First off, you really need two people. Don’t do it alone. Why? Because that makes a fucking mess and is stupid. Also:
a. A rag or shitty towel.
b. Some plastic baggies.
c. Some nail polish remover or Sea Breeze skin cleanser.
d. Vaseline or some other petroleum jelly—this is fucking key!
e. A disposable brush or comb.
It’s simple enough once you know how to do it:
1. Do it in a place with tile floors, like a bathroom or basement or garage.
2. Take off all your good clothes and maybe go topless.
3. Put the towel around your neck to keep the shit from dripping all over and making a general fucking mess.
4. Put the Vaseline all around your hairline, put globs of it on the top of your ears, back of your neck, and along your forehead all over, especially.
5. If you’ve got blond hair, cool. If not, you’ve got to strip your hair first. Dark hair doesn’t take that Manic Panic ultra-color hair dye. You can try, and waste your time, but it won’t work. Gretchen tried everything— I mean everything: Kool-Aid, food dye—and none of it would take because her hair was too dark. Like I said, we got this industrial stripper at Sally’s Beauty Supply at the mall. Do not leave that shit in too long, it will kill your hair. Follow the directions for the hair stripper, wash it once, dry it, etc. It should be almost whitish-yellow. Now you can either buy hair dye gloves or make them out of ziplock bags, using the bags and rubber bands, whatever, just don’t be dumb and use your bare hands—Gretchen did and her hands were pink for like three weeks.
6. Put a glob of the color dye on the top of your head and start combing it through. This is where the second person is really helpful, otherwise the back of your head will look like shit.
7. Once it’s all rubbed in and your hair is saturated, blow-dry it. Why? I dunno, this is what Kim said to do. Maybe it is supposed to cook it in or something. Wait like an hour.
8. Rinse it, but when you do, stick your head under the faucet instead of taking a fucking shower. If you take a fucking shower, the run-off dye will get all over your face and shit and stain you like a dumbass. Then the next day at school or the mall or whatever, you will look like a fucking poseur. Hold the towel over your face and wash off the shit. Don’t shampoo, just rinse it.
9. Use the skin cleanser or nail polish remover to clean up the color stains around your hair line. You’re probably gonna have to scrub pretty hard.
10. Take a Polaroid now because it will never look as good as it does right after you rinse it the first time. Expect that your fucking pillow and bed sheets will be ruined, like Gretchen’s, which were stained pink, permanently.
11. Why do you want to dye your hair, anyways? To look punk? Don’t you know, everyone dyes their hair to look punk? Duh.
OK, back to the mulletheads: Just before the stoplight could change back to green, the driver of the Trans-Am shouted, “Faggots,” and Gretchen shouted back, “Douche-bags!” and then she did it: She jumped out of the car and went right up and snapped the Trans-Am’s antenna right in two. Their loud, riffing wanker rock vanished immediately—“ Come Sail Away” disappearing, the radio going totally silent, totally quiet. The two motorheads, one of them in a black Alabama concert T-shirt, the other in his acid-washed vest, jumped out, flexing their mullets, and both of them began pulling on these black leather weightlifting gloves—they actually had them, these fingerless black leather gloves. When I saw them pull out the gloves, I thought,
Oh shit
, and I didn’t know if I should start laughing or start getting very fucking worried. But just then the traffic light turned green and a brown station wagon, which had been cruising along pretty fast, being driven poorly by an old, glassy-eyed man, slammed hard into the back of the Trans-Am. The Trans-Am, which had been idling, spun and screeched and its plastic red fender got crinkled all to hell, the whole car being knocked sideways, totally, completely.
As Gretchen hopped back into the superbad Ford Escort and we sped off, I had one thought and one thought only:
This year. This year everything’s fucking changing for the worse for me.
We lived on the south side of Chicago at the time. Our neighborhood was in bad trouble: brick bungalows in straight, arranged lines, appearing block after block with their small tidy lawns hiding this very quiet intent no one said out loud. You could see it in the uniform mailboxes and many statues of the Virgin Mary and repeated pots of matching flowers; in the white kids playing on their front lawns, parents talking over the fence, retired people raking up their leaves:the same kinds of faces and same kinds of last names, street after street, block after block, house after fucking house. The message to me was clear:
If you’re not white, don’t fucking cross Western Ave.,
heading west. Do not do it. Don’t come into this neighborhood. Don’t drive through, or you’re gonna end up hurting bad.
