Armpith

We were shaving our armpits in the shower in a half-assed way. Verboten hair: the speed with which it sprouts its graceless and aptly named stubble, and the difficulty of scraping it off its follicles. The hair in question has not had the decency to go gray. It remains obdurately black, and even under the skin the roots show blue. The armpits in question are of the concave variety. Armpits come in innies and outies too, and we await the debut of a double edged razor blade in the shape of a tiny disco ball. The implement at hand is one of those pink plastic things that come in a pack of six, the ones you grab in the checkout line at the supermarket. We scrape, rescrape, tug at the skin to pull the hairy part over the ridge of muscle so as to expose it to the blade. At some point in this process (thirty years ago, say) one might ask, WHY?

Patti on the cover of Easter, left arm raised sensuously over her head so what met our gaze wasn't her I-dare-you stare but that fluffy brown fan of armpit hair. The pout of her lips, her lowered gaze, the shadow of her breast inside her flimsy white chemise: all these telegraphed sex. At their center defiant as the O'Keeffe flowers she celebrated lay that tuft of hair. Maybe somewhere else women were burning bras and inventing a militancy we knew only through mustached rumors and suspicious new books in our moms' reading stacks. But even Gloria Steinem shaved her legs (we thought). And yet here was Patti. We had seen her posed on Horses like Jagger, beyond male, impervious to the nicks and odors of manhood: pure boy, fucking the camera just as sure as she had fucked the perma-boy who held it.

Now we sat cross-legged on our bed beholding a girl, seductive and strange. Here was not Linda Ronstadt. Here was an animal. A mammal, heat and hair. And here too was sex.