And what did my mind go to?
To that duct-taped slit-hole in my apartment. Like tape over her eyes. She hadn’t yet seen me.
I went home and got her off the couch and led her by the hands to the middle of the room.
She said, “You’re ice cold, but you’re sweating! You’re shakin’ like a leaf!”
I said, “Now listen here I’m gonna tell you somethin’ I shoulda told you long ago, Girly. WHOA here we go—”
If you’re ever wondering about why someone does something, and you’re thinking, “Why would that person do that?” and you’re judging the act on a scale of what’s normal and what’s not normal, stop right there and put your ruler away and get that pencil out from behind your ear. People do what they do for reasons. And more often than not, the reason is none of your business and it’s not even something you’d understand. It’s not your job to point out “flaws” in people. Like when there’s an apple in the grocery store with someone’s fingernail print stamped into it, you don’t take the apple to the manager and chuck it at his jaw, you just choose another apple or get that one and cut the fingernail part out. Or hell, if you’re a sicko, you eat the fingernail part along with whatever was under the person’s fingernail.
“Carol,” I said, “I’m gonna tell you somethin’ about myself that you might think’s shocking.”
She said, “What?”
“It was a sort of therapy I did.”
“Therapy?! You ain’t a psycho right?”
“No, not therapy like that.” I grimaced. “Sit down.”
She put her butt on a table meant for lawns.
I said, “It was when me and Father John were on the bus out here.”
“What?” she said.
“He was sleepin’ in front of me one night. And I was lookin’ at the back of his head through the gap between the seat and the window, you know. I was just like hating his head. Because you know what he said to me at that McDonald’s stop? He was like, ‘I want you outta me and your mom’s hair.’ So when he said that, right away I pictured myself walkin’ on his scalp through his hair like it’s some woods I’m lost in? Like with—I saw I had a piece of broken toothpick for a walkin’ stick?”
“Okay?” Carol said.
“It doesn’t matter, but I was sittin’ there lookin’ at his hair and he was asleep, so—” I stopped to chuckle, trying things, “—I took out my Swiss army knife and cut off a piece of his hair.”
“Ha! Good!” she said, clapping.
“It made me feel kinda good though, in a funny way. Like orgasms, but not that weird.” I farted fast, “No, not that weird at all, hell Carol. The point is, the next time I had the opportunity, I cut off a piece of someone else’s hair.” I tried shrugging.
“Who was it?” she said.
“Well, it goes on and on though.”
She blinked and put a hand up to her pearl.
“I did it a lot,” I said. “Hell, like every day I’d say.”
“No, you didn’t!” she said.
“Yeah, I did.”
A sickening pause; a sickened look on her face.
Yes, to complete the weirdery I said this to myself often, sometimes aloud: “I’m The Haircutter, and I like it!” I cut hair with the confidence of a serial killer. It was my thing. It didn’t make me proud, but it didn’t make me ashamed either. It didn’t make me masturbate, it just made me do it again. Locks frayed off with the sound of my father’s gasp if he’d witnessed the scene. There came a rush. Built up like fat and equaled a habit. Like saying I’m The Haircutter and I like it. Pull me up a chair and I’ll take my scissor out of my back pocket in order to sit down. Put me in a movie theater and I’ll snip from the head in front of me. Put me on the subway during sardine hour and I’ll snip from the hair trusting me. Put me in a bar and I’ll snip from your hairstyle, then order a Coke while inserting the lock into that miniature pocket jeans have. Put me on a toilet and I’ll connect those freckles on my thighs with my fingernail to see a red vacuum cleaner outline for a second. See? It’s nonsense, so who cares.
Except Carol.
“To strangers?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I can’t say why. I just didn’t have anything else to do or somethin’. It started bein’ a habit. But I’m done with it now that I have you!”
“You cut off their hair?!” she said.
“No! Just a lock!”
“What do you mean? How’d you cut off their hair? Didn’t they fill it?”
