More hogwash, thought Morgan. He’d probably done the boy good by exposing him. His own collarbone had been broken twice, each leg three times, all but two fingers smashed, and his nose reshaped so often he couldn’t remember its original contours. On wet nights he had trouble breathing. But why complain? You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
And yet, Morgan thought, squinting at the door of the school, there was a side to Lewis he’d liked. At first he had felt comfortable, as if he had at last found the kwoon he’d been looking for. True, Lewis had come on way too cocky when asked to spar, but what could you expect when he was hardly older than the high school kids he was teaching? And maybe teaching them well, if he was really going by that list of rules he handed out to beginners. And it wasn’t so much that Lewis was a bad fighter, only that he, Morgan, was about five times better because whatever he lacked now in middle age—flexibility and youth’s fast reflexes—he more than made up for in size and experience, which was a polite word for dirty tricks. Give Lewis a few more years, a little more coaching in the combat strategies Morgan could show him, and he might become a champion.
But who did he think he was fooling? Things never worked out that way. There was always too much ego in it. Something every sifu figured he had to protect, or save face about. A lesson in budo? Christ, he’d nearly killed this kid, and there he was, barking on the telephone like Saddam Hussein before the bombing started, even begging for the ground war to begin. And that was just all right, if a showdown—a duel—was what he wanted. Morgan set his jaw and stepped onto the pavement of the parking lot. However things went down, he decided, the consequences would be on Lewis—it would be his call.
Locking his car, then double-checking each door (this was a rough neighborhood, even by Morgan’s standards), he crossed the street, carrying his workout bag under his arm, the last threads of smog-filtered twilight fading into darkness, making the door of the kwoon a bright portal chiseled from blocks of glass and cement. A few feet from the entrance, he heard voices. Three students had shown. Most of the class had not. The two who had visited him weren’t there. He’d lectured them on his experience of strangling an assailant in Kyoto, and Toughie had gone quiet, looked edgy (fighting didn’t seem like fun then) and uneasy. Finally, they left, which was fine with Morgan. He didn’t want followers. Sycophants made him sick. All he wanted was a teacher he could respect.
Inside the school’s foyer he stopped, his eyes tracking the room. He never entered closed spaces too quickly or walked near corners or doorways on the street. Toward the rear, by a rack filled with halberds and single-edged broadswords, a girl of about five, with piles of ebony hair and blue eyes like splinters of the sky, was reading a dog-eared copy of The Cat in the Hat. This would be the child of the class leader, he thought, bowing quickly at the portrait of the school’s founder. But why bring her here? It cemented his contempt for this place, more a day care center than a kwoon. Still, he bowed a second time to the founder. Him he respected. Where were such grand old stylists when you needed them? He did not see Lewis, or any other student until, passing the curtained office, Morgan whiffed food cooking on a hot plate and, parting the curtain slightly, he saw Wendell, who would never in this life learn to fight, stirring and seasoning a pot of couscous. He looked like that children’s toy, Mr. Potato Head. Morgan wondered, Why did David Lewis encourage the man? Just to take his money? He passed on, feeling his tread shake the floor, into the narrow hall where a few hooks hung for clothing, and found Elizabeth with her left foot on a low bench, lacing the wrestling shoes she wore for working out.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’re finished.”
Their eyes caught for a moment.
“I’m done now.” She kicked her bag under the bench, squeezed past Morgan by flattening herself to the wall, as if he had a disease, then spun round at the entrance and looked squarely at him. “You know something?”
“What?”
“You’re wrong. Just wrong.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hell you don’t! David may not be the fighter, the killer, you are, but he is one of the best teachers in this system.”
Morgan smirked. “Those who can’t do, teach, eh?”
She burned a look of such hatred at Morgan, he turned his eyes away. When he looked back, she was gone. He sighed. He’d seen that look on so many faces, yellow, black, and white, after he’d punched them in. It hardly mattered anymore. Quietly, he suited up, stretched his arms wide, and padded barefoot back onto the main floor, prepared to finish this, if that was what Lewis wanted, for why else would he call?
But at first he could not catch sight of the boy. The others were standing around him in a circle, chatting, oddly like chess pieces shielding an endangered king. His movements were jerky and Chaplinesque, one arm around Elizabeth, the other braced on Wendell’s shoulder. Without them, he could not walk until his bruised ankles healed. He was temporarily blind in one blackened, beefed-over eye. And since he could not tie his own sash, Mark was doing it for him. None of them noticed Morgan, but in the school’s weak light, he could see blue welts he’d raised like crops on Lewis’s cheeks and chest. That, and something else. The hands of the others rested on Lewis’s shoulder, his back, as if he belonged to them, no matter what he did or didn’t do. Weak as Lewis looked now, even the old cook Wendell could blow him over, and somehow it didn’t matter if he was beaten every round, or missed class, or died. The others were the kwoon. It wasn’t his school. It was theirs. Maybe brought together by the boy, Morgan thought, but now a separate thing living beyond him. To prove the system, the teaching here, false, he would have to strike down every one of them. And still he would have touched nothing.
