Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

The Lip Enhancer

It was Ina who first told me about Brad's lips, and what he does with them. We'd met Brad this last summer, near Los Angeles, in San Pedro, on six acres of barren concrete with gang warfare, Crip and Blood territory staked out all around us. It was the set for a movie based on a book I'd written and could barely remember. Just before this, a neighborhood man had been tied to a bus stop bench here. The set crews found him, tied up, shot to death. The crew was building a rotting Victorian mansion for a million dollars.

All this buildup, this scene setting is so I don't look too stupid.

This will only look like it's about Brad Pitt.

It was one or two o'clock in the morning when Ina and I got there. At the production base camp, movie extras slept in dark lumps, curled up inside their cars. Waiting for their call. When we parked, a security guard explained how we'd have to walk unprotected for the last two blocks to the actual movie shooting location.

A pop, then another pop came from the dark neighborhood nearby.

Drive-by shootings, the guard told us. To get to the set, he said, we needed to keep our heads down and run. Just run, he said. Now.

So we ran.

According to Ina, what Brad does is lick his lips. A lot. According to Ina, this is probably not accidental. According to Ina, Brad has great lips.

Somewhere along the line my sister sent me a videotape of Oprah Winfrey, and there was Brad being interviewed, and Ina was pretty much right all over.

The first day we met Brad, he ran up with his shirt open, tanned and smiling, and said, "Thank you for the best fucking part of my whole fucking career!"

That's about all I remember.

That, and I wanted to have lips.

Big lips are everywhere. Fashion models, movie stars. Where I live in Oregon, in a house in the woods, you can ignore a lot of the world, but one day we got a mail-order catalogue and there inside was the Lip Enhancer.

For this movie, Brad had the caps knocked off his front teeth and chipped, snaggle-tooth caps glued on. He shaved his head. Between takes, the wardrobe people rubbed his clothes in the dust on the ground. And he still looked so good Ina couldn't put two words together. Girls from the 'hood stood five deep at the barricades two blocks away and chanted his name.

I had to get me some of those lips.

According to the people at Facial Sculpting, Inc., you can get collagen lip injections, but they don't last. Full collagen lips will run you around $6,880 per year. Plus, collagen tends to move around inside, giving you lumpy lips. Plus, the injection process causes dark bruising and swelling that can last up to a week, with new collagen injections needed every month.

To be fair, I called five local cosmetic surgeons in Oregon, all of whom do lips, all of whom refused to even discuss the Lip Enhancer. Even when I agreed to pay a hundred-dollar consultation fee. Even when I got down and begged.

Oh, Dr. Linda Mueller, you know who you are.

The Lip Enhancer cost me $25, plus a couple bucks for shipping, plus the snide tone of the man who took my order. It's not really marketed to men. We're supposed to be above all that. Still, the Lip Enhancer is similar to a huge number of penis enlargement systems you can buy.

These are systems you can buy, and use, and write funny silly essays about and therefore tax-deduct; needless to say, several of those systems are now in the mail to me.

The key word is "suction." Like those penis systems, the Lip Enhancer uses gentle suction to distend your lips. Basically, it's a two-piece telescoping tube, sealed at one end. You place the open end of the tube against your lips, then pull the sealed end away from you, lengthening the tube. This creates the suction that pulls your lips inside the tube, giving you full, pouty lips in about two minutes.

In the instructions, the lovely young woman has her lips sucked so far into the clear tube that she looks like a kissing gourami fish.

Some people, it gives them a big hickey around their mouth. This is just like when you were a kid and you pressed a plastic glass around your mouth and chin and sucked all the air out until you had a huge dark bruise that looked like the five-o'clock shadow of Fred Flintstone or Homer Simpson.

You should not use the Lip Enhancer if you're a diabetic or have any blood disorder.

According to the catalogue, your new big full pouty lips will last about six hours.

This is how Cinderella must've felt.

There are similar suction systems to give you bigger, more perky nipples.

In the near future, you can imagine, every big evening will begin hours earlier with you getting sucked on by different appliances, each of them making some part of you bigger for a few hours. The whole evening would then be a race to get naked and accomplish some lovin' before your parts snapped back to their original size.

Yes, there's even a system for enlarging your testicles.

I was visitor number 921 to the Lip Enhancer website.

I was visitor number 500,000 to any of the penis enlargement sites.

Your first week with the Lip Enhancer, you have to condition your lips twice a day. This involves short, gentle sessions of getting your lips sucked. This is less exciting than it sounds.

Now, I've kissed thin lips, and I've kissed thick lips. Me, I have what you'd call combination lips, a large lower lip and pretty much no upper lip. Some cultures scar their faces with knives. Some flatten the heads of their babies with special cradle boards. Some distend their necks with wire coils. All these National Geographic images went through my mind as I sat in my car, my head tilted back at the recommended forty-five-degree angle, the Lip Enhancer tight around my mouth and my lips sucked into the tube. Beauty is a construct of the culture. A mutually agreed upon standard. Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.

After two minutes-the recommended maximum treatment time-I did not look like Brad. Trying to talk, I pronounced almost all my consonants as B's, the same vaguely racist way the character with the huge lips used to talk in the old Fat Albert cartoons on Saturday morning.

"Hey'b, Fab Alberb," I said to the rearview mirror. "How'b boub dees'b libs?"

My lips felt raw and swollen, as if I'd eaten barrels of salty popcorn.

I could see why none of the lovely models in the Lip Enhancer brochures ever smiled.

I hurried out of the car, still in the window of time before my lips would shrink back to nothing. Back to just the regular, ordinary me. I went to a writers' workshop, and my friend Tom asked, "Didn't you use to have a mustache?"

I tried licking them à la Brad on Oprah.

My friend Erin leaned close, squinted hard, and asked, "Have you had dental work done today?"

I remembered Brad in the dentist's chair, sitting through the whole pain of getting his caps switched, to glam down his look with new broken teeth. How one day he had to have good teeth, and the next day, breaks and chips. How every switch meant more time under the dentist. More pain.

It's funny, but you see yourself in a certain way, and any change is hard to understand. It's hard to say if I looked better or worse. To me it was creepy, like those ads in old comic books where you could send away for "nigger lips" and "Jew noses." A caricature of something. In this case, a caricature of beauty.

According to the package enclosures, you can wash the Lip Enhancer with soap and water. According to the website, it makes a great gift. So now it's washed and wrapped, and Ina's birthday is October 16.

Somewhere in the mail, in the backs of trucks or the bellies of airplanes, various other suction systems are still headed my way. Ten of thousands are headed for other people. Me, these people, we believe. Something will save us. Deliver us. Make us happy. And, sure, you could say this kind of special effect is okay for an actor. An actor is playing a role. Well, I would say, who isn't?

So this wasn't really about Brad.

It's about everybody.