Is There Still Sex in the City?

She rubbed a clear gel over the goop. It immediately began to heat up.

“Do you feel the heat?” she asked. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes?”

“It means the product is working.”

“So this really works?”

She gave me a look. “Of course it works.”

She produced “evidence.” Before and after photos on her iPad that she accessed through a link.

“We are not supposed to show them but”—she glanced around furtively—“I will show them to you.”

I wondered if this was some kind of double switchback maneuver. If the product worked, wouldn’t you want to show the before and after pictures?

Krystal explained that the people in the photos were from a small village in Siberia where no one had ever used skin cream before. “Of course we pay them,” she said with a shrug.

I was hardly listening. I was transfixed by the images of wrinkled-apple-faced ladies transformed into smooth-faced beauty queens.

Okay, the results weren’t quite that dramatic. But they were dramatic enough. Enough that I couldn’t stop thinking about how that skin cream might work on me.

I had to have it.

How Much?

The moment I was ready to talk numbers, though, Krystal wasn’t. All of a sudden, Krystal wanted to talk about god.

“This morning I wake up and I pray to god,” she said. “And god answered my prayers.”

“Really?” For a moment, I was puzzled. If I were trying to sell face cream in Madison World I’m not sure I’d talk about god as a sales technique.

“I think you’ve been sent here for a reason,” she said.

No kidding. If you are sitting in a chair with mysterious goop on your face you should know you have been sent there for a reason. And the reason is simple: They are going to extract money from you, one way or another. They can do it painfully or they can do it nicely. But either way, you are not going to get out of that chair, you are not going home, you will not pass go ever again until you open your pocketbook and let them pluck out a few thousand.

Again, I asked how much.

Again, Krystal tried to bamboozle me with the half of the two years and then two-thirds of the total math bullshit, but I told her to cut it out and give me the final number already. I began to get another very bad feeling when she refused to say the number out loud. When a person won’t say a number out loud it’s usually not good. It’s what car salesmen do.

Instead, she wrote something down, circled it, and turned the pad around so I could see.

This time I didn’t care how aged I looked. I leaned forward to squint at the numerals written on the pad.

They were blurry but I could make out a one, a five, and three zeros.

My mind couldn’t take it in at first—15,000?

Fifteen thousand?

15K? Fifteen thousand dollars for face cream?

My heart began to beat in my lungs. I knew the face cream would be expensive but fifteen thousand dollars expensive? For a moment I felt as if I’d been shot into another universe.

I tried to explain to Krystal in the clearest way possible.

“I’m sorry. But I can’t afford to spend fifteen thousand dollars on face cream.”