An Ugly Man

At 28, it hit him like a ton of bricks. "I am an ugly man." He never fully allowed himself to realize it before. Perhaps his doting parents should have been more honest with him, should have guided him along more reasonable channels in proportion to his bad looks.

The moment of enlightenment came one evening at De Lucas. He was having a drink with his friend Mike who was the quintessential handsome man. He had gone to the bathroom. Kind of a roman type space, with water trickling, opera playing, mirrors everywhere. In an instant, he caught a glimpse of himself from all angles, his stooped posture, his frizzy red hair, his reddish fat-yet-narrow face, blond eyebrows set low over close set, tiny blue eyes. "Shit, I'm ugly," he thought. "This is why I've been unsuccessful as both an actor and a waiter."

"I'm an ugly man," he said, his voice echoing off the tiles of the bathroom. Even his voice sounded ugly.

Back in the restaurant, he saw Mike at the bar. All of a sudden, he was filled with apprehension. Why did he spend so much time with Mike? Often when he was with Mike, they met women. The women were of course totally consumed by Mike. Was that why he and Mike hung out so much? Was there the germ of some sort of reasonableness there?

Mike was intelligent, talented. He wrote a screenplay which he sold for 250,000 dollars. The name of the screenplay was Proteus Nine. It was science fiction, incredibly creative, engaging. They inked Jean Claude Van Damme which kind of doomed the whole thing from the start. Still, Mike made a bunch of money.

On the other hand, he had never managed to complete one of his screenplays. Since moving to LA, he had only been an extra. You can make a living at being an extra. As an extra he was used chiefly as padding for crowds, mobs, busy city sequences, concerts, etc. He wasn't one of those extras you wanted walking across the street, oblivious to the lead role passing in the opposite direction.

He was listening to Mike talk.

"I'm just an ugly guy," he said.

Mike paused. "Like Paul Giamanti?"

"Paul Giamanti's not ugly," he said. "He's got that teddy bear look. Tiny chin, big eyes that kind of plead with you..."

"Come on, you aren't ugly. There are a lot of guys who look like you. Just look around."

They looked around the room. It was as if every man in the room was stunningly attractive.

"Look at these guys," said the ugly 28-year-old. "Are they all body builders or something?"

"You do have a point," said Mike.

"Chiseled features. Look at their shirt sleeves. Their biceps fill out their sleeves," he said, holding onto his own lank sleeve. "Look at their women. It's as if for every totally average woman, there's this 6 foot stud," he said.

"You do have a point," said Mike.

"What kind of woman could possibly want me?"

"I don't know," said Mike. "I don't know."

***

He slid down off his bar stool to the floor, all 5 feet 7 inches of him sliding down.

That was the end of his friendship with Mike. Sometimes certain relationships don't survive transitions. It was as if a spell had been broken: the spell of his own self-illusion. He would no longer let himself be the sore thumb at De Lucas. He would go elsewhere. Maybe to Rippers, that bar full of those intellectual punks.

It was night. He walked down Sunset Blvd, passed the huge Hustler shop. He went in. He browsed the pornos, looking at the other men browsing the pornos. All like him, strung out on their own ugliness.

Jesus! What it means to be an ugly man! He thought. Your entire destiny is governed by your ugliness! He left the Hustler shop, a shiver running down his spine. He stopped in at a liquor store and bought a fifth of Bim Black from the Korean guy.

He made the turn onto his own street, walking up the silent little block toward the hills.

***

He entered the little door embedded at ground level in the bottom of the duplex. His flat was little more than a kitchenette, smaller than a studio. Everything was in one room. "Ok, I get it," he thought. "Ugly man, ugly living space."

He poured some whiskey into a coffee mug and sat at the rickety little plywood table.

"I have to get out of show business."

The whole point of show business was that you had to be appealing somehow. Even your archetypal ugly men, Wally Sean, Woody Allen, George Costanza, were deeply appealing. Yet, there was nothing appealing about him. He was neither pleasantly plump, nor downright silly. He got up, went over to the kitchen sink, looked in the mirror. His face had a disturbing quality.

Often, over the course of his life, people read in him some emotional disturbance that wasn't there at the time. His face was troublesomely ugly. It got to people on a level, made them feel like something was wrong. It exposed them. No one wants that sort of thing.

Ugliness should be opaque, like a brick wall. You can hammer on that ugliness all day long and it will take your blows because it's a strong, supportive kind of ugliness. His own ugliness was brittle, threatened to splinter at the touch.

***

He got out pen and paper and began to make a list of jobs.

