Hairstyles of the Damned (17 page)

OK, as we were driving around in the Escort a few days later, I told Gretchen about not having anyone to ask to Homecoming. “I probably won’t even go now,” I said, hoping she’d say something back, like
No, no, ask me
, but instead she said:

“Homecoming is like the most chauvinistic night of all time. It’s like, ‘Look, I bought you a corsage and now you should go down on me.’”

I nodded, though that wasn’t exactly what I had been thinking. It was quiet for a couple of minutes, us just driving, and then Gretchen sighed and looked over at me. “I got to tell you something,” she said.

“What?” I asked. She turned down the Clash or whatever it was on the radio and immediately I could see she was starting to cry, and then she tried to smile and said, “I let Tony Degan dry-hump me the other night.”

“What?”

“I let Tony Degan dry-hump me. Two days ago. In the backseat,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Right in front of his house.”

“Jesus, Gretchen, he’s like thirty,” I said.

“He’s twenty-six,” she said, and I could tell she wasn’t sad as much as she was angry. “The thing was, it wasn’t even bad,” she whispered. “Not that I’d know, considering he was the first guy to ever dry-hump me.”

I nodded, because
what could I say?
Here I felt terrible for her and mad as hell myself because, well, I mean, here I was walking around with an erection every ten minutes and all she had to do was ask.

“Let’s get something to eat,” she said. “I’ll buy.”

And so we headed over toward Haunted Trails. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, I could see all the punks and stoners hanging out by their cars, some good-looking ones, some pieces of shit, Ford Escorts and El Caminos and a few station wagons that looked all the same except they had different punk stickers like Operation Ivy or The Specials on them.

I got out of the car to go get three hot dogs from the snack shop, and as I was walking back with the food I heard Gretchen shout, “Douche-bag!” and when I looked over, she was already running—and for a big girl, she could move pretty fast—and there, there was Tony Degan with his shaggy blond hair and sleeveless T-shirt which said,
I’m with Stupid
and he had this girl we knew, Erica Lane, this skank, straddled around his middle as they crawled out of the back of Bobby B.’s purple wizard van, laughing and kissing and pinching each other very happily, and then, well, then Gretchen came flying out of nowhere and before anyone could stop it, she was pummeling Erica Lane’s head against the hood of the van, and Tony was trying to break it up but laughing at the same time, and I thought about going up and taking a swing at Tony, but I knew I never would, and so I helped pull Gretchen off and she shoved me and I spilled the hot dogs on my shirt.

Gretchen walked back to the Escort and started it up and I said, “Why do you got to act like a fucking dude all the time?” and she looked at me and said, “Fuck you, you fucking sissy,” and she started crying, and I felt like crying too, and then she threw the car into gear and took off.

I had to take three buses to get home that day and I had mustard all over my shirt.

one

In our history class, we had to do a twenty-minute oral report on An Event That Changed America so we picked the Boston Strangler—it was Mike’s idea, mostly, as my history partner. Mike was a stoner or a head or a burnout—as my super-anorexic sister called him—and, like me, he was very into metal and slasher movies. He also smoked a lot of grass. Mike had this hair, this really long reddish hair, which he tucked into his dress-shirt collar in the back and tied up with a rubber band at the end. There were a couple dudes like him who had tried to grow their hair long, but sooner or later they got busted and had to cut it all off. That’s how it was in Catholic high school. You could even argue that if you looked at paintings of Jesus he had long hair, but they weren’t gonna hear it. It was all dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes, ties, proper grooming. Proper grooming meant being clean-shaven, no mustaches or beards, and short hair. But somehow, like a fucking miracle, Mike had been able to escape Bro. Cardy, the drill-instructor-like dean of discipline, long enough that if he got caught now, all would be fucking lost. Bro. Cardy would either hit him up with so many detentions or cut his hair off in his office, right there, right then.

So when Ms. Aiken, our new super-fine history teacher who replaced Bro. Flanagan when he needed throat surgery, wrote the assignment on the blackboard, Final Project: An Event That Changed America, Mike and I looked at each other and nodded. He pulled out a piece of notebook paper, drew a quick picture of a muscular man strangling some other comic book–figure person with a huge rope—it was bigger than the both of them—and over their heads, nodding and winking, he scratched out a five-pointed pentagram. He showed it to me and I nodded at it for some reason. Why? Because he was like my friend and I thought his drawings were pretty amazing. I mean, Mike was the only dude I hung out with at the time.

