Hair Everywhere

Snip, snip, snip. Six women in a small room tainted with the scent of pamplemousse and a floor covered in hair.

"It's too bad about Michael. He was sooooo cute." Beaded flip-flops and red toenail polish. Her voice filled the room in a way no hydrating citrus spray could hope to match.

The stylist was using a big round brush, pulling the first woman's tawny hair up, up, up and out. "He was cute!"

"But he's dead, you know."

"Really? Recently?" Red flag No. 1. Angela and I exchange glances in the mirror. The third pair of women, visible only as two pairs of feet, are silent.

"He committed suicide."

One of the pairs of feet speaks up; I'm not sure which. "He strangled himself."

"Oh, that's right! He was doing that, that sex thing and died."

The stylist chimed in. "The owner of The XXX Factor died that way, too."

"No!"

"Yeah. They found him hanging by a doorknob by his belt. Nitrous and you know don't mix, do they?" She laughed. What was the problem with that word? Angela's pierced eyebrow arches and she snips in silence, Hello Kitty calaveras tat peeping out from under her shirt sleeve.

Red Toenails was gyrating in her chair. "They should put warning labels on the bottles. It's like in the old days when they'd say you'd get hairy palms if you, uh, you know, too much."

Another glance in the mirror. "Masturbation didn't kill Michael Hutchence; I'm sure the belt around his neck had a lot to do with it."

Silence from the corner containing the two pairs of feet.

Bouncing, booming, embarrassed, Red Toenails changed subjects. "Isn't it amazing that those hairy men, the cave-men, what are they called, Janine? Cave, cave, cave..." A shrug from Janine, still brushing in big long strokes and trimming oh so carefully. "All covered in hair, and first they're doing talk-shows and radio and now they have a tv show."

Did Red Toenails see me hang my head in disbelief? I don't know; I was looking down.

"I think they're wearing costumes."

"That's not what they really look like? Are you sure? I think they really look like that."

"Uh," sensing a diminishment in tip Janine backpedaled. "I don't know. But their tv show is good!"

I fled the noise and inanity before I could hear Red Flag No. 3.

She Doesn't Know

I saw Mrs S today, out walking the dogs. She's the one who told me how Tasi Drive got its name: it's what she and her husband used to call their dog, short for Tassle, part of her kennel name. As theirs was the first house on the street, and none of the other residents minded, they changed it to Tasi.

As I was heading back out I saw Mrs S had stopped to chat with a neighbor, so I pulled over and got out my little bag of dog biscuits, giving one to each dog. The little long-haired dachshund I'd seen before happily took the biscuit from my fingers, but the other dog, a black-and-white Pomeranian, just looked at it. Mrs. S said, "Oh, she's a rescue dog; we just got her Friday. She doesn't know what treats are."

Christ. I put the biscuit down and half-turned away, and she came over and took it off the ground, chewed it slowly. Mrs. S and the neighbor continued chatting and I drove on.

Pig-out of Doom

There was a young man from the East
Who attended a smorgasbord feast.
Back from the bathroom,
He said with a swoon,
It's more than passed-gas I released.

Hawaii

Five sets of eyes stared at the greenery fickering by as the van headed south along the highway. Only the three front rows of seats had passengers, giving the extta-long commuter van the feeling of chumminess. It was a submarine feeling, sitting close together, shoulders hunched and necks crooked to get a good view. Were all the engineers at Ford so short that the low-set windows weren't a nuisance, or did they never actually sit in their own designs?, she wondered. Patches of black broke through the green blur as the road started to climb through lava fields.

Dave, the driver, who was also the tour guide, half-turned his head as he spoke. It wasn't quite alarming. "Okay, we're getting close to the park now." The van's microphone hung limp on the front bench seat. "You'll really feel the temperature change. It's almost 4,000 feet high in Volcano—"

One of the Germans spoke up. "Will it be cold?"

I wish, she thought. Hawaii so far had been unseasonably hot, enough that she'd spent a good chunk of her discretionary funds to join this guided tour of Volcano National Park. She imagined how satisfying the crunch of Mauna Loa's snow under her sandaled feet would be. Although right now, anything under 80 degrees would be welcome.

Dave had his eyes back on the road, but his little tour group could still catch the edges of his grin. "Oh hell, yeah!" He wiggled the bill of his baseball cap up and down, then settled it back into place over his blond hair. He had on Hawaiian business attire: shorts and a red-and-white aloha shirt. "I came up here one time? It was raining, a cold rain! Man, it was so cold I had to put socks on."

