January / february 2006:

I Left My Schnozze in San Francisco
His defining feature too big, our intrepid reporter took the rhinoplasty plunge. And he lives to tell the tale.

Essay by Mason Lerner | Illustration by Raul R. Allen


My nerdy windbreaker with baseballs containing the logo of all the major league baseball teams stitched to each lapel kept the biting San Francisco breeze from reducing me to a shivering mass of Texan doing nothing but kvetching about the cold air. Even though I was only 11 years old, I knew that the jacket made me look like a geek. Or maybe I knew that because I was 11 years old. Regardless, the bottom line was that it was cold and I needed it. Besides, I was on vacation with my family and nobody would see me anyways.

The seals played in the bay and I was probably gnawing on a pretzel when it happened. A homeless man, playing familiar tunes on a worn out guitar, had set up shop on the wharf. He adjusted his song as passers-by passed by. By doing this he created a personal rapport with many of the people. His collection cup, while not running over, guaranteed him a bowl of chowder and maybe even a few sips of whiskey.

What happened next is what made it possible for me to remember this occurrence with such vivid detail. When we were about 15 feet away from the gentleman he saw us coming and he bust out into a hobo’s rendition of Hava Nagila.

After my dad tossed him a few dollars I asked, “Dad, how did he know that we were Jewish?”

My father adjusted his “travel hat,” a 1920s style cap with Mickey Mouse emblazoned boldly on the front and answered, “It’s the sadness in our eyes. He could see thousands of years of suffering in our eyes.”

Although I felt that was pretty deep coming from a guy that acted like Clark Griswald’s evil Jewish clone whenever we took a family vacation, I knew that was not how the singing bum knew. By 12-years-old I had already figured out how most people that easily identified my ethnicity were doing it.

Although I am pretty sure that my eyes are indeed weighed down by at least a few generations of sorrow I am positive that it was our noses, not our eyes, that had tipped the guy off. Most likely it wasn’t really even our noses that he noticed. Most likely it was mine.

The real problem with a big, wide shnozze isn’t the way that it looks on your face. I have a pretty big head so my nose was always pretty proportional to the rest of me. The problem with the wide shnozze is that it is such an easy target. Especially for a boy that played as rough as I did. Only God knows how many times I actually broke my nose growing up. The best estimate probably comes from the doctor I finally got around to seeing when I was 25. He stopped counting fractures when he got to five though. I guess I’ll never know for sure.

For years, one of the first things anybody asked after we were introduced was if I was a boxer. It is wild how forward people are. I guess if they were being completely forward they would ask me, “Were you a very bad boxer?” because that had to be what they were thinking. I can’t even begin to count how many times people told me I looked like Rocky.

I did OK with women despite a nose that followed you wherever you were in the room. Still, it got old seeing a stolen, darting glance at what doctors would later describe as an “acquired nasal deformity” every time I struck up a conversation with a woman. I like to think that I made up for it with charm and personality, but either way that is not why I decided to finally take the rhinoplasty plunge.

It also wasn’t the abuse of my friends growing up. I dish better than I take, so that wasn’t a problem. Conversely, a little self-deprecating humor can truly be funny. I was able to laugh when friends asked me to please leave the room because I was sucking in all the air and killing the plants. It was no big deal. I managed to stay secure. Surgery was the furthest thing from my mind.

What finally got me to visit the doctor was the fact that I had begun to breathe like a snoring grandfather when I was awake. It worked to my advantage when I played chess because my every inhalation had become a shrill whistle, but annoying chess opponents is not enough reason to go through life unintentionally announcing yourself from fifty yards because you breathe like Darth Vader.

It turned out that my multiple fractures had created an obstruction that hindered my breathing. Duh. It’d be possible to have a surgery to fix the breathing problem, but to straighten the nose only rhinoplasty could do the job. I had kind of figured that, but it still sucked to hear. I had a lot of reservations about using surgery to change my appearance. I also hated the idea of going through surgery and still waking up with a crooked nose.

The first problem was that I had always thought God had done a good enough job Himself. What could a doctor do that the Good Lord couldn’t? I found myself telling that to people all the time when they told me they were considering plastic surgery. I always told them that they were naturally beautiful.

Eventually, I began to ask myself if it was naturally beautiful for me to be breathing like the psycho ex-boyfriend that keeps calling you and hanging up. Surely, that wasn’t what God intended. Hadn’t He, Himself endowed humanity with the ingenuity and ability to rectify such a problem? God bless modern medicine and good medical coverage. My mind was almost made up.

The last stumbling block took me way back to my trip so long ago to San Francisco. I was worried that the post surgery Mason would lose all physical traces of his Jewish identity. I didn’t want to one day be strolling along the Fisherman’s Wharf with my Game Boy-toting son and have a musical vagabond break out in Adeil Vice when he sees us coming. Basically, I didn’t want to wake up looking like one of them.

The doctor took many pictures of me and his assistant used a computer to show me the projected post-surgery image. I must admit that it was the pictures that finally convinced me to go for it. When they say that the camera adds 30 pounds I thought that was only for TV. My before pictures made me look like a stupefied Cyrano de Bergerac whispering from the bushes. It seemed like the doctor had figured out just the perfect angles to make me look my worst.

Despite the humbling before pictures, I had to admit that the after pics were pretty alluring. Not too big, not too small. Basically the same nose, but straight. I brought the snap shots for my mom to review. She put on her glasses and held them up to the light. She smiled and looked at me. “Well, you’ll still look Jewish,” she said. My mind was made up.

I woke up from the surgery and for two or three days it felt like somebody had dropped a bowling ball directly onto my face. My raccoon eyes looked in the mirror and asked the bandaged young man in the reflection why he had done this to himself. “You looked fine before. So what, you breathed hard? Could fixing that really be worth all of this pain?”

I found my answer the day that the bandages came off. The doctor removed them for me while his assistant held a mirror up for me. I had flashbacks of Jack Nicholson being transformed into the Joker in Batman, and I feared the worst. When I could finally see my face I was nothing but happy. Not too big, not too small. No longer would anyone mistake me for Rocky. By definition that makes me look more Jewish, I figured.

The experience completely changed my views on plastic surgery. Now when I meet somebody, I no longer catch people trying to steal a glance in mid-conversation. I breathe clearly enough to realize that the air in my hometown of Houston really is the dirtiest air in the U.S. I was even called a pretty boy the other day. Not bad considering not long ago I was the only writer I know that looks like he wears a hard hat and carries a lunch pail to work everyday.

The telling sign came just the other day when I was introduced to a young lady at a local bar.

“Are you Italian?” she asked me.

“No, I’m Jewish,” I replied.

“Oh yeah, the nose. I should have known.”

It wasn’t the old homeless guy from San Fran, but it was still music to my ears.



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