All My Hairdressers (2022)

You really want to hear all about this?

   Really?

   You… really… want… to… hear?    

   Because I could go on and on.

   I really could.

                                             { elongated silent pause } 

   Well, okay then… since you asked for it, here it goes.

I guess it all began when I was a small child, watching my mother fret and groan in front of the bathroom mirror. Seemed like she was always in some kind of pain, in labor, almost giving birth… to something. She was always curling this, flattening that – understand, a woman in this part of the country at that point in time had appearances to keep up, to be socially maintained, and a bad part here or an uneven cut there simply could not be tolerated.   

People might not actually talk but they’d sure as hell notice.

I look back at all those old photos of me in my Pixie, oblivious to public comment, all smiles and so content in my own little world. Those were easy days, roll-out-of-bed-and-just-go days, and a part of me truly wishes to go back. But the other part, the real-world part, understands the need to cultivate a positive attitude regarding the endless performance of thankless duties which might otherwise be labelled as “tasks.” Better to not go there and mope about it, better to keep it real right here, keeping the mind lean and eager and indulging each day with a natural healthy routine – that of eliminating waste, replenishing vigor, and the simple acts of breathing and fixing my hair.

But so long wondrous Pixie Days, by the time I’d reached the final year of grade school I was fully engaged, indoctrinated, already rolling like some kind of out-of-control wildfire scorching the earth. Yes, in the early seventies our styles were quite elaborate and a comprehensive study of my school photographs set side by side by side over the years reveals a rather shrewd evolution, from the less complicated and simple to the extravagantly misguided. We can all smile now, laugh even among ourselves, and ask, what in God’s name were we thinking? But that only makes me a tad nervous about today and twenty years hence and the very real possibility of looking back and asking ourselves the very same question!

   But really, come on now… do you truly want to know what we were thinking?

   Well, we weren’t thinking at all… we were only reacting.

Back then my older sisters would sit around all Saturday afternoon with hot curlers in their hair preparing for their dates later that evening. I was just entering middle school and was extremely impressionable and I experienced first-hand what it took to properly prepare for such an engagement. Most things you can’t control about yourself – the size of your nose, the angle of your cheekbones, the sparkle in your eyes – but there are two things you can control: your body weight and your hairstyle. Luckily, I was naturally slim so that just left the one – my crazy fucked-up hair.

   And boy, did I ever come to obsess over that one!

   Curlers, curling iron, tubes of gel, an assortment of combs and brushes and electric handheld gadgets that would impress your local properly licensed beautician and make Liberace blush. We had them all. And God help the poor fool who ran off with my favorite brush leaving me in some kind of rabid panic trying to deal with that critical flip which can only flop when it doesn’t get the correct teasing from the appropriate instrument at the one penultimate moment. And once I finally found that lost brush I’d beat the scoundrel who’d absconded with it, or better yet, I’d beat them with their favorite brush. These were serious moments, I kid you not, crucial moments – this wasn’t high school algebra and me at the chalkboard, this wasn’t Sunday school Bible study with our eternal souls at stake and Jesus looking down on me waiting for me to mumble something profound – this was Saturday night on the town and in full public view. So you’re damn right I was meticulous and demanding. It’s not like I needed to look great, no, just as long as I didn’t look bad. As long as I didn’t stand out. Compared to what might happen to some other less fortunate girl, going unnoticed is not such a bad outcome when all is said and done.

After consuming a bottle of white wine and feeling a touch of nostalgia we drunkenly break out our eighth-grade yearbooks and take a gander. The boys looked like girls and the girls looked like their mothers, or gypsies or tramps or thieves (or, as in Elanor Parker’s case, all three). And yes, a few did look like Cher, their hair long and shiny and so straight, and those sweet things never bothered with much of a hairstyle at all. Now you might consider them to be self-assured and natural in their approach but the rest of us knew the truth: they were in fact cowards, hopeless bores, content with the status quo and resigned to doing nothing but smiling and letting it flow.

   But look at our eyes in those old photographs. Look closely at all of us. It’s so obvious… we were in fact lost children, hopeful yet doubtful, all apprehensive and most of us far too proud of our brand-new hairdos concocted for that very occasion. Snap! To be captured in that one moment in time in what we considered our very best, for posterity, for future generations… for the love of God, what were our mothers thinking?!

   Anybody got a pair of scissors?

   No, not for my hair, it’s way too late for that.

   For that small rectangle in the yearbook where the truth currently resides.

By the time I reached high school the Dorothy Hammill wedge was all the rage. Lucky for me it suited my face well, more than well if I may say, and I absolutely radiated with that perky cut with the light in my eyes projecting it. Boys looked twice, most more than twice, and I rode atop a wave of popularity that props me up even to this day. I never donned a pair of ice skates in my life, but all I can say is, thank you Dorothy and the USA Ice Skating team!

   The spirit of ’76 kicked ass.

But then came the dark days… I always fretted that they might.

