Hairstyles of the Damned

by Joe Meno

  The only record I could listen to straight through was Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. When everything else was wrong, that record made it right. I could go back to it, always. No matter what, that record would make me feel all right. Appetite for Destruction. Guns n’ Roses. That was it. That was my record. “It’s So Easy,” “Nightrain,” “Out ta Get Me,” then classics like “Paradise City,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and probably the greatest song ever, of all time: “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” What was it about that song? I loved that song so much it sometimes made we want to kick a hole in the wall. If Gretchen and I were driving and if her stereo was working—which it did once every ten million years—and if that song happened to come on, I’d have to get her to pull over so I could listen to it, without having to hear the engine running or traffic going by. She always pulled over; she understood, I guess. That one part, where the song kind of slows down—“Where do we go now? Where do we go now? Where do we go now?”—I didn’t even know what Axl was talking about, but if I was in the car with Gretchen, or better, at home alone in the basement where my room was, I would have to stop and crank it or just stand there and do the air guitar parts. In the car, I’d try to get Gretchen to sing along, but since it wasn’t punk, she wasn’t having it, though one time she did do the “Where do we go? Where do we go now” parts, but to get her to do anything else was almost impossible where GNR was concerned.

  When I brought the record over to Rod’s to try to get him to listen, all he did was roll his eyes and shake his head. It was the first time I had played a record of mine for him and he just folded his arms over his chest, raising his eyebrows, and laughed.

  “Lame,” was all he said.

  “What? How can you not like this?” I asked.

  “It’s just so lame,” he said.

  “Lame? Stevie Wonder is lame.”

  “Seriously. I’ll take Stevie over this any day,” he muttered, getting up to switch it off.

  “Dude, you’ve got to listen to the whole thing. At the end. It gets all quiet and pretty and everything.”

  He stood up and walked beside the deep mahogany record player, his hand on the record arm, and I thought, If he touches that needle, I am going to kick his ass and Maybe white kids and black kids can’t be friends and If he turns this fucking record off, I am never going to talk to him again, and just then Slash began his solo and the song began to build and Rod waited, closing his eyes, and listened, and sat back down on the bed. We listened to the whole song together and then when it was over he nodded and said, “That was a jam. I was wrong. That really was a jam.”

  “Like I said.” He handed me back the LP, gently sliding it into its paper sleeve.

  “Hey, man, I need to put a mix-tape together for this girl. Can you help me pick out some cool songs she’s never heard before?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to put songs she’s never heard on it?”

  “Because she does that for me. Plays songs I’ve never heard, you know.”

  Rod frowned, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

  “Don’t be lame, man,” he said. “That would be like writing somebody else’s love letter.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said.

  “I’m not helping you out. If you like this girl, you should be able to pick the songs out you want her to hear yourself.”

  “But I’ll pick fucking rock songs. I need sexy songs like that shit your dad listens to. Like Chet Baker and shit.”

  “Man, forget it. I’m not doing it.”

  “You’re screwing me here, Rod,” I said. “You’re blowing my chance with love.”

  “No, man, you are,” he said, and I knew I was on my own from there.

  sixteen

  At exactly that same strange time in my life, I began getting these massively raging erections for no real reason—sometimes right in the middle of class or walking down the hallway at school—and they would be so painful that I would have to go into the men’s room and masturbate right away or I would get these very intense stomach aches. I’m not kidding. Anything might set me off. I would masturbate for no real reason, thinking about anyone, any girl I had ever seen. Once after school, when I was watching Star Trek, some alien lady with blue skin and tight pants came on the screen and immediately I had to go jerk off. It got really bad. If I had a female teacher—any kind of female, skinny, fat, hot, ugly, whatever—I would immediately get an erection if she even called on me. If she was like, “Well, what do you think, Brian?” I would be like, “I think I have an erection now and so I have to go deal with it.” It was worse in, like, math class, where I had to sit close to the math teacher Mrs. Daniels’s desk. Once during a quiz, she spilled her perfume all over—that “White Fantasy” perfume stuff—and I had to run out of class in the middle of the quiz, which I failed, because I practically blew my load in my pants.

