For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Installment 3
I decided it was time for a haircut. I’d been trying to grow my hair longer for the last year or so. As soon as I realized that it was receding I figured this was probably my last chance to have long hair in this lifetime. I’d never worn my hair long as teenager and my parents had cut it in a bowl until I was about twelve. What I didn’t want was to end up as one of those Ben Franklin-looking aging San Francisco hippies with the bald head, horseshoe of hair, and stupid little pony tail sticking straight out in the back.
So for a while I just stopped getting my hair cut. It went through the page boy Prince Valiant-esque phase and now it was getting kind of stupid looking, sticking way out on the sides but still not long enough to gather in the back. I finally understood what women were talking about when they said that switching to short hair was a huge commitment because whenever they finally decided to grow it out again they had to put up with all those awkward lengths between the short haircut that looked good and the longer hair they were aiming for.
I was hanging out in the typesetter pit with Roger Brown who was playing around with a hypercard stack on his Macintosh. He’d been experimenting with little animations that he was able to show like a flip book by quickly clicking through a series of cards in the stack. Roger would make these little Don Martin Fonebone-looking caraicatures and then animate them slightly, mostly by putting in front of different backgrounds.
He had this one sequence called The French Guy that showed a stereotypical Frenchman with a beret, a twirly mustache and a striped shirt with a wide neck. He’d paste the French guy in front of a beach scene and call it The French Guy sur la plage, and then he’d put him in a row with a bunch of other people and call it The French Guy in line for the Jerry Lewis film festival.
Roger was showing me his latest stack, which was supposed to be me. It was a front-on view of a guy with glasses and a big nose with witchy hair sticking out all crazy on both sides of his face. His sequence showed the hair growing out longer and longer and then suddently it became a skull, at which point he said, “oops, went too far into the future.”
That’s when I realized it was time to get a haircut.
I went to this Asian woman who had a salon on 9th avenue. I told her I was trying to grow my hair out, so I didn’t really want it too much shorter, but that she should clean it up, especially at my temples. I placed my wire-rim eyeglasses on the counter in front of her barber’s chair and she gestured me over to the padded reclining chair that backed into the sink with the cutout in front for your neck.
She sat me down and had me lean my head back into the sink, gently cradling my neck until it settled onto the towel placed there to protect me from the icy-cold porcelain.
I always liked the pampering you got at the barber. It made me feel like a pasha to have someone wash my hair. She ran water through that snakey nozzle, testing it on the back of her hand until the temperature was right and then she wet my hair thoroughly, squeezed out the excess, and then started working the shampoo into it. While doing so, she massaged my scalp, focusing on my temples. I felt my neck relax.
She rinsed the shampoo out of hair and then applied the conditioner, working from the back. When she applied the warm water to my head a third time to rinse out the conditioner, I felt myself getting somewhat aroused, just from the constant soft touches to my head and ears, which were always very sensitive to touch, as well as to kisses and nibbles. I hoped she wouldn’t notice. If she did, she was professional enough to ignore it.
She sat me down in front of the mirror and started talking in her broken English about what she was going to do with my hair. She held up a hank of my hair and pointed to the tip of it. “Split ends” she said. “All split ends.” She emphasized the word split. I’d never really paid attention to advertisements about women’s hair on TV, so I only vaguely knew what a split end was or what caused it or whether it was a real or imaginary concept used to sell women on various hair-care products, but now that she was pointing it out to me I guess I did notice that my hair seemed a bit frayed at the end.
I gathered she was proposing to cut the tips off. That would set me back somewhat in my quest for longer hair, but I guess I didn’t want to look shabby. Then she ran her fingers through the hair at my temples and pulled it out on both sides. “Cut shorter here,” she said. “Clean up.” She turned my chair to the side and lifted the hair that was starting to reach to shoulders and showed me the long-ish hair growing closer to my neck. “Clean up here too?” I nodded. She was the boss.
“Keep long on top?” she said, running her fingers through the hair that was swept back from my high forehead. “That’s right,” I said.
She went ahead and did all the cleaning up she had recommended and again I felt somewhat aroused as she snipped the shears right next to my ears and touched my neck gently when she wanted me to lean forward or tilt my head to one side or the other. I couldn’t help it. Haircuts always felt that way to me. In some ways it was sort of like a milder version of sensual massage, with a strange woman ministering to me physically.