“No they didn’t feel it. I never got caught. I just got good at it. You’d be so surprised how many times someone’s hair is right in front of you just trusting you not to cut it, Carol.”
“But it takes rill guts to do something like that, John! Weird guts,” she said.
This pained me. I went to her and gathered her hands in mine and told her, “I know Carol, and I really hope it’s somethin’ you can accept about me. And it’s over with too, it’s totally done and over with, so what’s the big deal? It was just somethin’ that made me feel somethin’ when I didn’t have anything else in my life that made me feel. You know what I mean, feel? Like how I feel lovin’ you.” And at that cheesy admission, I felt so unlike myself I released her hands and paced with my brows furrowed, grinding my teeth.
“You’re lyin’,” she said.
“Why would I lie?” I said.
“Cause you’re a good guy!” she said.
“Well, maybe I’m not if I cut all that hair.”
“But normal people don’t do things like that!” she said.
“Unless they don’t have nothin’ else to do?” I tried.
“No! They go out with friends, they have hobbies!”
“That was my hobby! I even call myself The Haircutter, or H.C. for short! Everyone calls me H.C.! My name feels like it is The Haircutter. Carol, I had this whole life here without you and I’m just fillin’ you in on it is all.”
Then I thought, No! I won’t have this! I got angry and said, “No! Now this here’s dumb is what! I don’t have weird guts, I just had a weird thing for a while.” I picked up my keys and tossed them onto another table. She lowered her chin and writhed a bit, finding it sexy that my voice was raised.
“Okay! It’s okay with me. It’s fine,” she said.
I panted; she bit her lip and her legs twitched open an inch.
“Well, look first. Before you say that,” I said.
I went to the slit-hole and peeled off all the tape.
I said, shrugging, “God, I don’t know why the hell I didn’t tell you this when I was taping this hole up. I was all focused on the mold.”
I balled the tape up and tossed it at the kitchen. I cleared my throat and slid out the door. That old feel of sliding it out again.
Carol gasped.
There it was: 3,017 locks of hair in every color taped to that old piece of wood, dated and noted, looking like the coat of a wild animal if you squint. The coat of the beast that is New York.
She put her hand over her mouth. It made me wince and look away. I was frozen inside, waiting. I tried to look at myself judgmentally to see if I thought I was weird, but it all felt normal to me—that’s my hairboard, so what? Except it’s pretty.
Carol tapped her toe triangles over to stand before it.
“This is my hairboard,” I said, and faster than you can say Creepy she yanked me to the bedroom. And that’s the first time we really “fucked.”
So came the day when The Haircutter thought to stop in to Biggest Browse Bookstore to show Carol off as the product of the wolf job. They found the artistic boy Finn running a register.
“Why didn’t you check in after completing the job?” Finn said.
The Haircutter said, “Was there something wrong with my mission?”
“I don’t know. I just have your payment. I almost spent it.”
“Payment?”
“Yeah I’ve had to carry your cash around waiting for you to come in. I was broke last week, y
ou’re lucky I didn’t spend it.”
Finn opened a drawer and handed The Haircutter two thousand dollars. The Haircutter went, “Yee haw!” on accident, then stuffed it in his pocket, stuttering and looking around. “I thought the per diem was my payment,” he said.
“I don’t know. But hey, come to an opening Mr. Christmas is having at his gallery tonight. Come by, you have to. It’s the Thank You Gallery on 20th and 10th.”
“Oh yeah?” The Haircutter said, “Well hell, I’ll bring Carol. Here, this is my girlfriend Carol.”
Carol said, “How do you do,” and her heart fluttered beneath her protruding sternum—it was the first friend H.C. had introduced her to. And the last he ever would, because it was his only one.
