FACE TO FACE WITH FUGLY

My husband and I recently went to a wine tasting party at a friend's house. It was just a small group of friends from my journalism days - about 8 - 10 people. With 10 bottles of wine to taste, I was glad there weren't any more guests, or I would have to get my bitch on and confine other people to licking the corks.

One of the people I knew brought a friend who worked at the paper way before my time. A woman. At least that's what I was told she was. It was kind of hard to tell, to be honest, except for the fact she was wearing a skirt.

When she walked into the room, my husband and I simultaneously froze in a state of shock and disgust at the site of her. I believe I may have even spit out my cheese and cracker as a physical response. Yet despite our revulsion, we could not look away. We were fascinated. Appalled, but fascinated.

Before us was the fugliest woman we had ever seen.

I know you think I'm being mean here, or exaggerating for effect. As much as I like being and doing both, I kid you not when I say I'm being truthful. And I am willing to swear to it on a stack of tequila, my pair of Manolo's, and all my vibrators (except for maybe "The Wolf.")

There was just nothing good to look at on this woman. NOTHING. The eye just skipped from one horror to another, never finding relief. This was not just every day ugly - this was ugly of a whole new dimension - three scoops of fucking ugly with ugly sauce poured on top and chunks of ugly mixed in.

You know how even if someone is fat or bald or has a hair lip you can usually find something nice to say about them, like they have pretty eyes, or really nice skin, or they are a snappy dresser? Not so in this case. And it wasn't from lack of looking - since I COULDN'T look away. Someone didn't just beat her with an ugly stick, they tied her to an ugly tree in an ugly forest and sprinkled ugly dust all over her.

I could only imagine what her parents were like. It was as if a troll and a mangy dog mated - that is, if the troll were half ape and the dog was rabid. THAT'S how fugly this woman was. She was a violation to all that is right in the world - so much so that for a brief moment I thought about gouging out my own eyes as a defense mechanism.

Still don't believe me? Well, where should I start? She was mostly bald. The top of her head was a round, shiny dome with big blue raised blotches. Strands of wiry, greasy hair sprouted from just about ear level (and from the ears themselves) and coiled their way down to mid-shoulder.

Her face was shiny from grease, devoid of make-up, and sporting a 5 o'clock shadow. Her eyes were squinty and dull and overwhelmed by eyebrows that appeared like a family of caterpillars had made her forehead their home. Her nose, a bulbous atrocity that seemed to stretch from ear to ear, also sprouted its own nest of wiry hairs. Her lips were thin, cracked and bleeding. Her teeth were covered in a yellow and orange film. I have no idea what someone can do to make their teeth turn orange, and I don't really want to know. Some things are better left a mystery.

Her body wasn't deformed, but it was also not quite right. She was shaped like a potato (but hey, I'm also resembling a spud these days, so who am I to talk?) You could not tell where her boobs ended and her stomach started. She didn't seem to have an ass. Her legs were short, but her arms were too long, giving her an almost chimpanzee appearance - although that's an insult to the chimpanzee.

She was wearing clothes that had food stains all over them, were wrinkled, and about 35 years old. She was also wearing panty hose in which wiry leg hair stuck out of various holes and made her look like she could be used as a Brillo pad. A gnarled and hairy big toe that appeared to have enough dirt in the nail to start her own tomato farm stuck out of her open-toe sandals, protruding from yet another rip in her nylons.

She also had a unique smell. It was musty, like grandma's house, but gamy, like a meat-packing plant with health code violations.

I think it took a full 5 minutes for my husband and I to close our mouths and stop staring, even tho we tried not to. God knows we wanted to turn away. But our brains were stuttering from shock. We just couldn't believe what we were seeing.

We finally snapped out of it as she walked toward us. It was everything I could do to resist the urge to run, as it appeared that she had such a concentration of fugly on her that it could just jump off of her and onto someone else without effecting her at all - as if fugly was a swarm of mosquitoes.

Yet there was also part of me that felt sorry for her. Did she have so little self-esteem that she didn't even try to shower, or shave, or brush her teeth? Were her parents wild apes, and she never learned the ways of civilized man (or in this case, woman)? What possible excuse could there be for this?

She didn't HAVE to be this fugly. Regular bathing and grooming, some electrolysis, and a day of shopping (which included a stop at the wig store) would improve her immensely. If she had the money (which I assumed she must since she had a full-time job and wasn't spending her pay check on soap) she could reverse the rest with Hair Club for Women and some light cosmetic surgery. I just couldn't figure out why, in this day and age, a woman would CHOOSE to be this fugly when with a little work they could just be mildly unattractive.

