The Mustache

It arrived one morning, unannounced and not surprisingly, unheralded, on J’s upper lip. Something about it was distinctly disturbing. How can someone live through forty odd years with an upper lip as smooth as a baby’s bottom and then suddenly, this happens. It was perhaps then that the dreams started, J thought. Actually, they were more dream experiences, than dreams. He could tell a dream by the fact that it had soft edges and diffused lighting. Full time dream expert and part time professor Arnie Fell told him once. So, J started looking out for the soft edges and it was there. What a remarkable man, the professor was, he told himself. But then he started having dream experiences. In one of them he picked up his garbage and his jealousy of Morton and threw them into the bin. He didn’t feel like himself for a few days after that. Maybe the jealousy kept him going, but then for how long, so he did what he did.

In his next dream experience he saw and felt himself climbing the Eiffel Tower, except that it was called Pom Pom and there was a dollar store at the top where they sold kites and other such interesting stuff. J began enjoying his dream experiences so much that sometimes he took an extra day off just to have one of them. What was the point of going to work as a ticket checker on the train if you could be the train and roar through twisted tunnels carved out black rock. He could feel the wind whistle through him sounding a little like his uncle Puck when he fell asleep while knitting.

But that’s not how the mustache happened. It  was the result of  one of his dream experiences, because J clearly remembered the mustache coming to him for help. He had been waiting at a town square talking to a young policeman who told him that a revolution was on in the next street, so he better wait here and that was when the mustache appeared and asked for help. It was looking for a way to escape and J figured that the best way would be for him to wear it. There was a sense of swagger to wearing a mustache that had nowhere to go. Made him feel like a man. A hero.

And so it stayed with him. Every time he felt bored of its sameness he remember what the policeman had told him, ‘there’s a revolution in the next lane so don’t do anything foolish.’

Such profound words from one so young. Surely that should count for something.