Oh yeah, by then, I had tried to forget all about Gretchen. If she called for me, I wouldn’t talk to her for long and if she asked to go hang out, I told her I was busy. I had been hanging out pretty much every day with Mike. After school, we would just sit around his basement and listen to a lot of old metal records, like early Sabbath with Ozzy, Alice Cooper, KISS. Also, like I said, he was very into serial killers. He had pictures and books and movies all about Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. We would talk about serial killers and watch slasher movies and sometimes he’d try to teach me how to play Dungeons and Dragons, which I still didn’t understand. Mike also knew a lot of girls, all kinds of them. Girls seemed to really like him for some reason—mostly because he got them high, I think, but also because he had this easy-going way with them, like they just didn’t make him nervous; like he didn’t care if they liked him or not, which made them like him even more. So he would have all kinds of girls down in his basement and then he’d invite me over and we would put on some stoner records, like Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
, and then they would smoke dope—I didn’t really smoke dope, I would just try to get high secondhand—and then the girls would get all giggly and sometimes, sometimes, if I was lucky, I would end up making out with one of them. Mike was like the best friend I had ever had for inviting me over like that, though later he said it all just was part of his plan. He said girls were more comfortable coming over together than alone and that he always needed a second man, which I was more than happy to be, like I said.

The whole hanging out thing and finally meeting girls led me to make a very important decision. As an early birthday present, I told my folks I wanted contacts instead of my plastic-rimmed glasses. I appealed to my dad, simply saying, “You know, for girls,” and he took me to the eye doctor himself. Getting contacts had practically changed me. That and not hanging out with Gretchen anymore. I didn’t feel like such a total loser all the time, and because of Mike, I could at least talk to the girls I liked.

“All right, guys, Dave Dupree and Alex? What historical event are you thinking of?” Ms. Aiken asked, hot like always, her blond hair in a bob, her short white skirt, and her see-through blouse perfectly cupping her severe rack.

“You know,” Dave Dupree mumbled, scratching his enormous forehead. Dave was an huge kid, up around 300 pounds already; he was smart but like a human juggernaut. He would kind of tremble, visibly, whenever Ms. Aiken asked him anything. “You know, probably all that Revolutionary War stuff.”

“OK, good. Try to keep it specific,” Ms. Aiken said with a smile. She turned to Mike and me and winked. “Mike Madden and Brian Oswald? What do you think, guys?”

“We’ve got some ideas, Ms. Aiken,” Mike said, still nodding.

“Real good ones we don’t want to say until we’ve had time to, you know, debate them.”

“Good,” she said, turning quick to catch Billy Lowery staring at her beautiful, marshmallowly delicious ass. “Let’s break up into history partners and discuss for ten minutes and then I will ask you to make a decision. Then if you’re good, we’ll play History Jeopardy.”

I fucking loved this woman so bad it was almost incomprehensible to me. I mean, one, she was a teacher; but two, she was so hot and so genuinely nice. I had a total boner throughout the whole fucking sixth period. Seriously. I mean, Ms. Aiken, she was like twenty-four, just a few years older, and short and blond and hot and flirty, and like she made it all like a game, you know, with goofy names like History Partners, that was her thing, and like History Jeopardy. She even had this lunch one day where we ate foods from different people’s nationalities—you know, it was fucking crazy burritos and pasta and corned beef and everything. Like Mike’s hair, though, I thought it was only a matter of time before the evil Holy Brothers caught wind of her wacky shit and canned her quick. Not before I begged her to let me go at it with her, you know, or that’s what I hoped, sincerely.

Ms. Aiken strolled over beside Mike and my desks, which were side by side. She looked down at Mike’s drawing of someone being strangled and rolled her eyes, unable to keep herself from laughing.

“You two,” she said. “They ought to let you take art classes.”

