and soap. I've tried using the fancy stuff, and I'll even use that canned crap if I'm forced. For years, I've come up with all sorts of justifications and excuses for it - it's better for the environment, it's more manly, it's a lost art...

Look, I just really enjoy a good shave. And I've never understood why other people find that so damned fascinating, particularly women.

One ex used to make a point of telling everyone she knew about it, almost boasting to her friends that I was some sort of Marlboro Man. When she finally told her boyfriend about who'd really been sleeping over during their (what did she call it?) rough patch, she even used my shaving habits as a rather batshit reason for her slip-up.

Another used to insist on watching from the toilet, fascinated that an Anglo guy groomed his face like her Mexican grandmother groomed her legs. She'd finish peeing, then sit there, elbows on her knees, chin resting in her palms, staring.

Like my grandfather had taught me years ago, I worked the lather up on my skin, not in the mug, twirling the bristles like a ballroom dancer.

I stared down into the sink, running blistering hot water over the brush, rewetting the bristles...

The brush...

* * * *

I realized that I was using my grandfather's brush, the one he received from one of his old Navy buddies back in '38, the gift from the guy who, according to legend, would later lose his life on a December morning on the island of Oahu, that date which has lived in infamy since 1941.

You know, there's a reason I consider that shaving brush my lucky brush. Through some act of fate, my grandfather died quietly in his sleep in a Virginia hospital in 1987 instead of 1941, one reassignment and decades away from his fallen comrades.

Because of its metaphysical associations, I usually only use it on special days. No one else is even allowed to touch the sucker. For some reason, however, on just another afternoon in Oxford Fucking Ohio, I'd chosen to wield the magical grooming tool.

Hmmm. Must be my lucky night.

The baked enamel finish keeps crumbling off the handle, the boar's hair thinning like an old man's, blonded and frail from nearly seven decades of service.

It has lathered soap on destroyers and at port, in places like Guam and Cairo and Norfolk, Virginia. The brush has foamed up mugs beside the Red Sea, in backwoods Louisiana and Arkansas, in Mojave Desert mobile homes and five-star hotels in Naples, Florence, and Rome.

It served my grandfather well, through his Navy and diplomatic days, through countless meetings with world leaders and other diplomats, monarchs and ministers, ambassadors and soldiers.

My grandfather taught me how to shave using this brush and a bladeless safety razor when I was five or six, back on the farm in Virginia. Since then, the brush has accompanied me on my own adventures in life.

I met my first Academy Award winner after a good, old-fashioned shave with the thing, my first Playboy Playmate (hint - she's funnier and much more savvy in person than you ever saw on MTV), first professional ballplayer, first governor, and my own first world leader.

That old shaving brush has camped with me in the Rockies, traveled across the I-10 Badlands of New Mexico and West Texas, prepared me for Mardi Gras revelry, and even cleaned me up for my interview for my first-ever job as a bonafide librarian.

* * * *

And that rather lurid, funny tale I once guest-posted over at Courting Destiny, the one about that oh-so-romantic conversation between me and an ex of mine while we lay naked in the back of a pick-up beneath the Wyoming sky?

The ex in that post often accused me of shaving with that lucky brush as a way of ensuring that I'd get lucky. And, in all honesty, she was probably right. Hell, she was the woman who used to insist on sitting on the toilet and staring every time I shaved, after all.

More often than not, I was almost 100 percent sure that I'd indeed get lucky if she heard the clank-clank of that brush in the mug and if I heard her scurrying out of bed for the bathroom, to go pee.

Err...I don't want to even think about the psychology involved.

The adult entertainer ex did the same thing. And so did...

Wait...

Err...

Would that be considered a slick move on my part?

Pffft....nah.

* * * *

I finished shaving that evening, just as the dusk stole away the sun's beautiful art. I carefully cleaned the lucky brush, changed CDs in the changer, putting on some Etta James to re-read Siegfried Sassoon poems and to thumb through the latest issue of Rolling Stone.

While I was shaving, I'd realized something about myself, something fascinating and mysterious. For some reason, though, I couldn't seem to put it into words. And that bugged me to no end.

And then it finally clicked like an empty revolver in some James Cagney flick.

What makes a man is not any one experience but the understanding that those experiences carry with them a certain appreciation of time, the finite nature of the often petty world Mankind has built for itself.

The whole of existence can be measured against something as simple as a good, slow shave. And something as simple as an old shaving brush can hold just as much sway over the course of generations as a thousand neutron bombs.

* * * *

Since I've lived in Oxford, I've often been asked why I choose to live by myself, why I never seem to be in a hurry to date anyone, why I don't seriously worry much about rushing to marriage or commitment or any of that shit, why I don't seem to ever feel truly alone in this world.

Why would I fret about any of that? Life's way too fucking short. That's why I take time to savor each and every moment alone, even when I'm staring into a steamy mirror at an increasingly battered-looking face, laughing to myself and listening to the blues.

Besides, I really am a bit of a drifter, one of those loner types who can, honestly, drop out of people's lives for years at a time, then show up at the most random times.

Man, I said to myself, you're as old-fashioned as rye whiskey and water.

There's always another shave around the corner. And even if that mystic shaving brush were to disintegrate tomorrow, I'd still have a million long, hot shaves' worth of memories.

Er...

Yeah...

I'd probably regret losing the ability to attract women with bladders tied to the damned thing, though.

- # # # -