When Mona from Mississippi Met Peludo

My hormones went crazy at a young age. In the sixth grade I started shaving. A year later, I played shirts and skins basketball in PE with a line of hair rolling down my chest.

Over the next decade matted curls sprouted everywhere—back, front, shoulders, arms. Blessed with a positive body image, I always enjoyed my look. The black froth washing over my collars marks my visual brand. Shirtless at beaches, I think, “Gaze upon my swarthy Eastern European-sourced Jewish physique! This is one Yid who’ll never get a back waxing.”

Validation felt good. A woman I met in Brazil during my JDate days nicknamed me “Peludo,” Portuguese for hairy or shaggy. I have the beach pictures of us as evidence.\

For real peludo acknowledgement, consider New Orleans, 1987, at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. The sun, music and crawfish made me groggy by mid-afternoon, so I stretched out on the ground, shirt off, hat covering my eyes.

I had dozed off when I felt a finger jabbing my chest. “What the heck?” I thought as I blinked to attention to find two young women kneeling next to me, entranced.

“Why you are just the hairiest thing I’ve ever seen,” declared one of them, a woman who gave her name as Mona, from Mississippi. She’d come to New Orleans with another woman, a male friend and the thickest Southern accent I’d ever heard to eat, listen and see the sights.

Mona kept running her fingers down my chest in amazement; her frisky explorations tickled me, in more ways than one.

I told her, “I bet you moan,” but she was too sloshed to get my drift. I snapped a picture of her demonstrating a drunken Cajun-Caribbean limbo dance move. Their male buddy took a photo showing  me flanked by Mona and her laughing friend, as Mona’s hand stroked my peludo glory.

The peludo lifestyle isn’t all fun and games. Shower drains clog without daily attention, bedsheets need regular laundering. And consider the healthcare complexities. When I got a flu shot recently, the nurse exclaimed, “I’m glad I don’t have to give you an EKG!” Ah, yes, the EKG experience, the closest I’ve ever come to BDSM play, except there’s no “safe word” to make them stop. Nurses dry-shave my chest and sides so the attachments will stick. That’s the easy part. The nurses always apologize when they yank the EKG attachments off. I tell them I’m used to the sharp but short ripping pain as clumps of hair lift off me.

Knee surgery required my right leg to be shaved to resemble a raw Thanksgiving turkey drumstick. I hadn’t seen that much of my leg since I was in junior high. The shorn look didn’t concern me—the fuzz always grows back thicker than ever (I learned that when, on a whim, I asked a girlfriend shave her initials into my back, an escapade in body modification that garnered peculiar glances at the gym for a few weeks).

As an adult I developed what I call “hobbit ears.” My partner Naomi, as part pf my weekly home hair trim, always plucks my ears and eyebrows. She’s very thorough in hunting down every stray hair, so much so I often yelp, “Owww, this must be what childbirth feels like!” I imagine she takes a discreet enjoyment from the vigorous tweezering, giving me a little taste of the female maintenance experience. She also sternly warns me to never, ever, wear a tank top in public, whenever I muse on that fashion choice on hot days.

“No, Van, just—no,” she entreats me. She has more common sense than I do on style matters.

I accede but still, if I ever do this piece as an open mic, I may go all-in and let my furry freak flag fly in a tank top for visual impact. My inner peludo needs to express itself. And if I can't do that, then I'll an OnlyFans page and monetize this look.