Mike was too dumb to be able to take art and even if he could, he wouldn’t. Like anyone smart, he would have taken study hall instead of an elective, unlike me, the dumbass who took band instead. On his own, though, Mike drew hundreds and hundreds of weird Greek monsters all over his class notebooks, in the middle of his notes, dragons and Minotaurs and horse-men and Titans all stabbing each other with huge swords and menacing curved knives.

“That’s a pretty good drawing. Does it have anything to do with your project?” Ms. Aiken asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mike said. “We were thinking about, you know, doing something on serial killers, maybe.”

“Serial killers? Any one in particular?”

“We don’t know. We didn’t really discuss it yet,” he said.

“Brian, what do you think about doing your project on serial killers?”

“I like it,” I said.

“What is it with you guys and gore?” she asked, referring to our last project as History Partners, which was supposed to have been a visual representation of an Historic American Event, which for us was a very bloody and graphic depiction of two soldiers from the Civil War, one from the South and one from the North, cutting each other into tiny pieces. Besides all the blood and entrails, Ms. Aiken said we captured the emotion of the dire conflict. So, you know, we scored.

“I dunno,” Mike said. “It’s like life, you know, it’s the stuff no one wants to talk about, dying and all. Like Bro. Flanagan getting his throat cut open,” Mike said, miming himself stabbing his own neck. “That is the real stuff.”

“Well, I have high expectations for you two, based on your last project,” Ms. Aiken said, with her beautiful little sparkling smile. “I hope it is just as honest.”

“Cool,” I said, borrowing a phrase from Mike.

Ms. Aiken began to turn, to move on to the next pair of desks, but stopped and raised one single dark eyebrow, reaching out her small hand to the back of Mike’s neck. I felt my mouth drop open. I saw Mike close his eyes, grit his teeth, and mutter
fuck
under his breath. Ms. Aiken, so gently, so easily, caressed the back of his head, pressing her small white fingers into his bushy hair.

“That’s awful long,” she whispered, blinking at him.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mike said, still squinting. Ms. Aiken leaned down beside us and smiled.

“It’s OK,” she whispered. “I think it’s good that you pick how you look. It helps build identity, you know.”

“Yeah?” Mike said, confused and in total wonderment, I guess.

“And, well, my boyfriend has long hair,” she said and without one more word, turned and started asking questions to the next group.

Mike’s eyes bugged out as he stared at me and smiled.

“Dude,” he said. “One day, I’m going to make that woman mine.”

“Get in line,” I said.

“So, what should we do?” Mike asked, darkening the points of the pentagram. In a moment, the five star points had become a goat-head, with two horns rising up, its ears jutting out, and a long narrow face and chin—the band Venom’s symbol.

“I dunno, what do you think?” I asked.

“Dude, what about that fucking movie?” he said.

Mike and I had just watched this movie about the Boston Strangler, with Tony Curtis and Peter Fonda, I think. It was all about the case and how people in America were totally freaking out. I had no idea how it might qualify as An Event That Changed America.

Ms. Aiken stepped lightly to the front of the classroom, clapping her hands together once, which meant
shut the heck up
.

“OK, guys, who has decided? Who’ll volunteer to offer their ideas first?” she asked and like that, Mike just raised his hand like a lightning bolt firing into the air.

“Yes, Mike, what do you guys have?”

“We are going to do it on the Boston Strangler, how does that sound, Miss A.?” he said in one hurried, excited breath.

Ms. Aiken nodded and smiled warmly at us. “So why do you think the Boston Strangler is an appropriate Event That Changed America, guys?” she asked.

I thought we were busted right there, but Mike, just being Mike, all laid back, said, “It has greatly affected our sense of trust and comfort and, um, belonging,” and Ms. Aiken just nodded, impressed with us, I guess. She gave us a check mark in her assignment book, and her giving us the big OK was only our first mistake.

two

At the same exact time, Mrs. Madden, Mike’s mom, got her divorce finalized. She finally lost it, and one day while we were in her kitchen, Mike smoking over the sink, me inking
OZZY
on the knuckles of both of my hands with a magic marker, Mrs. Madden stopped, looked at us, set down the basket of laundry, pulled her hair, took a deep breath, and said to Mike and me: