Hairstyles of the Damned

by Joe Meno

  “Man, do you see all those animals in front of her house? What’s that about?” I asked.

  “She’s like fucking Snow White,” Gretchen whispered.

  “I guess.”

  “We should do something to them,” Gretchen said.

  “OK,” I said, and all we could think to do was stop the fourth time, leave the car idling, grab the two bunnies, then the elf, then the swan, and put them all on the front porch as quick as we could, then punch the doorbell before we hurried back to the Escort and drove off wildly.

  twenty-three

  In his garage, Bobby B. had the AC/DC cranked up, as he tried like hell to get his van to start. I was watching, sitting on the hood of an outof-commission Chevy, its black-and-chrome nose peeking out from under the dusty beige tarp. It was around eight at night, still real warm, Indian-type summer and all, but getting dark quick. Bobby B. had a work light hung from the lip of the garage and it made long, weird shadows on the empty white garage walls around me.

  “The fucking radio’s working,” Bobby B. mumbled, scratching his head, “so it’s not electrical. Maybe the alternator?” He had the front end of the purple wizard van edged beneath the open door of the white aluminum-sided square garage. His brown hair was raggedy and was hanging in his face as he wiped his hands on his gray Megadeth shirt, which was cut at the sleeves to reveal his muscular arms. He turned and picked up a screwdriver and began jabbing at the battery. “Start, you fucker!” he shouted. “Just fucking start.”

  I gave a little laugh and he glared over his shoulder at me.

  “Dude, what are you laughing at?” he asked, sorely.

  “Nothing. Sorry,” I said.

  “Well, fucking stop grinning and come over here and hold this screwdriver for me.”

  I hopped off the hood of the Chevy and took the screwdriver and pressed the contact wire down at the contact point on the top of the battery. “But hold it down there, so the headlights stay lit. Good,” he said, watching the big rectangular bulbs resume shining. “Now fucking keep it pressed down.”

  He climbed into the driver’s seat, wiped his hands on his gray shirt again, and turned the ignition. I could hear a strange, mechanical click-click-click as Bobby B. began swearing.

  “Dude, are you holding it down?” he shouted.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what the fuck?” he said, shaking his head. “Try it again.”

  I pressed down hard on the screwdriver and it gave a little spark as he hit the gas, turning the key, and then BLOOOOM, it roared to life, the enormous engine shaking right at my chest, the belts and fans turning with a whiny speed.

  “Fuck yeah!” Bobby B. shouted. “Looks like I’m gonna get some pussy tonight after all!” He hopped out of the van, mussed up my dirty hair, and said, “Is there somewhere you need to be dropped off, dude? Because I owe you.”

  “No, man, I’m cool,” I said. “But listen,” and I took a seat on the hood of the Chevy again. “Listen, OK. Um, say you like this girl, right, and you’re not sure if she likes you. What can you do to get her to, you know, like you?”

  “Well,” Bobby B. said, pausing in his answer as he walked over to the corner of the garage, opened a small, red plastic cooler, dug out a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, cracked it open, took a long drink, then drained the entire can. He crushed the can in his hand and threw it out the open garage door. “Brian Oswald, you can’t do shit.”

  “What?”

  “The more you like a girl, the less she likes you. It’s like fucking scientific.”

  “What about you and Kim?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, little dude. If I start being nice and acting cool and saying things and being on time, she starts acting, you know, fucking uninterested. But if I act like a total dick, then she calls me all the fucking time. It’s fucking crazy, because I really like her and all, but when I say nice shit to her, she gets all freaked out and says she needs some fucking space and all. So I just act like I don’t give a shit, you know? It’s all part of God’s plan,” he said, nodding.

  “Really?”

  “What the fuck do I know?” he said, smiling. “All I’m saying is that if I was into a chick that wasn’t into me, I dunno. I would play it safe and act like a dick.”

  “Huh,” I mumbled. “Well, thanks, Bobby.”

