The Ecstatic Trail

Some people get stuck with lice or cursed by psychotic daydreams. My lot is a hairy belly.

I am not a hairy person over all, no back hair for example; just tufted halos around my nipples, a bit on the breastbone. But then this patch on my middle, the hairy belly, a forest fortress round my bellybutton deeper, denser, darker than hair anywhere below my collar.

It’s not quite so much as my head. Not quite, but you can comb it.

Now men do have hair here, plenty of them do. You call it a happy trail. You call it so for it shapes usually a prim lane headed beneath the elastic band of your undies, the trail’s mood gained by its intimacy with these underparts. A smirking reminder it belongs really to the pubic hair.

But my abdomen’s overgrowth enters, for most who find it, rather too far into the obscene. It’s not hard seeing why. Picture a woman whose bush at a beach creeps out a furry full foot atop her bikini bottom.

The sight upsets taste. And in course, my belly hair fairly invited its round of humiliations.

I can remember leaving the shower at a friend’s house when in high school, his younger sister pointing. “He looks like Austin Powers.” Once a woman I’d been dancing with at a Chicago club lifted my shirt suddenly, I guess to check my shape to better judge if she should take me home. As if doubting it existed she tugged the fluff; I shrugged, she shook her head and made a wordless exit. Then at a backdoor barbeque, Fourth of July. There were beers, there were ribs. I prepared to run a race in the grass with Dave Kim. I took my shirt off. “Lars,” said Dave. “Your happy trail is ecstatic!”

Every man’s lot is his, indeed and yet my shame is not of the teasing, nor of the creeping out. The story cannot be made full till I confess that hand I myself laid in the making of the hairy belly, or so I ever suspected.

I was twelve and read in a sex manual that rubbing your hands in a clockwise manner above the pelvic region would help stimulate glands, inflate fecundity. Never mind I had nor use or exchange for intercourtly potential in those days, I did it the next time I masturbated.

I worked that hairless tummy with the one hand and got it ready for the other. And who but knows what my produce did where it spilled that day, but in days that came hairs of aging grew on my skin. Little did first, a trail, even vine, but they flowered, and by grownhood found and filled the shape of that circling hand.

Flimsy biology connects this to this, I know. I not so much believe as like fearing Christians dread it may be so, dread my own accomplice. If I can’t know in fact I did nothing to provoke my rash of lycanthropy, I least know I avoided not every disgrace I could to escape it. Then who again knows what pubescent stirring a warm touch might feed in a changing boy’s follicles?

The magic doubt buries itself in the moment as a scar. If coincidence, yet there it goes, swirling round the umbilical.