fantasy nails

a few birthdays back i decided to creep up on (i didn't want to get caught with my feet in a swirl bucket by unsuspecting friends) Fantasy Nails - the Korean manicure shop on Centre St. for a pedicure from the Vietnamese lady, a tiny ferocious broad who yanked one foot out of the swirl bucket and went at my toenails with a pair of cutter teeth that look like stainless steel choppers on a psycho beaver. i stared at Japanese rock videos on a silent screen as my feet shriveled in the swirl. to be honest, i was glad to get the lady. the guy was too delicate (a subtle application of eye liner) and i wanted tough love from the bitch on my gnarled, dog-hard toenails which had become warped into gruesome ugliness because, as a killer nun in Jim Steinman's never to be fully mounted musical Neverland, i leaped from the stage, landed on a electric cable and broke my foot. you don't get a cast for this sort of injury. you hobble and wait and in the end your foot is a disaster. you know that photo of Baryshnikov's feet? how they looked after decades of crushed 'on point'? they were like that. my big right toe is twisted and bent and my toenails look like fungus muffins. which is why i treated my birthday self to Fantasy Nails in the first place. i wanted a makeover. pulling one heel out of the water, the dragon lady swiped a cheese slicer across the bottom of my foot and scraped centuries of yellow callous away into the bubbly in larded lumps. the bottoms of my feet were now soft as a puppy's belly. still, i'm nervous. i remember Polanski's Repulsion. Catherine Deneuve as a manicurist snips a vein as she pared the cuticles of an elderly man. black blood squirted over white linen and soundless screams ricocheted off the walls. (my fantasy at Fantasy Nails became a nightmare.) about a year after the procedure an arsonist torched the place and now Fantasy Nails is kaput. i tried alternatives. none have made the grade. who's gonna make my feet once-a-year-new now? me. privatization. when my room mates are out of the apartment i fill a spaghetti pot with hot water, soak and chop at my screwed-up nails, one foot hiked on the tub, my ass on toilet and my cat meowing outside the door. see, with the soak pot replacing the hi-end swirl i'm able to snip my softened nails and nibble off the weird, Stonehenge shapes with impunity. i feel naughty and in-a-hurry fearful of the unexpected room mate catching me in the act, like mom barging into a teenage bedroom at 'the wrong time'.