Maybe she was hoping we'd all get liquored up and she would become more attractive in our drunkenness. Yet I doubted that there was enough alcohol on the planet to pull that off. Or maybe she really just was a socially stunted and petrified human being - too timid to ask for help, and too clueless to figure it out on her own.

But then she opened her mouth, and the mystery deepened. She wasn't timid at all. She was obnoxious, brash, and seemingly not phased by anything. She was, if anything, overly self-confident, bragging about her job, herself, and - gulp - her sex partners.

That's right. The woman talked about having sex, detailing her experiences for us in a way that left nothing out. At one point, I saw my husband take one of the bottles of wine we were supposed to taste later, and down it in one gulp. I said nothing, instead groping for my emergency flask in my purse. Her language was so vivid, her tales so horrifying, I was sick to my stomach and deathly pale. Yet again, I could not go to another room or turn away simply because I could not believe this was real and felt if I fled the scene, I would be admitting that yes, indeed, it was.

This woman, if she wasn't lying (and the details she gave seemed wayyyyyyyyy too specific to have been made up), was having more sex than Paris Hilton. I could only think that maybe she found a colony of blind men and was making her way through them one by one. That was the only explanation that would not drive me stark raving mad.

My husband and I got really drunk that night. The kind of drunk that makes your liver ache the next day. It didn't help. Every time we looked at her, it prompted us to have another shot - another glass. I think the other guests felt the same way too, because at one point another friend offered to go to the store and brought back two more cases of wine and a fifth of vodka. And this was a friend who normally does not drink.

I guess I should be inspired by this woman - here she is self confident despite her fugliness in a world that continually tells us that if you are not a super model, you aren't worth anything. She was a walking, talking advertisement for not giving a shit about what other people thought - a stand that I normally have great respect for. She was who she was - the fugliest woman on the planet - and she didn't care. That takes balls. And believe me, I would not have been surprised to find out she had them.

But as much as I like to think that I'm a big enough person, an evolved enough woman, that looks don't matter any more in this modern world, I just can't. Looks shouldn't matter. But there is a line for everything. And this woman had not only crossed that line - she'd walked 100 miles past it on two really ugly feet.

Your looks DO say a lot about you. This does not mean you have to be a super model, or a size 2, or ooze sex for attention. But you should care about how you look to others. Anything else just says "fuck you" and makes you seem like you probably don't care about anything else either. Except, it seems, having sex with blind men.

Comments

[zeus]

No matter how brutally ugly a chick you see, somewhere, somehow, there is a dude hard up enough to do her. It's staggering.

[Daisy]

Was she as bad as Crusty?

A transvestite perhaps?

[Otir]

Looks do matter. The way you look can tell the way you respect others. If it is such an obsession to someone that they want to "look perfect" to attract attention or control everything about their lives, it can also be disrespectful, as much as can be disrespectful the one who doesn't give a damn but still attracts the kind of negative attention that you have described.

My stand is in the middle. Be appropriate. And healthy.

[Ree]

Amazing isn't it. I work with a woman who looks so much like a man, I'm startled every time I walk into the bathroom and she's in there. It's like I have to check the sign on the door.

But then I think, no, really, she wants to look that way.

[Miss J]

Ai ai ai! She was talking about sex, with an orange film on her snaggly teeth, and you didn't pass out? I would have run away screaming from that, and I'm a tough little chick. Hats off to ya, Cookie.

[Junebug]

Ah the memories. It was an adventure at work every day to see what might show up. We all have our quirks, I like to say, but some folks get more than their share. And she reveled in it, it seems.

[Chantal]

My god woman. That just... I was scared FOR you! Did you make noise too? I usually give an out loud "Yegh" when I see something like that.

I mean, I'm not the prettiest in the sandbox, but damn, what you described came out of the pits of hell.

[Marie]

I have a friend like that, but she actually does make an effort. She even has a nice looking husband and two mildly unattractive children. She looks a lot like her mom, who also has no problem finding sex partners, although it may not be surprising to know they're all at least as ugly as she is.

[The Super Bongo]

She's not of my kind . . . we spend hours and hours grooming.

[Veronica]

I was scarily enthralled through your re-telling.

Poor you, at least there was alcohol though,