The following is an excerpt from my manuscript for The Moustache. I was writing this for some guys in L.A and their agent decided to pass so the project is now dead. I thought I may as well share a little bit with some of you. Enjoy.
Chapter 1
When the alarm clock woke Harvey Bellfield at 6:24 a.m every weekday morning, he would immediately pull himself out of bed, stumble toward the bathroom, turn the shower knobs more or less to the ideal water temperature, and strip naked, all before he was fully capable of understanding who he was or what he was doing. Routine preceded consciousness.
Harvey often shampooed twice during those morning showers, not out of an overzealous devotion to hygiene, but simply because he’d forgotten that he had already shampooed once and thus, enough. What usually brought Harvey fully into the waking world was the always too long and too cold moment between shutting off the water and wrapping himself in a towel. Once his upper body was dry, Harvey would tie the towel around his waist and step out of the shower, taking one perfect stride onto the bathmat in front of the faux-granite bathroom counter.
His first thoughts of the day occurred almost invariably during this one perfect stride and they usually consisted, in no particular order of frequency, of one or several of the following: his wife, Emma, and of how much she loved him now, or how much she had loved him a few years ago; a short highlight reel of himself as a high school athlete, in degrees of exaggeration varying from slight to hyperbolic; drafts of articles he wished to write about the previous night’s NFL or NBA games and happenings, almost all of which, in theory, were insightful, moving, accurate, and deserving of high praise from everyone in the sports journalism community; Amy, the coffee shop girl with the deep-set eyes, and sensual, tip-inducing lips, her velveteen laugh, the faint smell of cigarettes that lingered on her fingers when she handed Harvey his drink or his change; details about his life that he would consider to be blessings (forced into Harvey’s head by the self-help book he had been rereading for seven months, which encouraged him to think these thoughts); details about his life that Harvey would want changed, altered, bettered.
As these thoughts continued, sometimes crossing from one category into another, sometimes leaving the threshold of aforementioned categories and thinking whatever the hell they felt like thinking, Harvey opened his medicine cabinet and removed his shaving cream and his razor. He applied the shaving cream, which was always foam, not gel, first to his left palm, which curled upward like a beggar’s. Then he brought both hands together, and smacked the big, wasteful heap on to his face, trying to cover up every pinprick hair that had sprouted since the previous day’s shave.
Once the shaving cream was fully applied and the razor began its slow, measured charge across Harvey’s face, one single sentence grabbed hold of Harvey’s thoughts: Take that, Dad.
Harvey’s father had never taught Harvey about shaving technique, had never told him what to do, and, more importantly, what not to do. This parental neglect had cost Harvey’s late-teenage face many painful nicks and embarrassing, blood-freckled strips of gauze. Maybe it was silly, but Harvey saw that avoidance of fatherly duties as the first great failure of the man he had once admired, and he was certain that every great failure that his father had been guilty of (alcoholism, incarceration, abandonment), had stemmed directly from the initial oversight of not teaching his son the proper way to shave. Well, perhaps Harvey couldn’t be certain of it being the root of all problems, but he was certain that it could not be excluded from his dad’s long list of offenses. Now, every time Harvey saw the trail of perfectly smooth skin his razor left behind, he thought: Take that, Dad.
Sometimes, Harvey considered showing off his shaving skills to spite his father. He thought about fancy, well-groomed, goatees, he thought about pencil-thin chin-strap beards. He fantasized about just letting his hair run wild across his face, about going grizzly so that his father would see what could have happened had Harvey not been self-reliant enough to teach himself how to shave. But, that would have been a little more passive-aggressive than Harvey fancied himself capable of, and it would have been unbecoming. Plus, he hadn’t seen his father in six years, so it was somewhat unlikely that the subversive act would get across. So Harvey shaved it all off, every morning, never ceding to his fantasies of insubordinate facial hair.
