As I sat on a chair in the bathroom, holding the towel tight
around my bony shoulders and staring into the black-and-white subway tile, he trimmed and trimmed, grumbling about the light, tilting my head to and fro with a firm push of his index and middle fingers. He drew up tufts with a pick and squinted and clipped. I murmured the Prime Directive to myself, “Don't move your head, don't move your head,” even though it never worked. I moved. He always told me I moved no matter how much I concentrated, no matter how many oaths and pledges I devised between haircuts, as if a new arrangement of words might make things turn out differently next time. At some point he'd say, “You moved your head. Now I have to even it out,” and I cursed myself as he cut and cut, and my 'Fro grew shorter and shorter and shorter …
But when he was done, it was perfect. Like when he grilled—you had to admit that despite everything, he was a master griller. It was one of those things he did well, you couldn't say anything against it, it was a cornerstone of our reality. He gave us miniature versions of his own cut, the same one he'd given himself since high school, when he took over haircut duties from his father. The haircuts remained perfect for whole hours—don't be thrown off by the fact that no camera ever recorded them. The spell broke when you took a shower or slept on them, whereupon all his tucks and pats and proddings were undone and our superb crowns became utterly misshaped and disordered, the underlying principles revealed as counterfeit. What occurred on my scalp could not be called a “style” in any true sense, and it got wilder the longer it got. It was a weird black amoeba testing the edges of itself, throwing out nappy pseudopods here and suddenly there, an unpredictable new direction every day. I swear it lived, and have come to believe that its ever-shifting lumps and tendrils were a doomed attempt at communication with the humans. The tragedy of the day-after haircuts! And all the days after! The months passed until we had to admit to ourselves that the world abhorred us, and the process started anew.
Needless to say, I had no idea how fucked up the haircuts were at the time. To us they were normal. Just how things were done in our house. (Raise your hand if you can relate.) My delusions ended that
spring when I was cleaning out my desk during one of my periodic purges of nerdery. My twenty-sided die possessed a curious will, returning to pester and trouble me even though I had thrown it out a hundred times, the specter of D&D games past. This time I threw it out the window. (I found it under the radiator a week later.) I stashed dog-eared copies of
Famous Monsters
in a box at the back of the closet and hid all the comic books I'd bought since the last purge, in case a girl materialized in my room due to a transporter malfunction. I was in a good mood or something, feeling optimistic, like someone had chuckled at a joke that I'd made in Biology, or History, and it had gone to my head.
I came across a packet of fifth-grade class pictures under my copy of
Swamp Thing
#35. It is the nettlesome quality of elementary-school pictures to reveal the true nature of our childhoods. Nothing is how we remember it, and all the necessary alterations we've made in order to survive with semi-functioning psyches are exposed. Best to leave them alone.
Looking back, I think I had what is best described as a prelapsarian fondness for fifth grade, its lack of complication. No more. Miss Fredericks, the Social Studies teacher whose cruel smile had haunted me for years and who was actually the default setting in my nightmares when I needed an evil authority figure, had a melancholy face now that I really examined it. She seemed a bit too skinny, almost ill, and I got to thinking about what her house looked like, picturing the shadows in the kitchenette where she prepared her lonely meals. Two scoops of cottage cheese on a big leaf of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a side of misery. She never appeared in my dreams again.
Scanning the rest of the photograph, it was clear that none of us, teacher and pupils alike, had remained untouched by that horrible epidemic making the rounds back then, '70s fashion, the manic stripes and prints of the shirts and skirts and pants a kind of rash on our flesh that only a new decade could cure. Then there were the kids themselves. No one looked like they were supposed to. These changeling creatures surrounded me in polyester, touching my elbows. Strangers. I traced a finger along their faces like a movie amnesiac
… that must be my best friend … his name is Andy … that's the smart girl who sat in front of me all year … she ate frankfurters out of a
Bionic Woman
thermos filled with hot oily water. Then there was my own face. My face was not the one I remembered showing to the world. Were my eyes so dark, those days? There was something amiss with my mouth, always my mouth, even before I got braces. My lips were chapped, sure, but the chappiness seemed to have extended its territory, so that a huge white halo encircled my mouth, like I'd been eating ashes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then there was that thing on top.
