[niamhoneill]

A top male plastic surgeon wakes up with the face of an aged female celebrity after falling victim to a practical joke.


I look in the mirror and the face looking back at me is not my own. I gasp in shock, confused and light headed. I put my hand up to touch the fine lips and high cheekbones that are in the place where my own chubby rounded cheeks and stubbly top lip usually are. My eyes are little more than stretched slits and my eyebrows are two inches higher than normal forming a perfect arch. I attempt a frown, but the feline like image looking back at me is pulled back so tight that nothing happens. I recognize this face; I am looking at an exact replica of Joan Rivers. Only it’s Joan Rivers twice as wide with a bald spot, comb over and large gut. When I was a young man, I always feared the day I would wake up middle aged, divorced and 50 pounds over weight. I never considered that I would wake up a 74-year-old Jewish woman with a face like a slapped ass. “That fucker,” I yell as I realize who is responsible for this abomination.

It all started in college, over 20 years ago. I was a young and ruthlessly ambitious medical student with aspirations of becoming a top plastic surgeon. From day one, I knew I had something special and that in me was what it took to be the best. I aced every class; surpassed the knowledge of the professors in no time and was the most promising student the college had ever seen. That was of course until Paul Brown came along, the ‘Doogie Howser’ of plastic surgery as he would later be called. He was younger than me, but allowed skip ahead a year of medical school due to his significant brain and therefore joined my class. He was also slightly smarter and worst of all, half an inch taller than me. I hated him and it hurt like hell to be knocked off my number one perch. Before long, we became sworn enemies, competing to be the best. If I got an A, he got an A+. If I grew a moustache, he grew a beard. If he completed a three-hour written exam in two hours, I completed it in an hour whilst playing the violin. It continued like this for 3 full years.

Things got even worse when we graduated and entered the professional world. We were competing for jobs in the same city. We both interviewed for a position in one of the top cosmetic surgery firms. They were innovative and exciting and looking for great young creative minds, I knew I fitted the bill. I bumped into Paul in the waiting room before the interview. I was pleased to see my shoes were slightly shinier than his and that his tie was a little off centre. He shifted uncomfortably as he realized this and adjusted himself accordingly. During the interview, I promised that I would be married to the job, never have children and that if I ever had to get my appendix out I would do so on my lunch break. Paul must have said something similar as we both got an offer. Our offices were down a long corridor and next to one another. His was a half an inch wider than mine, but mine had a view of a quarter of a tree.

Some mornings I accidentally met him in the lobby on the way into the office. I would nod in acknowledgement and begin a fast walk up the stairs. He would do the same, but begin running. Soon we would be in a full sprint pulling at one another in the race to see who got upstairs first. It took bloody knees and one broken arm for this to stop, but I swear I got there first that one time!

Our offices were so close I could hear him moving around next door. I became fixated with his actions and would often spend hours with a glass fixed to the wall listening to his consultations with patients or monitoring how many times he went to the restroom. I would always make a point of rushing out at the same time as him to see who went to the toilet quickest. Sometimes we would get into an argument over who got to use the hand-drier first. We would end up screaming about who was the most valued surgeon to the firm, who had the bigger car or skinnier dog. I would accuse him of only working a 100-hour week and he would accuse me of considering taking a half day once.

Our competitiveness extended to our performance in surgery. If I heard that he had saved a woman’s arm, I would give a woman an extra leg, three was my lucky number when it came to limbs. I heard that he operated whilst listening to music, so I made sure I had a full string quartet in surgery with me. He demanded fresh fruit before an operation; I demanded a Brazilian supermodel to stir my coffee anticlockwise.

As our reputations grew, so did the caliber of our patients. Before long, celebrities and their wealthy friends were banging on our name-plated doors, (mine with the largest lettering by 0.02cm) to book our services years in advance. Celebrities were even known to phone up on behalf on their unborn child, booking a breast augmentation for when they turned 16. The competition grew as to who bagged the most famous ones. He got Cindy Crawford and I got Naomi Campbell. I was delighted when columnists wrote about how breathtaking her “natural beauty” was. She denied ever having plastic surgery stating that she was simply blessed with good genes and she was looking forward to growing old gracefully. Paul did an incredible amount of work on Cindy Crawford. I heard she looked like a middle-aged bag lady until he got his hands on her. It was difficult to find fault with the quality of his work, but I yearned for the day that he would be subjected to a malpractice lawsuit, accidentally give a male celebrity breast implants or kill someone under surgery. Equally I knew that he was waiting for me to mess up, which eventually I did when I got Jackie Stallone as a patient. Working on her face was like trying to mould the Venus de Milo out of jam. She was a mess. I did the best I could, pulling and pushing at her excuse for a face. She had dust where bones should have been and paper instead of skin, which just flaked away in my hands. When I saw the finished product, this monster I had created, I knew that Paul would be waiting in the sidelines ready to gloat.