Snow fell fast as rain the night we went to the Thank You Gallery. A crackling fire licked its shadows up the walls of Old Auntie’s apartment. The windows were tall and sweating; the city outside was covered in crystalline. Carol made mulled wine to fragrance the evening with cinnamon and the snagging smell of alcohol. Lace at the hem of her dress dusted the 1940s floor as she padded around on black-bottomed bare feet, getting ready for the opening. She squatted with a compact to use the fire as a light on her lips; she applied lipstick. I sat before a table of roses in a chair that had curling, metal legs and a split, yellow seat. Her spine was to me. She saw me watching her in the compact—she jerked it away so I couldn’t see, then she slowly glided it back and we held eyes seriously. Her hair was in one solid curl, matching the rose petals befallen before me. She stood up slowly, clashing with the flow of snow. I dug my fingernails into the table. She turned around to me blushing to show.
The chests of two “young people” pumped the air, tenderizing it.
A Love Songs record wobbled beside her, gleaming, matching her lips.
She looked like a protagonist.
I said, “You’re the cat’s pajamas,” being careful to pronounce pajamas pajawmas as aristocrats do, and realizing with a fading smile that I don’t in fact actually know what an aristocrat is.
Stuff like that. She wore a long blue dress, her black high heels, and for warmth her fur hunting coat. I wore the suit that I’d been wearing daily for job interviews. It smelled in the pits, but what’re you gonna do.
The snow melted when it touched the ground, but blew straight into us before it did. Clouds of steam came out of grates in the street like ghosts of past-century bushes. Carol’s high heels kept pace, tick-tocking the concrete. We had to stop in a deli to ask for a napkin so she could blow her runny bunny nose. Her makeup job looked nullified in the lime-green light. I loved her though, and she loved me. We hopped over puddles of slush, conquering them. A man shouted over the rumble of traffic and through the gusting white, “Do you mind if I tell you about the word of The Lord Jesus Christ?”
I said, “Look, we’re here!” and pointed across the street.
The Thank You Gallery was a square white room with Thank You gilded a thousand times on the window. It was packed with people inside. Carol and I shook off our coats, shouting over the din. The floor had a layer of grey slush that people extinguished their cigarettes in. A smiling girl offered us free glasses of champagne. A man wearing horse blinders turned to his friend and hit him in the head with them, “Ooh sorry! You just became a fashion victim.” His friend said, “That’s okay. This is amazing. It’s lovely, really. People are very gently on drugs.”
The whole thing was strange to Carol and me—a square room stuffed with smokers and free champagne. What for? What’s “an opening” mean? I thought, Well, I guess it means opening up and socializing. Okay.
I looked at Carol and she was brushing off her dress, drinking fast sips of her champagne. It was a tougher crowd than the one at the poetry houses. Where those people would suck pens and hunch and cross their legs doubley where you do the foot too, these people would glance at you with a look that could cut your next birthday cake.
I took Carol’s arm and led her to a couple who were linked together by a chain that was hooked to a nose piercing on her and an ear piercing on him.
“Hi, I’m H.C. and this is my girlfriend, Carol.”
I took a mouthful of champagne, then I saw something that made me spit it out so hard it dissipated completely and got nothing wet.
The girl on the chain shrieked and tugged her boyfriend away.
Carol and I stood before a pair of human lips sticking out of a hole in the wall.
Real lips.
“Oh my god, John! Weird! Is that rill?”
“There’s another!”
Each of the three walls of the room had some holes with lips sticking out of them.
“Excuse me,” someone said. It was a man who wanted to view the lips in front of us.
He stepped up to them and kissed them. A little peck.
“What’s he doing?” Carol said.
We looked around—there was someone else kissing. A completely normal lady was on a stepping stool kissing one of the lip sets too. Someone took her picture.
“John! What is this?”
“It’s the damned weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, that’s what.”
“It’s thrilling!” she said, like it was urgent to say so. Like she was saying, I’m gonna puke, gimme that trashcan!
It’s thrilling!
The crowd parted to show a man in a blue suit kissing a hole in the wall while caressing it as if combing the fronds of a weeping willow. A bald man stood beside him howling, loving the love scene. He was in a checkered suit that was red and green, so right away I thought: Christmas.