We lived on the south side, me in Evergreen Park and Gretchen in Mt. Greenwood, two neighborhoods set side by side but split by 103rd Street, in a city world-renowned for its dangerously racist history. There were huge race riots on the south side in the summer of 1919 that left 38 dead, more than 500 injured, and a lot more homeless, that were started by the killing of a black teenager at the 26th Street beach. That seems kind of random and historical, but it wasn’t, although I did have to do a history report on it freshman year. Then there was the exploitation and dehumanization of the Pullman porters, poor black youths who were treated so unfairly by the railroad boss that he demanded a slab of concrete be poured over his coffin, out of fear his grave would be later pillaged by angry south side workers. In the last decade Harold Washington, a smart-talking black politician, had run and won the mayoral office, but only after months of all kinds of racial animosity, including an incident in which St. Ben’s Catholic Church was defaced with the word “nigger” the night before he came to deliver a campaign speech.
Both of the neighborhoods Gretchen and I lived in were OK, both pretty similar, I guess. They both had houses that were mostly small, brick bungalows in the style which was made popular on the south side in the 1940s. Both neighborhoods were mostly Irish Catholic, both home to the notorious St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in which lug-heads from all over would gather to puke green beer in the street. There was an Irish bar every few blocks along 103rd and 111th. I’d see kids all the time, in grammar school and high school, from both neighborhoods, wearing T-shirts and jackets that proudly declared, “South Side Irish.”
Evergreen Park was this small town bordered by Chicago on three sides, but it wasn’t considered part of the city, even though the same kinds of people lived in both neighborhoods, all of them white and working class, Irish Catholics mostly—not bad people, but not tolerant people either.
The thing was, there were no black people in Evergreen Park and none in Mt. Greenwood either, even though it was still considered part of the city. They were not wanted there or allowed there—nothing. Why? Mt. Greenwood was full of the homes and families of white Chicago firemen and Chicago cops, who always had a real bad reputation for being racist. But it wasn’t just a reputation, it was the fucking truth. And that wasn’t in 1919 and shit. It wasn’t even the ’40s. It was fucking 1990. I don’t know how they did it, honestly, besides intimidation and threat of force. Maybe that’s all they needed.
There were these racist cops and then their kids, growing up on their parents’ racial prejudice and increasing frustration—
nigger this, nigger that
—who were running around calling themselves White Power. White Power? These kids had no idea what White Power was, really. At least, I didn’t think so. To me, it was a name these idiots associated with the anger they felt, the ignorance. Like calling yourself
punk
; it was just one other label to help create an identity, to give you a sense of purpose. But the White Power kids were tolerated—not only tolerated but fostered, looked past, ignored completely, even when they put some black kid in the hospital for walking past the imaginary racial dividing line that ran along Western Ave. There were some tough kids there, kids who had played football and gotten bored, or had wrestled for a year or two before getting turned on to smoking dope and buying used vans and Cutlasses and Novas, growing their hair long in the back, wearing their acid-washed jean jackets, Nike high-tops, S.O.D. T-shirts, that sort of thing. Most of them were into metal or hardcore—you would hear it blasting from their cars as they howled past you, “Kill Yourself!”—though none of them looked any different than any of the other burnouts we knew. The White Power kids tolerated the other stoners and the punks in our neighborhood as long as they were white, I guess, even if they looked like fruits, and for the most part none of them ever bothered Gretchen or Kim or said anything about how they dressed. I guess they thought the punk kids were all pretty harmless. We listened to some of the same music like the Misfits and Samhain, and some girls dated some of the punk guys and some of the White Power kids, so they didn’t have a problem with me, or Kim or Gretchen, considering how goofy they looked. But when I saw Tony Degan and his other cro-mag thugs, I don’t know. I’d dig my hands into my pockets in fists of kung-fu-movie-type rage, but not say anything and eventually just walk away.
