POVERTY or a GUIDED MEDITATION for GETTING a GROUPON FACIAL

Fiction by Busmita

“I have lost my taste for writing letters. Why? I have no idea. I think I’ve lost my taste for everything: it’s this goddammed ever-present poverty. At least there’s music.”

Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway

When the going gets tough, gathering a few pennies to indulge in second-tier self-care services can hit the spot—and if not the spot, at least a spot. An old-fashioned Groupon Facial can be a mildly effective medicine for temporarily staving off creeping feelings of fear and loathing fanned by an amorphous poverty. It will feel like a great idea at the time. You will taste a watered-down version of the good life and it will flow golden for seventy-five minutes. But every well eventually runs dry, and indeed, you will most likely regret the purchase in a few days—after you have been thrust back into your life of brutal modesty, over that week’s fifth bowl of beans.

In America, we treat poverty the same way we treat a girl throwing up on the side of the highway—"oh, gross…keep driving”. In scientific circles, the idea of socioeconomic status is only vaguely understood, and is thus poorly measured. It has been popularly boiled down to annual household income—with those scientists of the more foreword-thinking persuasion opting instead for some flimsy metric of parental educational attainment—and has, for the most part, been affectionately tossed into statistical models as a factor to control for. Plainly speaking, this tells us that socioeconomic status is generally viewed as something that gets in the way of “meaningful” patterns scientists want to observe. This is a gross injustice to the truth that anyone bumping along below the poverty line knows: that the juice of one’s socioeconomic context drips from each living, breathing moment, and that it is, ultimately, an uncontrollable variable.

If at this point your hackles have been raised, and chants of “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” echo through the dusty cavities of your skull, I must be transparent by confirming that I offer an embarrassing lack of actionable solutions that are viable within current scientific climates. Those who are most well-equipped to conduct Good Science in this area are too busy trying to find and keep jobs—and taking risks doesn’t get you hired the way it used to. The only good news in all this is that nobody listens to scientists anymore.

Do not be confused: this is relevant when it comes to getting a Groupon Facial. It offers valuable insight on the greater societal context that birthed Groupon, a platform where both consumers and proprietors are wind in the sails of our current thrashing, squealing economic model. Groupon was not designed for the elite consumer, and the businesses offering their services there are often only lurking a rung or two higher on the economic ladder than their patrons—if lurking above at all. What results is a perpetual exchange of the same hundred dollars between employee and employer; a game of economic hacky sack that leaves everyone either broke or flush, depending on the tide. It’s an all-around uncomfortable state of affairs.

It’s for this reason that I am proud to offer you this guided meditation for surviving your Groupon Facial experience. It will lead you through the recesses of an ambient mind—one that is perhaps similar to your own, but more than likely not—poking at memories like a chocolate-smeared toddler. It is dedicated to the vast majority of us who are unaccustomed to having services provided for them—to those who will never turn down a free meal, a free ride, or the chance to blissfully blow their bottom dollar.

Relax, and remember—it’s all just slippery rocks along riverbeds.

…now tune in, drop out, and prepare for…

A MEDITATION

You have located the strip mall. Inside the waiting area, a cardboard cutout of a vial of Botox chirps in fine print. It says, you are doing something nice for yourself. The woman working the front desk has given you a look that underscores how she does not care whether you live or die. They have closed the door behind you for ninety seconds so that you may change into a wrap-around towel with anemic plastic clasps. You have undressed to your comfort level. You are ready to relax.

Yes, relax—breathe. Rest assured you have closed your eyes at exactly the correct time, and that when your Groupon Facialist patted twice on the head of the table you are laying on, that it was indeed a signal to scoot up. You’ve had years of social training and boast a strong nonverbal intuition. And besides, she’s seen it all. Consider how four years in customer-facing positions blunted your own capacity for surprise, multiply this by however long your Groupon Facialist has been working, and add the values of having immigrated and raised children. This is how little she is impacted by anything—good or otherwise—that you do.

You know this but keep repeating “thank you” like a mantra. You repeat it because it is difficult to have someone perform a service for you. “Thank you” is a small hammer, use it to break down the uncomfortable wall between you and your Groupon Facialist. You are not one of those Botox ladies, after all. You are down to earth and let your leg hairs grow long in the wintertime.

