Shining Gleaming Flaxen Waxen

Wiggy’s partner Ziggy had just gotten out of jail. What he’d been in for, I don’t know, but he seemed sweet, so I figured weed.

Wiggy, a legendary hairdresser in Pittsburgh’s punk scene for her ways with Mohawks and buzz cuts, and other punk staples, was working out of her apartment on the side to get some extra cash because Ziggy, for the time being, was, understandably, unemployed.

Wiggy’s real name isn’t Wiggy, but everyone called her that.

Ziggy’s name isn’t Ziggy, but I called him that because it rhymed with Wiggy and no one including Wiggy introduced us and I can be a jerk.

Wiggy and Ziggy had a son named after the lead singer in a glam punk band called The Criminals.

The band’s name was not The Criminals, but everything else here is, more or less, true.

“It’s rough,” my friend Cookie, whose real name is Jeffrey, said. “They need money.”

Cookie looked at my jagged shoulder-length hair. I’d been growing out my last cut, which my husband Newman had given me with the electric razor he used to keep his own hair buzzed and easy.

Newman was pushing 30. I was 35. Together we were two struggling-and-failing writers rapidly approaching middle age and all about DIY everything, especially haircuts. Even Supercuts seemed pricey back then. We often joked about how broke we were, which is why Newman made me call him Vidal, as in Sassoon.

Years before this, I lived in New York and had a roommate who worked at the real Vidal Sassoon. She used me as her hair model. My hair – blonde, bobbed – looked mostly awesome. My roommate, a curvy Pittsburgh beauty who became a ‘90s Fen-phen addict, was, lucky for me, eager to climb from broom-pushing salon assistant to fashionista-gaunt stylist. This meant she kept after my hair on the daily.

I never properly thanked her. Left to my own devices, my hair would have looked like it belonged to a  good-luck troll doll, but Vidal Sassoon, as channeled through my sweet, generous, and determined roommate, was magic.

Side note: my roommate once did a Vidal Sassoon photo shoot with The Hell’s Angels at their East Village clubhouse. When I asked her how she got The Hell’s Angels to let her into their clubhouse, let alone style their hair for a Vidal Sassoon photo shoot, she shrugged.

“I gave them a lot of product,” she said, meaning mousse and gel and the same kind of deep conditioning hair mask that smoothed my own troll-doll locks and would turn a Hell’s Angel mane all shining gleaming flaxen waxen.

Please note: The Hell’s Angels love free haircare products.

Try some Argan oil, Animal. A little texturizing spray, Fat Freddy? And this tea tree shampoo will work wonders for you, Mouldy Marvin. 

If Hunter S. Thompson, that brilliant but unreliable Gonzo author of the classic book Hell’s Angels, knew this, maybe he wouldn’t have been stomped by the Hell’s Angels for either a) standing up for abused women or b) for not sharing the case of beer he kept stashed in the trunk of his car.

With Hunter, both or neither could be equally true or not.

Writers, man.

But Newman.

He draped my hair over my copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. He buzzed it down to a kind of bob.

“Watch it. That’s precious,” I said, about the book, which that beatnik Allen Ginsberg had signed for me back in grad school and in which Allen Ginsberg had drawn a dragon with huge hairy dragon balls on the title page.

As for my hair, I’ve never been precious about haircuts, even though as a kid I had nice hair–long, light brown, down to my waist, the pride of my mother, who put a lot of stock in having a daughter with pretty hair. But once I hit college, I experimented. In my quest to find myself, my hair suffered. Poodle perms. Pixie cuts. Bleach. More bleach.

One time in New York’s Astor Place, at a $5 punk salon called predictably enough Astor Place, a guy with jiggy clippers, not unlike my future husband’s, said, “Are you a model?” and I, feeling model beautiful, indestructible, let him do whatever and ended up looking like a city rat gnawed my scalp bloody on one side.

“A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life,” Coco Chanel said, but Coco Chanel was pretty much a Nazi.

Cookie held up some of my raggedy strands, inspecting. The ends were frizzed, like the razor had shorted out mid-chop. The box blonde I’d been DIYing had faded to a color I called moldy carrot. Still, I was holding out hope my hair would grow and keep growing, like a Chia Pet, maybe.

“You should let Wiggy cut your hair,” Cookie said, and let the strands fall. “It’s the right thing to do.”

***

Everybody called Jeffrey Cookie, as in Cookie Crumbles. Before that, everyone called Jeffrey Jo Jo Crash. This was the early aughts and nicknames referencing people’s drug and alcohol habits stuck around from the ‘90s.

Cookie, like most of us, wanted to be a better human and worked hard to get there. Cookie, like most of us, and by most of us I mean me, wanted to present as good. Cookie, working on getting sober, was living with Newman and me then. Newman and I figured giving Cookie a sober-ish place to land in the basement of our rented run-down Rust Belt condo was a good thing to do, even though neither Newman nor I was willing to cut back on our own drinking then.

Presenting as good is the first step to good, maybe, so it goes.

Which is how I ended up in Wiggy’s apartment with a damp dishtowel around my neck, staring off while Wiggy smacked my head to whatever position she needed it to land in. Wiggy herself had a dark black dye job. Her hair was wild, spiked with gel, but it looked good, just right. I imagined her playing bass in a band. I think she played bass in a band.

