Origami Lips

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 we ar- rived, a neighborhood man had been tied to a bus-stop bench there. The set crew found him tied up, shot to death. The crew was building a rotting Victorian mansion for a million dollars.
All this build-up, 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 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 unpro- tected 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 video tape of Oprah Winfrey in- terviewing Brad, 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 fuck- ing 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-or-
der catalogue and there inside was the Lip Enhancer.

For this movie, Brad had the caps knocked off his front teeth and chipped, snaggle-toothed 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 barri- cades two blocks away and chanted his name.
I had to get me some of those lips.

According to the people at International Facial Sculpting, 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 in- jection 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 $100 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-en- largement systems you can purchase

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