Want to get rid of that unsightly double chin? And how about waking up tomorrow without
the spare tire around your waist? These days, fresh-faced media types are flocking to
Dr. Stephen Mulholland, one of the most expensive plastic surgeons in Canada, as
much for what he does without the scalpel as he does with it.
By Matthew McKinnon
Photographs by Chris Buck
A Tuesday morning in June. Toronto's most expensive cosmetic surgeon, Dr. R. Stephen
Mulholland, introduces me to a Canadian film and stage actor - let's call her Alexandra -
minutes before her starring role in his next liposuction operation. Alexandra has bright
eyes, tight braids, and silky black skin. She began treatment at Mulholland's clinic in
March, starting with the Pan G lift, his scalpel-free, ten-week, twenty-session facial workout
that delivers many of the benefits of a facelift with a fraction of the pain and none of the
downtime.
Mulholland wants me to guess Alexandra's age. I stammer a moment. He reminds me to
always guess low. I stammer some more. I'm on the edge of spitting out forty-three when
Mulholland cuts in with the truth: sixty-four. Wow. Alexandra unfolds a wide smile and says
she feels like a new woman. Mulholland wants to know what has changed for her.
"I'm brighter," she replies. "My face used to be droopy, but now I'm up. I feel good."
Alexandra is thrilled with her face, but bothered by the look of her legs in a skirt. Mulholland asks
her to lift the robe she'swearing, and uses a magic marker to trace the perimeter of the "rub
zone" on her inner knees. "You're going to do great because I'm going to do great," he says,
shaking Alexandra's hand before he points her out of his office and towards his O.R.
Fifteen minutes later, she is out cold and splayed on his hospital-grade operating table.
Alexandra has been prepped and draped, covered entirely, except for the area being con-
toured. Mulholland asks for music while he scrubs in. The room swells with Sinatra. "I
always enjoy Frank after a cappuccino," he says, pulling on a pair of gloves to help his nurse
and two assistants roll Alexandra onto her stomach. By the time I've tied up my surgical
mask, Mulholland has already made a three millimetre-long incision in the dark creases
on the backside of each knee.
Liposuction begins with an injection here, a mixture of saline, Xylocaine, and
adrenaline - designed to distend excess fat. The fluid is pumped into the body with a can-
uses one hand to press and shape Alexandra's new legs while the other works the cannula.
When he stops, a nurse helps him dress Alexandra (still unconscious) in a spandex-Lycra
compression garment. Mulholland fits sili-cone-backed foam pads between the garment
and her body to apply pressure on her deflated knees. Alexandra will wear the stock-
ing twenty-two hours a day for the next three weeks, followed by three weeks of daytime-only
use. She will need three or four days of rest, and a full month before beginning the regular
exercise that she will need to keep the fat off. "Body contouring is part science, part art,"
Mulholland says. "The science is getting the fat out. The art is in how much you leave behind."
Robert Stephen Mulholland has a broad chest that makes him seem taller than his
height, five foot seven, which happens to be the reason why he's a doctor and not a retired
NHL star. Mulholland grew up a hockey prodigy - high-scoring centre, captain of every
team he ever played on - but forever too small for a shot at the big dance. His soft hands
MULHOLLAND TREATS FLESH LIKE A RELIGION AND HIS PRACTICE LIKE A NASDAQ FIRM.
Cannula, a long, thin metal tube with a hollow core and a slotted tip. The base connects to a
hose, which in turn joins a pump. Mulholland slides a cannula inside Alexandra's knees and
floods them with fluid. A moment later, a nurse reverses the pump while he switches
instruments. Party time. Mulholland slips the second cannula into
Alexandra's right knee and rapidly jerks his arm back and forth. He swings from the shoulder,
elbow cocked at a right angle, plunging the cannula three and five inches into Alexandra's
flesh. It looks like he's stoking a fire with a poker. The room fills with sloppy squelches as
the pump sucks down a chunky broth of fat, blood, and fluid. Everything plops into a sealed
plastic tub at the foot of the operating table. The fat looks like mashed McDonald's french
fries; it floats on top of the blood and saline dribbling out of Alexandra's leg.