  The only thing I had going for me romantically at the time was cable TV, which meant Cinemax After Dark on Friday nights, where they’d show these soft-core porno movies, like Emmanuel 5, Emmanuel 6, and Emmanuel 8, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tame stuff like that. I wasn’t brave enough to try and buy a porno magazine so all I had was the cable and my mom’s fashion magazines, like Cosmo, which if I wasn’t careful, were always left with a suspicious crease.

  Also, there was this guy at Evergreen Video, a few blocks from my house, who’d let me rent rated-R horror movies. He was a fat guy with a greasy white forehead and big brown glasses, and it seemed like he was always eating when I came in to rent something. “How’s Sorority Party Massacre?” I’d ask, holding up the video box, which was full of blood and gore and photos of beautiful co-eds in pink lingerie, screaming.

  “That one’s so-so,” he’d say, licking his fingers from fried chicken, maybe. “The one next to it, Prom Queen from the Dead, well, there’s some full-frontal nudity in that one. Girl in a shower scene—little red bush. Almost burned out my slow-motion feature on that one.”

  “How’s this one?” I asked, pointing to a copy of The Curse of Dr. Fang.

  “That one borders on straight porno.”

  “Really,” I said, bringing it up toward the register.

  In the film, which was Spanish, I think, with English subtitles, Dr. Fang is this scientist with big pop-bottle glasses and a Fu Manchu beard and a white lab coat and he invents this ray to get girls to have sex with him. Within the first ten minutes of the film, I had nearly blown out a nut, sincerely.

  So in school at about the same time, I began to sign all my tests and assignment sheets as “Dr. Fang,” just screwing around, and also because, like I said, I hadn’t gotten laid yet and I thought this might grant me some kind of individuality. I thought that was what I was missing, you know: a cool identity. I asked Gretchen and Kim to call me “Dr. Fang” and they just laughed. In my mind, though, I started to think of myself as a super villain who could make women fall in love with me, but instantly, like that guy from Charles in Charge in that one teen movie, where he would like blink and then bam! women’s brassieres would pop open. I imagined I would have some word, some secret phrase, like “Shazam!” or “Activate!” and I would like whisper it with a nod and women, like the ones I would ogle in the poster section of Spencer’s Gifts at the mall, all of them tan and yellow bikiniclad, would stop taking their soapy bubble baths or washing their cherry-red Lamborghinis or whatever they were doing, and become helpless sexual slaves to my most wild desires, which would have been a whole lot of making out, because that’s all I had done so far. It seemed Gretchen had no idea I was interested in her and all she could ever talk about was Tony Degan. I had no idea how to make a mix-tape that would, like, capture her, so I decided to put off asking her to Homecoming and I began waiting to see if my new persona might capture the hearts of a few other unsuspecting ladies.

  In band class, which, like I said, was just one other thing to be embarrassed of, there were the geeky girls from Mother McCauley. They were also fledgling band members, so
cially awkward and ultra-nerdy.

  But there was one girl out of all the creepy, bifocal-glasses-wearing types that was super fine: Suzy Lee Siler. As I sat pretending to play the xylophone behind Suzy Lee Siler—first chair clarinet, brunette, tall, very tall, and at age seventeen already very sexually aware, which I could tell because she never walked home from school, always riding in the passenger seat of some mullethead’s rusted-out red Camaro or Firebird, with her feet resting on the dashboard—on the dashboard!—which to me meant she and the guy had already done it because, Come on, look, her feet are up there on the dashboard—well in class, right behind her, I would trace the narrow crisscross of her bra strap which was visible under her white uniform blouse, all the time whispering, “Dr. Fang, Dr. Fang, you are under the spell of Dr. Fang,” knowing at any moment Suzy Lee would turn and wink at me, just once—wink—falling under the wicked, perverse charms of the most fearsome Dr. Fang for all eternity.

  I didn’t know any girls other than Gretchen and Kim, really, and like I said, I hadn’t ever had a real girlfriend, so to take up time between watching horror movies and hanging out with Rod and jerking off to photos of Suzy Lee in the high school yearbook I stole from my younger sister Alice, and Suzy Lee was in the French club and on the volleyball team and there was this one shot of her leaping in the air to spike a volleyball and her bare, long legs were like the blades of two magnificent scissors cutting through the air and my heart—oh, my heart, snip, snip—so after school, I asked my mom if it was OK if I could start mowing lawns again for a few families in my neighborhood like I had in junior high, and she said as long as I left time for studying; so I did, cutting lawns and nodding along on my headphones to Mötley Crüe or Guns n’ Roses or Slayer.

