Extreme Elvin

by Chris Lynch

  Why was I such a lightning rod for people wanting to improve me all the time? Was I so offensive that people had to come back from the dead to try and fix me up for the greater good of this world and the next?

  Anyway, who was he? Just because he was skinny, he could offer me tips on living? Because he was skinny and because he used to be related to my dad who used to be alive and used, also, to be related to me? And because he was also good buddies with God?

  I happened to be good buddies with God. I was cool with God and God was cool with me. I know, there was the issue of my good buddy’s kind of cruel sense of humor, but from my experience a friend is no friend if he cannot dig the needle into you on a regular basis. Like this:

  Me: Mikie, I don’t know what it is, but I am eating like a horse lately.

  Mikie: Like a horse a day, from the looks of it, El.

  Mikie, as in my best earthly friend, said that. But that was okay, because my next-best earthly friend was right there to jump in. Watch:

  Me: I don’t care. I have decided to live with it and embrace my inner fat guy.

  Frankie: That’ll come in handy, El, ’cause I don’t think anybody’s gonna embrace the outer one.

  So there, you see, was my frame of friendship reference. That’s what friends did. Therefore, I think I was one up on most people in being able to perceive the Almighty, because while most folks went flailing around and chasing signs and worshipping crying statues and ooohing and ahhhing at stigmata and the like, I knew profoundly that God loved me because he mocked me. I, in turn, praised him by being his straight man. That is why I was not required to go to church or confession or anything else. God and I had a more intimate thing, based on humor. And that, I could understand.

  But I didn’t have to like it all the time.

  “Ahhh,” I shrieked as I caught sight of myself in a big plate-glass bakery window. You know that morning bakery smell when all the different stuffs, the various bagels and birthday cakes and muffins and donuts and breads and rolls and danishes and baklava and cannoli and apple pie and blueberry pie and strawberry rhubarb pie and cherry custard tarts are all firing up at the same time and all become one unbelievable, inseparable, satanic, majestic smell?

  Right, well, I didn’t shriek, exactly, but I did take in a sharp breath of air that made a sound. I had lost myself in the bakery scent and stood there gawping at the window like a cross between a Norman Rockwell scene of wholesomeness in which I would eventually be handed a cruller by a kindhearted baker, and a Grimm fairy tale where a long, twisted, gnarly hand would instead reach out and yank me into an Elvin potpie.

  I didn’t look too good. I was showing the signs of lack of sleep, of a poorly chosen T-shirt that had fit me a couple years earlier when Bart Simpson might possibly have still said “Cowabunga” like he was now on my belly, and of the mysterious madness that still swirled on my head. I forgot, I was out to get a haircut.

  Peeling away from the bakery window, I assured myself that all that was required here was the proper styling. I had seen the shampoo and conditioner ads. A snip here, a flip there, and you achieved a new confidence that changed everything, put a bounce in your step and removed it from your belly.

  Not to mention putting a little distance between your look and your uncle’s.

  I must have wanted this bad, to go out looking randomly on a Sunday for a haircut. Sal, my regular barber, was closed on Sundays, but I suppose that was part of the plan. I didn’t want my regular barber. Not because I normally only went to him because I had done so all my life and he was three doors down from us. Not because he was well past retirement and I had to wake him up sometimes and when I did he usually couldn’t find his glasses and then he usually just went ahead with the job anyway. Not because I sometimes went in and got a haircut without needing one just because I was passing his window and he was very alone and wide awake and he waved at me like he was my grandpa and happy to see me. And not because he still gave me lemon or root beer lollipops in the clear wrappers that I don’t think you could get without going to an old barber.

  I didn’t want to go to Sal because he always made me look like me. I didn’t want that.

  Without much to go on, I cruised the streets of town, finding that there were not only an alarming number of hairdressers, but that most of them were open on Sunday. I thought about going into one and panicked, then walked the whole route again to casually look the whole bunch up and down again.

  I didn’t know what to look for. It could be hard to tell whether they did guys, for example, although I supposed that in the twenty-first century, everybody probably did. I couldn’t take a chance. I decided to consider only the ones that said “Unisex” right there in the window, and had guy pictures alongside all the girls, and the guy pictures could not be prettier than the girl pictures. This whittled down the field surprisingly quickly.