I remembered that Sid Vicious, who played bass in the Sex Pistols, used Vicks VapoRub in his hair because it worked better than gel, but when he sweated it out onstage, the Vicks burned his eyes so badly that he couldn’t see.

Still, Sid Vicious had amazing hair. Still, Sid Vicious was true to his nature, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

“Do whatever,” I told Wiggy, “I trust you.”

I did not know Wiggy enough to trust or not trust her, but I wanted her to feel good about something. More than that, I wanted to feel good about wanting her to feel good, such is the self-indulgence part of wanting to be a better human.

Wiggy’s apartment looked like someone had broken in and tossed the place. Ziggy lurked around like a wilted houseplant. The apartment smelled alternately of weed, incense, and old potatoes. There were, suspiciously, no mirrors anywhere near Wiggy’s home-styled salon, meaning her kitchen.

“Fuck yes,” Wiggy said. “My girl. I got you,” and whipped out the scissors she kept tucked, maybe, in the small of her back like a gun.

***

Years back, when I lived in New York, another one of my roommates, Kim, had saved up. She was sick of smoothing out her natural black-girl hair. She wanted locs. She wanted to go to Harlem, to a Jamaican salon, because she wanted real honest-to-god locs, not some janky white person’s idea of locs or anything by Vidal Sassoon.

Kim was from Atlanta, the suburbs. Her brother was a professional golfer. Her dad was the CEO of a company that made protein shakes. Kim’s mother, an Atlanta socialite, would not approve of her daughter getting locs any more than my mother approved of my Astor Place half-Mohawk.

Still, Kim was determined to make her own way. She found a place that would do a full head for $125, cash, a great price back in 1995. She rolled the bills with a rubber band and tucked it in her bra. She took the train uptown from our neighborhood in Queens. She was gone a long time.

When she came back, I could hear her crying before she opened our apartment door.

“I look like the Terminator,” she said as she came through the living room, riding a wave of tears. I knew she meant Predator because the Terminator did not have locs, but I didn’t say that.

Kim wept more and ran to the bathroom. She held up a mirror. She turned this way and that, looking for something that would make all of this okay. The locs were thick and the fake hair woven into her own lovely hair looked grizzled, like steel wool.

“There weren’t any mirrors,” she said. “I felt great. Everyone was nice, really. I didn’t know until I saw my reflection in a window. Oh my god.”

We spent the next hours unraveling things. I filled two garbage bags with whatever hair the salon had used.

Kim, beautiful as ever, stopped crying eventually but something had shifted inside her. I can’t pretend to know what.

What Kim was looking for in that salon in Harlem and what I was looking for in my visit to Wiggy was and will always be different but maybe not.

Everybody, including Kim and me, called locs dreadlocks back in the 1900s. Most people outside of Jamaica–the country, not Queens–don’t call them that now. In 1990s New York, I didn’t stop to consider the semantics of the word “dread.” I didn’t ponder whose dread or absorb the idea that cool hair could inspire fear in white people like me.

I loved my lovely friend.

And fuck those people who did her dirty like that.

***

Back in Wiggy’s apartment, her scissors snicked. She pulled and pushed. It hurt some, but I felt good about everything.

Wiggy’s little boy, named after a punk-rock god, sat on the floor in the living room playing with action figures. He made pew-pew sounds. He said, “Aaaargh.” He seemed, if not happy, content. He seemed, if not content, wise enough to keep busy.

“Done!” Wiggy announced.

It had been, maybe, 10 minutes. No time for small talk. No time for us to get to know one another in any way that might be meaningful.

Wiggy whipped the dish towel off my shoulders. I felt the clipped hair slither down my shirt. It itched, but I didn’t want to scratch or twitch. I had so much invested in making sure Wiggy didn’t feel bad about any of this. I had invested so much in thinking I was a righteous person, authentic and deep, someone who didn’t care about surface things, like how I might look after a 10-minute Wiggy cut.

I paid her, plus tip, what would have amounted to my grocery money for the week. My husband, waiting in the car, would, I know, have something to say about that. I thought maybe Wiggy would pass me a mirror, show me her work, but instead she showed me the way out.

“Later,” Wiggy said.

“Later,” Ziggy said, and he sunk lower into the couch he seemed to have melted in.

When I got to the car, Newman, who, when he took the clippers to me, said I would always be beautiful no matter what, looked stunned. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t laugh. I flipped down the visor and caught my first look at myself, post Wiggy.

It would take years for me to wonder if maybe Wiggy did it on purpose. I’m sure she was onto me, my would-be self-serving do-gooderness, served up with a side of curdled charity. I think of how I must have looked, showing up at Wiggy’s door, a too-friendly raggedy fake-blonde stranger in an oversized pleather biker jacket, black turtleneck, and too many silvery rings. I always wanted to be punk, cool even, or at least look the part, but then and now, despite my difficult personality, despite my lack of money, I mostly can pass for a receptionist in a dental office.

If I were Wiggy, I’d have hated me on sight. Not because of how I looked, but because there’s a line between empathy and pity.

How terrible to be on the receiving end of pity, especially from a stranger. How easy it is, probably, to spot the desperate longing of someone who wants to be something other than what life has gifted her.

The haircut? A reverse mullet. Party in front, woodchipper in back.

It was the kind of haircut that would make people in Walmart stare.

It was the kind of haircut that would lead strangers to ask, “What possessed you to do that?”

It was the kind of haircut that, like other things in life, was something I’d want to grow out of.