Sometime in the summer of 1972—I’m reasonably sure it was mid-August—I remember it being blistering hot. Sweltering, eggs-frying-on-a-sidewalk hot. I was leaving junior high and heading to sophomore status at Searcy High School, a period of life when everything was changing: school, body, and definitely attitude. Everything in life was abhorrent, hilarious, loathsome, fun, and rebellious. Friends were the ultimate expression of loyalty and cutthroat exploits. Friends were the center of the known universe. Parents knew nothing and could do nothing right. I didn’t honestly think they were ignorant; they just thought they knew everything (anything).
One particular Saturday, I was just finishing summer band rehearsal at the practice field, which was just behind Ahlf Junior High. Mom informed me as I threw my trombone into the back and jumped into the front seat beside her that it was way past time for a haircut. No big deal. She would drive me to Hickmon’s Barber Shop on Race Street, a little ramshackle wooden shop, as I recall it, with maybe only two chairs. I can’t remember anyone ever working there besides Mr. Hickmon. One seat sat empty every time I was there.
At any rate, we were not going anywhere near Race Street. In fact, we barely went the length of a football field before turning into a house adjacent to the stadium. I immediately recognized the sign out front: Merlene’s Beauty Shop.
Merlene Barker was Mom’s dear friend from church and the manufacturer of most every woman in town’s coif. For some reason, she apparently never had recovered from the death of John F. Kennedy, because most every woman coming out of her salon was channeling the exact same flip Jackie had a full decade before. Except for my mother, who insisted that much like the basic black dress, the beehive would never go out of style. She usually said that at bedtime while wrapping her head in toilet paper.
For some undefinable reason, as with a rabbit when it senses danger—a coyote or woolly mammoth—every ligament and tendon in my body tightened into defensive mode. “What are we doing at Merlene’s?” Somehow, I knew we weren’t there to pick up one of Merlene’s amazing casseroles, the culinary marvels she was famous for making when there was sickness or a death in the family. “Why aren’t we going to Hickmon’s? And where’s Andy?” My little brother was almost always in the mix when it was haircut time.
“Hickmon’s is closed today for some reason.”
I can’t remember if Mr. Hickmon was sick that day or out hunting with his boys, but I’ve never entirely gotten over the resentment of what transpired over the next hour.
Mom tried to sound excited. “Andy was finished, so I dropped him off at J. R.’s while I ran some errands.” J. R. Betts was another friend of the family. She’d dropped my little brother off at J. R.’s gas station while she came to get me. “Merlene wasn’t busy today, and she said she would be happy to do your hair.”
Do my hair? My breath caught in my chest as I remembered the time Merlene had given my little sister a perm and burned her hair off at the crown. To this day, Jacqui still calls her “Mom’s old-lady hairdresser.”
“Mom, I can wait till next weekend. It won’t get that much longer.”
“I’ve already paid her, so get in there.”
Many people, when they are in an unnatural, albeit nonfatal, accident, will experience flashbacks. They recall small bits and pieces, pictures of the event, and not the entirety of the cataclysmic, life-shifting episode. As I walked into the room, my first thought was to wonder why my mother didn’t whisper, “Dead man walking,” as I shuffled to the chair in the middle of the room.
Merlene was thrilled to see me and exclaimed how excited she was since she rarely ever got to work on boys.
I couldn’t compartmentalize any of the smells in the place: a mixture of bleaches, dyes, and—what? Burned hair? Merlene began her ritualistic persecution by strangling me with a pink-and-blue-striped plastic apron thing. Before I could instinctively rip it off, the chair was jerked back into waterboard position. I have to admit, the hair washing wasn’t half bad. I think I fell asleep, until the chair was unceremoniously thrust back into an upright position, and Merlene began circling me with a pair of scissors and a comb.
No clippers?
Merlene absentmindedly conversed with Mom while she snipped at my head. They talked about church and what someone had worn to someone’s funeral. They laughed and giggled, which was annoying to me—stupid stuff.
Then Merlene began performing some kind of sardonic treatment to my head, as though she were raking it with a fork, as if she were combing it backward or something. I asked, “Are you teasing my hair?”
She joked, obviously for the hundred thousandth time, “Oh no, honey. If I were teasing your hair, I would be doing this.” She pointed her fingers at my head and said, “Nyea, nyea, nyea, nyea, nyea nyea.”
I assumed at least one person over the past several decades had found that hilarious. I, however, did not.
I rolled my eyes as she continued to tease my hair. The entire time she was teasing, she was spraying me with some kind of lethal toxin. My eyes were burning with the fires of a thousand volcanoes, and I was unable to take in air, gagging as I gasped for what I felt sure were my final two or three tattered breaths.
