Fifty Shades of Black Read Online Free Page A

healthy hair follicles from one place—say, your back—and replants them in an arid zone. Say . . . above your upper lip.
    This does not sound like an operation many North American males would line up for, but Dr. Tulunay does a brisk business in the Middle East, where moustaches—particularly big, bristly, walrus-style moustaches—are serious symbols of virility.
    The procedure is painful, unsightly and takes six months to show results. Oh, and it costs about seven thousand dollars per upper lip. Dr. Tulunay is booked solid for months in advance.
    According to Andrew Hammond, a journalist based in Saudi Arabia, having a huge, substantial moustache is, well, huge, for Arab males. “Most Arab leaders have moustaches or some form of facial hair. I think culturally it suggests masculinity, wisdom and experience.”
    The converse is also true. A few years ago militants in Gaza kidnapped an opponent and inflicted on him the most severe and humiliating punishment they could devise, short of death.
    They shaved off his moustache.
    You want to smear a Middle Eastern man with the worst slander possible? Don’t belittle his politics, make fun of his belly or cast aspersions on his family. Just look him in the eye and growl, “A curse be upon your moustache!” When I was a teenager I cursed the place where my moustache wasn’t. Long after my pals had sprouted facial hair the area between my nose and my upper lip remained as bare as Senator Duffy’s pate.
    I rubbed it, I scrubbed it. I slathered on gobfuls of hair restorer and even shaved it, for an old wives’ tale said that the surest way to make a beard come in thick was to scrape it with a straight razor to “stimulate the follicles.”
    Not.
    Every morning I rushed to the bathroom mirror and pored over my facial pores looking for anything, just one small sprig or microscopic frond that would indicate my manhood was on the way. Nothing.
    Now, decades later, I am trying to appreciate the fact that Somebody Up There has a divine sense of irony, if not humour.
    I finally have my coveted moustache—it’s no Lanny McDonald but it’s respectable.
    Meanwhile, the top of my head is as bare as a Sylvania 60-watt bulb.
    Good one, God.

 
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    Take Back the Night
    O nce upon another lifetime it was my honour to address the gradu­ating students of a private school. When I’d exhausted my repertoire of pieties and platitudes the headmaster asked me if there was one piece of advice I could offer that would guarantee success in whatever they chose to do.
    â€œSure,” I said. “I can tell you how a simple, easy, healthy, dirt-cheap alteration in your daily life will guarantee success. I can also guarantee that 99 percent of you will scoff and reject it the moment you hear it. Still game?”
    They were.
    So I gave it to them in three words: Get. Up. Early.
    How early? Crack of dawn early, I told them. Get up early and work on your dream. Read, paint, sing, sketch, write, knit—whatever. Do just an hour or so early every day. They groaned and recoiled as if they’d been clubbed with baseball bats.
    For once, I knew what I was talking about. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a husband, a new father and a holder of a full-time job it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to be anything more than the above, I needed to find some extra hours in my day.
    It was summer, and I lived in a part of the country where the sun was already up and blazing at five in the morning. And so, after a few coughing, spluttering mornings, was I.
    It’s a grand time to get things done, the early morning. There is nothing on TV, no colleagues to drop by and chat. The rest of the family is asleep, the phone isn’t likely to ring and it’s way too early for Jehovah’s Witnesses to be knocking at the door. Best of all the mind is fresh, rested and—after a jolt of java—frisky, even.
    So I got up and wrote. Not