Janitor. Janitors were notoriously repulsive. Not just ugly, but creepy ugly: his kind of ugly. Computer programmer's had a kind of geek chic: were actually beautiful people who didn't realize they were beautiful. Air conditioning repair man was more like it. Cable guy. All these jobs were in reach. Ugly men made a living at these jobs. They made a living enough to afford a ticket to where they could find a bride that would accept them because of their money. They could go and find a women totally worn out by poverty, willing to accept ugliness as an occupational, gold-digging hazard.

He realized that his problem all these years had come from trying to have the life of a handsome, talented man like Mike. He shuddered at the thought of Mike. What had Mike wanted out of that relationship? Maybe out of some deep seeded incomprehensible insecurity, Mike needed an ugly foil to go around with as a constant reminder of his own beauty.

***

"Ever think of settling down and having children?" his mother asked him the following day.

This seemed like a good moment to break the news. "You can't have children without first having a girlfriend."

"I guess someday you'll decide that you might like to have children," his mother said.

The big difference between his experience his mothers was that companionship was not a choice for him. It was not something offered to him from out of a range of choices. It was not within his life's lexicon of trajectories, which primarily consisted of toward and away from homelessness.

"I guess so," he said, not knowing what to say.

His mother and father were handsome people. He often observed that handsome people produced ugly children.

Working on the margins of the celebrity world, he had observed that beautiful celebrity parents usually gave birth to ugly children. Take Jake and Mercedes McCoy. Their kids Tyler and Jessica were down rights beasts. They were so ugly they were like genetic anomalies, although they seemed quite happy. They were the children of beautiful celebrities. They had boyfriends and girlfriends. The boyfriends and girlfriends were unsuccessful musicians or unknown models. They came to visit on the set.

When you were the children of celebrity you married better looking but poor wanna-be celebrities or celebrity bar tenders.

***

Gradually, as reality sunk in, he began to sense a new wisdom come upon him. It was the wisdom that comes from trying to be one thing all your life only to discover that you are not that thing and will never be.

He thought about his former state. Everyone in that former state seemed like a narcissist. Had he assisted their narcissism? Maybe they were all a bunch of narcissists because they were just really good looking. That was only one of the many ashen learnings he wrote down in a notebook.

"Handsome people love themselves because they are loved."

***

The Ugly 28-year-old, continued to work as an extra, although he stopped trying to stand out. He graciously accepted his role as human background bulk. He managed to hang on to just enough day shifts at The Grill to make rent. He became quiet. His co-workers troubled him by what he now perceived as the constant narcissistic entitlement they projected. He discovered that those who did talk to him continued to do so with our without his input. They weren't really speaking with him: they were simply speaking, to the air, to the room at large. The only things they ever had to say were about themselves, their own lives, their pursuits. Had it always been like this? He had never noticed before.

In the evening, he rode the bus down to the community college. Now the bus: now that was the ugly man's natural environment! Everyone on the bus was either seriously ugly or deranged or mentally retarded. The mentally retarded had it easy, he thought. There was something angelic about the retarded men and women who rode the city bus in LA. It was as if God had spared them from the burden of differentiating themselves from society and coming to grips with their own oddity. They seemed brimming over with acceptance, like saints.

Sometimes, you couldn't quite peg the mental capacity of the bus riders. It was occasionally hard for him to delineate between the insane, the ugly, or the saintly retarded. Being cross-eyed did not necessarily indicate a lack of capacity, nor did tourettes syndrome make for a totally unpleasant companion. In fact, some of the most delightful passengers were those who rattled off lists at random, did intricate calculations, or announced out loud the objects of their interest...'there's a Maxima. Another Maxima. Another Maxima..." said the Asbergers guy obsessed with Nissan Maximas.

Riding the bus in LA was an experience reserved for the ugly, the critically obese, and the insane, as was standing around for hours on desolate, scorched strips waiting for the bus to arrive. There was no flirtation. The only speech came in the form of unbidden, random babble as if dialed in from Proteus Nine.

Before bed at night, he wrote in his book. "It's not that people don't reach out to other people: it's that they don't reach out to me." It was a grim epiphany, but he felt comforted by it all the same. It meant that it wasn't his fault, that all the advice Mike and his mother had given him over the years was total bullshit.

Then he wrote, "It matters less what you do and more who you are."

The words seemed true. He shed a tear and then fell into a deep, unruffled sleep.

Since his epiphany in the De Lucas' restroom, his sleep had improved.

***

He rode the bus down to Contra Costa Community College planted like an alien colonizer on a strip of blasted earth. The landscaping consisted of dirt and ripped, plastic garbage bag material anchored in the dirt, come loose in areas, flapping in the wind, not a thing living. The skeletons of shrubs scraped up against stucco walls. Inside the building, he saw many ugly people like himself with that brittle, critical mass kind of untouchable ugliness. Big glasses, narrow shoulders, heads too tiny, too big, frail, obese, pasty, hairy, squat, gangly, mutated, blank, transparent, mottled, dripping.