I approached him with a finger pointed at him.
“I drove the wolf,” I said.
“You’re my wolf man!” he said, laughing eight feet taller than me.
I felt a surprise sting of jealousy upon realizing that the wolf was as much his as it was mine, if not more.
“Leslie Christmas,” he said, shaking my hand and spitting in my eye. He had piles of spittle in the corners of his little mouth like piles of silver bullets.
“I’m H.C. and this is my girlfriend Carol.”
“Hi!” Mr. Christmas said and kissed her hand.
Christmas had turtle’s lips and his head looked enormous because it was hairless and his face seemed to take up only a very small area of the head. He looked like an ultrasound. But tall—very tall, and very thin. And when he laughed, which he did a lot, his eyes starred and his top lip gathered even pointier and flipped up a bit.
“What do you think of the piece? Isn’t it a gas? She’s one of my favorite artists. Blaise DonRobison. She’s over there.”
“What? It’s an art piece?” I said.
He burst out laughing. “Yes! An interactive installation. The kissers will be here every day. Hi, how are ya?” he said to someone else.
I said, “What?”
“Yeah,” Carol said with her jaw dropped, smiling, “How’s that art?”
Christmas popped a laugh, “I like you two!”
Once more—his face was placed discretely on a small area of skin that protected his king-sized brain. It made me stand there thinking about how brains are stored inside of faces—or behind faces? Or simply how faces are placed on the skin that protects brains. And, as if this weren’t odd enough, these “faces” act like labels on boxes with ever-changing contents—as minds change their contents, facial expressions label the change—see what I mean? The brain is Sad; the brain is Horny. And, because women love ultrasounds, Christmas was a womanizer and all that. The man is A Baby; the brain Likey. Most everyone’s brains held charm for him—their labels clearly indicated such. He’s the kind of man who stands on the edges of skyscrapers to get high.
“You are inside of the Thank You Gallery, my gallery, an art gallery and the artist is Blaise DonRobison and this is her art piece.” He stopped to laugh sincerely and hike his pant legs up by the pockets. “It’s a comment on the ambiguities of sexual pleasure in the year 2000.”
I said, “Huh?�
� snarling.
Carol said, “I’m not accustomed to art ideas or ads or whatever, but any dummy knows art is sold in museums, so what’s an interactive installation then? And what’s an art gallery?”
“It’s all the same! Art is art. This is a museum!”
“I thought it was an art gallery,” I said.
“Yeah!” Carol shouted, pointing at me.
Mr. Christmas pushed us out of the way and ferociously kissed a set of lips, having to bend his legs to their height. Then he sucked away from them and looked at us half cross-eyed as if the scene was supposed to make us understand.
“It’s art because the artist says so,” he said quietly. “You can read about it on the sheet, it’s around here somewhere. The idea inspired the artist enough to see it to fruition. She’s letting us inside her mind. Hi, how are you,” he said to a man in a wheelchair who had his wrists floating up around his head like gnats on a peach.
“Your hairboard is art,” Carol said.
Carol had a black eye booger in the corner of her left eye and H.C. permeated body odor at a radius of five people and had one of his pant legs caught in the heel of one of his shoes when their lives changed forever.
Carol said, “I’ve been tellin’ him, Mr. Christmas. He’s got this giant board of hair locks.” Her fingers oogled the words like she was talking endangered crystals.
“Carol!”
“I’ve been tellin’ him he should do somethin’ with it,” she poked Mr. Christmas to keep his attention. “It’s a big huge sliding door at our apartment and he’s got all these locks of hair that he cut off people on the street taped on it.”
Mr. Christmas looked me up and down. His face labeled that his brain/box contained interest. “Is that right?” he said.
I set my champagne glass on a table and a dwarf took it and put it in a bin.
I said, “Carol, can I talk to you?”
“No, tell him John! How many hair locks you got, like, what’s it, three thousand?”
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