Mulholland removes a scant 300 millilitres of fat (the average liposuction yields three
litres), rolling Alexandra onto her back near the finish. "The front view is the icing on the cake,"
he says. "We've already set the foundation." He proved useful, though, when he turned to
medicine. He had thoughts of becoming a team doctor for a pro hockey team and living
the Slap Shot life a while longer. But, at med school (class of 1988, University of Toronto,
ranked second out of 280), he discovered a flair for surgery, then sharpened his skills as a
head and neck consultant at a Hamilton hospital, slicing tumours out of people's faces
and necks and rebuilding the areas cosmetically. His plastic practice came later, after he
grew weary of watching cancer come back to claim half of his patients within eighteen
months of his touch. Mulholland's own face collected fifty-two stitches over the course of
his hockey career,most of which have faded. He is forty-four, old enough to "intellectually understand"
ageing, but only beginning to live it. He has a soft smile but still carries an athlete's swagger:
In one breath, he will admit that his prices may offend many of his peers; with the next,
he will boast that his practice is growing exponentially. Mulholland speaks quickly but
clearly, holding every syllable for a full beat, often using expensive words where cheap
ones will do. His diet, because of his busy schedule - surgery on Mondays and Tues-
days, patient consultations on Wednesdays, seminars and speaking engagements in
assorted American cities for the latter part ofmost weeks - is "haphazard, sporadic, poorly
thought out, and heavily weighted in simple carbohydrates." He shops for clothes in two
ten-minute bursts once or twice per season, stopping first at a master tailor to collect
his shirts, then on to Harry Rosen to choose from a handful of suits pre-selected by his
favourite salesman.
The doctor is mildly paranoid about clean liness. He keeps his fingernails short and
cleans them four times a day when operating. He washes his face without soap, but mois-
turizes twice daily with a cream from his own line of soon-to-be-released facial products.
Mulholland doesn't like anyone touching his food, and cannot enjoy a meal at a restaurant
if he can see into the kitchen. When he lunches at the Subway franchise near his clinic, he will
sometimes bring a pair of surgical gloves for the counter jockey to wear while preparing his sandwich.
SARS is among his favourite topics of conversation. "I think that perhaps
handshaking is on its way out" is the sort of thing he will say, throwing in a little smirk to
make you wonder if he's serious. He thinks sleep is an evolutionary defect.
Mulholland is equal parts doctor and entrepreneur, a wildly talented surgeon who
treats flesh like religion and his practice like a Nasdaq firm. His clinic, SpaMedica, is in
Yorkville, Toronto's toniest shopping district, barely a block up the street from the Four Sea-
sons hotel, where many of Mulholland's celebrity clients stay while recuperating from his
scalpel (typically, he says, registered under pseudonyms). Mulholland estimates that
twenty percent of his surgical patients are "dependent on the media in some way" -
actors, politicians, television anchors. The same holds for him: Mulholland employs a
public-relations firm to promote his seminars and new procedures. He has appeared on The
View, The Other Half, and health reports on newscasts for almost every Canadian and
American network; he progressed through two rounds of pre-production on Oprah be-
fore the show's schedule was scrambled by the war on Iraq.
Mulholland is in the process of opening eight to ten clinics in Southern Ontario, all
"catering to skin in a non-threatening way": Pan G lifts, Botox fillers, laser hair removal. If you
ask how much money he makes, he will tell you that the top three cosmetic practices
in Toronto - a list that includes SpaMedica - gross between $2- and $4-million a year. Then
he will remind you of his manufacturing, training, and consulting commitments, "all
very lucrative, all very profitable," and lean back in his chair. His ultimate goals, he says,
"are to continue innovating new methods for developing beautiful skin, and to then control
or shape their delivery."
