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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v211) (the August 2010 Issue) |
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The Self-Inflicted Haircut
Valor Brown
I pedaled faster and faster to replace the screams I could not make, so that all of the waiting nosy neighbors wouldn’t be inclined to create their own version of events. I was already a hopeless melancholic with a future flipping burger patties, so it would be easy for them to fill in the blanks on this day. The truth was less complicated than they realized: I just wanted them to fuck off.
I was in my twelfth year, and had just given myself an emergency haircut. That’s right. It’s not the kind of haircut you give yourself to make you feel prettier, or the kind that attempts bangs like a grinning Jennifer Aniston in a glossy-paged Cosmo. This was the kind of haircut that required large dull scissors, a Sisters of Mercy album, and plenty of angst to last the entire snipping session.
I looked in the same mirror that had kept me frustrated these many months. I just grabbed large chunks and started chopping away. Every time I caught a glimpse of a big red pustule marring the landscape of my face, I would have to take another hack, as close to the scalp as possible.
Life wasn’t always like this. I was chubby for awhile, but at least I never had acne, I had thought. Maybe those kids with acne just never washed their faces, or ate too many French Fries and drank too many sodas. I was lucky that my parents would rarely allow those things. But much like the high of gorging on Pepperidge Farm cookies at midnight, this euphoria too would come to an end—when I noticed the new face in the mirror.
I was suddenly not only fat, but now I was fat with a face like a pizza, thanks to the medication I was forced to take. Ever since I tested positive on the routine TB skin test, I was forced to take a medication for nine months. It, consequently, made my face erupt angrily overnight in an army of painful and large pimples.
I would spend hours in front of the mirror pushing and prodding with fingers and hot safety pins. Like a mutant monster, each bone-deep pimple would grow five new heads if I conquered one before it. My face was a carnage filled battle field, still wet with puss and blood no matter how many times I would treat it with peroxide or other agents, so that it was in a constant state of flux.
I could not leave my room without beginning to drip, so I would tap, and blot, and pray for it to cease for a moment, so I could wait for the bus and do whatever I needed to do to get through the day as a self-conscious preteen. What did it feel like to not ooze? I didn’t know anymore.
It was on this day that I found myself, stuffing into a t-shirt with wolves on the front—the kind you buy at a Western truck-stop from a cashier in a John Deere cap that looks like he’s lain under a heat lamp for twenty years too long. My stomach did nothing to assist my lack of fashion sense, like eight breasts pancaked inside my t-shirt. I put a hoodie on over that to lamely disguise my stomach, and mainly to pull the hood over my newest revenge on myself: my holocaust haircut.
I rode as fast as I could pedal to my only friend’s house. I could have done the route blind-folded, I went so often. He knew it was me when he said—as if prepared already—like a gentle father, “What did you do this time?”