  “No problem, little dude. Good luck with that shit. Listen, I got to split. I got a lady to meet.”

  I hopped down off the hood of the Chevy and watched as Bobby climbed into his van, blaring “Hell’s Bells” as loud as the van’s stereo could crank it. I watched him back out into the street, the van stalling for a minute, then the lights coming on bright, and him tearing out, leaving a length of rubber as he disappeared into the dark. I wondered about what he said and then thought hard. I could never be a dick, not to Gretchen anyway, so I guess I was doomed; doomed to go for this girl that didn’t go for me. But that was OK as I long as I did everything I could. So I crossed the street and headed down to my room and got out all my records and cassettes, found a blank tape under my bed, and started making it, the mix-tape, you know, totally ignoring what Bobby had just said. In about an hour, I was done with it and I stared at the little plastic thing and punched out the tabs so it couldn’t be recorded over, and after I did all that, I decided Bobby B. was totally right and there was no way in hell I was going to hand it over to her, knowing how she felt. Like always then, I decided I would wait and see, and hope something in the next few weeks would change for the better for me.

  twenty-four

  Bad-ass ideas for Kung-Fu movies in which I could star in :

  1. A teen helps save an old man ninja who teaches him the way of the ninja and he goes around kicking the other kids’ asses in school before he learns the true ninja way in a Chinese star showdown at a video arcade.

  or

  2. A teenage boy inherits these magical camouflage nunchucks from an ancient council of mysterious assassins and he must learn to use their powers to defeat a series of strange, masked killers, hired to steal the magic nunchucks in their quest to rule the world.

  or

  3. The boy’s father, before he dies, hands him this mysterious book, The Way of the Samurai, and the boy learns many important ninja skills before saving a female ski team from Soviet terrorists bent on upsetting the Olympics. He falls in love with one of the girls from the ski team who is from Sweden, maybe.

  Yes, I ordered two Chinese throwing stars and a set of camouflage nunchucks from Ninja magazine and that shit still hadn’t come yet. It’d been four weeks—why was everyone in the world trying to keep me from realizing my dream of becoming a shadow assassin? I ask you, Bro. Dorbus, why you think it is OK to stand in my way. Yes, you are teaching me in “Religion Class” what spirituality is, which will help strengthen my inner-spirit if I am ever captured and tortured by my countless faceless enemies, but not even you forcing us to watch the entire Ten Commandments movie will calm my undying rage and need for the ninja’s kind of unending vengeance. You may very well be Numero Uno on the hit list, Bro. Dorbus, and if not Numero Uno, a very close Numero Two.

  Numero Uno? John fucking McDunnah. I had seen him in the cafeteria and in the hallway after school. He was bigger than I fucking remembered, in his maroon and orange varsity wrestling jacket, moving between freshmen and sophomores like a motherfucking Aryan mountain range, surrounded by two weasel-faced sportos in their matching varsity jackets. I was standing at my locker and he walked past and I heard that high-pitched jungle-hyena laugh, him shoving one of his fellow goons, and I looked up from putting my books away and made eye contact with him and he just grinned like he knew that I knew it had been him and he also knew that there wasn’t shit I could do about it and he just kept staring at me, nodding, until he disappeared down the hallway.

  It was hard not to imagine: ordering the Chinese stars and nunchucks, leaping out of a tree on a dark, windy night, busting out his kneecaps or something hardcore kung fu like that, and
leaving him there to squeal in pain. I made a solemn ninja oath that somehow, John McDunnah, some way, you will get yours, some day.

  twenty-five

  It was bad going for Rod at school too, not just because he was black but because he was also a nerd. He got it worst of all from the other black kids in school, I guess. In between 7th and 8th period one day, Rod got his assed kicked by two big black kids, Derrick Holmes and Mike Porter, both of them stiff-necked seniors on the varsity football team. They told him it was because he was so fucking light-skinned. “Hey, white chocolate,” one of them said, knocking Rod’s chemistry books from his hands. It was just after two o’clock, at the end of the second floor hallway, so no one but other jocks, who got out of class early to work out, and the janitors, who hid beneath the stairwells smoking, were around.

