The bottom line is this: I’m not into kids. Not even close. Not even a tiny little bit. Never have been, never will. (I mean, Never say never and all that, but never.) I cannot emphasize this point enough. Now that that’s out the way, we can begin.

I want to shave my beard into a mustache.

Also, sorry, one more note on the whole ‘I’m not into kids’ thing. Even if I was into kids (which I am not), I wouldn’t, of course, walk around with a mustache. That would be like starting a company that sells oil-based cosmetics but relies financially on the recruiting of new distributers, and having the company’s logo be in the shape of a pyramid. No one does that. No one wears a costume of who they actually are. There would be no point for the guise, then. There would be no need to try to figure out what lies behind the façade, and there goes all the fun. Still, were I to totter through the streets of the world with a bushy caterpillar over my top lip, I wouldn’t want people to look at me, see the caterpillar, and go, Hm, that dude looks like he’s into kids. I wonder if he actually is into kids. (I am not.)

I’m sure that pedophiles these days don’t walk around with mustaches, anyway. They probably do their best to convey the exact opposite of the stereotypical pedophile persona, which, from here on out, we’ll refer to using the portmanteau that I just made up, stereopedo, which, while referring to a disgusting subject, makes me think of the always cool and always neat and always badass torpedoes, which turns the topic from fully gross to kinda cool. Turning ew ew into pew pew, if you will.

My guess would be that pedophiles do their best to avoid demonstrating anything that emits stereopedo vibes. I don’t want to give too much thought to these vibes, nor trigger my assigned FBI agent with some questionable Google searches, so I’ll base my perception of the persona on conventional wisdom. My guess would be, then, that they never wear trench coats, never drive those big white minivans with sliding doors, never ask kids at the park if they want to come see their puppies, and never enroll into a Catholic seminary. (We had to have at least one catholic church child molestation scandal joke at some point here, so I just filled our quota out nice and early.)

And, of course, pedos never totter around with a bushy caterpillar over their top lip. Probably. I don’t know. I don’t know any pedophiles personally (though Kevin Spacey in American Beauty has touched me [figuratively] somewhere deep inside). The whole ‘pedophile with a mustache’ look is kind of cliché, anyway. Seeing someone rock a stache these days surely connotes other characters. Like hipsters, or 70s porn stars, or the sex icon that is Tom Selleck, or the Top Gun that is Myles Teller, or women who think they’re sticking it to the patriarchy by rejecting imposed hair removal norms. You go, girl! You rock that Fu Manchu look better than any man I know! (This would actually be true, because no man can pull of an original Fu Manchu stache except, of course, Pai Mei in Kill Bill, but I think that has more to do with him being awesome at kung fu so he makes everything look cooler. So, if any human being were to try to pull the Fu Manchu look off, it may as well be a woman. I say this mostly since I’m [most likely] straight, so I just instinctively believe anything looks better on a woman [except floral sundresses because you should see my buddy Lewis rock one of those bad boys with an August breeze at his perfectly sculpted backside.])

I wonder what the male equivalent to that rejection of imposed gendered norms would be. Like, what traditionally female performance can we claim in an attempt to stick it to the matriarchy? Shave our armpits? Love men? Show our emotions? not use capital letters? Demand a 17% pay cut? Become submissive and accept the _atriarchy’s rule on us because it’d be good if we have our day in the shade for a little bit? maybe. anyway.  

There was a figure in my childhood called David Villa. He’s a human being. A former soccer player, actually, who was at the peak of his powers at the same time my friends and I were at the peak of our ‘teenagers without formalized facial hair’ phase. I call him a figure because when you’re at that age, and the social fabric you share with your friends is composed of sport, athletes become figures. Each of us had our favorite team or player, and they became a way through which we not only understood each other, but gauged one another. If your team or guy did well, by extension, you won. And vice versa. If your team lost, you, a teenage boy halfway across the globe who was just trying to conceptualize the world and shave without cutting yourself, had to carry the burden of the loss.

I say all this to say—and please bear with me, I promise we’ll go back to stereopedo stuff in one moment—David Villa wasn’t anyone’s guy. Sure, he was a key cog in two dynasties (Spain, Barca) that shaped the soccer landscape for the large part of a decade, and one could easily argue neither dynasty would’ve manifested without his goalscoring prowess, but he was never The Guy. Still, he became a figure for my friends and I, mainly due to his facial hair. He basically had a little upside down triangle of hair in that area separating your bottom lip from your chin. Google tells me that this facial hair style is called a “soul patch,” which I had no idea was a thing, and would’ve guessed it’s called something like a “douchebag patch.” My friend group, however, used to call that patch of hair a “David Villa,” leading him to become not a person, and maybe not even so much a figure for us, but a noun. For example:

Dude, you got some ketchup in your David Villa.