After tending to Alexandra, Mulholland lets me tag along on a series of follow-up visits with
some of his facelift patients. "You can never be too thin, and you can never pay too little tax,"
he tells a fiftysomething woman while inflating her lips with Restylane, a collagen-like
filler that lasts six months before deflating like a blown tire. The woman is here tuning up for
her stepson s summer wedding. Mulholland asks about her prospective daughter-in-law.
"f d like to get her in to have her nose done." Mulholland pokes his patient with a needle,
one of twenty (plus four for freezing) that she is receiving in today's session. "You should
make it part of the prenuptial," he suggests. The woman looks like she wants to smile
but can t convince her lips to move. "Yes." A drop of blood rolls out of her upper lip and
onto her teeth.
Another Tuesday, this time in May. I feel pretty. I'm at SpaMedica, lying inside a milk-
white plastic egg that most closely resembles (a) a tanning bed, (b) a bobsled, or (c) a hyper-
baric oxygen chamber like the one Michael Jackson used to sleep in. Vibrating motors
tickle the length of my body. Climate controls hold the interior temperature at twenty-six
degrees Celsius, offsetting the heating pad that warms my lower back. Miniature speakers
hum classical music at a modest volume; aromatherapy ducts swirl basil and lavender. Only
my head, swathed in soft towels, rests outside the pod. Silent fans cool my cheeks and brow.
I am being tended to by Dawn Sinclair, SpaMedica's "medical esthetics co-ordinator."
She could be thirty-five, forty, fifty, or more - it's difficult to guess age here, where every face
glistens with the sheen of vitality or recent treatment. Sinclair wears only a hint of
makeup. Her skin is smooth as melted chocolate, although she gently complains that her
round cheeks are sliding south, transforming her face from oval to rectangle.
In a moment, Sinclair will give me a Sono-Peel-CaviFacial, the first element of Mulhol-
land's Pan G program. Pan G is short for pan- germinal, a term Mulholland uses to describe
all the cells (epidermal, dermal, subcutaneous, and muscular) that make up the face. Meted
One of the four Pan G treatment rooms at SpaMedica, Mulholland's upscale clinic. Twenty sessions
cost $3,550, and the master stroke is maintenance: Patients usually return for refuellings.
The egg that clients recline in (above) is a non-essential frill. out twice a week for ten weeks in forty-five-
minute sessions, the Pan G is intended to cleanse, tighten, and strengthen skin and
underlying muscles. A Pan G course can yield four to eight millimetres of lift in the brow
and upper eyelids; overall muscle size, strength, and tone can increase by as much as
fifty percent. It leaves no marks, so there is no temporary disfiguration. Patients come and
go over their lunch hours. Most report looking five to seven years younger.
Sinclair wets my face with sterile mist. Next, she slides a wide stainless-steel knife across
my skin, its blade pulsing at 30,000 cycles per second. The knife is dull, but its ultrasonic
movement causes cavitation: Tiny oxygen bubbles swell and implode, sloughing dead
cells by forming microjets that plunge through my epidermis like needles. It is painless, enjoy-
able even - similar to rolling the barrel of a pen across your forehead.
She hovers over me now, dabbing gel near my right eye and temple. This is Pan G's sec-
ond phase, MyoFacial resistance treatment. Sinclair uncoils a pair of cords from the
M.E.D.U.C.E. (pronounced medusa, short for muscle, epidermal, dermal, ultrasonic, cavita-
tional, electrical) system, an R2D2-sized cart that Mulholland devised to deliver the Pan G.
Each cord is topped by a rounded metal prod.
Sinclair touches prods to gel. Electricity ripples through my face, twitching the muscles above
and below my eye. She counts ten repetitions and stops. MyoFacials are delivered in three
sets of what feels like increasing amperage (but really isn't). The first is like a light tug at the
sleeve; the second is more insistent; the last is a hard pull. "This is going to the gym ," Sinclair
says. "You do it twice a week. We make sure there is a gap between visits so the muscles
have a chance to rest."
