Thu, 19 May 2005

The Girl With Beautiful Hair
How I met the girl with beautiful hair is a weird story. Me and Jimmy Cheerios and Jimmy’s cousin Ray were out by Traer, Iowa, flashlight hunting out of the back of Ray’s old beater bronco, loaded to the eyeballs on meth and fresh out of beer, which meant a run back to waterloo (it was one a.m., only place open) where one of us was gonna have to face the certain doom of going in the food king and, y’know, having to DEAL with human beings, which we woulda skipped but we were hunting. See, back in ‘93 we had nasty-ass floods for a long time and some farms spent months isolated and empty and the livestock had Linda gone mad. So the state designated certain areas no-limit, and with the horses and most cows able to get shipped to holding pens, the big game was chickens and rabid pigs, who’d been known to attack when cornered. There were stories of a few hunters already dead but that was more likely just stupidity. Anyway we needed the meth to keep us up and the beer to cut the anxiety, which was riding high by the time we got into town. We were in no condition to deal with the humans, no condition to try to make cash transactions, but somebody had to buy the ammo and beer, so Trenchcoat Larry’s Brother and Sinatra and I did three out of five rock-paper-scissors and I was the big loser. So with my pupils big as saucers, I half-stumble into the Food King (whose slogan, “We Are The Meat People”, took on evil resonances between the late hour, the powders and liquids we’d soaked into our brainpans, and out mission of the evening: hunting deranged pigs out on Shield’s Farm, now a flat plane of moonlit water broken by clusters of trees and the occasional abandoned barn. The rains had gotten so bad by this point that it was not uncommon to see people around town decked in hip-waders; thus I attracted little attention decked out in my bright orange thermal-insulated boots. I remember thinking all the aisles were crooked and I couldn’t follow a straight line to their ends. I kept having to stop, turn around, and backtrack, my hand gently along one shelf trying not to knock anything over, wishing I could crawl, dazed into stupidity by the low-hung fluorescent lighting. a girl in a Pantera shirt asked me if she could help me but she only spoke in clicks and subvocal whistles so I had to keep her from entering my personal space with curses and secret mudras. I found the beer and ran my hands along the inside of the cooler, feeling the syntho-frost melt onto my hands, and like a hammer to the skull it hit me: it was after two, there would be no buying beer nor ammo. I sat down beside the cooler, confident that I was hidden from prying eyes, and I heard a voice from behind me say (in clear human-speak) “there’s tile patterns you have to follow to get out of this place. I learned ‘em when I was little, watched the way the babies and insects moved. Follow me out, I got year back.”

This was how I met The Girl With Beautiful Hair. It was only the next day that I realized I had left Trenchcoat Larry’s Brother and Sinatra in the truck, waiting on me, but to no surprise they forgot about me as well and returned to the farm, where Sinatra got a nasty dent put in the side of his truck by a truly massive sow who split the waters like Moses, abandoning all plans for flashlight-hunting, instead doing up the last of the necessary mission supplies out on Traer County Bridge and shooting at debris bobbing in the water. I awoke on the floor next to The Girl With Beautiful Hair’s bed (apparently my idea. Stupid, stupid), the legs of puppets hanging over my head, the trails of ghosts still laid over my eyes. And, for a while, it was on to better days for all of us.

Alright, well, fuck. This is gonna be a longer story than I thought, and I’m gonna skip the long part for now.

…and then I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out and drinking bad coffee with The Girl With Beautiful Hair, who didn’t hesitate to tell me that this wasn’t her first story.

“Don’t mean to burst any bubbles, but you and I both know that authors tend to frown on kidnapping characters from their books and putting ‘em into your own little pseudopomometayaddayaddayadda stories. I’d hate to see the writer’s guild have to come all the way down here and throw a bat party, is all I’m saying…”

“Who? Who is this person who wrote of The Girl With Beautiful Hair? Huh? If you don’t know, then I say it’s open season.”

“Well, y’know, there was that book by Murakami-”

“Wrong. She was the Girl With Beautiful EARS. Whole different gig. I’m still in the clear. (Laughs) Next!”

“Okay, well, David Foster Wallace-“

“The Girl with CURIOUS Hair! Next!”

“Fuck, uh…Carol Ermschwiler?”

“(giggles) And again, wrong! Well…um…I don’t really remember anymore…shit. I think you might be right. Okay, so MAYBE somebody else came up with this basic premise before, but that don’t mean squat, ‘cause — what are you doing?”

“(sighs) This is my job, remember. Don’t play like you don’t know.”

And The Girl With Beautiful Hair, as she does here in the marketplace every noon, stands up and shakes her head while people who have gathered from across the land watch and take snapshots to remember this moment, the brightest their lives may ever know, and hold close the memory forever. I know The Girl With Beautiful Hair pretty well, have seen her beautiful hair many times, and sometimes it amazes even me. As you’ve probably figured out, I am hopelessly in love with The Girl With Beautiful Hair. She is in love, essentially, with Someone Who Isn’t Me. Do you know the term “saudade”? And she sits back down to her bad coffee and we try to begin conversation again, but it’s a lost moment now. Perhaps I should invest in a camera.

One afternoon The Girl With The Beautiful Hair asked me if I would shave her head.

“Why?”

“It’s not beautiful anymore. Nobody can see it. All they see anymore is The Beautiful Hair. And it’s starting to dread, actually, which makes it a bitch to comb.”

“You realize the gov. is gonna cut off your Hair Artist stipend.”

“Probably. Fuck ‘em.”

“And I can go to the bighouse for Defamation Of A Government Site.”

“Listen, man, you don’t have to do it if you don’t wanna. I just thought I’d ask, is all.”

Once upon a time The Girl With The Beautiful Hair and I slept together, by which I mean quite literally we shared a bed. I would spoon up behind her, the spaces on my body where I felt her still holding the memory across the skin, my face covered like a veil in The Beautiful Hair, not so much lost within it as found, so long, so long ago. I’m getting maudlin.

“Certainly I’ll cut your hair. I’d be less than a friend to decline.”

It’s amazing the way that when someone we love leaves our life, how desperately we collect and cling to the small deuterium left behind in their absence, photographs, small pieces of trash, forgotten jewelry, letters scrawled on the backs of handouts and flyers. the way we listen again and again to messages left on the machine, layers upon layers, like Schleimann discovering troy, inventing subtext beneath subtext to every word, every breath. The way that, wandering around the room trying halfheartedly to clean, finding a long black hair reduces me to tears, curled and cradled on the floor, the spaces reopening like wounds.

After serving my two years of house arrest, the marks from the ankle bracelet still visible today, the first place I went was to the museum, wander back where no one goes anymore, get lost in the bones and plunder, back to the Body Art exhibit. I must have been there for hours, getting found in the blacks shifting into blues into purples into reds.

When love is shown as impossible it doesn’t really die, it shifts, becomes something lesthanmorethan, confuses, asks more than it ever answers. It’s a feeling you have to learn. But you learn it, a language you only speak to yourself. There really isn’t much else to do.

Sometimes I wonder if there is another Beautiful Girl With Beautiful Hair down at the marketplace, but I’ll never go look. The museum, though…I’m sure I’ll end up back there again, no matter how many times I tell myself I will not go.

Once I asked an old woman what you do when your friends are all gone, and she said, and I’ll never forget this, “You do laundry.”

Maybe I’ll never understand.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #