The Haircutter

by Dana Thompson

  I went back to the warehouse and there were early-comers viewing the piece.

  “This is dumb,” I heard their voices echo.

  “Or is it?” they said.

  “Yes it is,” they decided.

  I gasped and put a gained-weight hand over my mouth.

  “I’m artsy fartsy, and this is even too artsy fartsy for me. Is there more or is it just this?” they said.

  “I thought his stuff was supposed to be fun.”

  “TURN THE MUSIC ON!” Charlie Quick shouted and charged toward an orchestra that flinched and picked up their bows in one motion and started to play. They were hooked to speakers around the room. They didn’t sound classical, they sounded like a human body full of nerves. I lowered my gained-weight hand and shook it near my pocket. I thought about wishing I had a gun to draw, then I imagined getting shot and didn’t care. My shaking hand retarded.

  Then the elf was sprinkling catnip around for the white cats; he had a terrifying little pouch. My shaking hand restarted. Christmas approached me frowning.

  “Haircutter!” he said, spreading his arms and stopping on thousand-dollar soles.

  “What?” I said.

  “Have you been going to museums?” he said.

  I said, “No?”

  “HAVE YOU BEEN GOING TO MUSEUMS OR LOOKING AT ART BOOKS?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  Charlie Quick went to whisper in Christmas’s ear.

  The early-comers multiplied and multiplied again and made a din that multiplied in the same pompous fashion.

  Christmas said, louder, “I don’t understand, Haircutter! There’s something queer going on here! I almost don’t believe that that work is yours!”

  Now the elf was standing at the edge of the spotlight’s glow, staring at me.

  “He intimidates me,” I had said. “I don’t need a girlfriend. Scram!”

  My teeth started chattering.

  “You don’t like the piece?” I said.

  “Noooooo!” Mr. Christmas stated.

  “Oh wow,” I said with farts suddenly puttering out of me. “Hell, I’m sorry. Do you think it’ll sell?”

  “My buyers want The Haircutter! This work looks like you’re taking the piss out of them! We want a Haircutter piece!” he started pacing. “You were the real thing! You were an original! And now you’ve ruined it!”

  “Well boo fuckin’ hoo, Santy Clause!” I said.

  Christmas held out a hand as if to show me to Charlie Quick, “I can’t even laugh at him anymore. I used to think he was so funny.”

  “Get that fuckin’ elf outta here!” I shouted.

  “Get the hell out!” I pointed at Siedle and he ran to Charlie Quick and hugged onto his leg. Charlie whispered in Christmas’s ear again.

  Christmas said, “My lawyer is telling me to stop talking. Siedle, go home.”

  A set of elevator doors opened up that I didn’t know were there and a group of people blinked into the room.

  “How was the ride?!” Christmas said, walking toward them.

  He was doing helicopter rides to and from the Thank You Gallery for the elitest of the elite. A woman riding a dying alligator came out of the elevator last. Quick gave me an apologetic frown as Siedle took off his curly shoes and had normal feet. He put on kids’ tennis shoes and took off his jingle bell hat and got into a cab. And just like that he proved that there is no such thing as elves. I snarled and took out a toothpick and crossed my arms to rest them on my stomach while The Haircutter looked around.

  There were school buses backed up unloading jacketed people for the party. There were candles on ten-foot-tall sticks; there were camera flashes; there were gleams on the golden ashtrays standing around the black room; gleams on eyeglasses; gleams on diamonds when they tossed the seas within them as ladies laughed. Party-comers had come to see The Haircutter’s latest. The light of their cell phones lit their ho-hum faces as they descended the platform stairs after looking down on my failed piece of shit. Anna-Patrick! Charlie Quick stood at the bottom of the stairs passing out invitation cards for the next Thank You Gallery opening: it said LOXER VEER presents LOXER’S GRANDMOTHER and had a picture of a naked old woman vomiting into a potted plant while keeping a lit cigarette going in the corner of her mouth. A SERIES OF PORTRAITS AND VIDEOS, it said.