  Then I eliminated the one where my mother went. And the three others on the same street. Then I crossed off the ones where the hairdressers themselves had scary, large, dry, white and/or sparkly hairstyles. Why would a place that wants your hair business show you atrocities like that if they had the first clue of what to do with your hair? Asymmetrical styles, out. Too many stylists, say five, with two or fewer customers, not—

  “Listen, kid, if you pass by once more without coming in for a haircut, I think it’s harassment,” said the man with the perfect black, straight-back comb job. His hair came down kind of long on the sides, hanging softly on either side of his face, but the middle bit on top stayed miraculously still, holding the whole show together. He had a sort of pirate mustache and beard, and altogether looked far cooler than I ever figured a hairstylist was supposed to. He stood in the doorway, under a sign that read “Mysterious Ways Hair.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “No, you’re not sorry. That hair is sorry. Get yourself in here right now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now,” he said when he had me in one of the two available chairs, “you have done the right thing. Now it is up to me.” There was a third chair, where someone was sitting under one of those Martian helmet dryers, with some kind of towels swirled all around her face. There were no other stylists around. “What is your name?”

  “Elvin.”

  “Good. I like it. I am Nardo. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Elvin.”

  We shook hands. He had a good firm grip, but mostly from his first two fingers and thumb. From all that scissors work, probably.

  “How old are you, Elvin?” He was looking me over now, walking around, crouching low, then boosting up on his toes to get angles on my head.

  “Almost fifteen.”

  “Almost? Almost fifteen. Does that mean that you are fourteen?”

  “Yes,” I said, my chin dropping guiltily to the navy polyester cloak I now had wrapped around me.

  “Well, you look fifteen, I must say. Carol,” Nardo said, poking the other body with a comb, “doesn’t Elvin look quite mature for fourteen?”

  Carol grunted.

  “So who did this to you? You can tell me,” Nardo said as he began taking exploratory snips of my hair.

  “My uncle,” I said grimly.

  He stopped clipping. “Oh. Well, I usually don’t get an answer, since it’s actually just a joke question. But okay. Is this uncle of yours the devil, or just a very, very bad hairstylist?”

  “He’s...”

  What was he? I didn’t know what he was. And what was it about getting your hair cut that made you feel obligated to answer questions?

  “I don’t know what he is, actually.”

  “Close family, huh?”

  “Well, no, I guess not.”

  “What do we have in mind today, Elvin? Something radical? Bold? I’m guessing you are looking for something new, because that’s why the winds brought you here. Do you have something in mind? Or see something you like on the walls?”

  The walls had dozens of pictures, divided equally among men’s
and women’s styles, with very little difference between them. They could have all been the same mannequin with the wigs switched for each new picture. And the truth was, not one of them looked remotely as slick as the maestro himself.

  “Can you make me look like you?” was what came flying out of my mouth. I felt myself turn red with embarrassment, but was glad it came out anyway as long as the result was going to be that I was as devilish cool as this guy.

  “No.”

  I deflated. Not in any good way, though.

  “You can’t?”

  “I can, of course. But I won’t. Nobody gets to look like me. That’s the rule.” He pointed dramatically toward the back of the shop, to a sign posted on a door, that read “We are sorry, but nobody can look like Nardo.”

  “Anyway, my friend Elvin, you are a very handsome young man in your own right. You do not need to look like me. We just need to find the details to complement what you already have.”

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the picture. Of Frankie. It was his most recent class picture. He gave it to me for my birthday.

  “Can you make me look like this, then?”

  He took the picture from me, stared at it, and expressed himself.

  “Oooh, mama. Isn’t he nice. Do you know this boy? I mean, he’s no Nardo, of course, but he is awfully nice anyway.”

  I slumped. “That means no, then.”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to stop studying the Greek god in his hand, but he could spare me a thought at the same time. “Hey, hey, didn’t we already have trouble with this? No more of this low self-esteem nonsense, or I will make you ugly. I can do that, too, you know.”

  “Sorry. We wouldn’t want that.”

  “No. Now about this. You don’t have curly hair, for starters.”

  I tugged at a corner of the picture. He wouldn’t give it up. I craned. “It’s not curly, exactly, though. It’s wavy, really.”

  “Yes, true. And it isn’t as... dark as yours, or... quite the same texture. And his hair is thick....”

  “I have seen the picture, Nardo. Many, many times. Seen the real thing a lot too. I understand the gargantuan nature of the request. I just thought maybe if you were really talented...”

  “Hmm. An awfully big challenge to set a person for a slow Sunday. But I do like a challenge. You have come to the right place, Elvin. Probably the only place.”

  “Great,” I said, clapping my hands, buzzy with excitement now.

  “First we’ll need to wash this mop.” He pulled me out of the chair, led me to another chair, and leaned me back all the way over till my head was in the sink. “So this uncle who did this to you...,” he said as he began running warm water and his fingers through my hair.

  “Oh, I guess he’s probably all right. I’m still getting used to him. I thought he was dead, but he’s not. He’s out with my mother right now.”

  “Your uncle goes out with your mother? What does your father think of that?”

  “Not much. He’s dead.”