“Ed,” Lewis said, looking over Mark’s shoulder. “When we were sparring, I saw mistakes in your form, things someone better than me might take advantage of. I’d like to correct them, if you’re ready.”
“What things?” His head snapped back. “What mistakes?”
“I can’t match your reach,” said Lewis, “but someone who could, getting inside your guard, would go for your groin or knee. It’s the way you stand, probably a blend of a couple of styles you learned somewhere. But they don’t work together. If you do this,” he added, torquing his leg slightly so that his thigh guarded his groin, “the problem is solved.”
“Is that why you called me?”
“No, there’s another reason.”
Morgan tensed; he should have known.
“You do some warm-up exercises we’ve never seen. I like them. I want you to lead class tonight, if that’s okay, so the others can learn them too.” Then he laughed. “I think I should warm the bench tonight.”
Before Morgan could reply, Lewis limped off, leaning on Mark, who led him back to his office. The two others waited for direction from Morgan. For a moment he shifted his weight uncertainly from his right foot to his left, pausing until his tensed shoulders relaxed and the tight fingers on his right hand, coiled into a fist, opened. Then he pivoted toward the portrait of the founder. “Bow to the master.” They bowed. “Now to our teacher.” They did so, bowing toward the curtained room, with Morgan, a big man, bending deepest of all.
THE WEAVE
News item, July 12, 2012. Hair theft: Three thieves battered through a wall, crawled close to the floor to dodge motion detectors, and stole six duffel bags filled with human hair extensions from a Chicago beauty-supply store. The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday that the hair extensions were worth $230,000.
“So what feeds this hair machine?”
—Chris Rock, Good Hair
IEESHA is nervous and trying not to sneeze when she steps at four in the morning to the front door of Sassy Hair Salon and Beauty Supplies in the Central District. After all, it was a sneeze that got her fired from this salon two days ago. She has a sore throat and red eyes, but that’s all you can see because a ski mask covers the rest of her face. As she
twists the key in the lock, her eyes are darting in every direction, up and down the empty street, because she and I have never done anything like this before. When she worked here, the owner, Frances, gave her a key so she could open and straighten up the shop before the other hairstylists arrived. I told her to make a copy of the key in case one day she might need it. That was two days ago, on September first, the start of hay fever season and the second anniversary of the day we started dating.
Once inside the door, she has exactly forty seconds to remember and punch in the four-digit code before the alarm’s security system goes off. Then, to stay clear of the motion detectors inside that never turn off, she gets down on the floor of the waiting room in her cut-knee jeans and crawls on all fours past the leather reception chairs and modules stacked with Spin, Upscale, and Jet magazines for the salon’s customers to read and just perhaps find on their glossy, Photoshopped pages the coiffure that is perfect for their mood at the moment. Within a few seconds, Ieesha is beyond the reception area and into a space, long and wide, that is a site for unexpected mystery and wonder that will test the limits of what we think we know.
Moving deeper into this room, where the elusive experience called beauty is manufactured every day from hot combs and crème relaxers, she passes workstations, four on each side of her, all of them equipped with swiveling styling chairs and carts covered with appliance holders, spray bottles, and Sulfur8 shampoo. Holding a tiny flashlight attached to her key ring, she works her way around manicure tables, dryer chairs, and a display case where sexy, silky, eiderdown-soft wigs, some as thick as a show pony’s tail, hang in rows like scalps taken as trophies after a war. Every day, the customers at Sassy Hair Salon and the wigs lovingly check each other out for some time, and then after long and careful deliberation, the wigs always buy the women. Unstated, but permeating every particle in that exchange of desire, is a profound, historical pain, a hurt based on the lie that the hair one was unlucky enough to be born with can never in this culture be good enough, is never beautiful as it is, and must be scorched by scalp-scalding chemicals into temporary straightness, because if that torment is not endured often from the tender age of four months old, how can one ever satisfy the unquenchable thirst to be desired or worthy of love?
The storage room containing the unusual treasure she seeks is now just a few feet away, but Ieesha stops at the station where she worked just two days ago, her red eyes glazing over with tears caused not by ragweed pollen, but by a memory suspended in the darkness.
She sees it all again. There she is, wearing her vinyl salon vest, its pockets filled with the tools of her trade. In her chair is an older customer, a heavy, high-strung Seattle city councilwoman. The salon was packed that afternoon, steamed by peopled humidity. A ceiling fan shirred air perfumed with the odor of burnt hair. The councilwoman wanted her hair straightened, not permed, for a political fundraiser she was hosting that week. But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—sit quietly. She gossiped nonstop about everybody in city government as well as the ’do Gabby Douglass wore during the Olympics, blathering away in the kind of voice that carried right through you, that went inside like your ears didn’t have any choice at all and had to soak up the words the way a sponge did water. All of a sudden, Ieesha sneezed. Her fingers slipped. She burned the old lady’s left earlobe. The councilwoman flew from her seat, so enraged they had to peel her off the ceiling, shouting about how Ieesha didn’t know the first thing about doing hair. She demanded that Frances fire her, and even took things a step further, saying with a stroke of scorn that anyone working in a beauty salon should be looking damned good herself, and that Ieesha didn’t.