Step three, the SonoFacial. Sinclair slathers my face with another gel, this one a thick mix-
ture of Vitamins A, C, and E. SonoFacials hydrate and nourish skin, pushing nutrients
deep below the surface through an ultrasound process called dermtophorisis. Sinclair
traces circles across my face with a M.E.D.U.C.E. wand that looks like a kitchen-sink hose; its
gentle heat feels like a rub down after the MyoFaciaFs heavy lifting.
The Pan G is good medicine because it is good business and vice versa. Mulholland
charges about $25,000 for a full-on facelift (the competition, he says, asks for as little as
$4,000); twenty Pan G sessions cost $3,550. His master stroke is maintenance: After a Pan
G lift, patients return for monthly MyoFacials, SonoFacials every six weeks, and semi-
annual Botox refuellings forever after - or at least until they decide to have the surgical
work that Mulholland is only too happy to perform. What's more, he owns a piece of the
Florida manufacturing company that makes M.E.D.U.C.E., so he gets a cut of every
US$65,000 sale. His seminar pitch package boasts that the Pan G converts patients into
"year-after-year . . . in-perpetuity revenue." One of the discussions describes "how to gen-
erate and how to retain $l,500-$3,000 per Pan G patient per year."
"Steve does facial rejuvenation, and so do I," says Dr. Tom Bell, one of the few Toronto
plastic surgeons with a price list to rival Mulholland's. "His approach is different than
mine. [The Pan G] is not for the type of person who wants something that is going to last
for a long time. You have to come back on a frequent basis."
Dr. Lome Tarshis, another competitor, calls Mulholland "an extremely bright man.
He's respected, he's very capable - but if I had to pick one adjective to describe him I would
say that he is controversial. Doctors as a whole tend to be conservative, especially surgeons.
Steve is approaching things from an angle that has not been traditional for them."
My test drive is over. Sinclair opens the egg and asks me to stand. I don't want to. The egg
is a frill, in no way essential to performing effective medicine. It belongs in a Bel Air spa,
not a doctor's office. SpaMedica has four, one for each Pan G treatment room. Mulholland s
way is to pamper patients: make the Pan G a total body experience, the best exercise they've
ever had, and be assured that they will come back - to him, and no one else - wanting
more, month after month for years on end. Has anyone, I ask Sinclair, ever come to
SpaMedica for the Pan G and quit after a single treatment?
"No."
Mulholland was born in Vancouver in 1960, He learned to skate at age four and left home
at fifteen to join the West's major junior hockey league. When his body stopped grow-
ing, he hit the gym, lifting weights to compensate for the missing height. "I was obses-
sive-compulsive about optimizing my genetically challenged vertical status," he says. "I
could benchpress 310 pounds."
At eighteen, Mulholland accepted a scholarship from Michigan's Lake Superior State, the
NCAA's smallest Division I university. He remains the only player to lead the school in scor-
ing for four consecutive seasons, and was an All-American academic in 1983, the year he gra-
duated with a degree in biology and chemistry. Mulholland signed a professional con-
(Left) In addition to surgery, this facelift patient received laser treatment for acne scars,
lip enhance-ment, and postoperative FotoFacials. (Above) Surgery for
love handles (shown), double chins, and male breasts
are among the most popular procedures for men.
tract with a team in Sweden. He travelled Europe for a year, playing on and off the ice.
"It was a fairly limited lifestyle," he says with a shrug, "focused around hockey and scoring
and extending that prowess off the ice. I liked meeting new women, and back then it
wasn't a fatal pastime." Colorado came next. Mulholland toiled there, part of the Calgary
Flames' farm system, waiting for a call thatnever came.
