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I go to my manscaper, a Somali named Pedro who cashed out his landscaping company in Málaga after he killed a man in Ceuta over a straight flush that was a little crooked and then took a hedge trimmer to a cop when they raided his hideout in the sewers of Córdoba, sawing through neck, badge, and uniform all. His manscaperie, the hottest in the 21st arrondissement, is a cubby on the Rue de Kappabashi, wedged between a donuterie and a creamerie. Pedro collects the leftover hair and dander and sells it to the creamerie where they blend it into the salt and pepper soft serve that so many foreign dignitaries lap up like overheated dogs. People love the texture. The added grease, the incomparable mouthfeel. Pedro then uses the money to buy donuts from the donuterie which he feeds to his customers which keeps them queuing up thus the cycle continues to cycle.
I’m here primarily for the donuts myself, especially the crispy Earl Grey one. I’d go to the donuterie and buy direct except for two weeks I was a power bottom to the owner’s son’s feckless top which was fun while it lasted but the donuts are better. My current beau Beaufort is a stud and it’s love, I tell you, sweaty humping forever love, so when he asked me to do some manscaping—I’m of Akkadian descent ergo hairy as Sargon and Beau is a marine biologist with a harbor seal bestiality taboo itch that he scratches by hammering hairless men—I remembered Pedro and the donuts and here we are.
Pedro takes out his pruning shears and starts clipping my chest thicket and before we know it he’s knee deep in my curly black chest hair, madly cutting in a flurry like Edward Scissorhands, snip, snip, and singing sad Fado numbers to me in his raspy Arabic, snip, snip, while in my mind’s eye, my mindscape, I’m picturing Mr. Donut Jr. fucking me and my ass morphs into a donut that Beaufort eats, dunking it/me in a massive cup of Earl Grey tea, licking the frothy milk, snip, snip, and Pedro starts lathering me with wax using special brushes he stole from the Gauguin Estate, the handles made with a composite of Tahitian palm fronds and the distilled saliva of the most talented students at Les Beaux Arts de Papeete, lather, lather, and in my inner fuckscape now Pedro is making an appearance, with his one cauliflowered ear from his jujitsu academy days putting half of Burco in armbars, and the one studly slit in his lower lip from his brief stint at Camp Cheney, a CIA black site in the caves outside Ouarzazate, and I hear him say, in the real world (if such a thing exists), in the manscaperie, “you have beautiful nipples,” and I say, “keep singing, Pedro,” and then in my mindscape which begat a fuckscape which begets a heartscape, I see Pedro and I strolling through the Gardens of Versailles, hand-in-hand, eating donuts, trimming hedges, and I hear Pedro’s raspy Arabic in the world again and it sounds like Earl Grey smells, a bergamot voice, and I’m on my stomach, my lathered chest cool against the leather chair that’s reclined into a bed, horizontal now, like a massage table, and I feel Pedro’s tongue just grazing my asshole as he’s singing terms of endearment, sweet everythings, into me in all the tongues birthed by Babel’s hubris, “habibi, aziz, qurxoon,” intoning inside me, blowing into me as if I’m a duck about to get Pekinged, “bellissimo, khoshgelam,” or an alphorn to his Swiss Ricola man, “zwin, sheli, charmant,” and lighting up my landscape which begat a mindscape which begat a fuckscape which begat a heartscape which begets a soulscape, bright as the Mount Ingino Christmas Tree, lick, lick, as Mogadishu shining across the Seychelles, lick, lick, as the torches glowing in the ruins of Akkad—Warlike Ishtar bless her—and I can’t wait to taste my hair in tomorrow’s ice cream.
Twitter: @doughboywrites