Contra Costa Community College was only for the ugly and Mexicans, although the two groups didn't mix as he learned over the 6 months of his air conditioning repair course.

That's where he met Daniel and Maria, an ugly couple from Orange County who had moved to the city because they wanted to design sets.

"We discovered that it's impossible to break into that market!" said Maria.

"Impossible," affirmed Daniel.

They were at Daniel and Maria's place. Their place was basically like his own place, but times two. Like him, they lived in the lower, sunken level of a duplex. All their furniture was old and worn. Although they were large, their clothing was larger. Daniel's hemispheral jeans were continually sliding down, reavealing his butt crack. Maria's tremendous blouse hung low, revealing her pendulous breasts. They were eating some kind of repulsive barley stir fry.

"So, when did you realize it?"

Daniel and Maria looked at each other. "Realize what?"

"That, you, you know, I mean, that you don't really look...like...show business people."

"You mean that were ugly?" Daniel began to laugh loud and uncouth, throwing back his head, revealing his dark brown nasal bushes. Man! was he ugly.

"We've always known," said Daniel.

"How do you cope with it, I mean, doesn't it bother you?"

"We see each other's inner beauty," said Maria who was in every way Daniel's equal in terms of ugliness. She looked god awful.

He sat clutching his mug of Yeager Meister. Yeager Meister was certainly the ugliest of alcohols. He wondered if he would someday learn to see inner beauty.

"When did you realize?" Maria asked.

"About 4 months ago."

"That's interesting, isn't it? Some people always know while others find out," said Maria.

"Not everyone knows!" said Daniel. "It's easier if you always know, don't you think?"

"Definitely," said Maria. "If we have ugly children, we're just going to tell them."

"You're going to tell your kids they're ugly?"

"Definitely," said Maria. "After they reach a certain age. But I don't think they will be ugly," she said, smiling at Daniel who raised her hand to his lips.


***

Everyday he got out of bed, looked himself in the mirror and thought, "Everywhere people are falling in love with each other, reaching out to each other."

This somehow made everything easier to bear. It made life seem sane and comprehensible, softened the impact. Everywhere people are falling in love...

He was approaching the end of his air conditioning repair course. Through Daniel and Maria, he met others like him who possessed a fragile, threatening ugliness. Like Erik, the comic book artist from Vermont.

"I just don't make personal appearances," said Erik. "It's bad for sales."

They sat around his table, drinking Bim Black, watching the light fade. They had no desire to go anywhere because they knew that doing so would be absolutely pointless.

"Sometimes they want to meet me. They send me letters, even with photographs. Sometimes naked photographs, really actually quite attractive women. Before I realized what the problem was, I used to send autographed head shots in return. That's the last I would hear from them. Once someone wrote back telling me that they had changed their mind, that I wasn't the man for them after all. It was very odd. You could tell that she was disappointed by the head shot, but she wanted to preserve my feelings and so she came up with all this bullshit, like now wasn't the right time in her life, like she wasn't ready for commitment and wanted to devote herself to her career. Totally crazy shit. All I wrote was my number and look me up next time you're in LA. You could tell she had constructed some elaborate fantasy around me."

Erik suddenly began to laugh, a kind of spastic, convulsion beginning at his diaphragm, rolling up through his esophagus releasing a hollow, machine gun like, ehehehehehehe.

"Now, I just have fun with it, send them random clippings from National Geographic, pictures of elephants and stuff, with a note, like 'what do you think of this?' just to see what their response will be. This one writes, 'ooh, I like animals too!' It really gives you a weird glimpse of what life must be like for attractive people, like it doesn't matter what you say, like you could just say, duh, blu blu blu, and people would be like, oh, that's so fascinating!"

He thought of the Nissan Maxima guy. "There's a Maxima! There's a Maxima!"

He met Dwight Bode, one of the first people he had seen at Contra Costa Community. How could you miss him? Dwight Bode was 7 feet tall. He was a giant with long, noodly arms, ginger hair neatly parted on the side, incredibly thick glasses with an Andrey the Giant voice. But his most repulsive feature was his face by far, planted close together right in the middle of his head. The eyes, the nose, the mouth: it was as if you could cover them all beneath a coffee mug. It was like he didn't have a face: only glasses.

Dwight Bode was a really nice guy, but really, really gloomy. When he drank Bim Black, he wasn't funny and chatty like Erik. He became reckless, smashing a glass in a moment of insane, bi-polar glee, looming there, hunched beneath the ceiling breathing hard. "I just don't know what to do anymore," he said, looking at this hands. "It's so...crippling," he fell to his knees.