Bro, of course he played the role of the creepy older brother in that 1997 movie set in a high school in suburban America, he has a David Villa.

Well, you know you’ve gone down on a woman for long enough when your David Villa is soaked in at least 1.8 ounces of liquid.

I bring David Villa up now for two reasons: First, to be able to make that oral sex joke (which maybe isn’t a joke question mark question mark). Second, to acknowledge that facial hair comes in all kinds of shapes and forms and styles, but when I say that I want to shave into a mustache, I just mean the classic wedge of hair that spans precisely the length of one top lip and width between aforementioned lip and septum. No pencils, toothbrushes, chin straps, or goatees. Just a classic—sorta kinda sketchy—mustache.

I think it’s incredibly unlikely that, in the case I muster up the courage to go for the stache, and I’d find myself walking down the street towards a mother and her child, that she’d grip their hand in a panic as if I’m a hangry bald eagle and the kid is a flopping salmon skipping on the water’s surface. Frankly, she’d probably be grateful if I were to take the little pest off her hands for a couple hours. Heck, she’d probably throw them into my tote bag if given the chance, just to have some peace and goddamn quiet.

Plus, think of how much social media sympathy she’d get from people sharing posts of the manhunt after me on their Instagram stories. Think of how many thoughts and goddamn mother fucking prayers political leaders would throw her way! I wonder, if this did actually happen (which I promise you it will—and has—never), what picture the police would use for the manhunt; what picture the media would use in the articles. There aren’t any photos of me with a mustache or in a trench coat or holding up a sign that reads “free candy,” so people tapping through Instagram stories would probably tap the right side of their screen as soon as my photo comes up because our brain is now conditioned to spend no longer than 0.0002 seconds on a single story (that isn’t your crush’s or ex’s or that one dude from undergrad who is now suspiciously Republican and seeing his lifestyle or opinions makes you seethe in a way that, masochistically and deep down, gives you gratification). But then, people’s brain will register what they just tapped on, they’d click on the left side of their phone to go back, hold their finger on the screen, see my face, the headline saying I stole a kid, and think to themselves, Hm, that dude doesn’t look like a child snatcher. He doesn’t even have a mustache.

Actually, that’s not true. There are pictures of me with a mustache. Multiple, actually. The earliest I can recall is from when I was thirteen, as I was an early bloomer, baby. The same scalpel used to circumcise Mizrahi Jews can be kept around for shaving purposes that are surely just around the corner for the eight-day-old bushy baby. We’ll get to that picture later (of me at thirteen, not of me being snipped against my will by a mohel better versed with the Talmud that with a medical book in what makes total fucking religious sense bro yeah please snip as much as you want dude yeah I’m not gonna hold this against you fifteen years from now when i’m holding a ruler for sure yeah come back for seconds if you want there’s more to snip). anyway.

Nearly all the photos where I have a mustache are from Halloween, because that’s the most perfect excuse. Bro why do you have a mustache? they’d ask, and I could easily reply, Oh, it was for this Halloween costume, and that would banish any stereopedo vibes I may emit. On the holiday where everyone tries to figure out who you are, no one tries to figure out who you really are. You can be anything. I’m sure there’s some quote or proverbial piece of wisdom or something about costumes or masks or guises, and how they enable you to be your real self, but I don’t want my assigned FBI agent to think I’m getting sentimental (yet), so I’ll refrain from looking that up. I know you know what I’m saying.

I’ve used two recent Halloweens to fulfill my mustache dreams, and it would actually be kind of funny if the police used a photo of a less beefy but similarly tanned (though one of us is a natural) Hulk Hogan in their post asking for the public’s assistance in catching me. Me, in a ripped yellow tank top and matching cheap sunglasses, red bandana, and dyed blond handlebar mustache, the caption probably reading: “Hulkamania is running wild (with a child), brother!”

It would also be funny if they’d use my costume from last year. A couple days after I wore that costume, mustache still on me, I went to tutor a child at his home (we’ll address this aspect of my daily life that is clearly related to all of this in a little bit). As I said hello to the child’s father in their kitchen, he hit me with the 50-year-old dad who still wants to be cool version of Bro why do you have a mustache?,which is where they ask that exact question in that exact tone, except for some unknown reason they’re wearing Lycra running pants and drinking a keto diet meal replacement shake. I told him it was for this Halloween party where I went as Freddie Mercury, and he immediately said he can, and I quote, totally see that. I was relieved that any unbecoming thoughts about my mustache were averted, but did wonder whether I should book an appointment with my orthodontist.

So, it would be funny if the article would include a photo of me as Queen’s lead singer, wearing the incredibly skinny light blue jeans I bought from the girls’ section in a Harlem boutique, a wife beater tank top, my hair slicked back with gel, and a bushy caterpillar mustache over my top lip. Maybe they’d include a picture of the missing child, too, looking at me, a speech bubble coming out of their mouth, reading: “No, I want to break free!”