Frances was not a bad person to work for, far from it, and she knew my girlfriend was a first-rate cosmetologist. Even so, the owner of Sassy Hair Salon didn’t want to lose someone on the city council who was a twice-a-month, high-spending customer able to buy and sell her business twice over. As I was fixing our dinner of Top Ramen, Ieesha quietly came through the door of our apartment, still wearing her salon vest, her eyes burning with tears. She wears her hair in the neat, tight black halo she was born with, unadorned, simple, honest, uncontrived, as genuinely individual as her lips and nose. To some people she might seem as plain as characters in those old-timey plays, Clara in Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty or Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. But Ieesha has the warm, dark, and rich complexion of Michelle Obama or Angela Bassett, which is, so help me, as gorgeous as gorgeous gets. Nevertheless, sometimes in the morning as she was getting ready for work, I’d catch her struggling to pull a pick through the burls and kinks of her hair with tears in her eyes as she looked in the mirror, tugging hardest at the nape of her neck, that spot called “the kitchen.” I tell her she’s beautiful as she is, but when she peers at television, movies, or popular magazines where generic, blue-eyed, blonde Barbie dolls with orthodontically perfect teeth, Botox, and breast implants prance, pose, and promenade, she says with a sense of fatality and resignation, “I can’t look like that.” She knows that whenever she steps out our door, it’s guaranteed that a wound awaits her, that something will tell Ieesha that her hair and skin will never be good enough. All she has to do is walk into a store and be watched with suspicion, or have a cashier slap her change on the counter rather than place it on the palm of her outstretched hand. Or maybe read about the rodeo clown named Mike Hayhurst at the Creston Classic Rodeo in California who joked that “Playboy is offering Ann Romney $250,000 to pose in that magazine and the White House is upset about it because National Geographic only offered Michelle Obama $50 to pose for them.”
Between bouts of blowing her nose loudly into a Kleenex in our tiny studio apartment, she cried the whole day she got fired, saying with a hopeless, plaintive hitch in her voice, “What’s wrong with me?” Rightly or wrongly, she was convinced that she would never find another job during the Great Recession. That put everything we wanted to do on hold. Both of us were broke, with bills piling up on the kitchen counter after I got laid off from my part-time job as a substitute English teacher at Garfield High School. We were on food stamps and got our clothes from Goodwill. I tried to console her, first with kisses, then caresses, and before the night was over we had roof-raising sex. Afterward, and for the thousandth time, I came close to proposing that we get married. But I had a failure of nerve, afraid she’d temporize or say no, or that because we were so poor we needed to wait. To be honest, I was never sure if she saw me as Mr. Right or just as Mr. Right Now.
So what I said to her that night, as we lay awake in each other’s arms, our fingers intertwined, was that getting fired might just be the change of luck we’d been looking for. Frances was so busy with customers she didn’t have time to change the locks. Or the code for the ADT alarm system. Naturally, Ieesha, who’d never stolen anything in her life, was reluctant, but I kept after her until she agreed.
Finally, after a few minutes, Ieesha enters the density of the storeroom’s sooty darkness, feeling her way cat-footed, her arms outstretched. Among cardboard boxes of skin creams, conditioners, balms, and oils, she locates the holy grail of hair in three pea-green duffel bags stacked against the wall, like rugs rolled up for storage. She drags a chair beneath the storeroom window, then starts tossing the bags into the alley. As planned, I’m waiting outside, her old Toyota Corolla dappled with rust idling behind me. I catch each bag as it comes through the window and throw it onto the backseat. The bags, I discover, weigh next to nothing. Yet for some reason, these sacks of something as common and plentiful as old hair are worth a lot of bank—why, I don’t know. Or why women struggling to pay their rent, poor women forced to choose between food and their winter fuel bill, go into debt shelling out between $1,000 and $3,000 and sometimes as much as $5,000 for a weave with real human hair. It baffled me until I read how some people feel that used things possess special properties. For example, someone on eBay bought Britney Spears’s chewed gum for $14,000, someone else paid $115,000 for a handful of hair from Elvis Presley’s pompadou
r, and his soiled, jockey-style shorts went on sale for $16,000 at an auction in England. (No one, by the way, bought his unwashed skivvies.) Another person spent $3,000 for Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten French toast. I guess some of those eBay buyers feel closer to the person they admire, maybe even that something of that person’s essence is magically clinging to the part they purchased.
As soon as Ieesha slides into the passenger seat, pulling off her ski mask and drawing short, hard breaths as if she’s been running up stairs, my foot lightly applies pressure to the gas pedal and I head for the freeway, my elbow out the window, my fingers curled on the roof of the car. Within fifteen minutes, we’re back at our place. I park the car, and we sling the bags over our shoulders, carry them inside to our first-floor unit, and stack them on the floor between the kitchenette and the sofa bed we sleep on. Ieesha sits down on a bedsheet still twisted from the night before, when we were joined at the groin. She knocks off her shoes run down at the heel and rubs her ankles. She pulls a couple of wigs and a handful of hair extensions from one of the bags. She spreads them on our coffee table, frowning, then sits with her shoulders pulled in, as if waiting for the ceiling to cave in.
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