  On the other side of the block around the corner was a girl a year younger than me, a sophomore named Carrie Steeple, who everyone called a skank because her parents put her on the pill in eighth grade, and everyone knew she was on the pill because the little plastic thing had fallen out of her purse during homeroom—that’s what Kim had told me—and her dropping the pill compact made a lot of people think she was full of shit, because it seemed like Carrie was advertising, and also, it had been rumored that she had been knocked up twice before she was on the pill, which to me didn’t make any sense, considering she didn’t have any babies, but that just goes to show you how much I knew about abortion and condoms and the pill and all that kind of sex-stuff. Well, Carrie Steeple would sit in a yellow plastic lawn chair right on her front lawn and watch me mow her neighbor’s grass and she wouldn’t wear nothing but a bright yellow two-piece bikini, and it was like October, and this girl was still young, younger than me, and not very developed—I mean, her chest was as flat as a cutting board and the only thing remotely curvy on her was her very large, swooping forehead. Also, her shoulders were always covered in bright red freckles. Her hair was kind of brown and dirty and long and stringy. She would sit there in the yellow chair, purple sunglasses on, with a boom box playing Paula Abdul or Madonna or whoever, tapping her foot along, and to be honest, her sitting there scared the hell out of me. One time, she uncrossed her legs when I was looking, and I could see the soft folds of her privates held tight against the stretchy yellow fabric and just the faintest line of black stubble where she had shaved and it made me feel sick and excited all at once. This other time, I remember I had run over a stone or rock or something, and the mower had jerked forward suddenly, and Metallica was blaring in my headphones, and I looked up and Carrie Steeple was sitting there in that chair, leaning forward in her tiny yellow two-piece with her elbows on her knees, and she was staring right at me and I think she was mouthing some words at me and I said, out loud, “What?” switching off the mower, and she flipped her stringy hair over her shoulder and said, “Take off your glasses,” and I didn’t understand what she was saying, and then she said it again, “Go ahead, take off your glasses,” and I said, “I’ve got to get back to work,” and I started the lawn mower and finished the side of the Foster’s house, not looking her way again.

  About three days later, it hit me: I was in the middle of a chemistry test and, of course, I had signed my name at the top of the page as Dr. Fang, and right then I began to play that moment over and over, again and again, in my head—Carrie looking up and saying, “Take off your glasses”—and I’d be at school, or at home, or lying in bed, or at dinner when my mother would ask me to pass the mashed potatoes, or when I was being called on in class, or when I showered, or when I went to the bathroom, or when I walked down the street, I’d be thinking about Carrie—her flat chest, her stringy hair—saying, “Take off your glasses. Take off your glasses.” In that moment, anything could have happened. Anything could have happened, but I had chickened out. I had chickened out, and this might have been it, my big chance, and I had blown it. I had blown my chance to just get it over with and now nobody was going to ever have sex with me—not Carrie Steeple, certainly not Gretchen—and I’d get all worked up about it and swear to myself that no matter what, the next time, I’d do it, no matter what, and I’d decide to masturbate right then, sure that that was the closest I’d ever get to sex before some kind of nuclear war or Soviet radiation destroyed me.

  seventeen

  Bad-ass possible songs for the Gretchen mix-tape:

  1. I Won’t Forget You by Poison

  2. Every Rose Has its Thorn again by Poison

  3. Home Sweet Home by Mötley Crüe

  4. Don’t Fear the Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult

  5. Feel Like Making Love, Bad Company

  6. Freebird by Lynrd Skynrd—all-time number one making out song

  7. Separate Ways by Journey

  8. Rocket Queen by GNR

  9. Patience by GNR

  10. Sweet Child o’ Mine by GNR

  eighteen

  Out of nowhere, at school, I got a fucking egg busted on my head for no real reason. I was going to the bathroom in a stall in the washroom on the second floor, and it was just after third period began and I was feeling sick because I had milk with my cereal for breakfast, which I shouldn’t have because I was lactose-intolerant, but Tim was down at the table eating breakfast and the gallon of milk was sitting there and it looked really good on his Cap’n Crunch instead of plain fucking water, which is what I usually had, so I put some milk on my cereal—and not just a little, a lot—and by third period, I was all cramping and everything, and when I asked Bro. Hitler—a.k.a., Bro. Paluch—if I could go to the bathroom, he said yes, because he must have saw how bad and green and sweaty I looked, even though usually he never let anyone go to the bathroom, which is a little fucking crazy because what the fuck are you supposed to do? Crap your pants? If you are at a job and have to take a dump, they will let you because that’s common fucking courtesy.