When Mulholland applied to med school, he turned down Stanford to attend the Uni-
versity of Toronto, partly because several of his hockey buddies lived in and around the
city. He liked the women here too, so much so that he decided to marry one. "It was the right
time," he says. "I wanted to stabilize my social life. I was about to start a residency. And she
was very bright: Bay Street lawyer, writer." (Sylvia Mulholland is the author of Lingerie
Tea, The Thirty-Two Teeth Smile, and Womans Work: Is There Life After Birth?) "It didn't work
out, like sixty-four percent of all marriages. We have two great kids. She lives in Los
Angeles and I live here."
In 1995, a year before they divorced, Sylvia wrote an essay for The Globe and Mail detail-
ing the rigours of Stephen's residency in Hamilton. "It's a Wednesday evening, 8:30.
My husband has just arrived home. He left this morning at 6, unshaven, hair greasy, after
stumbling into some rumpled greens (those baggy bile-coloured tops and pants in which
nobody looks good). So far, it's been a standard work day. In the fifteen minutes since
he's been home, he's been paged three times. (He was also paged, in his car, on the way
home.) As he inhales his warmed-over dinner, our two young children climb all over
him, desperate for his attention. They have not seen him since Sunday. He leaves home in
the morning before they are up; seldom returns before they are asleep."
Mulholland spent a year deciding if he could carry on with reconstructive work, then
abruptly quit the hospital and moved to Toronto. "It sort of culminated with some
social circumstances around family issues," he says. In Toronto, Mulholland began his tran-
sition into aesthetic surgery. His marriage,however, proved beyond repair.
Sylvia moved to L.A. to concentrate on her writing career. The kids stayed behind in
Toronto with Stephen and a nanny. He was happily raising them as a single father when
he met his second wife, Ann Kaplan. Kaplan was (and is) CEO of Medicard, a Vancouver
company that finances cosmetic surgical and dental procedures for clients who are short on
money and long on wanting to be beautiful. (Then, as now, she spends two out of four
weeks each month on the West Coast tending to Medicard.) Kaplan was Canadian Woman
Entrepreneur of the Year in 2001 (awarded by the Bank of Montreal and the Rotman School
of Management); last year, she organized a Toronto aesthetic-industry trade show called
"New You" and was named the Bank of Montreal's Finance Woman of the Year.
Mulholland and Kaplan spent a year building a friendship before their relationship
turned romantic. "It culminated in a merger acquisition, followed by a non-hostile take-
over," Mulholland says. "We merged her two kids with my two, then had our own child."
The newborn is six months old. Kaplan is pregnant again; her husband is hoping for
Irish twins.
This will be as close as I get to Mulholland's personal life. "It's not that I want to
keep my family private," he says. "I just don't want you to come over and meet everybody."
In 1997, Mulholland was driving through central British Columbia with his two kids
generated by the blast stimulates collagen growth.) Mulholland likes to brag that there
are 10,000 FotoFacials performed in the U.S. every day. "The FotoFacial is as important as
Botox, although not quite as hyped," he will say. "Three Canadians [Botox's aesthetic use
was discovered by Vancouver dermatologists Dr. Jean and Alaister Carruthers in 1987] have
had more impact on skin enhancement than most Americans combined, at a grassroots,
level." (FotoFacials are frequently packaged as a Pan G add-on at SpaMedica. The clinic's Pan
G Plus program includes six FotoFacial treatments; it costs $4,650.)
Mulholland's arm came all the way back. He bought out his partners at the Toronto
clinic where he had been working and renamed it SpaMedica. His timing was ideal. Six
years ago, cosmetic surgery was on the cusp of revolution. Non-surgical options began and
ended with collagen. Botox was only beginning to catch on. Once it hit, though, much of
the stigma that used to envelop plastic surgery disappeared. In 1992, the year that the
American Society of Plastic Surgeons began
MEN COME FOR SWEAT-
SUPPRESSING BOTOX INJECTIONS
IN THEIR PALMS AND ARMPITS
when his rental car hit a patch of black ice and flipped over an embankment, knocking him
unconscious. His oldest, now fourteen, climbed to the road to summon help. Mulholland
woke up in the back of an ambulance, unable to move his left arm. Bad news for a left-
handed surgeon.
