Free Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz Page B

episodes you will ever undertake. By the time your appointment actually comes, you are prepared for an operation more painful than an abortion. You wonder who thought up leg waxing. It involves a tiny woman screaming at you in Spanish while she pours boiling hot wax over your legs and rips out the hairs.
    You wish women's styles would change and that hairy legs on women would become a new trend. Somebody made a big mistake when they assigned you to a female sex role; you'll never get over feeling like a female impersonator.
    You spend all of Monday searching for the right kind of expensive sun tan oils and lotions; the Bronx Zoo has come out with a line made from cobra and turtle grease. You don't know
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    why you spend half your life trying to scrub your body free from essential oils and the other half smearing stuff onto it.
    You can't wait for the day when humankind is so far evolved that bodies are completely unnecessary and people are nothing but large, flabby gray brains in Plexiglas boxes. Then maybe you'll be appreciated for yourself. As it is, your body has evolved far past the mainstream of society already. You've never been interested in physical exercise. Your highly developed mind inhabits a braincase balanced on top of a large, larval body with feeble, antennalike arms and legs.
    The food on the plane trip is not to be believed. Exquisite! Those chefs must have worked hard in the back of the plane: you are served a whitish material resembling chicken, delicately seasoned in a saliva-colored sauce; some unusual pressed vegetable matter shaped like green tubes; and a salad with real lettuce and actual pieces of tomato. This is to be the last fresh food you'll taste for five days.
    In order to help your boyfriend calm down—he finds airplane travel extremely erotically stimulating—you feed him your piece of cake, topped with voluptuous sandy frosting. With the coffee comes tiny packets of a white substance, which, when mixed with the coffee, reconstitutes itself into something quite similar to cream. That such food can be served miles above the ground is an amazing feat of modern man: it must be difficult to raise the chickens, lettuce, and so forth so far off the ground.
    You are staying on an island about an hour from Port-au-Prince. It's curious how, at the travel agent's, the brochures of Haiti showed an island filled with palm trees and natives with excellent dentures; they must have rented palm trees just to shoot the commercials, because there is no vegetation to be seen on the entire place.
    The only thing on the island is the hotel. You are told at once by the hotel clerk not to drink the water or eat any fresh fruits
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    or vegetables. A surly, superior lackey leads you to your cottage, carrying a thermos of drinkable water. The cottages are A-frame, Swiss chalet type residences; whoever built this hotel saw Heidi and The Sound of Music one too many times. All the buildings are Swiss chalet type. It is as if Walt Disney had a nervous breakdown and got the plans for Bali H'ai and the Swiss Village at Disney World mixed up.
    You go in for a dip and when you come out the surly lackey tells you that dinner this evening will be a barbecue by the swimming pool. You can't take a shower because the water isn't working in your cabin, but you are told this condition is only temporary.
    You dress and go to look at the view. A large pink man, whom you've seen earlier, comes and stands directly in front of your picnic table, blocking the way. "You're right, Linda," he says, "I can't see any fire, just smoke."
    "What's burning?" your boyfriend says. "Is that a fire in Port-au-Prince?" Across the bay, near the lights of the city, black, crackly-looking clouds of smoke rise into the white, moonlit sky.
    "It's not in Port-au-Prince," the man says. "It's much closer, a brush fire."
    Your boyfriend strikes up a conversation with the overweight man. His girlfriend, sitting at the other table, is named Linda; she's also