Some of his finest memories from that time came from his walks with a sober Dwight Bode in the hills around LA. They sat watching the star come out each beyond the need to try to summit the indescribable with paltry language.

***

He let his extra jobs dry up. Without hustling, he discovered that his day shifts at The Grill were slowly granted to other actor-waiters. This allowed for a smooth transition into the life of an air-conditioning repair man.

He kind of let himself go physically, filling out his ugliness, becoming less like Erik and more like Daniel. Being 30 pounds over weight made sense. His hair began to fall out. He shaved his head. Since becoming fat and bald, he noticed that on occasion total strangers had a word or two for him. They didn't say a whole lot, just commented on the weather, on current events. It was kind of nice. It was as if he was morphing from a state of fragile ugliness to durable ugliness: transforming from something disruptive to something intelligible.

He began to save money. Suddenly, he found himself making 60 thousand a year, which was for him an absolute fortune.

Since he never went out in the evening and didn't need to think about renting a nice place, he saved approximately 30 thousand dollars the first year after taxes. He had a bank roll now and he felt like the world was his oyster.

Since that moment of epiphany in the De Lucas toilets, he had learned and accepted the world's terms and conditions. He had learned of his limitations. Most importantly, he had learned that everywhere, people were falling in love, just not with him. Still, despite his own singularity, the world revolved on the axis of love.

***

Three years later, having saved up approximately 80 thousand dollars, he bought a ticket to Japan. He wasn't particularly seeking love: he just didn't know what to do with himself and thought that in Asia things were more possible and that he might as well go there if only for the food.

He spent several weeks in Tokyo, going out in the evening, talking to no one, reading a Japanese novel written in the 1960s about the ghost of a traveling salesman who comes back to live with his widowed wife who, having re married, doesn't want anything to do with the pesky ghost.

The novel reminded him of Japan in general.

From Japan, he traveled to Korea, and from Korea he flew to Thailand. The Thai ex patriot scene repulsed him. It was as if ugly men from around the world traveled their to inflict themselves on beautiful, young girls who, out of sheer poverty, were ready to embrace any form of ugliness, be it disruptive or obdurate, creepy or hilarious, radioactive or inert. They would accept anyone as long as they had money.

Yet, even there he felt indescribably distant from the possibility of connection. Walking Bangkok's lurid streets, he began to think that the problem was really beneath the surface. There was something beyond gross looks that kept him from contact. Unlike with Daniel and Maria, he possessed a kind of internal ugliness.

***

Several weeks later, his rusty, iron junk bound for the Andaman Islands sprung a leak. He had been told that this kind of thing happens all the time in those waters. When he heard the crewmen shouting, he could hardly believe that it had happened to him. But it had. His ship was sinking.

"They go straight to the bottom," said some ugly white guy in a Hawaii shirt, a beautiful girl on his lap. "Plish, glug, glug, glug," he blithely mimed the act of a ship sinking. The mostly naked teen laughed.

The encounter made him desire all the more a long trip on a Thai rust bucket. So, the following morning he paid the 60 or so dollars and gathered his stray belongings.

He sprang out of his cabin and into the light. The water was already frothing over the edges. The captain chattered frantically over radio, but it was happening so quickly and they were miles from land. Soon, they were bobbing in the blue-green sea. There were 8 of them, but only 4 life jackets which the senior crew quickly snatched up. A shark attacked the captain who had been one of the first to snatch up a life jacket and leap overboard straight from the bridge. They all watched the attack. He felt no fear as the captain's eyes closed and as blood bubbled from his lips.

Another member of the crew, one without a life jacket, suddenly began to struggle. He went under. He came back up. He tried to cling to one of his crew mates who pushed him away. He tried to cling to the ugly 28-year-old. They went under together. Beneath the waves in full view of the sharks, he struggled to free himself from the sinking Thai sailor. Finally, with his last breath he kicked away, rising slowly, barely reaching the surface without passing out. The remaining six were in hysterics as the hammerheads circled. Sharks picked off two more during the night. Another sank.

He was amazingly calm. He floated on his back beneath the starlight, his fat belly well-above the waves. The sharks were on his mind all the time, but he learned to compartmentalize that anxiety and to live with it as a friend. He never new that outside of being ugly, he was also courageous. After being rescued 27 hours later, sitting on the edge of the bunk, he said the words:

"I'm an ugly, courageous son of a bitch."

Then, in a moment of celebration, he walked over to the sink and smashed the mirror with his fist. Later that week he got a hammerhead shark tattoo on the inside of his right forearm.

When he returned to Los Angeles several months later, he discovered his old notebook. Upon reading the epiphanies contained therein, he realized how much he had changed. For one thing, he was no longer the sort of person who tries to understand why life is as it is. At least he thought so. At least he wanted it to be so.