Just before I went unconscious, I had two thoughts almost simultaneously. The first was This is what females go through weekly, and they rarely come out of it genetically altered, as if they grew up next to a nuclear power plant China syndrome meltdown disaster. The second thought, as I glared at my mother, who was mysteriously absorbed in a Southern Living magazine, was For the love of all that is holy, I am your son. Why aren’t you doing something to save me?
Finally, it was over. Merlene stood back, crossed her fleshy arms, cocked her head to the side, and exclaimed, “Oh!”
Mom lowered her magazine, looked up for the first time, and furtively murmured, “Oh.”
Then, almost as if deliberately adding intentional punishment, Merlene held up the mirror, and I morosely said, “Oh.” I thought, Please. No. Let me wake up or die. Please. It was like vainly attempting to look away from a train wreck. Only I was on the train.
Growing up, I possessed a weird tic. I would laugh at the most inappropriate times. If someone told me his or her mother had died, I would stifle an insane urge to guffaw. There was no way to politely say I would rather have had my eyelids stapled to a railroad track than look in that mirror. So I froze. The next thing I knew, I was laughing.
I looked as if Patsy Cline and Lady Bird Johnson had given birth to a poodle, only my bouffant was way more poofed up and solid. It was hard, remarkably stiff. If I had been Samson, the entire trajectory of history would have been altered; Delilah would never have been capable of shearing that monolithic concrete from my head. If I raised my eyebrows, my whole scalp migrated backward. I was a guy—in junior high school!
Somehow, in my near hysteria, I mumbled, “Thank you,” which came out sounding vaguely like a question. I slinked out the door, almost crawling, praying that no friend—actually, no other human—would see me before I got to the car. When Mom got in, I dove into the floorboard and began trying to flatten my hair down with my hands and spit. But it was like scraping a concrete yard gnome. I think my fingertips bled.
Mom yelled at me to leave it alone. “You need to keep it just like that till tomorrow, so Merlene can see it at church.”
There was about as much chance of that happening as hell getting a Baskin-Robbins. I figured I could leave it alone until the second we got home, and then I could drown myself in the shower with a jackhammer.
Again, however, the car wasn’t going toward home. We were heading down Race Street. It wasn’t until we pulled into J. R.’s service station on the town square that I remembered my little brother. Mom, frustrated at me for futilely attempting to get the mutant off my head, said, “Go in, and get Andy.”
I hope you’re getting the emotional picture here. I was fifteen years old and about to enter high school in a town of about ten thousand people, where everyone knew everyone, and I looked as if Merlene had dipped my head in Aqua Net and dragged me through a donkey barn. And up until this experience I thought zits were the most evil scourge of the Devil. I said, “I am not walking into that gas station. It’s not happening. You can pull out a couple of hairs from my head right now and stab me in the heart with them if you want. I’m not going in there.”
“Timothy Eldridge, get out of this car this minute, and go get your brother.”
She’d used my first and middle names, so I knew the battle was over. I prayed that a freak tsunami would splash through Arkansas, washing away the entire town, including my hair.
I walked toward the firing squad, which was actually a glass door. I pushed it open to see three gas station attendants wiping tears from their eyes, looking toward the opposite corner of the room. I glanced over and saw Andy in the farthest chair, curled up in a ball, with exactly the same bouffant as mine. Every greasy gas station attendant in the lobby turned and saw me. One of the good ole boys snorted and said, “How can I help you, Miss Sinatra?” The hilarity started all over again.
Andy and I tried to beat each other to the car. I jumped in first and stammered, “Okay, let me get this straight. You actually allowed this hairdo thing to happen twice?”
“Oh, well, now, it doesn’t look that bad. It’s just …” She trailed off with a heavy sigh.
The remainder of the ride home, Andy and I avoided eye contact. It would only have ruined the false hope that we didn’t have the same alien on our head. Andy would have burst into tears, and I would have burst into uncontrollable laughter.
Mom barely had the car parked before Andy and I raced into the house and stood in our respective showers for about forty-five minutes. Although I’m sure Mom only took us to Merlene’s little shop of horrors, torture, and humiliation out of convenience, no boy from our family ever stepped foot in that place again.
The only consolation I felt from the experience was at church the following morning, when I marched in and watched Merlene’s look of shock. There might have been a snarl on her face, as if I’d deliberately defaced a masterpiece. I might as well have drawn nose hairs on the Mona Lisa with a Marks-A-Lot or taken a chisel to the statue of David. At any rate, fortunately, right about then, the old tic set in again, and I burst into peals of hysterical laughter.
We all have specific moments in our lives that define us. If you ever wondered why it doesn’t faze me for a single second that my forehead recedes to the back of my neck, now you know.
