A pivotal experience I had as a child was the realization that people are different in the world. People look differently, behave differently, live differently. Not everyone had the suburban, American, upper middle-class upbringing that you always see in movies.
In the teen classic “American Pie”, an exchange student is changing out of her clothes in the protagonist’s bedroom and he has, ever so slyly, set up a webcam to secretly broadcast everything to his neighbor’s computer. He slips out of the bedroom so she’s comfortable, and then he sprints over to his neighbor’s to watch.
What nobody notices is that it takes him seriously about 15 fuckin’ minutes for him to get to his neighbor’s McMansion three doors down. Most citizens of the world would be like, “Why is it taking so long for him to get there?” And “What the fuck is a webcam?”
This also goes for standards of beauty. While we are all familiar with the tribes in Africa that put big ass plates in their lips or the women in Burma who elongate their necks, there are more subtle differences even in what we consider more modern areas.
This ALSO goes for common philosophy: “One cigarette shortens your life by 8 minutes. One work day shortens your life by 8 hours.” Well said.
One area where certain parts of Europe differ from the United States is the grooming of body hair. Decades of male teenagers, much like our male protagonist at the beginning, have heard of the mystical land across the ocean, a land where the young women are liberated, tops come off at the beach, sex is casual, and all this comes at the small price of not vomiting upon sight of a bushy armpit. If only the hotness of that scene in “American Pie” was comically stymied as the foreign exchange student lifts up her arms to reveal bristly tumbleweeds of pit-fro. Best gross-out laugh of the movie; moviegoers would be telling their friends for weeks. Someone get me a Screen Actor’s Guild card.
I too had heard these rumors in adolescence. I pondered if beautiful European models like Heidi Klum and classics like Sophia Loren were anti-razor and if my movie fantasy of a comedic romp through Rome or Venice with either of these ladies came true, would I shudder at the thought of touching them.
After a few girlfriends, I came to a conclusion. Some of them had let their legs get a bit stubbly during winter/strictly pants-wearing season. Some had a stripe of light hair that painted them dorsally like a Rhodesian ridgeback. Some had arm hair, and I inductively reasoned: arm hair is body hair, so if I am OK with it, all hair is a go. Ah, but how fallacious inductive reasoning can be.
It was a Wednesday night during the summer in Berlin. The kind of night that you go out on because you have literally nothing to do the next day. Besides that I had met up with Gary, a guy I met a few stops back in Austria, since we knew we’d be in Berlin on the same days. As I did not want this to be a sausage fest [or a “fireman party” as it’s called in some countries–too much hose 😉 ], I slid straight for the common room at Gary’s hostel and zeroed in on the two cutest girls, having coffee alone.
Gary’s hostel.
I walked up, introduced myself, and invited them to join. These two French young women glanced at each other and flashed the smile of people who are desperately trying to stop their face from turning red. They were hesitant, but with a little bit of needling, a lighter, playful bit of begging, and asking straightforward questions to ascertain that they literally had nothing else to do, they were upstairs changing, ready to come with us. My game is not sharp, but it works when it has to.
Gary was amazed but it was really more the trick of identifying both pairs as in the same boat: bored and glad for some attention from the opposite sex.
Bullet holes from the Nazis’ last days.
After leaving the hostel, Gary and I split them up quickly based on preference, and it worked smoothly to our favor. The blonde seemed more interested in talking to him and the brunette was listening more to what I had to say. Perfecccct.
We chatted and chatted, walking on a concrete overpass that crossed over a highway that was strafed from time to time by cars zipping by so fast, it must have been an autobahn. The brisk night was thick with a moist humidity, and the focus of my attention’s curls seemed to puff up, getting more voluminous as glistening beads of sweat gathered where her neck met her shoulder.
As she formulated her speech, her eyes were bright, the concepts crystal clear in her brain, but as the words came to me, they were forced to surmount the French spiderweb spanning her lips that was her accent, some getting caught to suffer a slow head-sucking doom and some agitatedly wrestling free, twisted and disoriented as they continued, excessively drunk on the sheer joy of having survived for another day. The words seemed to infect me with their high-on-life intoxication, because I was entranced.
At the first sight of a friendly establishment, all four of us left the wet air and creaking crickets of that strangely semi-rural street to climb down a polished staircase. At the bottom, we could see dots of colored light dancing like choreographed fireflies and feel the ground shaking with syncopated bass like different factions of giant frogs leaping and landing in rhythm to catch the fireflies wheeling overhead in their perfectly timed performance.
The club was fairly wide open with places to recline and chat in various parts of the massive space as if the area doubled as a furniture showroom with a variety of different matched sets sprinkled around so that consumers could pique their imagination as they translated what they saw there to their living room at home. Directly in the middle, was a massive square bar with all the vulnerable alcohol behind its fortifications, just like a phalanx of Spartans had gathered to protect their precious whiskey against their ancient enemies, the giant frogs, who were currently on their lunch break.
Although the frogs were putting out a good beat, first things first, we had to sweet talk the Spartans with our euros. We all got a couple drinks and continued our conversation in segregated pairs. Who knows what we talked about? The humidity from outside mixed with the body heat indoor that, combined with the liquor, created a foggy cocktail which was the perfect antidote to remembering anything.
As the fireflies started to get blurrier and musical notes blended together in my mind, the colors becoming visual representations of every sound I heard in my subconscious, the be-ringletted libertine mouthed something to me through the fog, staring intently. The gluey spiderweb slowing the movements of her mouth made it easier to read her lips than with native speakers, but I wanted to verify what I had understood.
Exactly what I was thinking…
“But you know I don’t shave,” she repeated when I asked. Given what she must have known about American coming-of-age rumors based on their preponderance in the movies she must have watched as a teenager, I wanted to hug her for being so clever and getting me good. She had zeroed in on exactly what I was thinking as if she were receiving intelligence briefings from the little men living in my head.
In hindsight, I should have been as clever and said, “Oh yea? Well I didn’t tell you, but I have a pistol on my hip just in case one you Europeans tries to take my freedom,” in keeping with our stereotypical teasing. Instead at the last second, my drunken mind decided to throw down a playful gauntlet, and blurt out, “Oh yea? Show me.”
Wasting no time, she grabbed the edge of her extremely short sleeve and rolled it delicately over her shoulder. Her next motion squeezed her deltoid and turned it over in the light to expose a clump of brown hair so thick and with so much form it could have been a braid formed close to the skin, thinly coursing along the central axis of her axilla.
A bit of stubble I could deal with, some indication that in real life, while not backpacking, she was remotely interested in hair control. But no, what she said and her quick willingness to display was clearly a badge of honor. In a split second and with maybe a teaspoonful of stomach acid in my mouth, I lost my illusion as they say in Spain, and it was time to move on.
Lesson learned: Be careful what you wish for. The hairiness thing is true!
–Cody (25), Houston, gathering sheep to shear in Berlin