  “Are you sure? You were wrong about the other guy.”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Oh,” he said, working some honey-smelling shampoo through my hair with an extra-gentle motion, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. They’re not really out-out; they’re at church.”

  “Oh,” he said again, stopping even the shampooing to sympathize. “I am sorry. They always have the worst hair of all.”

  He went back to his very fine work of shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing my hair. It was a pretty relaxing treatment for a haircut, a whole different world from old Sal. I was nearly asleep by the time Nardo revealed that his mother went around telling people that she had had affairs with Jimi Hendrix and Ernest Hemingway and at least two Beatles, but she wasn’t certain which ones.

  “They will screw you up, your relatives, if you pay too much attention to them.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Good. And take better care of your hair.”

  “Right. Less attention to relatives, more attention to hair.”

  “Bingo. Key to life.”

  Finally I had the key.

  A Biography of Chris Lynch

  Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.

  Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”

  In 1989, Lynch married, and later had two children, Sophia and Walker. The family moved to Roslindale, Massachusetts, where they lived for seven years. In 1996, Lynch moved his family to Ireland, his father’s birthplace, where Lynch has dual citizenship. After a few years in Ireland, he separated from his wife and met his current partner, Jules. In 1998, Jules and her son, Dylan, joined in the adventure when Lynch, Sophia, and Walker sailed to southwest Scotland, which remains the family’s base to this day. In 2010, Sophia had a son, Jackson, Lynch’s first grandchild.

  When his children were very young, Lynch would work at home, catching odd bits of available time to write. Now that his children are grown, he leaves the house to work, often writing in local libraries and “acting more like I have a regular nine-to-five(ish) job.”

  Lynch has written more than twenty-five books for young readers, including Inexcusable (2005), a National Book Award finalist; Freewill (2001), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor; and several novels cited as ALA Best Books for Young Adults, including Gold Dust (2000) and Slot Machine (1995).

  Lynch’s books are known for capturing the reality of teen life and experiences, and often center on adolescent male protagonists. “In voice and outlook,” Lynch says, “Elvin Bishop [in the novels Slot Machine; Extreme Elvin; and Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz] is the closest I have come to representing myself in a character.” Many of Lynch’s stories deal with intense, coming-of-age subject matters. The Blue-Eyed Son trilogy was particularly hard for him to write, because it explores an urban world riddled with race, fear, hate, violence, and small-mindedness. He describes the series as “critical of humanity in a lot of ways that I’m still not terribly comfortable thinking about. But that’s what novelists are supposed to do: get uncomfortable and still be able to find hope. I think the books do that. I hope they do.”

  Lynch’s He-Man Women Haters Club series takes a more lighthearted tone. These books were inspired by the club of the same name in the Little Rascals film and TV show. Just as in the Little Rascals’ club, says Lynch, “membership is really about classic male lunkheadedness, inadequacy in dealing with girls, and with many subjects almost always hiding behind the more macho word hate when we cannot admit that it’s fear.”

  Today, Lynch splits his time between Scotland and the US, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His life motto cont
inues to be “shut up and write.”

  Lynch, age twenty, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he played with while living in Jamaica Plain, Boston.

  Lynch with his daughter, Sophia, and son, Walker, in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 2002.

  Lynch at the National Book Awards in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s brother Brian; his mother, Dot; Lynch; and his brother E.J.

  Lynch with his family at Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags at Hollyrood Park in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s daughter, Sophia; niece Kim; Lynch; his son, Walker; his partner, Jules, and her son, Dylan; and Lynch’s brother E.J.

  In 2009, Lynch spoke at a Massachusetts grade school and told the story of Sister Elizabeth of Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plain, the only teacher he had who would “encourage a proper, liberating, creative approach to writing.” A serious boy came up to Lynch after his talk, handed him this paper origami nun, and said, “I thought you should have a nun. Her name is Sister Elizabeth.” Sister Elizabeth hangs in Lynch’s car to this day.

  Lynch and his “champion mystery multibreed knuckleheaded hound,” Dexter, at home in Scotland in 2011. Says Lynch, “Dexter and I often put our heads together to try and fathom an unfathomable world.” Though Dexter lives with him, Lynch is allergic to dogs, and survives by petting Dexter with his feet and washing his hands multiple times a day!

  Lynch never makes a move without first consulting with his trusted advisor and grandson, Jackson. This photo was taken in 2012, when Jackson was two years old, in Lynch’s home in Coylton, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Lynch later discovered his house was locally known as “the Hangman’s Cottage” because of the occupation of one of its earliest residents. One of his novels, The Gravedigger’s Cottage, is loosely based on this house.

  Lynch dressed up as Wolverine for Halloween in 2012.