He never let it drop. I got an anonymous package delivered to my office with a Quasi Modo mask inside adorning red lipstick and a brunette wig. It looked just like Jackie. I knew it was from Paul and the note inside saying “from Paul” confirmed this. Each time we bumped into one another at work he’d pull a face mimicking her. He had the upper hand, until of course he got Joan Rivers. After he operated on her, giving her that pulled ridiculous face, the newspapers and gossip magazines had a field day and wrote about the “Worst face in Hollywood”. Paul got the nickname in the industry as Dr. Frankenstein and his business began to dwindle. Of course, I basked in the opportunity to make him feel small. I got a twelve-foot high image of Joan pasted onto a billboard that I knew he passed on the way to work. It had the words “Cry me a River Paul” written underneath it. Following his humiliation, he dropped off the radar. Rumor had it that he ended up in a nut house for shamed plastic surgeons. For the first time in years, I felt truly victorious.

That was until this morning, when I woke up with that face, her face. Paul obviously has gone through great lengths for this performance. I touch the face again, it is fully healed. He must have kidnapped me, done the surgery, fed me through a drip for a week and then returned me to my house. That crazy bastard. I had to give it to him though, he was original. So here I am, with the worst face in Hollywood staring back at me. I phone my office. Barbara, the dim witted secretary asks me if I am feeling better. Apparently I called her a week ago to say I would be off due to illness.

“I’m fine, you imbecile” I tell her. “It wasn’t me who called you, it was Paul Brown.” I’ll be in the office in an hour.”

In all my years of being a top plastic surgeon, I had not missed one day of work and today would be no different. Quickly I unbutton my pyjama shirt to get ready. I gasp in horror yet again when I find more evidence of Paul’s work. I now have an extra nipple.

I dress in my usual attire, a pinstripe suit with a pink shirt and smart tie. I do my best to try and comb my thinning hair over my now stretched forehead. I look like the worst kind of middle-aged transvestite on one hell of a bad day. I vow to avenge Paul for this.

I climb into my Mercedes, which has a stronger horsepower than Paul’s. To top the whole experience off, it won’t start. I’ll have to get the bus, something I haven’t done since I was a boy. I am fuming with rage and if I were capable of expressions I’m sure my anger would be pasted all over my face, her face. Standing at the bus stop, I become aware that people are whispering and talking about me. A young mother covers her daughter’s eyes with her hand as they approach me. “Yeah, yeah, you’re ugly too,” I yell out as I try to kick the little girl.

I finally arrive at the office. The bus journey had not been fun, an old woman had started pelting me with her umbrella saying I was an unsavory character. I actually now have sympathy for Joan, what must her everyday life be like with this hideous face?

I approach Barbara’s desk. For a woman that has such easy access to a world-recognized plastic surgeon, she surprisingly remains silicone and enhancement free. I am forever telling her to get her nose fixed and that it’s so big she could smell a fart in Japan. She just brushes me off and tells me that it defines her character. She is single, never married, I blame the nose.

“Good morning Barbara.”

She looks up. Her face is surprisingly one of concern rather than terror.

“Is that you? Oh, God, what happened, you poor thing?”

“I am having a bad day,” I answer through gritted teeth, and “It’s complicated.”

There is only one surgeon at work that I trust to reverse Paul’s work, but he is away for another two days. So, I am stuck with this face until then. I sit down in reception and put my head in my hands, annoyed. Barbara comes over and puts her arm around me. “Do you want to go for a coffee and talk about it?” I admit that her kindness is a refreshing change to the behavior I witnessed from people on the bus. “Sure, why not?” I try to smile but my mouth barely moves.

“You are clearly traumatized by what has happened,” she tells me on the way to the coffee shop.

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are, admitting it is not a weakness,” she turns to me with concerned eyes.

“If anything is traumatizing me, its your nose.”