   I’m being too dramatic here. Of course I am, but if this is a story deemed worthy of telling, then a little drama and a lot of angst (and perhaps a healthy shot of exaggeration) should be expected. So the effects may be a tad dramatized, but the causes are all absolute truths.

I was still in college when I met Salvador. Tall, dark and somewhat handsome… twenty years older than me and sporting some kind of exotic accent. Possibly Italian, possibly Iberian Coast, possibly east-coast vernacular for I-need-me-a-gimmick-out-here-in-the-sticks, and I only understood about every fourth or fifth word that sang out of him, but they were words like beautiful, unique, and princess. He made me feel like I was a model, a work-in-progress of wondrous art begotten by his very own hands, and he described his hair sculptures as exquisite magic, as jazz-styled improvisations conjured by inspiration manifested right there on the spot. It’s a good thing that this was back when New Wave music was all the rage, jettisoning into our frazzled society a slew of punks and goths with deviant styles and fashions, so I didn’t end up looking like just another confused person.

Then one night I was at a party at some friend’s apartment when a person named Syd broke out a pair of sharp scissors and started pruning the manes of either the very daring or the very drunken. As a devoted member of the latter assemblage, I volunteered in a rush of oh-what-the-hell and awoke the next morning hungover and dealing with a rush of just-what-the-hell?

Out of desperation I ran back to Salvador, who sniffed at something unseen in the air, took one look at me and asked, “Good God, who the fuck cut your hair?” and in perfectly clear English. No exotic accent whatsoever. Sheer disdain flitted off his tongue like headlice from a desecrated comb. I could only bow my head in shame and hope for a miracle bestowed by the magic man.

   “Come back to me in a month when you actually have something I can work with.”

After Salvador’s intervention, I bumped into Syd (and I should add that Syd was a buzz-cut effeminate and I never could decipher his or her proper gender, not that it really mattered, but then, in the end, wouldn’t we all really like to know who’s got what?) who clucked like a constipated hen and duly inquired, “Holy shit, did some idiot cut your hair or did you slip on a banana peel and fall straight into a grinder?”

   That stung and yet it’s funny… all these incoming nasty jabs as delivered by the affronted. I can envision a scenario where Salvador and Syd would get along just dandy. Become the best of chums, exchange trade secrets, share scintillating client-only disclosures. Because, when one really gets down to it, it’s not really pure disdain for the perpetrator’s styling chops that truly chaps their ass – it’s the evidence of someone else’s capable thumbprint stamping out their own.

   It was then that I came to understand completely and experienced a lasting epiphany: one gal’s fool is another gal’s savior, and in the end, for better or worse, no one understands that these two entities are absolutely interchangeable on a whim.

   No one understands, that is, except for me.

   And now you.

By the late eighties there was a new style sweeping over the nation, or at least, settling in for a spell right here in the heartland. A modern, bi-level cut.

   “Are you sure you want me to do this?” Biff asked one last time.

   “Clip away!” I gamely replied.

   And that’s how I became the talk of the town. A cluster of friends huddled around me, and I recall one of them remarking, “Oh my God, we love your hair… it’s… it’s… it’s both short and long!”

   Yessss!

   “What do they call it, dear?”

   “This here is what they call a Mullet.”

   I actually smiled with great pride when I said that.

We, or they, used to call it the beauty shop, as if you could walk right in and purchase beauty straight off the shelf. Like, I’ll have a couple of high pointy cheekbones, a pair of pouty lips, and since they’re on sale, two bedroom-eyes that could seduce the robe right off of a catatonic priest.

   If only it was that easy.

   And then came the salon, no doubt the result of some lame French derivation, a swanky parlor where hair couturiers act like they don’t care and charge you twice as much because they really, really do care, they care very much, and if you’re hip and rich, then you are supposed to act like you care even less than they do.   

   Does that make sense? Are ya feelin’ me?

There was this one time when I found myself in a confused state of mind and stumbled into an old-time barber shop, encountered one sad and lonely (and sporting a self-imposed comb-over, I might add) barber, plopped myself down into his old creaky chair and treated myself to an old-fashioned haircut, taper the sideburns, Bart, and please block off the neck, and wound up with a ten-dollar bargain that had all my friends begging me to tell them where I’d got the cut because they had to go and get the very same one as soon as possible!

  Of course I lied and told them down at the salon.

In those early days there was a new hairdresser every three or four months. Harry, Jude, Alexandra, Biff, Barbie, Leopold, Jill, Bill, the Chill, the Do Over, the One & Done… the list goes on and on. Names from the past, blurred faces in my dreams, and the boiling pot of a recurring nightmare where one of them shaves me bald in full public view wearing nothing but a diaper.

   Him, not me.

   I’m absolutely naked.

There was poor Vanessa, self-conscious and overweight, wore a little too much mascara, and as unbelievable as it may sound, wound up the victim of some random drive-by shooting. A white girl living in a suburban neighborhood mind you, and that bullet still somehow found a way into her torso during working hours. An unfortunate ricochet left her toting around a colostomy bag and so that was the end of that.