Tests revealed a brachial plexus injury, and Mulholland spent eight weeks wondering if
he would regain full use of the arm. Unable to operate, he travelled to San Francisco to work
with Dr. Patrick Bitter, Jr., a dermatologist who was experimenting with intense pulsed
light therapy as a means of treating minor skin issues: rosacea, flushing, ruddy complex-
ion, broken capillaries, spider veins. Bitter and Mulholland shared a passion for beauti-
ful skin - and a desire to make money creating it. They teamed up to perfect the FotoFa-
cial RF, "a synergy of pulsed optical light and radiofrequency energy" that is one of the
fastest-growing non-invasive aesthetic procedures in North America. (Basically, a flash of
laser-like light zaps imperfections in the skin, evening tone and decreasing redness; heat
keeping statistics, 400,000 North Americans had some form of aesthetic enhancement.
Last year's total was almost 6.6 million, with more than seventy-five percent of patients opt-
ing for non-surgical procedures (filler injections, chemical peels, laser hair removal,
microdermabrasion, and so on).
SpaMedica's upper floor is doctor's office as luxury resort, complete with babbling water-
fall and Botoxed receptionist. A magazine rack stocked with fashion and beauty titles takes up
a wall by the entrance; a two-inch binder in the waiting area is filled with laminated copies
of Mulholland's press clippings. A series of black-and-white Robert Mapplethorpe pho-
tos hangs on several of the walls. The pictures are chaste studies of flowers, although a dis-
cerning eye will notice their petals growing further into bloom the deeper you travel into
the clinic.
The vibe downstairs is more W Hotel than Four Seasons: The entrance is frosted glass
and cool grey, with a waterfall that is larger and louder than the one upstairs. Everything
here is stop-and-go - non-invasive procedures that take an hour or less, with no telltale
redness or swelling to prevent a same-day return to the office or boutique. Registered nurses
and medical aestheticians administerPan G treatments and laser hair removal in four examination
rooms; Mulholland has a pair of back offices used by local dermatologists. He shows me the latter
on a tour of the clinic. "There is $2-million worth of equipment in here," he says, sweeping a hand past
the array of gadgets inside. We pause for a while I whistle, then carry on to a
dressing area with big mirrors and high windows. Makeup of every colour and kind lines
its shelves. Mulholland installed the room after he grew frustrated watching his female
patients cover up his surgical work with poorly applied cosmetics. "I'm always amazed
that for so many women of means, their only experience with makeup has been over the
counter with a high-school dropout at Holt Renfew," he says. Mulholland now pays a
Toronto film-industry makeup artist to teach his post-op patients how to prepare their new
faces. "Some of these women have no fashion term for an S-shaped curve. Every part of the
human body is about ogees, subtle shapes and curves. It's the breast coming out to the deltal
pectoral groove, then coming in at the waist and out at the hip again. Linear shapes are
unattractive to Western civilization." On their third visit, Mulholland takes
patients into a closet-sized room built into his office. There's little inside save two chairs, an
enormous mirror, and the world's least flatter- ing fluorescent lights. "It's a very hideous room,"
he says. "You can't escape what you don't like." Doctor and patient spend half an hour study-
ing problems and potential solutions in the mirror. Then he asks to see pictures of what
they looked like at twenty, twenty-five, thirty. "We'll go through their ageing process to see
if what they once had was attractive. There's no point in recovering what they had if they
hated it. Patients help create their own canvas." That done, Mulholland hands the candi-
dates off to his surgical co-ordinator, a trim and tailored nurse who handles all financial
discussions. Mulholland claims not to knowthe exact price of his services, preferring to
A MULHOLLAND FACELIFT
COSTS "MORE THAN A MINIVAN
BUT LESS THAN AN SUV"
sense, but I don't go that far. I do let them dress themselves."