A cucumber-scented cleanser is applied to your face. A tiny bit leaks in the corner of your mouth, which begins to tingle. Focus: overcome the urge to raise your finger to your face and fish it out of there. Distract yourself by using this time to reflect on your previous thoughts of “not a Botox lady”. Why is it that you must judge strangers so? When was the last time a Botox lady did anything to you--good or ill? You are reminded of how, just a few days ago, you were sitting at a coffee shop next to a Botox lady and her Pomeranian named Gucci. She kept repeating the dog’s name, hands resting on the bird-like bones of its shoulders, while it yipped defensively at passing children. She was doing that thing some people do, where they have a private phone conversation so loudly that it feels intentional.

This is how you came to be privy to her intimate troubles. This is how you know about how her ex-boyfriend habitually cheated on her. She would lend her computer to him, and he would leave tabs open for sites with names like Date Single Latinas Tonight. Using the AirTag they kept on a set of shared mailbox keys, she would follow him to his hookups and wait outside heartbroken. When the relationship finally ended, she got Gucci, whose worst habits can fit in small plastic bags to be thrown away.

You thought that this may have been the saddest thing you’d ever heard, until later that day when your boss told you the story about a man at the county jail who hanged himself with a chain used to keep inmates from stealing toilet paper.

Two cotton pads are dampened in lukewarm water and wrung out; this comes to you as an interlude of soft splashes from the plastic bowl about a foot from your head. The cucumber cleanser is removed. Somewhere in the universe beyond your eyelids, a plastic cap is opened with a crisp snap. A small amount of product is dispensed, and your Groupon Facial massage begins. Breathe. The smell is vague and anonymous and utterly intoxicating. It reminds you of the type of lotions your grandma would buy you in the late 90’s, whose ingredients have been damned by Instagram infographics, and whose chemicals are now making it difficult for people of your generation to have children naturally. Practice cultivating self-love, even though you have eaten enough sugar-cookie flavored Chapstick to permanently degrade your ovaries. Focus on the gloved hands that swish in satisfying loops across the soft plains beneath your eyeballs.

Now, think: when was the last time you examined your relationship with desire?  

Reflect on how, wow, this thought feels like too much right now. You are here to relax—why must every moment turn active?

You possess a few memories. Replay them now across the backs of your eyelids. You used to have a different partner than the one you have now. They were traumatized by having forgotten to pack socks when moving from China to the United States and would religiously make lists of things they needed to bring each time before leaving the house. They would say far-out, delightful things, and you had never heard someone use words in that way. For example: they once told you the story of how they ate Indian food while coming up on acid and finished it by saying that they get psychedelic flashbacks when faced with a “particularly heady vindaloo”. But: they would not kiss you when you had a cold. When it ended, you went three days without sleep and re-watched each season of Deadwood. Occasionally you would call your roommate over to show them scenes that made you cry. Something about seeing that mean bastard Al Swearengen doubled over and dripping pus while passing a kidney stone grounded you in the universal truth that “to everything there is a season”.

In the months that followed that sour break from the sockless Chinese expat, you engaged in a series of questionable online relationships in an ill-advised quest to rebuild your self-image—a quest that culminated in a road trip to the Florida Keys to meet a paramour you had fished from a chatroom dedicated to foraging free food from Walmart dumpsters. In a rented Hyundai—one of gummy steering wheel and broken radio—you barreled through a landscape of sandy earth and thick, towering pine trees. Reception had dwindled on the outskirts of Apalachicola. You were locked in a thought—about how some species of small insects are born, live, and die in the span of time it had been since you passed another car—when a six-foot snake became suddenly aware that it was in the middle of a two-lane highway.

You remember locking eyes. Secrets about cedar chips were beamed from one eyeball to another in the time it takes for a grain of sand to commute to work. You remember knowing even then that this was an illusion. It is impossible to lock eyes with a snake from the seat of a moving car.

The car skittered violently left, then right. You could feel your heart stop beating in the tips of your fingers. When the car finally settled, you were too high on adrenaline to even check to see if the snake had made it. All you could do was breathe deeply—just like you are right now.

