Monologue 1 - Powersander

"You’d be amazed what a power sander can do to a human face. You’d be amazed. You don’t think you’d be amazed. You’re thinking, man, I know you could sand away a nose and a chin and a forehead and an ear into absolutely nothing in maybe a minute or two. You don't think you'd be amazed. Trust me. Trust me. You’d be amazed. On this here--I don’t know if you can see it good under this light. Here. This here is forty grit sandpaper. That’s rough. 'Coarse' they call it. The stuff that’s smoother—two hundred grit, three hundred grit, more--they call that 'Fine'. 'Coarse'. 'Fine'. Those are the two extremes, the two types of sandpaper. Coarse and fine. That’s like black and white, or hot and cold, or night and day. Every type of sandpaper is somewhere in between coarse and fine. You got me? You got me. This is grade six. It’s really coarse. It’s like--you know how sharks are? When a shark slides up past a person, when a shark rubs his body against you, it takes the skin off--because the shark’s skin is very coarse. Like this. See? That’s what she said. My aunt. She’s a scuba diver. My aunt is a professional scuba diver. She took movies of sharks and eels and rays and skates. Some of her film has been shown on National Geographic. On the TV show, not in the magazine. Obviously. I don’t think she does any still pictures. Maybe she does. Her husband. Her last husband--she was married close to three times--her last husband was a boat pilot. The two of them would go on these shoots to take pictures of sharks. They were down in the Keys, I think. Somewhere down there. My aunt was down there by herself. I don’t think she was down there for more than a few minutes before the sea--the water all around her--was filled with about twenty sharks. I don’t know. I’m probably lying--or, you know, making that up, I mean. But she did tell me when she told me the story that it was a lot of sharks. She was just in a small swimsuit, I guess. She didn’t have a full suit on. You don’t need one down there. If you’ve ever gone swimming down there, you know what I mean. It’s warm. So she was in just a small swimsuit. I don’t know if it was a bikini. I guess it was. She has the most gorgeous body ever. I really swear. My aunt’s really just got the most beautiful body in the world. Trust me. But she was down there taking pictures of these blue sharks. Blue sharks are the most popular species of sharks that they have down there. And one of them came at her, she said. Right at her. And she tried to swim out of the way, twist out of the way, and the shark turned at the last moment. Like the last second. Not even that. Like the last half a second. Or even less than that, I’m guessing. And it rubbed right up against her. Right against her side, against her waist. Right here. It rubbed against her right here, almost on her stomach, and it scraped off all the skin. From here, down to her hip right here. And this wasn’t even the biggest one, she said. It was about a medium one--kind of an averaged-sized one. She has a scar now. It’s always white. It doesn’t tan. I was watching it and it didn’t tan the whole summer. That is how coarse the shark’s skin was. And that’s how coarse this grade six paper is on this sander. It’s just like shark skin. I’ve never felt a shark, but when I rub my fingers on here on this sandpaper, I kind of pretend like I’m touching a shark’s skin."