by Charles Troob
- Age.
A year ago I attended the 75th birthday party of a woman who went to high school with my younger brother. I was startled by an uncannily familiar face. “Jane,” I said. “What is it, 50 years since we saw each other? You’re exactly the same, just grayer with a few wrinkles. I’d know you if we met on the street.” She laughed and said, “You, too, Charles.”
It’s in my genes. My father, who lived to 96, looked pretty much the same at 80 as he did at 40. Only at 85 did he show signs of advanced age, and even then, he was just a frailer version of himself.
I once looked unlike my two brothers; now there’s a hint of a family resemblance. But on balance my face has changed so little that people have a hard time guessing my age. I’m surprised when I’m offered a seat on a bus.
- Mustache.
At some point in the late 1960’s I grew a beard, because I could: it seemed a badge of maturity. Nobody hassled me about it, but nobody said it looked terrific. When I look at old pictures with the beard, I think, “Eh.”
In 1971 I went to see “The Virgin and the Gypsy,” based on a D.H. Lawrence novella. Franco Nero was dazzlingly handsome as the swarthy gypsy—but I was also drawn to an elegant young major with a bewitching little mustache.
I’d associated mustaches with cartoon villains, with Adolf Hitler, and with repressed and proper Englishmen, like Alec Guinness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and David Niven in almost anything. In other words, not an appropriate look for a twenty-something during the early years of the sexual revolution. But this mustache was different. It beckoned and hinted: my mouth is available for a passionate kiss.
That night I shaved off my beard, leaving only the hair on my upper lip. No movie star—still, a definite improvement. I’ve had that mustache ever since. Twice I grew back the beard for a year or two, only to get rid of it. I preferred my bare chin, and its cleft.
I used to shape my mustache myself, but now my barber Avi takes care of it when he cuts my hair and trims my eyebrows, which in recent years have grown bushy. I don’t much care how long my hair is, so I wait until the mustache in the mirror reminds me of John Bolton, a very silly looking man. I then head over to Chelsea for a reset.
From time to time I wonder whether I should get rid of the mustache and present my face as it really is. But it’s as fixed in my image of myself as the eyeglasses I’ve worn since I was five…. I’d feel incomplete, naked without it.
- Skin.
In June of 1961, after my junior year of high school, I went to the beach at Rockaway with some classmates. We spent the entire day there, and for over an hour I lay on my left side playing Scrabble. Unfortunately, I had the harebrained notion that I needed sunscreen only on my face, arms and neck. The next day my right leg was purple and sore. It never blistered, but it looked sunburned for months.
I expected that this leg would be doomed to skin cancer or some other pathology. It hasn’t happened. Every six months my dermatologist does a full body check, but he never finds anything—except on my face, which requires constant attention. If I’m lucky, he merely freezes off a pre-cancerous cluster. But I’ve had half a dozen positive biopsies—basal cell carcinoma—followed by Mohs surgery, a procedure that sounds scarier than it is. Dr. Mohs, whoever he was, developed a protocol for removing the surface layer of skin, then examining it under a microscope, and, if necessary, taking off a second layer, repeating the process until all is clear.
The face has remarkable recuperative powers. I once had Mohs on the top of my left ear, and when the bandage came off it looked like a dog had nibbled off a chunk. The ear grew back, and now there’s only a faint scar at the site. Other Mohs procedures usually end with an inch-long incision: the surgeon cuts beyond the cancer site to create two flaps that are sewn together to close the wound. A month or two later it’s difficult to locate where the surgery took place.
When I have Mohs I feel like a car brought in for an oil change or a new battery. It’s routine maintenance that leaves me as good as new.
- Nose.
My mother had a peculiar attitude about being a Jew. Though nearly all her friends were Jewish, she was made uncomfortable by such markers of Jewish identity as Brooklyn accents and big noses. As a child of immigrants, she needed to feel fully “American.”
Fortunately, none of her sons had big noses, and for some reason she particularly liked mine. In addition, unlike my brothers, I was blond and blue-eyed. She often said with great pleasure that as a little boy I “looked like a Polish prince.” Mother was certainly aware that actual Polish princes oppressed Jews and serfs, and she wouldn’t have wanted one in her house. What she meant by the Polish prince thing was that it was great that I didn’t look at all Jewish.
A people-pleaser by nature, I took to heart Mother’s message that it’s important to smooth any rough edges, blending in with the majority culture. On first meeting, people rarely tag me as a Jew, as a gay man, or even as a native New Yorker. I’m comfortable with all these identities, but I don’t embody them in my speech and bearing. I travel incognito.
I’m a little sorry about this. After all, I was raised in Queens, not far from Fran Drescher of “The Nanny,” and I’m perfectly capable of invoking her nasal whine: “Oh, Mr. Sheffield.” In the early 1970s, when I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx, it gave me great pleasure to talk like my students–at least a little like them.
But I can’t do anything about my nose, not that I’d want to.
Charles Troob: This was written in response to a prompt from David Grogan in his wonderful memoir study group.