24 Days To Dudes: "Touch Of Mascara"

The United States’ Interstate Highway System has existed since 1956. It services nearly every major city in the contiguous 48 states. Once you spend a fair amount of your life on it, as I have, the entire thing begins to feel like a network of veins and capillaries, a vascular web in which you are merely a passive participant, one lone blood cell being carried along on its way to yet another bodily destination.

Whether you do or do not jive with this particular analogy might have a lot to do with your personal driving technique. To many Americans, our automobiles symbolize freedom. Most of us earned our driving licenses at age 16. To a teenager, the license to operate a motor vehicle offers, for the first time in life, the option to go wherever one wants, whenever one wants, however the fuck one wants to go there. If any feeling encapsulates The American Dream, this might be it.

Many of us carry this sense of vehicular entitlement into adulthood. Despite receiving tickets, enduring accidents and going into debt paying for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, we cherish and nurture the idea that we own the road. “Screw those highway fatality statistics,” we tell ourselves as we careen into the left-hand lane, writing a text while abruptly stopping in front of a line of traffic behind us. “I want a burger.”

We think we can control things. We make goals, set deadlines, plan, execute, overachieve and triumph. And then a mini-van comes smashing into our rear bumper, pushing us out into oncoming traffic, right in front of the goddamn Burger King.

I wrote “Touch of Mascara” when I was 22 years old. Originally, it was intended for Trisha Yearwood, the country singer. At some point I realized that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of her ever recording it. Awash in disappointment, I came to the conclusion that, although there were plenty of macho ruminations about The Great American Road, very few dudes had sung about the highway and the application of cosmetics. I thought I could corner the market. This was well before the appearance of the hit television series, ‘Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.’