*

As those of you who have met me know, I’ve got me one deliriously large honker dangling off the front of my face. It’s the only physical legacy I inherited from my heathen savage grandmother. Here is a picture of her taken after the missionaries cleaned her up, taught her how to not scalp settlers, hate the Great Spirit and love Jesus:**

***

Once, in high school, a group of my friends snuck into the office, got a hold of the intercom speaker, and announced to the entire school, “Will Adam ____’s big ham and cheese nose please report to the office.” This school was was one of those experimental “school-without-walls” sort of schools, so I got to listen to over one thousand students laugh at my ham and cheese nose in unison (I actually thought that was pretty damn funny). I’ve had little children look up at me, point, and say (to their parent’s horror) “Look Mommy, I have a LITTLE nose.”

Regardless of what I told you in the last paragraph, I LOVE my big Injun ham n’ cheese nose. It gives character to my otherwise honkey donkey pasty white Caucasian face. I can smell a bison heard, a cavalry unit or a liquor store from over two miles away. It’s good for tracking. But most importantly, I love my big Injun ham n’ cheese nose because with it, on those rare occasions when a woman actually decides to flirt with me, I can always tell.

Let me explain. Every time in my life, and I mean every single time, that I’ve ever had any degree of success with a woman, whether of the noble sort of success, or the not so noble sort, that success has ALWAYS been preceded by her telling me how much she likes my big Injun ham and cheese nose.

Is that ridiculous? Yes. I don’t believe them for a second. Woman are simply not as aesthetically stimulated as guys are. My nose has never helped me seal the deal with anyone. A woman may be attracted to a guy because she thinks he’s funny/smart/charming/an alpha-male dick wad/rich/talented etc., that guy could have a hairy mole on his face the size of a guinea pig, and that woman would think to herself, “hairy guinea pig sized moles are SOOOO SEXY.”

In my case, for whatever unfathomable reasons women in my past has chosen to allow themselves to be attracted to me, whether it’s the reasons I’ve cited above or the more realistic motivation of the lowered expectations of alcohol, they’ve looked at me and allowed their subconscious to make up a physical attribute to find attractive and zoom in on it (bare in mind that I’m well aware that 99% of the women who meet me only see a schmuck). With me the answer is as plain as the nose on my face, it IS the nose on my face. Consequently, when I hear the words “I think you have the best nose” I know that unless I screw things up ridiculously, I’m in.

Which is why it KILLED me the other night when I was hanging out with two people; one a woman I’ve been acquainted with for several years, the other a guy friend who was flirting with her shamelessly to no avail for nearly two hours, and I received my “You’ve got a great nose” from her and wasn’t able to act on it. After he had spent all that time laying that worthless groundwork, I couldn’t act. Damn it! I only get a “You’ve got a great nose” every six months or so, and this one was totally wasted. It felt so defeating having her say goodbye and squeezing my arm as Mr. Flirt Flirt was giving her a ride home, for which I am sure he received a big fat hug and a hand shake for his trouble. Now I’m going to have to wait six more months for some woman to convince herself that my big Injun ham n’ cheese nose is in some way sexy to her.

*My profile superimposed over a photograph of Two Moon, Chief of the Northern Cheyennes (no relation). courtesy of Denver Public Library.

***photograph of my grandmother. courtesy of the shoe box on top of my bookshelf.