Handlebar by Delaney Rebernik

Nov 25 2011

He had a handlebar mustache, but he took himself very seriously. It was in fact, perhaps, because of the mustache that he cut such a grave figure. Of average height and solid build with healthy orange coloring, his face was surprisingly gaunt, pale skin stretched taut over jutting cheekbones and skittering blue veins. On this hungry, brittle face, over the thin, cracked callous of a mouth, brushing the pulsing blue cheek hollows, spanned the most lush mustache, potentially, known to man. Two rich deep dark sloping points, arched dexterously to the nostrils, sweeping grandly back to the twitching mouth corners then up and out into ear-skimming, playful curls. Uniform color throughout, though he was nearing forty and his lineage predicted early-onset graying, and glossy as a magazine cover, the mustache hair was of quality only conjured in the daydreams of beauty school hopefuls.

Although he was not prone to appearance attentiveness, he recognized his extreme good fortune and exercised rigorous maintenance with regard to his extraordinary facial hair. Each morning, with solemnity to the very sleep crust in his eye, he balanced his tools on the sink ledge. With sterilized hands, he massaged in the volumizing shampoo followed by the corresponding conditioner, a delicate towel-pat, the remainder left to air dry as he slipped into his pin-stripped button down and pleated black slacks. Finally, the grand finale, a thumb and forefinger dipped and dainty into the wax, the deft tracing of the faintly-strawberry-smelling whiskers until they smoothed into those rich deep dark slopes at impossible angles.

The mustache was complete, and it was glorious.

He didn’t know who he was before the mustache. It wasn’t so much that he defined himself by the mustache. It was that the mustache was so much more than he would ever be. True, he was responsible for the survival of the mustache, but the mustache had, undeniably, a life of its own. A parasitic relationship. Once he began growing the mustache, his face shrank and drained to accommodate, to nourish, to act as not only a weathered canvas on which the mustache looked particularly stunning, but to act, in addition, a mobile, animated method of display.

Yet was it really parasitic?

He didn’t mind tending to the mustache, coaxing and gentle like a new mother, and he was just as reverent towards it as everyone else; it was impossible not to be.

Some women do not like, or claim not to like, mustaches– do not like the look or feel as they kiss their significant others and snag on, say, a well-waxed coil. But no woman could resist this mustache; thus, no woman could resist him, as it was– is– inappropriate to be infatuated with facial hair alone. He didn’t mind being second to the mustache; after all, he felt at least partially responsible for its profound success. As a result of the gracious recognition of his inferiority to the mustache, he met many agreeable women who often offered– insisted– on grooming the mustache for him.

So maybe it was symbiotic. He didn’t need tan fleshy face skin so long as he had the mustache, had all the ladies wrapping it around their little fingers. He was not a proud man, and, again, was not so offended to blanch in comparison to the mustache. He reasoned most people would. He took what the mustache provided and provided for it in return, like a crippled old man with only his pet dog keeping him alive. But he was barely alive. Quite literally; the mustache was sucking the very life from his body. It was plumper longer curvier, more bodacious than ever, and his neck was whitening fast.

He was left in an interesting predicament. He was an observant man, and as he stood at the mirror, clamping his chin in one hand, prying at his withering neck with the other, he pondered his ultimatum. “Either the mustache goes, or I go,” he said, to himself, in a marked Texan drawl, real.

Either way, he was going. But which death was preferable?

His innate human drive for survival of course urged him to kill the stache. But his learned, maybe, human drive for pleasure urged him to, in essence, kill himself. But the mustache was a quintessential part of his self, if not an entity greater than himself. Possibly the latter, probably. There he stood, with a razor, electric, in one hand, the other empty and not meaty orange for long, considering the value of life, what constitutes life, the point at which–if at all– primitive instinct overrides reason, morality, stooped over his perpetually dribbling sink with the rusting valves. Heavy, heavy Tuesday night.


Delaney Rebernik is an English major at Northeastern University.

One response so far

  1. You are going places!!! Right on, girl! OOPS! Write on!!!

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