  The bathroom smelled like Pine-Sol and cigarettes and I was in the stall closest to the wall, because I was uptight about that kind of thing. I didn’t like taking dumps when someone was sitting in the stall next to me. I’d sit there and wait if I had to. I did not enjoy hearing other people take a dump and I didn’t like it when people could hear me taking a dump. Why? I dunno. Common fucking courtesy, I guess. So I picked the stall farthest from the door—I mean, the whole bathroom was empty, but it was just in case someone came in to piss, that kind of thing. I went into the stall, pulled down my pants, then remembered and wiped the black toilet seat with some toilet paper, then sat down on it. I didn’t fucking squat, I sat down. Why? Because I had been sick like this my whole life and you just get very fucking tired of squatting your whole life. So I sat down and was waiting, which I had to because it would be like this hour-long buildup until it shot through me, and so I started looking around the stall. The walls of it were dull green marble, the floor tile was greenish blue, pretty clean-looking. Toward the front of the john, one of the sinks was dripping. It was pretty quiet because everyone was in class, I guess, and then I started reading the graffiti.

  EVERYTHING TODAY IS AS BAD AS MY SP
ELLING

  come here to suck my cock at 1:30 every day

  COLLEEN CHANDLER WILL NOT FUCK

  I was sitting there trying to make out some line that started with, IN CASE OF FIRE, EVACUATE YOUR BOWELS AND STROKE YOUR, when the heavy wood door swung open and two pairs of feet stumbled in. I could tell they were bigger dudes from the way they were laughing and shoving each other; they didn’t give a fuck about anyone hearing them. Someone lit up a cigarette—I could hear the sound of the wheel grinding against the flint. Someone farted, then laughed and shoved someone else. Then someone crouched down on the floor. I could hear it. I could hear the sound the rubber soles of his shoes made as they squeaked and the sound of him breathing and laughing and the sound his knees made pressing against the floor, and then he whistled and said, “Dude, McDunnah, someone’s shitting in there,” and right away I got a flash of this kid, John McDunnah, this big cro-mag senior on the wrestling team, who I once saw de-pants some honors-class fag in the gym locker room like two years before. This kid, John McDunnah, was big, like over six-feet tall, square-shouldered, square-faced, square-chinned, and probably square-brained, his face hidden under a dark, monolithic eyebrow ledge. In that moment, all I remembered was the look on that one kid’s face—some squirrelly pockmarked kid with enormous bifocal glasses—as John pinned him against a row of lockers, first tearing down his dress pants, then his scabby white underwear. It was all Animal Kingdom strongest-of-the-jungle kind of shit, John McDunnah’s laugh like a brooding and very feral hyena.

  “Someone’s in there?” I heard a voice respond and then that same cackling-hyena laugh. Just then, I kind of started getting nervous and decided to pull up my pants even though my stomach still felt sick as hell, and then the heavy door opened and either someone else came in or someone left, and I heard the same voice again—slow, deliberate, stupid with laughter—say, “Someone’s in there taking a fucking dump,” and I buckled my pants and heard the door open again and one of them was laughing, then another, and then I heard the quick squeak of someone’s shoes against the tile and I could hear someone on the other side of the stall door, very close by, and then I felt something hit my fucking head. It hurt, just for one quick second—a slight sharp sting from how hard it was thrown—and then another sensation, like I was bleeding, but it was not blood but egg yolk running down my face and neck, down the crook of the collar of my shirt, and there were pieces of egg in my hair and I didn’t even stand up or say anything. I picked some of the shell out of my hair and waited for them to leave. I heard the squeak again of their feet and the heavy door finally slam and I opened the stall door and went to the mirror and it made me think: Did they know who it was, or could it have been just anybody and I mean, who brings a fucking egg to school? What kind of people do those kinds of things? The answer: John fucking McDunnah. I knew it was him for sure, at least he had been part of it. But why? Why did they even bother? What do those kinds of fucking people grow up to be? It seemed like shit Gretchen would bitch about. Seriously.