This is all hypothetical, of course.

But if they used photos of me in one of those costumes, the article would be too silly or funny for people to take the Instagram story seriously, in the same manner they do when a millennial white woman shares her crucial and vital and groundbreaking opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, Jenny, tell me how the blurring of The Green Line in school books post-1967 indicates the implicit erasure of Palestinian history in mainstream Israeli education systems, creating a generation of closed-minded oppressive right wing Jews who will forever stymie any hope of cohesive living in the region. (It’s me, I’m the millennial white woman. JK, my Instagram story is reserved solely for puns and cats.)

The cats in question.

Maybe next Halloween I’ll dress up as a character who would emit a more accurate steropedo vibe, so that people would take the article a little more seriously. Like I could dress up as Woody Allen, or Michael Jackson (pre-ops), or Barney the Dinosaur (we don’t know this, but we also do kind of know this), or a priest (exceeding the quota!), or, if I’d want to kill two birds with one stone, I could dress up as Mario (he has a mustache and—according to the reliable internet—is 41 years old, whereas Princess Peach is 17). Or, I guess, the easiest costume to pull off next Halloween while still fitting the character would be to not kill myself and say I dressed up as Jeffrey Epstein.

Come to think of it, between the ability to look like whatever you want, the normality of holding up a sign that reads “free candy,” and kids roaming around everywhere, Halloween, for those trying to snatch children, must be like shooting fish in a barrel. Except the barrel is the streets, the fish are kids, and what’s being shot is I’m not finishing the rest of this joke.

Not only is Halloween the best possible day to try a mustache, but the entire month that follows is perfect, too. I wonder if the creators of Movember had Halloween in mind when they conceived the idea of growing mustaches for charity, which, according to Wikipedia, happened in 1999 when a group of young men were hanging out in a pub in South Adelaide, Australia (of course that’s where it originated). Five years later, an unrelated group of men in Melbourne (Australians are incredible) organized an event where thirty men grew a mustache for thirty days in order to raise awareness for prostate cancer and men’s mental health, setting in motion the Movember movement as we know it today.

So, the entire month of November offers a perfect excuse, too. It’s not even an excuse, actually. It’s better. It’s more like one of those responses that you give someone who just tried to make fun of you, which makes them immediately feel bad about it. Like if someone hits you with a “yo mama” joke, and you tell them your mother actually died when you were a kid. That’s what I feel Movember offers. As in:

“Lol bro what was going through your head when you decided to go for this mustache?”

“It’s Movember, you dick. Don’t you give a shit about men’s health? Did you know that studies indicate that the overall prevalence of mental illness in men is typically lower, yet much of that is attributed to the fact that men are far less likely to seek mental health treatment? Do you not realize that negative stereotypes attributed to therapy are stymieing men from reaching out, inflicting all of us? Did you know that while suicide attempts are more frequent among women, suicide deaths in the Western world are three to four times more likely among men? (Largely attributed, according to researchers, to their opting of more lethal methods to end their life.) Did you know that, according to the CDC, a suicide occurs once every eleven minutes in the US, and with men accounting for—roughly—eighty percent of suicide deaths, that means that around 38,000 men kill themselves every year? Can you not ignore the fact that I obviously can’t pull this mustache look off, but I’m doing it to advocate for a cause bigger than myself. A cause that isn’t meant to advocate in place of other issues, but in parallel and conjunction with others, because that’s the only possible way for all of us to move forward? Can you not see around all the humor and look at what I’m actually trying to say?”

“I was just asking what you were thinking, man, which kind of feels like the exact thing you’re advocating for. You don’t have to get so defensive.”

I didn’t participate in Movember this year. I wanted to. Badly. I stood in front of the mirror covering my cheeks and chin for prolonged periods of time all throughout the final week of October. I was a beer or two’s distance away from dressing up as Freddie Mercury again this year just to force myself into the mustache again. But even if I had the audacity to repeat costumes, I’d have probably been too nervous and clean shaven the very next morning, with my Mizrahi Jewish genes restoring my full beard in next to no time, anyway. I didn’t participate in Movember this year, mostly because I had to appear at two separate work events during the first week of November, where I didn’t know anyone. One would think that would make it easier to show up with a mustache. No one knows me, so I could show up with any costume I want, and they wouldn’t know. But somehow, it made it more difficult.

