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when I made a lot of money from these sales? I ate big bites of crepe with whipped cream and imagined taking a vacation to Baja Mexico and sailing in the warm water and sunning and drinking margaritas outside my own little blue villa on the water, a soft and squishy nanny to watch my brood and teach them Spanish. The sunlight split my head into tiny shards of hangover glass. On second thought, nix the margaritas. Make that mango juice.
    “Well what do you know? It’s the mysterious vanishing Avon Lady. Are you throwing more things at customers today?”
    My crepe flipped into my lap and I looked up to see Mr. Kilt Question staring down at me, his eyes wrinkled. With anger? No, his lips turned up slightly at the edges, dimples about to burst forth. It was just another joke, and I started laughing, couldn’t stop, couldn’t breathe, just laughed and laughed as the rum and bananas ran over my shorts.

Below the Belt Belongs to Turkey!
    My Avon delivery man arrives like clockwork every other Wednesday afternoon in a slightly dingy nameless truck with a roll-up back door, bringing cardboard box after box of lipsticks and glossy brochures. He doesn’t wear a starched uniform, only a scruffy black t-shirt and faded low-slung jeans. His face sports slate gray eyes and a sparse black goatee that never seems to grow. I don’t know his name, only know he smells like cheap deodorant soap, only knew that Wednesday he would arrive with fifty tubes of hand cream and a few other Avon odds and ends.
    Thursday meant meeting my mysterious customer at the train station, meant dropping Marty and Louie off at a neighbor’s house for the night, meant dolling up for an evening of heavy metal and sure shots of cheap tequila with Harley ridin’ mullet boys. I didn’t have a plan for Friday yet, but imagined sleeping off the smoke and alcohol haze of my blind date. I switched on my boombox and twisted the dial until I found a station playing early 80’s big hair music, the kind my mom called “satanic” and banned from our house during my teenaged years. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and practiced head banging to Black Sabbath’s War Pigs . I didn’t hear my friend Ulak ring the doorbell and invite himself inside.
    “Birdie. What is that terrible noise? Is there something stuck in your ears? Why are you shaking up and down like that?”
    Ulak spoke in his customary staccato sentences. I whipped around in embarrassment and pretended I was tousling my hair.
    “Oh! Hi Ulak! Don’t worry, just some hair RX!” I fluffed a bit more for emphasis.
    The first time I met Ulak he stood in line at a coffee shop along the Pacific Coast Highway. He barked out his order as if giving simple instructions to a confused child. I stood behind him, stared at the tufts of black and gray hair sticking out from the back of his neck. My God, what a hairy man , I thought. Thank God he’s not shirtless .
    Just a month or two later I saw a shirtless Ulak at the beach, lying on his stomach as his traditional mother sat in a folding chair under a voluminous umbrella. She wore a long eggplant-colored tunic with a matching head covering. Aqua and pink watersocks peeked out from under her skirt. A cooler nestled in the sand between them, open to reveal a plethora of exotic Turkish delights. I waved hello, kept walking, dragging my boys and their beach toys behind me, terrified that if I set camp beside Ulak he might ask me to rub lotion on his back...hair.
    Now, most weeks included breakfast with my Turkish friend in a diner surround by tire stores and piercing salons on the Pacific Coast Highway. He chose the same special every time - a huge Spanish omelet with home-fries and rye toast. One morning my legs ached with the fatigue of a hundred hills of Avon brochure delivery, and I stretched them under the table and rested my feet on the red vinyl booth seat next to my friend. The waitress filled a pot of hot water and placed it on the scarred Formica table