I had to admit that it looked a lot better when she was done. Then again, haircuts always do seem to look best right when the barber has finished them. They seem to know how to poke and prod the hairs into place. Usually once I’ve washed my hair the first time it sproings out and starts looking odd again. She had put a little gel or mousse in the top, something I almost never did myself, although Cecilia was always suggesting I use more “product.”
When I saw Cecilia that night she said she liked the haircut a lot, but when I went to work the next Monday I was a bit self-conscious. In some ways I thought the hippies had it right: don’t fuss with your hair, just let it grow naturally and sweep it back or to the side. Same thing with beards. If anything it was unnatural to shave every day. I was less pure on that, though.
I’d never really tried to grow my beard but I was too lazy to shave every day and with my fair hair I could get by for usually three or four days between shaves although when I’d been home for a month or so after college before driving out west, my Dad had gotten on my ass for going around unshaved. To him it looked dirty, as if I hadn’t bathed. He was from the fifties. I told him that a couple of days stubble was a “look” that people my age thought was perfectly fine. He accused me of being influenced by TV and movies. “You’re not Don Johnson,” he said. I got sucked into his stupid premise, saying “You guys imitated Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart in your day.”
“Frank Sinatra had class,” he said. I decided to let it drop. I wasn’t going to be around much longer anyway.
Look, if I’d been a lawyer or something I’d have shaved every day. Hell, I’d have worn a tie to work, something I also didn’t have to do. But it made sense to me that things like hair shouldn’t require a lot of fussing and shaping and all sorts of special treatment to look okay. We had evolved this way for millennia and people had been finding mates and looking fine to each other for most of that time, so I didn’t see why plain old long hair shouldn’t look just fine as is.
Still, I had to admit that the little bit of shaping that the haircutter had done, the trimming on the sides, the shaving under my neck, had made my hair and therefore my face look a lot better, so what did I know. People had been styling and coloring their hair since the Egyptians at least, after all.
I got compliments at work, including from two of the proofreaders I was slightly attracted to, Bettie and Kim. “Hi, Daniel!” they said when they ran into me on the way in through the front door of the office building in Emeryville. “Hi girls,” I said.
Bettie was really tall, definitely over six feet. She wore striking makeup and dressed kind of punky. She drove a VW bug and had occasionally given me and Paul rides home to San Francisco after work. She lived in Noe Valley, near where Paul lived with his wife, but she didn’t mind dropping me off in the Sunset.
Kim was half Chinese, about my height, ultrathin, and very shy. I had had lunch with her a few times and she told me that until very recently she had had very bad acne. Her dermatologist had prescribed some incredibly strong steroids and that had cleared up the blemished on her face. When I met her she still had a few small scabs that were nearly healed over, but now her skin looked smooth and dry. She was very pale. It may have been in comparison to the somewhat Asian cast to her features, but she looked whiter than a white person to me. Her hair was also a very dark black, so maybe that added to the contrast.
Kim told me that she was a “happa” which she said was a Hawaiian term, sometimes said “happa happa” which meant half-Asian, half-white. Her parents were divorced and her dad was retired military. Her mother was from Taiwan and lived down in Monterey where she taught at the military language school there.
Kim was a huge music fan. She liked a lot of the same SST-type bands that Roger was turning me onto, but she was into other more obscure groups I’d never heard of, some of them came from the Boston scene that the Pixies had come out of. She was one of the few people I knew who had also heard of the Pixies in fact, and she remembered when they were called Death to the Pixies and that they had covered “Heaven,” the song the girl in the radiator sings in Eraserhead. She made me a tape with Dinosaur, Jr’s first two albums on it, with filler from Sonic Youth and Live Skull.
I had that feeling that Kim would totally be willing to go out with me if I showed any interest, and I did find her appealing, but I hadn’t yet entirely given up on Cecilia and I was also thinking a lot about Giselle. It’s funny, both Giselle and Kim had very dark hair, whereas Cecilia had that honey blonde thing going on. It’s almost as though in my mind I was lining up my next affair and subconsciously selecting someone who was physically the opposite of Cecilia. Neither Giselle nor Kim were particularly busty, either, and Giselle dressed in that grown up, almost frumpy way, while Kim was kind of tomboy-ish, wearing straightleg jeans and rock t-shirts.
I wasn’t really serious, at least not yet, about trying to get involved with someone new. I was open to the idea of a fling, I guess, but I still considered Cecilia my girlfriend and she still called me her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to mess that up, at least not deliberately.