  “How come you so white, boy?” Derrick Holmes asked with a laugh. Derrick was a huge kid, with a massive chest and forearms and a face as wide as a bull’s.

  “Looks like your moms must a gave it up,” the other kid, Mike Porter—slighter, ganglier, with a loose, fluid kind of coolness—said, and then shoved Rod against his locker by his neck. “How come you think you’re better than all the rest of us, huh?” Mike tore off Rod’s clip-on tie and spat. “Prancing around with fucking white kids.” He swatted the side of Rod’s head and laughed.

  Rod wasn’t the kind of kid who would fight back. He just closed his eyes and let Derrick Holmes dump a plastic garbage can full of papers and trash all over his head. “Go home to your whitefolks, Oreo.”

  When I asked him about it that Saturday, we were on the bus heading to the flea market. Rod was looking for the Velvet Underground on vinyl and I was looking for the guy from Chinatown who sold switchblades and butterfly knives, the things that were illegal to sell in the back of kung-fu magazines. I had been eyeing this one silver pearl inlaid but terfly knife for weeks. I was convinced what Rod needed was some sort of weapon he could flash and not another out-of-date record from some group that no one had heard of except his dad.

  “How come you didn’t fight back?” I asked. “You could have done something.”

  “You don’t get it. Even if I fought back, they wouldn’t get it.”

  “‘Get it’? Who cares if they ‘get it’? If someone is out to hurt you, you got to fight back, man.”

  “That’s not the way me and my dad see it. He’s been hassled. He says they just want you to act like an animal, you know. But if you do, then you’re no better than them.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know about any of that. I just know if someone knocked my shit out of my hands, I’d start swinging.”

  “Maybe that’s why no one fucks with you.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking of getting hit in the head with the egg in the stall. I never told anyone about it. Why? Because it was fucking humiliating and I never really knew if they had done it to me on purpose or if they would have just done it to anybody, and, well, like I said, it was pretty fucking embarrassing.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  “Hey, you thinking about asking anyone to Homecoming?” I asked. “It’s coming up quick.”

  “Who? Who am I going to ask?” he said, shaking his head. “The only other people I talk to is you and my mom and dad. And I ain’t asking any of you.”

  At the flea market, we ended up stopping at this booth where this man had all kinds of weird, foreign horror flicks. The guy was tall and thin with a brown ponytail that ran down his back. He was wearing a Blizzard of Oz T-shirt and was smoking, nodding his head to some Dio he had playing.

  “You guys wanna see something scary, check this one out—it’s from Italy,” he said, sliding a videotape of Lucio Fulchi’s Beyond across to me.

  “Dude, I’ve seen that one already. It’s garbage,” I said.

  “OK, how about Evil Dead? ” the guy asked.

  “Man, that came out like ten years ago. Do you got anything, like, unknown?”

  “Have you ever seen El Santo, the masked wrestler from the ’50s?”

  “Duh,” I said. “I was asking about serious horror.”

  “Well, OK, how about this,” he said, sliding a blank VHS tape toward me. “It’s a VHS transfer from an old 8mm.”

  I picked up the videotape and read the title: Lion vs. Tiger!

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “Five bucks to find out,” he said. I had the five bucks I was planning on spending on the butterfly knife, but Lion vs. Tiger! How could you resist it?

  We went back to Rod’s house, locked his bedroom door, slid the tape inside, and waited. A black screen came up:

  THIS DOCUMENT IS A WORK OF FACT: SADLY, WHILE FILMING A SHORT FILM WITH THE VERHOEVEN CIRCUS IN FINLAND, OUR CAMERA CREW BECAME WITNESS TO THIS TERRIBLE ACCIDENT.

