I’ve been kinda busy touring and singing and shagging random strangers on street corners lately to do a diary entry, but I gotta tell you something, now that I’ve gotten over the initial shocking pain.
Waxing one’s chest. I’m hairy, OK, and that’s been fine for a long time, but now that I’m a) really fit and b) touring, I felt I needed a change. It’s easier to wipe a clean slate free of sweat than having to blowdry a furry bush between each song, I tell ya that. So I got into this beauty place and I got a little Japanese chick that was barely twenty to do it. She asked me to take my shirt off, and went “ooh. You hairy!” and I said “What did you expect?” She asked me to lay down on a table, took out this little scissor and started clipping me down like a sheep in the places where the hair was too long. This is cause we tried to just put the strips of wax on, but it wouldn’t take.
So, first wax strip on, she said “It will only hurt for second” and I was thinking “OK, a second I can do.” She counted to three, ripped it off and suddenly it dawned on me just how accurate the reaction in “40 Year Old Virgin” was when he got his chest waxed. Oh-holy-mother-of-God, the pain spread like fire in dry grass and I released the most obscene swear-phrase you can imagine. I didn’t even know I could fit that many words into one breath. So I asked “Is this the least painful you have, cause it’s kinda unbearable, considering I have about an acre of hair that needs to be taken care of.” She said for ten quid more, they had a less painful hot wax – but they were currently out of that. Brilliant.
At this point I was just thrilled. I had a flaming red stripe of skin in between my nipples and asked in horror just how many more it would take. When she said “maybe thirty” I nearly fainted. So I said, “How about you shave it first and then wax it?” and she said “Then no hair to pull out”. So couldn’t do that either. An hour, thirty-seven strips – and being hoarse from screaming – later, I was feeling numb all over. Not to mention that I looked like a lobster between my shoulders and belt buckle. She had to go over certain areas more than once in the chest area (which brought me to tears – literally). When done, she said it would be red for “couple hours” then be fine.
This was at 2pm and by that evening I had a mass of red spots on my chest. So I applied some oil-free moisturiser to it, hoping it would soothe. I couldn’t go out cruising looking like that, so I went to bed kinda early and woke up the following morning looking like a plucked chicken. The spots were still flaming red with little white dots on them, like that you see on – well – a newly plucked chicken. I wasn’t happy at all, called the salon and they said I may have had a reaction to the wax or the tea-tree oil they put on afterwards. What to do? Put some ice on it. So I did.
Three days later the redness was gone, but I still had the chicken-look, and that was the day of the Barcelona gig so I had to go onstage looking like that. To my dismay the hairs were starting to come back, but there was no way I was going to do the waxing thing again in a hurry. Since, I’ve stuck to the old fashioned way; razor and foam. Twice a day. Like I used to have to do when I was clean-shaven. God bless the existence of razors. Really.
George – the plucked rooster