On the way to the coffee shop, I notice people staring at me with a look of horror on their faces. It is really starting to bug me. A bus driver shouts out of the window at me “Hey doll, what you gonna do for a face when King Kong wants his ass back?” I give him the finger, which by the way is slightly longer than Paul’s. We arrive at the coffee shop and I go up to the counter to order us two coffees, mine must be stirred anti clockwise of course. I notice an elderly man sitting perched to my right. He is devoid of teeth, has a hip flask hanging out of his pocket and smells like he has been basking in shit for the last 40 years. “Nice tits sugar,” he says as he stares directly at my chest. I am aware that I have put on weight recently and vow to have any trace of my man boobs removed following this ordeal. I feel very uncomfortable and move to the opposite end of the counter.

I am outraged when an attractive woman in her 20’s gets served before me even though I am before her in the line. When I protest, I am ignored. This is the last straw. I feel the anger building up inside me. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, a balding, fat version of Joan Rivers in a gentleman’s tailored suit. I begin banging my fist on the counter, my greased hair flopping over my smoothed and creamy forehead, veins popping out of my neck and some chest hair sprouting from beneath my shirt. “Easy lady, easy,” the barista tells me from behind the counter “your face is scaring the customers!”

“I am a person and I deserve to be treated like one,” I shout, my voice quivering but my face irritatingly expressionless. “It shouldn’t matter how I look!.”

And then it hit me; I had been spending my whole life lying to people, telling them they look terrible and that I could fix them, when I knew in my heart that there was nothing wrong with them. So what if someone had a tiny bump in their nose? Maybe Barbara was right and that it does define character.

I turn to her, “Why are people treating me like this?”

“Because of how you look.”

“But it doesn’t matter how I look, I may have the face of Joan Rivers, but I am a rich and successful man, who deserves respect.”

Barbara looks surprised.

“You have based your career on telling people how they should look. I have always tried to tell you that there was more to life than perfect cheekbones or smoothing fine lines.”

“My God, maybe you’re right. All this time I have been striving for perfection, when it’s what’s inside that counts,” the realization hit me like never before. A moment of revelation, my life could never be the same again.

Three weeks have passed and I have had the surgery reversed. Thanks to the skilled hand of my colleague, I now look the same as I did before this whole ordeal. However, I have changed inside and am no longer able to look a patient in the eye and tell them that it needs to be 0.01cm higher in order to create perfect symmetry. I have left the world of cosmetic surgery and am working to help release rehabilitated monkeys back into the wild. It is very rewarding, and for once it doesn’t matter that who I am dealing with is covered in excess body hair and has unattractive genitals.

On my return home, in between visits to monkey sanctuaries, I decide to make amends with Paul. I also want to thank him for giving me this new lease of life. If he hadn’t of made me into Joan Rivers I would still be living that unfulfilled, superficial life unaware of the hardship of monkeys. He is in a minimum-security mental institution out of town, I am only allowed 15 minutes of visitation. His room is covered with images of Joan Rivers. He has copied the one photograph of her over and over and has cut the noses, eyes and lips of other celebrities out of magazines and pasted them over face. He has scrawled “Reduce cat like appearance” on the walls and every point on his to do list says, “Find Joan and fix her.”

Paul has clearly lost the plot. He tells me sit down on the end of his bed and offers me a jar of his urine to drink. I begin to tell him about the transformation I have been through, not just physically but also mentally. I tell him that I realize that there is so much more to life than cosmetics and that I am now happier than I have ever been. I thank him and say that his actions have inadvertently caused this new lease of life I am experiencing. Unfortunately, this seems to be wasted on him as the only coherent thing he tells me is “Eat apples on the subway at dawn.” I smile, bid him farewell and leave. When I am back in my car, I pull up my shirt and give that extra nipple a little tweak; I have grown quite fond of it and decided to keep it as a reminder of what I have been through. Also, tweaking it kind of turns me on. I start the car and drive off towards the monkey sanctuary a truly a happier man than before.

['Ginnis]

I think this may be your best piece of work, niam. The sarcasm was so deep, the little quibs were great. Wonderful hyperbole. You've grown.

[Timmay]

wow, bravo. kara's right, the sarcasm is great, and your characters had this great 3rd dimension to them. good job.

[Aleox]

Wow, Niam, that is one of the best humor short stories I have read on Storiesmania. Your sarcasm was witty, each character shone out of the pages, and the writing and dialog flowed very well. You made me laugh out loud more than a few times, a rarity in these parts. Some more stories of that caliber, and you will truly have become/grown into a great writer.

[niamhoneill]

Hey,

Many thanks for the kind words.

I am trying to develop more of a plot to my stories, so glad you liked it.

Niamh

[superbum]

I wish I had a 3rd nipple

[Ferris]

Haha, very deep and a little shocking - for a moment then I thought you were going to tell us he had something else removed! :S

Good laugh that one!

Ferris