  “Ooh, Loxer Veer’s the best!” they said.

  There were opinions held and opinions given, there were tampons held inside of women, there were dead foxes, dead rabbits, dead minks, the alligator died, there were people who were dead inside, people living-the-life, people who’d grabbed their keys off their living room mantels before coming out tonight, there were professions of every enviable type—all there to get a load of the genius Haircutter because everyone knows they need artists in order to have something on the wall above their beds. It was a nightmare I had no choice but to wait to wake up from. Frankincense and myrrh burned thick atop the top hats of failed-actor caterers: nightmare. The mouth of the borderless black room swallowed tuxes and dresses and con men and princesses, who greeted each other like “Que the hell pasa!” or “Say, Mama!” or “I didn’t catch the name!”: nightmare. Some of them were the type to not mind a cold ocean, and some were the type who’d rather not get in. Some had made money at desks for so long that they knew how to flip a pen in the space above their hand and catch it. Women walked into the warehouse wearing gowns that rushed against their legs like night rain on curbs. They gently took cigs out of their mouths to say, “Pretty kitties,” on clouds of smoke. My testicles hid fearfully in my stomach fat near the one dollar in my pocket: nightmare.

  Nightmare: maybe Scott Harp was off climbing Mount Everest somewhere? With Carol riding on his head? And my scissor in his back pocket? And panty-free Carol had her skirt over his eyes with holes cut in it so he could see? So she came and came on his head again and again as he ascended?

  In between flashes of people walking by and brushing past me, and in between moths from people’s attics that they got their fur coats out of brushing past me, I looked for a wheelchair—where was she?! I got faked-out by a wheelchair with that guy in it who has his wrists up by his head like gnats on a peach—“Ach, get out of here!” I said. I even saw Planet Head from my first train ride in New York City—“How New York—now get out of my face!”

  Christmas was petting his white cats so hard their fur was coming off completely. He stripped each cat down to a pink excuse for an animal, then tossed it and grabbed another one. People inhaled cat hair and coughed it out or swigged it down with champagne.

  “I never knew I liked lutefisk pâté!” I said, walking up to him. “Now where the hell are Carol and Harp?”

  He said, “Come meet Laaren Ray.”

  Laaren Ray looked like a cat that stretched and got stuck. She walked like a ladybug over to us. Her eyes stuck out of their sockets like golf balls. She had an entire bouquet of flowers behind one of her ears and she held a knife in her hand.

  “Hello!” she said to Christmas. “Hello!” she said to me, holding out her knifeless hand.

  “Why do you have a knife?” I said.

  She looked offended.

  “He’s kidding!” Christmas said.

  “The work isn’t like your others,” she said. “What’s the genesis for this one?”

  I remembered the gist of the answers that Christmas had printed out for me on a sheet once.

  “For this piece, I wanted to focus on more of an underlying sense of what I thought was a trajectory that made more sense to me in terms of speaking to what I originally felt compelled to make at the start of my experimenting with installation works, so for here I was processing more about dancing upon the line between obvious and more subtle. Including a Freudian slip toward my grandfather,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Laaren Ray, and then she took up a boring conversation with Christmas about someone else’s piece they’d recently seen, and they said all the same things that I’d just said but in a d
ifferent order.

  “Did you catch that Freudian slip toward her relative?” Christmas said.

  “I sure did,” said Laaren Ray. “She must be a genius.”

  We did the same thing with Valter Konig.

  “This work speaks to consumerism,” I added.

  He checked his watch and barely looked at me.

  I looked back at the scaffolding—people were walking up and down the stairs and not stopping long to view the piece. And no one was climbing down into the sinkhole to catch the vagina twat.

  I interrupted Christmas to say, “Tell people they can climb down into the piece. It’s what the ladder’s for.”

  Christmas laughed a fake laugh for the first time ever.

  “I’ve gotta run,” said Valter Konig. “But good luck.”

  He shook our hands and Christmas said, “Fuck,” under his breath.