That really fucked-up haircut.
I recovered from the class picture pretty quickly. It wasn't that bad. Seeing the white letters identifying my homeroom, the construction-paper map of France we'd toiled over that winter, the poster of Neil Armstrong floating down to the lunar surface, I felt a nice warm tingle of nostalgia. The killer was the four panes of wallet-sized photos beneath the class picture. It was just me there. They should have stopped me. They should have stopped me at any number of checkpoints. As I tried to leave the apartment—here, a close relative would have been key. The doorman could have taken me aside. We got along, him and me, trading
hey
s with enthusiasm, or so I thought. But he said nothing. Certainly the bus driver, de facto deputy of the body politic, could've forbid me entry, ripping my bus pass in half and tossing it to the dirty black treads. The security guard outside school should have beat me with his flashlight, and surely my homeroom teacher, Miss Barrett—stickler by nature, wielder of a bifocaled annihilating gaze—should have shoved her big wooden desk up against the classroom door, back brace or no back brace. All of them should have said, What the fuck is up with your hair?
Obviously it had been months since my last trim. Instead of a haircut, the photographer had captured some primordial process unfolding. The universe tugged and pressed on my hair with invisible fingers, the way it had pulled up mountains to the sky and gouged the deepest ocean chasms, where the only living beings are pale
boneless things rooting around in everlasting gloom. What else is there to say but that in my vicinity larger forces were at work, the ancient underpinnings of it all. There are natural laws. The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that as temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion holds that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The entity on my head was proof of another fundamental law: a fucked-up Afro tends toward complete fuckedupedness at an exponential rate over time, as expressed by the equation,
AN = F * t
where AN is Absolute Nappiness,
F
is fuckedupedness, and
t
is time
The pane of photos was uncut, of course. Who'd want a picture of that in their wallet, poisoning their money?
I don't remember being teased about my hair or my acute chappiness. But surely they made fun of me, the children in the photograph and the strangers out of frame. Surely they had to see it. Why didn't they say anything? I was due for another haircut when I found those pictures, but it never occurred to me not to ask my dad to cut my hair as usual. We'd always done things a certain way. Then out in Sag I was at Clive's house when he was cutting NP's hair, and when he was done he turned to me and asked, “You want me to cut off that jungle bush or what?”
I finished my cream soda and went to wash out the can. Chicken parts bobbed in a big pot of water in the sink, defrosting. He was going to barbecue tomorrow. I made a note.
“He just boiled that dizzy bitch in the hot tub,” he said.
Halloween II
. “Dag,” I said. I sat down on the couch and watched the rest of it with him.
Reggie woke me up with his french-fry smell when he came in. The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling in the dark. When I got up, he'd already gone back to work.
It was almost noon, from the noise. Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I
liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up. First, though, I concentrated on the house noises, to see what I'd be getting into. The screen door slammed shut and someone entered the living room—my mother, from the walk. She made a comment, my father responded in his wisecracking intonation, and both of them laughed. I relaxed. Things seemed okay out there.
I had three speakers—the two windows and the crack beneath the door—that functioned as my tri-phonic hi-fi, filling the room with the melody of an Azurest afternoon. If I closed my eyes, I saw everything perfectly. Things never happened otherwise. Last-minute lawn mowers spun and spat, and a car made a slow turn 'round Terry onto Walker, reconnoitering to see which houses had cars in the driveway. That eternal question: Who's out, who's out? Three houses up, Big Dennis cranked up his Earth, Wind & Fire best of, which by that point in the summer I knew track by track, crooning the next song while this one was still on the second verse. “Reasons, the reasons that we hear.” Out on the water, two motorboats cruised in circles, preparing for the busy weekend workout: hauling worthies up on water skis; fishing expeditions in the Great Beyond outside the bay; and slow jaunts around the Neck or into Baron's Cove, depending on one's motives. The weekend jigsaw fit together into the shape on the box, the one we were promised. Then I heard it, a sound the normal person would never notice.
