As a kid, I would badger my mom to clean my ears at least 3 times a week.  I would run to the pen cup, pull out the skinny little bamboo shovel with fuzzy cotton ball top, and scream out to my mom, “Mama, can you clean my ear???!!!”  If my mom wasn’t busy outside harvesting silkworms or chopping the head off a duck, she would usually oblige.  So there I would sit, Indian style, with my head kinked 45 degrees to the left or right depending upon which ear canal was being excavated.  I’d usually have my hand sticking out like I was expecting someone to give me money.  But instead of cold hard cash, my hand acted as a depository for the bounty of ear wax my mom would soon be pulling out of the dark recesses of my canal.  It was beyond satisfying to feel the little bamboo spoon probing my ear hole, scratching and scraping the walls and occassionally hearing it encounter a little boulder of hard wax.  Crunch!  And then, to my delight, my mom would present me with a yellowish-green chunk of gold and let it drop into my hand.  After a few minutes, I would have a little stack of wax piled on my palm and a smile on my face running from clean ear to clean ear.  Little did I know that this innocent mother/son ear-probing ritual would become a fervent, lifelong obsession…

a bounty of ear pleasure

At first I didn’t know that casual ear cleaning with a “picker” was an ancient, asian tradition.  But one day, after school, my good (white) friend, Billy, came over to play.  When I suggested that I clean his ears with my assortment of asian ear pickers, he just screamed and ran away in terror.  It was as if I had asked him to eat a cockroach or stick a Rubik’s cube up his butt.  After convincing Billy that I wasn’t going to shish kabob his brain, Billy told me that the only thing he had ever stuck into his ear was a Q-Tip.  This had to change.  So for an hour, I tried to convince Billy of the bliss and satisfaction he would experience if he would just let me probe his ear canal with my bamboo pole.  To comfort him, I even gave him a choice of a metal picker, a plastic picker, an illuminating picker, and even a Hello Kitty one.  But he would have none of it.  When I asked him why he was so resistant to a good ear rooting, his answer was simple, “your stick is too long and it scares me.”  Hmm…  What to do?  Every stick I had was at least 6 inches in length.  To me it was no big deal.  But to Billy they all seemed like brain javelins.  ”Let me pick your ear you pussy!”  ”No Roger, your stick is too long and too scary!”  Finally, through my asian gift of logic, reason, and seduction, I was able to come up with a solution – a plastic pen cap.  You know, the one’s with the little one inch arm designed to clip onto a shirt pocket?  Anyway, when I presented that option to Billy he seemed somewhat more receptive.  Billy figured that no matter how hard I tried to ram it in, the pen cap would act as a natural barrier on his outer ear and prevent any possible deep tissue trauma.

So the stage was set – Billy, with his virgin ear canals, sitting, Indian style, preparing for insertion.  And me, plastic pen cap in hand with the anticipation of finally getting to pick instead of being the picked.  The son had finally become the mother.  Ohh la la…

How was it?  Amazing.  For both Billy and me.  Why?  Well, you have to know that Billy had virginal ear canals with a lifetime of buildup just waiting to be liberated.  Also, since the only thing he had ever stuck into his ear was Q-Tips, he spent his lifetime mashing and compacting wax deeper into his ear instead of actually cleaning it.  To this day, I have never yanked out a larger piece of wax with greater ease.  And I did it with a one-incher.  The bounty was the size of a thimble, mosaic in earth colors, and had a bit of fuzz from the years of Q-Tip abuse.  It came so easily.  So, so easily.  There we sat, two boys staring with mouths agape at the gnarly, pre-made candle that smelled of 8 years of body funk.  After the initial shock, Billy turned to me and hugged me long and hard.  ”I can hear, Roger!  I can hear!”  Turns out Billy’s unknown, earwax buildup had resulted in him living most of his life partially deaf.  But upon release, he was flooded with the sounds of life and nature on a scale that he had never know.  It was like someone seeing color for the first time after living a life of black and white.  ”Use the long one!  Go deeper Roger!”  I guess after round one I had gained Billy’s trust.  Billy wanted me to use the big stick, go deeper, and get the rest.  So round two we went for it.  We pulled out stuff that science had no classification for.  As much as I get off on digging for ear wax, this stuff was so repellent that I vomited twice (but I swallowed both times as not to make Billy feel bad).  After we finished, Billy and I were sweaty and breathing hard.  It was a most memorable moment for the both of us.  It was rad.  You never forget your first time.  I became the digger, Billy could finally hear, and both of us felt…clean.

be soft while being hard - the key to a clean ear