Sometimes driving around in the blue crappy Escort after school, we would see black people who had been stopped by the Evergreen Park cops and were being hassled, their cars searched and them being frisked, just for driving through. I am not lying about this shit, seriously. Once, I had gone with my older brother to play basketball up at Hamlin Park—basketball, which I sucked at but my older brother Tim made me play because he said I had to do something to prove I wasn’t really turning into a girl, which I think my dad made him do. Well, while my brother and I were playing, two Evergreen Park cops came up and said, “You better not steal those basketball nets like a bunch of niggers,” and one cop hit his nightstick into his hand and the other nodded, and then both walked off. And that story is fucking true.
The class thing in our neighborhood was very important to Gretchen because of all the fucked-up punk music she listened to. “The world is racist and chauvinistic by nature,” she said. “How come every person with a shit job, like at McDonald’s or at the 7-Eleven, is like black or Mexican? Do you ever see a white kid working at McDonald’s? Maybe. Maybe at the register, but they sure ain’t back there frying the fries.” She’d say this nodding with herself and it would make me want to kiss her even more, her believing in things I had never even taken the time to think about.
At school, again.
Bad-ass horror movie titles for those direct-to-video horror films which could include at least two partial sex scenes, like all those knock-offs they have at Evergreen Video of Halloween and Friday the 13th, in which I could star as the slasher, possibly:
1. A Night of Agony, A Night of Pain
2. Enchanted by Evil
3. How the Undead Weep
4. The Hangman’s Hand
5. Kill for Thrill
6. Night Seductions
7. The Game of Deadly
8. Beware the House that Bled
9. Lethal Injection
10. Sleepover Party Camp
11. The Crypt Has Spoken
12. Brother Mooney Speaks with his most sinister discussion of anal-ass grammar which eats your fucking soul for one hour every fucking day nonstop and there is no end in sight ever never ever until your fucking eyeballs bleed out of your skull and they have to clean it all up with that motherfucking red sawdust stuff and even then you have to fucking listen, so you have to jam pencils in both your ears and I’m sure you’d find a way even then, wouldn’t you, Bro. Mooney? you baboon.
OK, this is another mix-tape Gretchen made me which was all about the summer before, which she titled, Better Days, when it seemed everything was all right, so listening to it was kind of like going back in time, even though it was only a year ago when Gretchen first got the Escort and I had been seeing this girl Colleen, not actually seeing her like dating, but seeing in the sense that I saw her at the Chinese Wok counter in the food court at the mall, and I had found out her name and she knew who I was and, well, like I said, it seemed like there were these secret messages on the tape that reminded me of when everything was still good for me:
Police and Thieves/The Clash
We sang this one in the parking lot of Arena Lanes, this bowling alley, after we had each stolen a pair of bowling shoes some night that summer.
Panic/The Smiths
Wow, this one seemed to be about our lives that summer for sure, because it was when Gretchen first got the Escort and even though it was used, the tape player still worked but there was never anything good on the radio, it was all crap all the time, and there was this line in the song where the singer sings, “Hang the DJ, the music that constantly plays says nothing to me about my life,” and when I first heard it, I thought,
That’s exactly right, man.
Hateful/The Clash
Another sing-along song, this one though, was, to me, about the time Gretchen thought it would be funny to drive really fast behind a student driver—you know, the kids who drive around with the big sign on top of the car—and so Gretchen was like swerving and riding the poor kid’s tail and kept honking her horn at different stoplights until finally the driver’s ed teacher got out, and she was this crazy-looking woman with permed hair who was screaming like a fucking banshee, and Gretchen tried to back up, but she backed into a parked car and had to pay two hundred bucks to get the other car’s headlights replaced. The song that was on when she backed into the other car? “Hateful.”
Ball and Chain/Social D.
Social Distortion was one of Gretchen’s bands that I actually liked because they were kind of just rock’n’roll. When the singer sang, “I even got me a little wife,” I always thought of Colleen, the girl I had been seeing at the food court at the mall, because in my mind she was my girl that whole summer and she was like 4'5”, very tiny.