  Then we talked to The Jewells. James Jewell had a red beard that reached the floor. Kara Jewell had E-cup breasts and a hooked nose with a small witch’s cauldron pierced to the tip of it—there was a boiling brew and the green fumes went up her nose and came out of her mouth when she spoke.

  “The scale is definitely titanic,” she said.

  “Kara, you flatter me,” Christmas said, braiding James’s beard casually.

  “Don’t make me laugh, my potion will spill,” she said. “So why is it called The Headstone?”

  “Do you know my old girlfriend Carol Mary Mathers?” I said.

  “Yes, of course!” Kara said. “I love Carol! Is she here?”

  “Let me ask Quick,” Christmas said and blew on a whistle from his pocket.

  Charlie Quick appeared, “Yes?”

  “Where are Carol and Harp?”

  “In the chopper,” Quick said. “Should be here any minute.”

  “Have The Jewells gotten an invitation for the Loxer Veer show?” Christmas asked.

  I charged toward the elevator and stared at the unlit red light above it.

  “That sculpture’s bullshit,” I heard people say.

  “I could do that,” some people said.

  “I’m sick of when people suck,” I heard.

  “Let’s either go, or get drunk,” they decided.

  “He’s nothing without Carol.”

  The red light dinged red and the elevator doors opened up.

  And there she was.

  In a braided-handled nineteenth-century wheelchair.

  She was bickering with Harp.

  Then she saw me.

  Her lipstick looked like she’d just eaten someone.

  My heart beat in my head, my hands, my legs, my chest, the air around my fat mass. She was in a blue dress—with a kneehole cut for her boner calf. Light winked off a crystal shoe; pearls were tied around the ankle in a bow; the leg was swathed in fishnet hose. She swiped it side-to-side like a windshield wiper and then stopped it with the crystal shoe covering her face so I couldn’t look at her.

  Upon seeing Carol dressed like everyone else: the shattering of a spell I’d been in.

  “Carol, shut cher mouth before yer guts spill out,” I said.

  “I didn’t even say anything!” she shouted.

  “Harp. You know what I came here for,” I said.

  “I ain’t going back with you, psycho!” Carol said.

  “Good! Cause I don’t like short girls!”

  Scott Harp came around Carol to stand between us—he yanked on his lapels as if it would hurt me that his suit fit so well.

  I said, “How’s Harpy? You got a surprise for me in your pants?”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “He knows! I saw you!” we heard.

  We looked, and Finn was charging towards us, pointing at Harp, wearing a collared shirt with rubber duckies on it.

  “You saw me what?” Harp said.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen!” we heard.

  We looked and Christmas was holding a microphone over by The Headstone—the mic was the kind like a stick with a ball on the tip.

  “I’m Mr. Christmas.”

  Everyone cheered till their voice boxes popped and confetti shot out of their mouths.

  “Welcome to the unveiling of The Haircutter’s The Headstone.”

  Not as many people cheered.

  Christmas walked up the wooden stairs to speak from the platform—his dress shoes scuffed the wood and sparks came off.

  Half the heads in the room rotated toward me, shining the light of their diamonds.

  Seconds dripped like diamonds onto The Haircutter’s head.

  Finn whispered, “You should go up there. I don’t think people like your piece. Try to show them the way.”

  I walked through the crowd and it parted like Josiah’s sea, or whatever the Bible saw fit.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  People smiled at me like flowers that look alive but are dead.

  “It’s toast time,” Christmas said.

  I climbed the stairs toward him, and people followed up to gather around and drape on the stairs like orphans cause we’re gonna tell a story. The party looked floating on a black sea of tar—the candles were torches, the eyes were unextinguished souls. The red dots were recording me. Nightmare. Christmas placed a hand on my shoulder like an unexploded bomb. He handed the mic to me as cameras begun to flash.

  “Hello.”