James Durbin, also known as Jimmy D, who worked out of his small house and unknown to me beforehand, was a gay black male who was extremely nice, maybe even too nice, and the whole thing felt weird. That turned out to be a one-timer. Is it okay to say that I’m not exactly comfortable if I can’t relate to somebody else’s personal jive? I mean, I’ve got my own jive too, and he didn’t seem to get me either – he just looked at me with a constant look of concern in his eyes. Maybe if Jimmy D could have worked wonder with my hair then I might have had to really think about overcoming any reservations, but when I got home all I did was stand in front of that mirror and try to undo everything that he had just done.

   That’s par for the course… and it made it easy for me to move on.

   But I harbor no superficial scruples when it comes to choosing my hairdresser – if it’s a polka-dotted pansexual Siberian dwarf, as long as he/she/it is a Michaelangelo with scissors in hand, then that’s my guy/gal/thang.

When I first went to Patty she was a single mother of a teenage girl, a normal suburbanite, but over a span of about two years she turned into a blue-haired headbanger with gold rings punched into her nostrils and her lips and God knows where else, and when she got fired from the salon I heard that her departure was akin to a foul-mouthed tanked sailor being dragged out of a West Indies brothel at closing time.

Then there was young Barbara, cute and athletic, and I wanted to try and get her hooked up with my youngest son as she’d just broken up with her boyfriend and didn’t bother to hold back any of the details. She was open-minded, spontaneous, a little wild and very capable – one day she told me that she had signed up for a triathlon for the first time. “Wow, you gonna train hard for that, huh?” I asked, and she said, “no, not really, I don’t have the time for any of that – it’s this Saturday.” Next time I came in for a trim I asked her how it went. “Oh, I won that,” she nonchalantly answered. Then her sister shows up one day and the bickering begins. The next thing you know Barbara’s gone but her sister, who I really didn’t know and didn’t really like (I was on Barbara’s side all the way), remained. I still get cards in the mail from Barbara informing me of her new venue, but the address reads like a dive on an interstate utility street.

   I’ve been down that road one too many times.

William – my current stylist – at the urging of his fiancée, Teddy, recently relocated to a hip urban locale at the center of the metropolitan area. I now must drive twenty nerve-wracking miles through roadwork and congestion to reach his new digs: Bangz. He informed me that it was a converted gay bar and they chose to just keep the name. Truth is, I could find a better stylist but his coloring skills are just too amazing to give up. So, for the time being I’m committed to the long and taxing commute and the emphasizing of dramatic highlights.

Just the other day an acquaintance recommended some new guy named James. When I visited his web site the glamour-shot photo looked faintly familiar. And it hit me. That’s Jimmy D! But things change, time rolls on, and now he’s simply James. No longer the great Jimmy D – hmmm, something tells me not to go there.

And so here I am.

   Looking back, projecting forward, and the here and now feels a little tenuous. It feels like I’ve had the same cut for years. Some mornings I wake up and want to rock the boat, but then I hear that inner voice.

   The waters are choppy over there girl and no land is in sight. No safe port is to be had. You rock that boat, then you prepare to swim. And when (if) you reach shore, you’ll look like a drowned rat. And then everyone will possibly see the truth…

   I take heed. I find solace. I think back to all my hairdressers. Every blessed one of them. They all contributed to this, to this grand experiment of human follicle, to the evolution of me and my crazy hair. They teased it, they curled it, begged it to behave. They smiled, they nurtured, they prayed with me and confided, and in a way, they have always been my current best friend.

   All twenty-eight of them.

I know what you’re thinking. Damn, I pity this poor woman. So hung up on her vanity, her stupid hair. Come on girl, just get over yourself.

   But we’ve all got something that we’re vain about. Something that bugs us. Something that we just can’t seem to get right. Woman or man, young or old – there’s always something that could have been a little better, could be a little better now, or should be a little better somewhere down the road. Our waistline, our bank account, those dark spots upon the cheek, the respect and admiration from peers.

   Our happiness.

   And if you teeter back into the shadows right now still shaking your head in disagreement then I’ve at least got one vital thing over you.

   I’m honest.

When you really think about it, if you can really be honest, it all boils down to the damn mirror, that thin sheet of reflective glass that some fool stuck up there upon the wall so long ago. If there were no mirrors in the world think how much happier our lives would be. You’d have to walk out to a local lake on a perfect day in hope of finding a decent reflection. I wonder where our old mirror resides now? The one my young face graced all those years ago, peering into it and hoping for something acceptable to possibly peer back. Busted up into a thousand pieces probably, just shiny, tiny, shattered hauntings, or possibly still hanging up there on the same wall, still polished, still reflecting, still revealing… and still judging.

   Or maybe it’s not the mirror’s fault at all but our own eyes.

   Or maybe it’s our brains, our hearts… God help me, maybe in the end, the very end, the fault resides right there within our own blinded souls.