contrasts
So I go to this retro/hipster/rockabilly barbershop to get my hair did. Its the only place I feel comfortable under the scissors, and its the first place I got my haircut in LA. In Hollywood, it was the nearest, most decent, and most affordable place on the red subway line. Now I live in the same neighborhood as the barbershop, mainly, and I admit this reluctantly, because of its reputation as a sort of hipster mecca; a place in LA where more young and more ‘real’ people can eat at independent cafes, shop at independent record stores, and shit in independent toilets. I’ve recently become aware of the fact that I am more of an observer than a participant of these hip amenities. While there’s an adorable little independent sandwich shop down the street, a charming bakery owned by a French family with stylish denim, I still eat the bacon-turkey-guacamole at Quizno’s. While theres a small bookstore owned by a friendly gay man with horn-rimmed glasses and a short literary name, I still mostly go to Border’s. So I guess the entire basis of my move from Hollywood to Silver Lake was the latter’s proximity to my barbershop; a barbershop I don’t even necessarily love, but I guess its beautiful in that all things that are familiar are beautiful.
The other reason for my move had something to do with Single White Female, the power-hungry maniac I lived with in the advent of my Los Angeles days. Her name was Annie, a name more suited for a robust, freckled, red-haired young orphan than the man-hating Leviathan that she was. Think the ever-bipolar Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction meets the biting lesbionic cynicism of Janeane Garofalo. It might even be apt to introduce James Spader (ala Secretary) in this comparison, except Annie exchanged red correction pens for alarmingly critical post-its.
“You left the television on while you were gone,” the first post-it read, ca. late August, 2004. The last post-it, adhered to the sink faucet, 7 months later, read: “You fucking still haven’t scrubbed the grime off the frying pan. This better be done by the time I get home.” I woke up the next morning to the frying pan propped against my bedroom door, so that when I opened it the pan toppled over and tickled my feet with its grimy steel-flesh. The next several days were constituted by me scrubbing the pan in those dark hours before she arrived home from her 9to5, and placing the What I Thought Was Clean Pan (these words still haunt me) on the countertop for her critique. I remember the way the blinds refracted the light of the setting sun, framing the rags and the pan - a potrait of my apparent ineptitude. Day after day it wasn’t clean enough, no matter what the sweat of my brow had to say about it, and it still wasn’t clean on the day that I left, February 14, 2005 - a chilling Valentine’s Day.
My new roommate is decidedly the exact opposite of Annie. He’s 27, straight, single, and probably the most intelligent and witty dead-beat that I have ever known. I met him through some friends at my school, who warned me of his flamboyant alcoholism, but reconciled it with the fact that he is one of the funniest and most sincere persons on the planet. While he doesn’t own a single thing in our apartment, not even half of our new digital cable or any shampoo, he fills the place with a sort of welcoming warmth that to me, after the Hollywood civil war, feels something like taking a shit on heroine. I’m constantly dancing around the living room with moves I never knew I had before, moves so fluid and ecstatic, moves that I thought could only be expressed and translated by recently liberated negroes, hundreds of years ago. The only critical remark I have is usually directed to him, with an arched eyebrow: “are you sure you want to start out he night in that way?” I say referring to the Sparks in his hand (the half energy drink / half beer voodoo potion.) He doesn’t control it, IT controls HIM.
And there are all of these vibrant idiosyncrasies roaming around the townhouse we live in. There’s the possessed cat, the one that rolls around the driveway with the enraptured, erotic ecstacy of Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa, the cat that looks at me seductively, religiously, with its poltergeist eyes. I’m both attracted to and afraid of it. There’s a nice, crippled hispanic lady with three toy dogs (her children), who constantly takes her yapping shitzus and malteses on walks down the block. There’s a girl with an eating disorder upstairs who blares contemporary Christian music as a sort of solace to seeing the face of Satan in the toilet before she flushes. And of course there’s the crooning queens, who I could fill pages of illustrious stories with, but are most notorious for their constant complaining and references to the rest of the tenants as “inconsiderate monkeys” in their Luther-esque bulletins constantly posted on our doors and car windshields.
Since the seasons in LA don’t change, and since I haven’t allowed myself a break from school, the transitions I have made in this city are most appropriately marked by the bad and even worse haircuts I’ve had at the aforementioned place. I’ve had everything from a premature crack-baby buzz-cutt to a criminal exaggeration of the proverbial Jew-fro. One lady worth noting ran her fingers through my hair and, with a slight, royal upturn of the nose, squealed, “who do you have to thank for this hair?” This was obviously not in a complementary tone - this was a tone that seemed to say, “you know, John Deere doesn’t make hair clippers.” And it wasn’t a rhetorical remark. She actually expected me to defend my hair, as if I had a family tree with pictures in my satchel. “Aha!” I would say, pointing to somewhere in the middle of the tree. I would demonstrate with my index finger the peculiarity of the black man adjacent to my Great Aunt Yamami, and to the italicized word under his picture: “slave.” Tears rolled down my cheeks as she obliterated my curls with a dull razor, looking like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, channeling her hatred of cheating husbands and bratty children through a midnight hacking of the rose hedges.