You evaded death and eventually made it to the Keys to meet your online crush. You decided to give church another try the moment that they held you in their arms, which were nothing like the ones you had imagined—when you noticed that their mouth didn’t fit yours, and that their smell reminded you of a caged rabbit.

Your Groupon Facialist presses her index fingers on the upper corners of your eye sockets. The sensation freezes the entirety your ambulatory attention and dispenses it to the surface area of two finger-pads. It reminds you of how your grandpa would pick the barn cats up by the extra flesh at the back of their neck, and the standoffish animal would be replaced by something all limp and wobbling. Your grandpa would tell you how, when you do this, the cats think they are babies again, and that you are their mother.

Notice how the Groupon Facialist sighs while reviewing the acne at your jawline. She knows this will take a while. It is natural of you to jump a little bit when she ruptures the silence to say, “lotta acne, huh?”. Ah, yes. Good, good, good. This was just what you needed to hear. Picture your Groupon Facialist as God delivering these words and their meaning changes.

Adjust your inner focus now to the most humiliating thing you have ever done to another person. Sense the shame gather in small pools at the base of your lungs, there where your breath should be, weighing you down like concrete. Think about whether you would drown if thrown into a motel pool.

As a child, you saw a movie where a mafia assassin buried a man up to his neck on the beach and let the tide come in to drown him. The assassin was a pretty sick cookie and filmed the whole thing. In the tape, the man being drowned sputtered like a failing car. When you went to the beach the next summer you laid on your back and let the waves push up around you. Sometimes, a big wave would come, and you would practice sputtering like the guy in the tape. Later in the movie, the guy who was killed came back and got revenge. He was all draped in slimy green kelp. It was supposed to be scary, but all you could think about was how he was ruining the shag carpeting. The Groupon Facial extraction is in full swing. You can no longer think in complex sentences.

A short while later your pores have been assailed. Your Groupon Facialist has exorcized the congestion up from your jawline, and the pain of being picked at conjures vague memories of your childhood. You briefly consider whether your mother’s constant picking in your ears wasn’t a mild case of Munchausen by proxy, but abandon this memory, dropping it back to the warbly sonic fields of your early life archive. Watch it as it is swept up in a murky wind tunnel and drifts somewhere you can’t touch.

A device is applied to your face which makes sloppy, dripping, metallic kisses across your cheeks. It brings to mind murky tanks of fish you once saw in a New Orleans massage parlor. From the sidewalk, you watched as employees scooped the fish into plastic pitchers—the type that pair well with off-brand Kool Aid—and dispatched them to nibble dead skin off the feet of their patrons. Think now about how they must feel. If this proves too much of a bummer, direct your vein of consciousness to reflect on the overall aesthetic curiosity of the cheap foot massage.

When you recoil slightly at the unexpected chill of a hydrating sheet mask, know that this is quite common. Let your toes curl loosely in on themselves. Loosen the screws that keep your personality suspended in front of you. Hear the gentle flop it makes as it crumples to the linoleum below. You have arrived at the solitary climax of your Groupon Facial, the beginning of which is punctuated by the click of a closing door.

Now: live your entire life, and do so over the course of fifteen minutes. Feel the sore undulations of pain and anxiety that want to grind you into a fine, chalky dust, and all the moments that wiggle like loose teeth. Taste the paste of one thousand walnuts. Let yourself be soothed by a cargo-hold of embraces, and trust that each time you have made an offering out of I and Love and You, it was never the wrong thing to do.

You are grateful to be met by the sounds of footsteps approaching. The swell of an opening door and the scuffling of chair legs, another set of damp cotton pads. You have now seen it all, though this will be forgotten the moment you open your eyes.

Return to the room to see that your original Groupon Facialist has been replaced by another employee, who is somehow distinct yet equally ageless. You mumble a confused “thank you”, to which they tip their head gently, expressing how they’ve heard you but are not interested in building rapport. When they leave the room, you collect your messily folded clothing from the ground (there was nowhere else to place them) and examine the colors and textures of the skin on your face.

Emerge into the world a person slightly older. And do not forget to tip.