  Then it cut to a grainy black-and-white shot of a lion swiping at the bars of its cage. A strongman in black tights strikes his whip at the animal, trying to get it to perform, maybe. He turns and closes the gate to the cage. The camera follows him as he smiles, says something unclear, and flexes his muscles for the camera. He lifts the bar for another cage and leads a magnificent tiger out by its collar. And then, from out of frame, the lion attacks, escaping from its cage somehow, knocking the man on his back. The strongman rolls to his side, catching a meaty claw to his neck. The tiger lunges, hissing and growling, snapping its claws near the lion’s head. The lion snaps back, leaps forward, and sinks its mouth into the tiger’s neck. The tiger turns and catches one great paw into the lion’s throat and then quickly, with one movement, has its enormous jaws around the lion’s neck and begins snapping wildly. The tiger retreats as a gunshot goes off, limps into its cage, and stops moving. From out of frame, two cameramen help the strongman to his feet, and the lion lies there, its black eye blinking, before you can tell that both animals are dead.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “That was intense.”

  “Yeah it was.”

  “It’s just like fucking high school.”

  “Nope, it’s the whole fucking world,” Rod corrected.

  “Yeah. Shit,” I said. “Listen, I got to use your can.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  I crept out of his room and went down the hall to the bathroom, shut the door, then double-backed around to the front room. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just happening as I was doing it. I knelt down as quietly as I could before those hundreds and hundreds of records, looking nervously for the Chet Baker one. I found it, slipped it out of its place, and started to open it. Why? I dunno. I think I was going to try to steal it. Why? I dunno, really. I mean, I could say it was because I wanted to give it to Gretchen, but then again, I dunno. Maybe I was just jealous of his dad and everything, I’m not sure at all. I do know I looked up to be certain his parents weren’t around and there was Rod, standing there, silent, watching me just like that, not saying anything.

  “What are you doing?” Rod asked.

  I closed my eyes and felt my heart drop like a hammer in my chest.

  “I dunno, I’m sorry, man. I was just looking.”

  “Why are you doing that?” I looked up again and it seemed like he might start crying. His face was dark and his eyes were shiny.

  “I … I’m sorry, Rod.”

  “I would have given it to you if you asked.”

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry. Really.”

  “I think you should leave,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He opened the front door and looked at me. “I thought you were my fucking friend.”

  “I am,” I said, and knew how dumb that sounded even as I was saying it.

  twenty-six

  OK, I was an asshole. A real, total, super fucking asshole. I sat in my bed all night feeling like shit, like crying—but I didn’t—and I thought about calling Rod up and apologizing, but for some reason I couldn’t do it. I just sat in bed with the pillows over my head. For some stupid fucking reason I just couldn’t do it;
I couldn’t say I was sorry because I was so fucking embarrassed and everything. I put on a mix-tape Gretchen had made for me like a year ago, Things Been Bad, and the first song that came on was by the Lemonheads, when they were punk, and it was called “Fucked-Up,” where the singer sang, “I fucked up, I don’t want to hear it.” The next song was by the same band, and it was called “Hate Your Friends,” and he sang, “When you got problems you can’t solve, it’s enough to make you start to hate your friends.” I rewound that song and played it over and over and over again all night, twitching and convulsing like an epileptic in my bed.

  twenty-seven

  At Gretchen’s, what we did sometimes was go through all the rooms in her house, just kind of snooping. It was something we did a lot, I guess. We’d get so bored that we’d go through her sister’s and parents’ rooms, looking for stuff to either laugh at or take. We’d go through her dad’s clothes looking for money, or her sister’s hope chest to find silly shit, like condoms and love letters. We usually started in her parents’ room, lying on the floor, searching under the four-poster bed which was made-up perfectly with pink pillows, the white sheet taut and wrinkle-free on one side, but totally ruffled and unmade where her father slept, which I thought was sad and kinda strange, I guess, how he still only slept on his side of the bed.