  The Haircutter didn’t belong. His voice was a western river in a hailstorm, a mosquito hovering over it. A battered pastoral flow beneath a buzzing. His river boomed. Seven echoes. His eyes were like bright bird eggs found in tufts of twilit grass, dewed.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said, and handed the mic back to Christmas. I looked to Carol and Harp and saw them watching me smugly because they could tell something was off—Why don’t people like my piece? I thought.

  I turned around to see it.

  “Hey!” I said.

  Christmas stopped talking.

  “It broke!”

  It was a stupid box filled with dirt!!!

  “What?” he whispered.

  The hole had collapsed completely and covered Carol. The box was filled with dirt. There was a ladder sticking out of it.

  “That’s not the piece,” I said.

  The tip of a ladder sticking out of a box of dirt!

  Christmas put his hands on his knees and screamed, “WHAT?!” It bursted every speaker in the room. Women flinched in slow motion as their diamond earrings burst.

  “It collapsed!” I told them.

  A lady screamed.

  She was sitting on the stairs, pointing at the piece.

  The orchestra throbbed a ten-part harmony as the center of The Headstone started to sink.

  An elegant, tan hand burst through the dirt.

  Photographers lit it with flashes.

  The hand extended a long arm like a graveyard movie.

  A second hand emerged—

  two elbows bent to pull out a brown-haired head.

  An overbite cracked open, gasping—

  it was Anna-Patrick.

  “WHAT?!” I shouted.

  She labored hard, going, “GUUUUUUH!!!!” and pulled her long body out.

  She rose to seven feet of height, unfurling upwards.

  Her face was covered in blood, her breath was heaving, her hair was slop.

  She was wearing Carol’s lace duster dress—it went to her mid-thighs and had a C on the chest.

  [..................]

  Like a thunderclap—the house showered her with rain; they deleted her with flash pics.

  She scratched at the dress and reached back to unzip it; it slipped to the earth like a wisp of hair and revealed her naked body like a camera pop. Her pubic hair was a mass of black bigger and wilder than I ever knew pubes could be—they used her legs as a trellis to display their humbling beauty. I got down on my knees. Carol’s pubes were downy and barely there—Anna-Patrick’s were an ode to Women.

  I looked to Carol: “That’s my dress!” she was screaming.<
br />
  I looked to Christmas: he was pressed back against the wood railing with tears streaming. “Oh god!” he said, orgasming at the sight of such art.

  “Anna-Patrick!” I said and held out my hand and she saw me and remembered: that’s Him.

  She stepped forward and climbed the short rungs of ladder and collapsed into my fat arms. The photographers closed in to shoot Carol’s blood-crusted dress on the sunken center of the sixteen-foot box of dirt. Everyone applauded so hard their hands started bleeding and splattering their faces with blood.

  “What in the dang hell, Girly?” I said.

  “You were supposed to sleep in there,” she said in my ear. “I was going to surprise you for a talk. It collapsed on the road. I woke up a little bit ago. I found a slice of air to breathe in. I waited until your toast. I love you,” she said.

  “I love you!” I said.

  We kissed. They deleted us with flash pics.

  “Carol, no!” Charlie Quick screamed as Carol was pulling herself up the stairs by her arms like a piece of snail meat.

  “That’s MY dress and MY Haircutter!” she screamed.

  Charlie Quick picked her up and passed her to Scott Harp, “Do NOT let her vandalize the art,” he said.

  When Harp turned around, I saw my scissor sticking out of his back pocket.

  “HEY!” I bellowed.

  Christmas was pouring champagne down Anna-Patrick’s throat.

  “Come on!” I yelled and took her hand and she choked.

  We ran down the stairs and I leapt forward and snatched my scissor out of Harp’s back pocket and landed on my stomach for the most pleasant honk to shoot out of my mouth.

  “Your scissors!” Anna-Patrick said.

  Photographers flew over us on pulley harnesses like Peter Pan.

  I stood up and shouted, “This is my future wife! And the woman I lost my virginity to! Look how tall she is!”

  I cut off a lock of her bloody hair and threw it up into the air.

  “Yes!” she said.

  “Do me!” someone screamed. I ran and cut that woman’s hair too.