"Socks?" The taller of the two Germans sounded unsure.

"Yeah, I know! Oh, it must've gotten down to 60, 65. Man, I was dying."

The Germans were looking at each other, so she asked. "But you were still wearing shorts, righ?"

"Huh?" Now Dave was confused. "Well, yeah. I was driving up from Hilo. I'm not used to it being that cold." He paused. "My toes were cold."

"You grew up on Maui, you said?"

"Yeah! Volcano's the coldest place I've ever been to."

Wow. "I hope it's cold."

Dave slowed down the van and rolled it into a little parking lot off the highway. He rubbed his arms. "Well, I hope you brought socks, then."

A middle-aged lady, her hair still black, or was it dye? Middle-aged clothes off the racks at Mervyns that everybody wore, even the young women, the girls in their make-up and curled hair. The same that the middle-aged women wore. Except that lady wore rings with stones the size of chickpeas, and they weren't from Sears.

A middle-aged lady, sitting in front of a screen, watching the documents scroll past, five days a week. Sometimes she developed the film, or sorted the boxes instead. Five days a week for the past seven years, never calling in sick, two weeks of vacation a year. Where did she go?

A middle-aged lady, who chose Nora for her American name, happy in her bubble where the worst thing that happened was heavy traffic for the commute, or a supervisor in a jealous snit. Nothing things. No patrol squads, even though it was a military town. Never bodies on the sidewalk or guns in the hall. Happy. Banal. Safe. But still wearing those rings to work just in case.

Tomorrow was a holiday, and while everyone around him was bustling and running and sometimes screaming from the driver seat of their car, he was walking down a neighborhood street in the sunshine. His wife was doing all the cooking; all he had to do was fetch the few things she had forgotten or couldn't find during the big shopping expedition over the weekend. Even though it meant walking into Berkeley Bowl on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It wasn't snowing, they weren't traveling, no family feuds to fret over. He didn't even have to pretend to like football as the only person who cared to watch the game would be in the kitchen. Just an easy day of playing with the kids and killing time until dinner.

He walked the long way home from the store with a bag of fruit in one hand, his groceries in the other, going down the street he usually saw the homeless people on, the panhandlers, the men and women with their milk crates and street sheets, the Reaganized insane. The down and out the university students and soccer moms bumped between on their daily rounds.

He saw a woman digging through a garbage can, real down-and-out-looking, dirty, disheveled. "Would you like an apple and a banana?"

She pulled her arm out of the trash but didn't reach for the fruit. "No thank you. I made a vow to only eat what I find in dumpsters." Her skin had the leathery look of long exposure to the elements.

He started to put the paper bag on top of the trash, but she interrupted him, "No, I won't take that."

"It all comes from Him." He still held the bag out. She didn't smell much.

She smiled but still shook her head no. "You can tell me where Trinity Church is. They give donuts out on Wednesday and I'd rather dumpster dive there than behind the donut shop."

He smiled. "I don't go to church–He doesn't live in churches."

"I know." Now she took her arm away from the garbage can and touched her chest. "He lives in the heart."

Didn't he know it. "Good luck to you, sister."

"Thank you. Any wisdom for me?"

He thought about all his time on the road, looking for nirvana and seeing the human condition, beautiful and ugly. The saved and the damned. About how he stopped and got out of that car one day and knew he was home. About his grand-baby and his children.

"Just remember, it all comes from Him."

She went back to digging through the trash as he turned and walked home.

---------------------

Sorry it sounds stilted, but I wrote it from notes. That one's true, and I love my husband for being that kind of man. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I Remember You

He thanked everyone for coming, a small touch of civility when sitting in the dark, in the dirt, buck-naked. While getting dressed, his friend turned and said, “Thanks, that was a great sweat! But his name is Earl.”

”It is? Shit, man, I’m sorry!”

A third man spoke up. “I called him Eric when I first met him, too.”

Earl said, ”It’s okay. Everybody does. That was my name during the Civil War.”

Nobody guffawed, this being that kind of place, and Earl went on. “I fought in the Civil War, but I don’t know if I died in it. I asked a psychic, who told me that I was a warrior in 23 of my past 25 lives. When I met my girlfriend the first time, we saw each other in Civil War-period clothing.”

”So it’s okay if you call me Eric.”

What is for sale?

[So yesterday the Orowheat driver told me a snippet of conversation he heard in the Marina Safeway as a woman on a cell phone walked down the aisle:

...I'm glad you're alive, but I'm just not buying your lies anymore...

He said that's the start of a novel—not sure why he told me, but I know why I'm passing it on.]