Getting Tan

It’s like being almost nude inside a lit flash cube: the three-foot-square booth has been veneered with bright reflective foil. Ten triple banks of ultraviolet light, tube atop tube, strip-search me. I feel wonderfully fatuous, swaying from side to side here, cootch-dancer-style: a kind of self-rotisserie. One arm up, then another, as I have been instructed, so that plastic sunlight can baste my ribcage. Each eye is shut, but not pinchy shut: wouldn’t want crow’s-feet in my tan. I have rolled underwear up to form a cache-sexe (there are things better left pale), but my right boxer leg will keep unfurling down. And I wonder—is this pretend stuff? After all, the lights are cool, bland, office-fluorescent: surely innocuous. But lock a man in here for ten minutes and by nightfall he’d be suppurating lymph: blistered, blood-raw, and certainly comatose: within commuting distance of death. Sunlight can be a blunt instrument. Still, I have to admire the all-American convenience of it: this booth will always be cloudless: and no sand in the shoe or Coppertone to turn your back into a sort of multi-purpose adhesive. Bip! The automatic timer has let synthetic dusk fall. I am done with my initial session (one minute and a quarter) at Modern Age, New York’s first Kentucky Fried People Outlet.

Ed Mara, tan-flesh peddler, has been giving ersatz sunshine a big plug. Mara’s own face is toasty beige: as though he’d set the dial on southern California: expressive counterpoint to his brown-silver hair. Ed Mara is always on daylight-saving time. “We’ve only been open since Christmas. Right now we only do 15 or twenty sessions a day. If it works out Ed like to open a bunch of them all over the city. Well, not all over: not in Harlem, I guess. But first Eve gotta find out whether the idea can survive on its own. Em not sure it can. You’ve gotta get a hell of a lot of clients at $2.50 a shot. It’s a numbers game: $2.50 isn’t much, but when you talk about $2.50 times six booths, times seven days a week, times 15 salons, then you’re talking money.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.

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It’s like being almost nude inside a lit flash cube: the three-foot-square booth has been veneered with bright reflective foil. Ten triple banks of ultraviolet light, tube atop tube, strip-search me. I feel wonderfully fatuous, swaying from side to side here, cootch-dancer-style: a kind of self-rotisserie. One arm up, then another, as I have been instructed, so that plastic sunlight can baste my ribcage. Each eye is shut, but not pinchy shut: wouldn’t want crow’s-feet in my tan. I have rolled underwear up to form a cache-sexe (there are things better left pale), but my right boxer leg will keep unfurling down. And I wonder—is this pretend stuff? After all, the lights are cool, bland, office-fluorescent: surely innocuous. But lock a man in here for ten minutes and by nightfall he’d be suppurating lymph: blistered, blood-raw, and certainly comatose: within commuting distance of death. Sunlight can be a blunt instrument. Still, I have to admire the all-American convenience of it: this booth will always be cloudless: and no sand in the shoe or Coppertone to turn your back into a sort of multi-purpose adhesive. Bip! The automatic timer has let synthetic dusk fall. I am done with my initial session (one minute and a quarter) at Modern Age, New York’s first Kentucky Fried People Outlet.

Ed Mara, tan-flesh peddler, has been giving ersatz sunshine a big plug. Mara’s own face is toasty beige: as though he’d set the dial on southern California: expressive counterpoint to his brown-silver hair. Ed Mara is always on daylight-saving time. “We’ve only been open since Christmas. Right now we only do 15 or twenty sessions a day. If it works out Ed like to open a bunch of them all over the city. Well, not all over: not in Harlem, I guess. But first Eve gotta find out whether the idea can survive on its own. Em not sure it can. You’ve gotta get a hell of a lot of clients at $2.50 a shot. It’s a numbers game: $2.50 isn’t much, but when you talk about $2.50 times six booths, times seven days a week, times 15 salons, then you’re talking money.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.