Poomp
.
It was the magnet. There was one magnet with which I was well acquainted. It resided in the next room, in the lower left quadrant of the kitchen island, securing the liquor cabinet door. It produced a sound—
Poomp
—when the twin metal strips on the cabinet door connected with the magnet in the cabinet itself.
Poomp
meant the liquor cabinet had been depleted.
Poomp
meant it had started.
I felt a twinge. Then relaxed. It was okay—I'd devised an exit strategy when I saw the chicken in the sink.
I haven't gotten to the layout of our little hideaway yet. The beach house was a ranch bungalow my grandparents built in the late '60s. Long planks stained a deep, earthy red covered the exterior, and
the roof sloped at a narrow angle, like a book that had been set facedown. The two small bedrooms faced the street; walk out of them and you were in a hallway with a bathroom on your right before things opened up into the living space. The TV area and encircling couches on the left, kitchen and dining on the right. The north wall was glass, facing the deck, and beyond that stretched the beach and the bay. Visitors coming up from the beach used the screen door, and those from the street used the side door next to the stove. The clomping up the side stairs was an invaluable early-alert system, allowing us to scurry into the back if we decided to pretend not to be home. Which was quite often.
We'd spent three summers there. We used to stay on Hempstead Street, in the old house my grandparents put up when the developments started going. My mother and her sister inherited the two houses, and then in some intricate bad-blood transaction our family got the beach house and my aunt got the Hempstead House. Obviously, from an objective real estate point of view, the beach house was the better property. Location, location, etc. But I'd spent my true childhood at the other place, and I never got over leaving it. My laundry list of psychic injuries aside, the Hempstead House was just bigger. In the new place we were on top of each other. My sister got the second bedroom whenever she came out, forcing me and Reggie to sleep in the living room, waiting for her or our parents to get up so that we could stumble off into their rooms for the short but important stretch of late-morning sleep.
The beach house was still big enough for you to sneak around in, slink into the bathroom, and generally get your shit together before you had to say good morning. This day, I heard my mother talking to one of her friends out on the deck, so I dashed into the bathroom, checked that the coast was clear, and then made a break for it to my parents' bedroom to use the phone.
“James going to barbecue today?” I heard NP's mother ask.
“You know James,” my mother answered.
Bobby said he'd pick me up at two o'clock to go driving around. I counted to one hundred, and when I emerged Mrs. Grimes was just
disappearing down the stairs to the beach. Good timing. My mother tucked her hair into her bathing cap, an old favorite of hers, white with rainbow-colored plastic flowers floating on it. “Have to get my swim in before those maniacs get out there,” she said. In a few hours, the boats would be zipping back and forth, the drivers with one hand on the wheel and the other in the beer cooler, eyes on the rove for the next escapade. There had never been an accident, but an afternoon in Sag Harbor had special pockets of tsk-tsking that needed to be filled.
My mother looked great. Always this magic happened: as the summer went on, she got younger and younger. The sun tanned her skin to a strong, vital brown, and her thin crow's feet disappeared, ushering an impish twinkle into her eyes. During the week she was a mild-mannered attorney, an in-house lawyer for Nestlé. Every few years, I asked what she did there, and she said, “Oh, you don't want to know about that,” or worse, explained in full detail, causing my synapses to shut down. Something about international trademarks, the protection of the Nestlé family of products and top-secret formulas. We got a big crate of Hot Cocoa with Mini Marshmallows every Christmas that lasted us all year.
City mornings, she armed herself for the midtown hustle, walking out in her monochromatic business-wear and Nikes, her nice shoes in a PBS tote bag. It's a living. But out there, she was a different person. She'd never missed a summer the last forty years. Her friends on the beach were her friends from the old days. Her crew, like me and Reggie had our crew. She wasn't the only one who went back to the start of Azurest, but Sag Harbor worked on her in a way I'd never seen it do other people. There was a part of her that only existed out there. It made her go.