Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Our father reacted with the boilerplate threats and harangues, and finally this renaming. Whenever our father was in the room, Reggie disappeared and in his place lingered this embarrassing, ever-accountable stain. “Is this Shithead's?” he'd ask, holding up a copy of Spin that had fallen between the cushions of the couch. Lightbulb burn out? “Shithead's using too much electricity.” I got off the hook a lot. I was grateful. We were always grateful when someone else got the business. If I left some dirty dishes in the sink, my father said, “These must be Shithead's,” as he passed by, and I took the hint and scrubbed them. It wasn't until Labor Day that I realized that over the course of the summer Reggie had moved most of his Burger King time to the weekend, trading and swapping with co-workers shift by shift to minimize exposure. That night he was at BK like I said, and had arranged for a double on Saturday. That was a big chunk of quality time disposed of right there.

I opened a can of cream soda and leaned against the fridge. My father said, “I was wondering when you were going to stop having me cut your hair.”

I ran my palm across my bristly scalp. “Clive has a whole clipper set.”

“Look like one of those corner niggers,” he said. Groups of brown young men — black, Dominican, Puerto Rican — hung out in alternating shifts outside the bodega on the corner of 101st and Broadway, that locus of licentiousness. Whenever something went awry in the neighborhood, the corner niggers eagerly stepped up for scapegoat duty. Gum mashed into your shoe, runny dog shit in front of the building, transit strike: these were all well-known manifestations of corner-nigger high jinks. They kept their hair grazed down to quarter-inch stubble, and Clive had inducted me into their gang.

“I like it,” I said.

“Your head.” He shrugged. He leaned back on the couch and returned to the TV. It sounded familiar. I'd seen the movie before.

It was the first time someone else had cut my hair. Since I could remember, me and Reggie had a ritual. When our hair got too crazy, we asked our father to give us a haircut, and he put us off, saying he was too busy or had had a long day at his practice, and over the next few weeks or months we'd ask again, judiciously spacing out our requests so as not to “nag like an old woman,” and then eventually one evening he'd come home tipsy after “a meeting” and break out his scissors. Black barbers the world over, they use electric clippers. These are modern times. In many sectors, technological advances are welcomed and embraced. My father, however, loved his special pair of old-school barber scissors, and we loved them, too, because the sound of the long, thin blades sniping against each other was the sound of his undivided attention.

As I sat on a chair in the bathroom, holding the towel tight around my bony shoulders and staring into the black-and-white subway tile, he trimmed and trimmed, grumbling about the light, tilting my head to and fro with a firm push of his index and middle fingers. He drew up tufts with a pick and squinted and clipped. I murmured the Prime Directive to myself, “Don't move your head, don't move your head,” even though it never worked. I moved. He always told me I moved no matter how much I concentrated, no matter how many oaths and pledges I devised between haircuts, as if a new arrangement of words might make things turn out differently next time. At some point he'd say, “You moved your head. Now I have to even it out,” and I cursed myself as he cut and cut, and my 'Fro grew shorter and shorter and shorter …

But when he was done, it was perfect. Like when he grilled — you had to admit that despite everything, he was a master griller. It was one of those things he did well, you couldn't say anything against it, it was a cornerstone of our reality. He gave us miniature versions of his own cut, the same one he'd given himself since high school, when he took over haircut duties from his father. The haircuts remained perfect for whole hours — don't be thrown off by the fact that no camera ever recorded them. The spell broke when you took a shower or slept on them, whereupon all his tucks and pats and proddings were undone and our superb crowns became utterly misshaped and disordered, the underlying principles revealed as counterfeit. What occurred on my scalp could not be called a “style” in any true sense, and it got wilder the longer it got. It was a weird black amoeba testing the edges of itself, throwing out nappy pseudopods here and suddenly there, an unpredictable new direction every day. I swear it lived, and have come to believe that its ever-shifting lumps and tendrils were a doomed attempt at communication with the humans. The tragedy of the day-after haircuts! And all the days after! The months passed until we had to admit to ourselves that the world abhorred us, and the process started anew.

Needless to say, I had no idea how fucked up the haircuts were at the time. To us they were normal. Just how things were done in our house. (Raise your hand if you can relate.) My delusions ended that spring when I was cleaning out my desk during one of my periodic purges of nerdery. My twenty-sided die possessed a curious will, returning to pester and trouble me even though I had thrown it out a hundred times, the specter of D&D games past. This time I threw it out the window. (I found it under the radiator a week later.) I stashed dog-eared copies of Famous Monsters in a box at the back of the closet and hid all the comic books I'd bought since the last purge, in case a girl materialized in my room due to a transporter malfunction. I was in a good mood or something, feeling optimistic, like someone had chuckled at a joke that I'd made in Biology, or History, and it had gone to my head.

I came across a packet of fifth-grade class pictures under my copy of Swamp Thing #35. It is the nettlesome quality of elementary-school pictures to reveal the true nature of our childhoods. Nothing is how we remember it, and all the necessary alterations we've made in order to survive with semi-functioning psyches are exposed. Best to leave them alone.

Looking back, I think I had what is best described as a prelapsarian fondness for fifth grade, its lack of complication. No more. Miss Fredericks, the Social Studies teacher whose cruel smile had haunted me for years and who was actually the default setting in my nightmares when I needed an evil authority figure, had a melancholy face now that I really examined it. She seemed a bit too skinny, almost ill, and I got to thinking about what her house looked like, picturing the shadows in the kitchenette where she prepared her lonely meals. Two scoops of cottage cheese on a big leaf of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a side of misery. She never appeared in my dreams again.

Scanning the rest of the photograph, it was clear that none of us, teacher and pupils alike, had remained untouched by that horrible epidemic making the rounds back then, '70s fashion, the manic stripes and prints of the shirts and skirts and pants a kind of rash on our flesh that only a new decade could cure. Then there were the kids themselves. No one looked like they were supposed to. These changeling creatures surrounded me in polyester, touching my elbows. Strangers. I traced a finger along their faces like a movie amnesiac … that must be my best friend … his name is Andy … that's the smart girl who sat in front of me all year … she ate frankfurters out of a Bionic Woman thermos filled with hot oily water. Then there was my own face. My face was not the one I remembered showing to the world. Were my eyes so dark, those days? There was something amiss with my mouth, always my mouth, even before I got braces. My lips were chapped, sure, but the chappiness seemed to have extended its territory, so that a huge white halo encircled my mouth, like I'd been eating ashes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then there was that thing on top.