All but one of SpaMedica's employees are female. Four in five of his patients are women.
(When he opened the clinic, male patients were rare - less than one percent of his prac-
tice. He now treats a long list of men, gay and straight. Many come for sweat-supressing
Botox injections in their palms and armpits; some of them used to need a half-dozen shirts
per workday.) He operates 200 times per year, inflating breasts, deflating love handles, shap-
ing new faces. He meets with surgical candidates three times before their procedures, and
spends a lot of time discussing motivations, desires, expectations. He asks about lifestyle,
whether they will have enough time for a proper recovery.
"I used to be an anatomist and a denominating tension lifter - pull this nerve, pull that
nerve, and you're done," Mulholland told me once, during one of several soliloquies on the
art of aesthetic surgery. "True facelifting is so much more - it is three-dimensional, it is
achieving an ogee, which is an architectural say instead that his facelift costs "more than a
Dodge minivan but less than a fully loaded SUV." Talking about money, he believes, sul-
lies the doctor-client relationship. Post-op patients spend the night in a
recovery room outfitted with a cable television and two beds - one for them, one for the
overnight nurse who wakes every two hours to moisturize their wounds. A back door con-
nects to a passageway and private elevator, which in turn leads to an underground garage
and two shielded parking spots. High-profile patients use the elevator to rendezvous with
their chauffeurs, safely beyond the reach of prying camera lenses. SpaMedica again. I have agreed
to try the FotoFacial. Mulholland leads me to an empty office and asks me to sit while he attends to a
backlog of patients. While waiting, I make notes and poke at the half-dozen breast im-
plants left out on a coffee table. (First time. Can't figure how they're supposed to feel like
the real thing.) Fifteen minutes later, Mulholland returns carrying a jar of white cream.
"Do you have any social engagements in the next two nights?"
Don't think so.
"Good."
He rubs the cream onto my cheeks and nose, explaining that it will numb my face. A
moment later, he dashes away to tend to another patient. I go back to fiddling with the
boobs and writing in my notepad. By the time he comes back, I can't feel anything from my
lips up. Mulholland leads me into an examination room and has me stretch out on a padded
table. He waves an airhose over my face and asks me to shut my eyes. (The FotoFacial gen-
erates a burst of heat; the hose is used to cool the skin before and after the zaps.) His oppo-
site hand holds a blue-and-white plastic handpiece. Mulholland says something about
a snapping elastic band, and suddenly I feel a hard slap on my cheek. Everything pulses red
for an instant. I feel the hose again, followed closely by another slap.
This lasts for about ten minutes. Mulholland works from right to left, slapping and
cooling, cooling and slapping. I smell burnt hair when the flash drops below my beard
line. Finished, Mulholland looks over my face and tells me to expect two hours to two days
of redness.
He's leaving for Florida tomorrow for another Pan G seminar, so we shake hands and
say our goodbyes. I walk halfway home in the rain, catching stares from strangers all along the
way. After boarding a streetcar, I open the window and point my cheeks into the wind. It
stings less when we go fast. At home, I lean into a mirror, fingering the
array of small cuts that now covers my rightcheek. (They aren't supposed to be there, but
would turn out to last nearly a week before fading. Not so much bad news for me as it is for
Mulholland, I suppose: like spilling soup on a restaurant critic.) I try to recall why I wanted
the procedure in the first place, and wonder if I'll be willing to go through this again when
I'm old and actually need it. Probably not. Later that night, I put one beer in my belly
and hold another to my face. It doesn't hurt so much any more, and skin around the cuts looks
firm and tight. Or maybe it was like that before. I never really checked.
I remember something Mulholland told me the first time we met: "In the truly advanced
civilization, we would all go boldly forward as we are, saying, 'Love me for who I have be-
come,' " he said. "Thank God I don't live in that world. I would be unemployed." U
Matthew McKinnon is a Toronto freelance writer.
94 TORO AUGUST & SEPTEMBER 2003
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