When I had the mustache last year, and I walked into that kid’s house to tutor him, and his dad asked me why I have a mustache, I was nervous. But I’d known the family for two years by that point, we’d had rapport, and, most importantly, they’d known me for two years by that point. They knew who I am, and knew that even if my exterior may suddenly connote something else, I’m still me. So, last year, I carried the mustache around for the whole month (not to mention that Covid still existed so I always had the option of being hyper liberal and wearing a mask everywhere if I really felt the need to hide). But this year, I didn’t know the people at the two events, and, more importantly, they didn’t know me, so I didn’t have it in me to carry a mustache around for a month (I guess I could have worn a mask this year, too, which would have made me hyper hyper liberal).

I’m not sure whether there’s some sort of exploitation in me using Movember as a guise for me go for the mustache. As if I don’t really give a shit about men’s health, and I’m “joining the cause” solely since it allows me to do this thing that I’m nervous about doing. That’s possible. It’s possible that, despite the fact there’s a larger cause, I’m doing it for me.

Back in undergrad, a buddy of mine, a real sweet guy, posted on Instagram, around Christmas time, a picture of him and a homeless man he’d bought food for, and used the caption to preach how we should all be more giving and loving this time of year. I was impressed not only by the act of kindness, but by him having the idea to be kind. I’m pretty sure that I commented something indicating my impression (I could go back and check the exact words, but fear I’ll cringe). I mentioned the post to my roommate, one of my best friends to this day, and he was slightly more cynical. If you’re gonna do something like that, he asked, why do you have to post about it on Instagram? I’m not sure if those were his precise words, but that was his sentiment, and it altered my view of it all. Does it matter if my friend was kind to that person for attention purposes and the boosting of his own ego, or because he genuinely wanted to encourage other people to find a way to be kind? Does it matter whether or not my friend was full on virtue signaling if the man actually enjoyed and appreciated the food and conversation they had? (I won’t go into the whole ‘if you really want to help homelessness, you need to…’ discussion, as, truly, I’m incredibly ill-equipped to do that.) Was that kind version of a human being who my friend really was, or who he wanted others to think he was? Does it matter how the kindness got there, or does it only matter that it did? I’m not sure I know the answer to any of those question, but I’ve not talked to that friend of mine for eight years or so (for no reason other than we went our separate ways), yet I think about that photo, regularly, much like the very first photo of me with a mustache, taken on October 18^th, 2007.

It was the day my Bar Mitzvah was celebrated in the backyard of one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, who gave in to cancer a couple of years ago. Everyone I loved in the world (except Steven Gerrard) was there that day. All the people who knew me best in the world, at that moment in time, were there. In the weeks leading to that day, I began sprouting hairs over my top lip, known colloquially in Israel as a ‘Bar Mitzvah Stache.’ My sister, who never needs a second invite to take a shot at me, used the awkward little bit of fluff to jab at me, and said I absolutely must shave before the big celebration. Annoyingly and typically, she was right, but I would have preferred to be punched in the face by Mike Tyson over admitting so (a sentiment I still carry to this day, though to a lesser extent). So, that morning, I sent a text message to my dad, using the T9 keyboard of my Sony Ericsson phone (this will be such a wild niche reference soon enough, if it isn’t so already). I don’t think I’m going to shave, I wrote, and I remember those words precisely. I was desperate to rid of that little blotch of hair, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it on my own accord. I needed someone else to not only push me, but be the answer if anyone asked me why? I needed someone to give me an excuse to do what I want. I needed someone to be kind enough to do what I need them to do, without them having any idea that’s what I’m asking.

Okay, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, my dad, who knew me perhaps better than anyone, kindly offered me, though, unbeknownst to him, it wasn’t the kindness I needed that day.

When I look at that picture of me at thirteen in my grey buttoned shirt with the white collar, I cringe (as we all should when looking at teen pictures of us), but I also find it funny. Not only because I look so dumb with that mustache that looked like it was drawn using a pen that’s almost out of ink, but because fifteen years and a million or so razors later, not much has changed. That kid is still here, hoping someone is kind enough to know what he needs and understand why he is the way that he is, despite him not saying anything.

I also find the whole thing funny because I find almost all my thoughts funny (you’re more than welcome to disagree). Funny is how I think, so for me to able to say anything, it has to start funny. All I can do is hope that you’ll be able to see around all the humor and look at what I’m actually trying to say. That you’ll be able to ignore the fact that I obviously can’t pull this sentimental tone off, but I’m doing it to advocate for myself, as well as a cause bigger than myself. A cause that isn’t meant to advocate in place of other issues, but in parallel and conjunction with others, because that’s the only possible way for all of us to move forward.

Maybe it doesn’t matter how we get to the point, and only matter that we end up getting there. And the point is that my reluctancy and averseness to communicate is what’s holding me back from being myself; my inability to establish rapport with others is what’s stymieing me from receiving the kindness I need. That’s the sentimental point I’m making behind all the jokes. The true face behind the mustache, which I’m not sure I’m able to pull off, but I really want to.  

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