My haircut this afternoon was a sort of delightful anomaly. There was only one stylist in the queue who had yet to give me a terrible haircut. She was wedged between the cackling, fat, gay pacific islander with the awful faux-hawk (who bestowed upon me the same awful faux-hawk) and the skinny blonde lady who ambled slowly and indecisively through my hair as if her scissors were the fork in the plate of pasta she couldn’t bring herself to eat the night before.
“I’m Tanya,” she tells me, the industrial fan of the salon blowing around her damaged hair like the modern-day Boticelli Venus that she was, a little scathed and weathered, but still Muse-like. “I’ll be cutting your hair today.”
She took off my baseball cap and placed it delicately next to the mirror. I always wear the same hat on the days I get my haircut. Its a tattered Yankees cap that, instead of reading ‘NY’ in the essential script, reads: “you can’t imagine the horror you’re about to unfold.” She placed both hands symetrically along the sides of my head, and pushed her tongue from between her teeth - a look of serious contemplation.
I noticed the sloppy, seemingly erroneous tattoos dancing across her arms and hands. Etched in her skin were cryptic drawings of vulva-like botanicals and Twombly-esque iterations. Her natural hair color, her dark roots, pushed a strange auburn color to the tips of her split-ends, making her head look like the tail of a fox. She removed her hands from the side of my head, and looked at our reflection in the mirror. She then uttered these most beautiful words: “I love your hair.” I made her say it again, claiming that I couldn’t hear her because of the large fan next to us.
“I love your hair.”
There was ambient music playing the background. I felt entranced by hands that enjoyed my hair, confident in their acceptance. As her fingers kneaded deeper and deeper, fingers akimbo clutching small tufts of hair, my eyes rolled behind my head. The ambient music and her foxtail ticked my ears. All was silent.
Suddenly, I felt cool scissor blades sloppily graze my ear. The background noise, the harsh pinwheel of the fan, seemed blaringly loud. I looked up from my reverie, my short nap. My post-nap expression of beatitude was met my another similar gesture, although her eyes were still closed and her tongue had retracted back into her mouth. I nudged her.
“Omygod!” She exclaimed. “Looks like we both sort of dozed off there. Must be the heat… or the music!”
If I weren’t still in my state of sleepy relaxation, I may have been more horrified. I just smiled and watched her continue assidiously cutting my hair, compensating. It didn’t really matter whether or not I had another bad haircut. By precedent, I would be back. Hair or no hair, faux-hawk or cockatoo.
It ended up being a good cut. Maybe the first in over a year.
One of my most vivid memories, one of my most epic senses of “becoming”, one of the most powerful scenes in my unfolding bildungsroman was the moment when my parents left me in Philadelphia, on the college green. I watched them hail a cab and disappear into the buildings of center city. I reverted my attention to my feet, fixed on a cobblestone path. I remember looking at the research building to my left, the one designed by Louis Kahn, and to the skyscrapers to my right. I looked at all the people laughing and cavorting around the square. I looked at my hands, as they detatched themselves from my conscience and fumbled in my bag for a cigarette. Through the haze of cigarette smoke, I felt a sense of entitlement, an essence of premature independence. I knew that the feeling was fragile, crafted by ambivalent and naive hands, but it was very lively. I felt very much alive.
When I arrived in LA, I didn’t feel the same delicate anticipation. I also didn’t feel particularily solid. It was a sort of hasty transition, between the east and west. LA didn’t provide me with instantaneous gratification, it has gradually introduced to me to a sort of existential happiness, a happiness beyond my articulation. There were no a priori notions to my arrival here; if there were, they were completely wrong. My moments of epiphany and realization have been inspired by great contrasts. It has taken good and bad roomates and bad and worse haircuts, in a jigsaw succession, to trigger my feeling of being, my feelings of belonging here. LA never started as an abstraction, it was a concrete thing which I had to analyze, simplify, add and subtract from. LA has been deductive. They don’t call it “lala land” for nothing, its a city built on and compromised by dreams. Its a city unrealized, a city that is my trial and my error and my triumph, a subliminal, reactive city. Its a city that resides somewhere in my subconscious - a subconscious concealed by a really bad haircut.