Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

That really fucked-up haircut.

I recovered from the class picture pretty quickly. It wasn't that bad. Seeing the white letters identifying my homeroom, the construction-paper map of France we'd toiled over that winter, the poster of Neil Armstrong floating down to the lunar surface, I felt a nice warm tingle of nostalgia. The killer was the four panes of wallet-sized photos beneath the class picture. It was just me there. They should have stopped me. They should have stopped me at any number of checkpoints. As I tried to leave the apartment — here, a close relative would have been key. The doorman could have taken me aside. We got along, him and me, trading hey s with enthusiasm, or so I thought. But he said nothing. Certainly the bus driver, de facto deputy of the body politic, could've forbid me entry, ripping my bus pass in half and tossing it to the dirty black treads. The security guard outside school should have beat me with his flashlight, and surely my homeroom teacher, Miss Barrett — stickler by nature, wielder of a bifocaled annihilating gaze — should have shoved her big wooden desk up against the classroom door, back brace or no back brace. All of them should have said, What the fuck is up with your hair?

Obviously it had been months since my last trim. Instead of a haircut, the photographer had captured some primordial process unfolding. The universe tugged and pressed on my hair with invisible fingers, the way it had pulled up mountains to the sky and gouged the deepest ocean chasms, where the only living beings are pale boneless things rooting around in everlasting gloom. What else is there to say but that in my vicinity larger forces were at work, the ancient underpinnings of it all. There are natural laws. The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that as temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion holds that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The entity on my head was proof of another fundamental law: a fucked-up Afro tends toward complete fuckedupedness at an exponential rate over time, as expressed by the equation,

AN = F * t

where AN is Absolute Nappiness, Fis fuckedupedness, and tis time

The pane of photos was uncut, of course. Who'd want a picture of that in their wallet, poisoning their money?

I don't remember being teased about my hair or my acute chappiness. But surely they made fun of me, the children in the photograph and the strangers out of frame. Surely they had to see it. Why didn't they say anything? I was due for another haircut when I found those pictures, but it never occurred to me not to ask my dad to cut my hair as usual. We'd always done things a certain way. Then out in Sag I was at Clive's house when he was cutting NP's hair, and when he was done he turned to me and asked, “You want me to cut off that jungle bush or what?”

I finished my cream soda and went to wash out the can. Chicken parts bobbed in a big pot of water in the sink, defrosting. He was going to barbecue tomorrow. I made a note.

“He just boiled that dizzy bitch in the hot tub,” he said.

Halloween II . “Dag,” I said. I sat down on the couch and watched the rest of it with him.

Reggie woke me up with his french-fry smell when he came in. The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling in the dark. When I got up, he'd already gone back to work.

It was almost noon, from the noise. Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up. First, though, I concentrated on the house noises, to see what I'd be getting into. The screen door slammed shut and someone entered the living room — my mother, from the walk. She made a comment, my father responded in his wisecracking intonation, and both of them laughed. I relaxed. Things seemed okay out there.

I had three speakers — the two windows and the crack beneath the door — that functioned as my tri-phonic hi-fi, filling the room with the melody of an Azurest afternoon. If I closed my eyes, I saw everything perfectly. Things never happened otherwise. Last-minute lawn mowers spun and spat, and a car made a slow turn 'round Terry onto Walker, reconnoitering to see which houses had cars in the driveway. That eternal question: Who's out, who's out? Three houses up, Big Dennis cranked up his Earth, Wind & Fire best of, which by that point in the summer I knew track by track, crooning the next song while this one was still on the second verse. “Reasons, the reasons that we hear.” Out on the water, two motorboats cruised in circles, preparing for the busy weekend workout: hauling worthies up on water skis; fishing expeditions in the Great Beyond outside the bay; and slow jaunts around the Neck or into Baron's Cove, depending on one's motives. The weekend jigsaw fit together into the shape on the box, the one we were promised. Then I heard it, a sound the normal person would never notice.

Poomp .

It was the magnet. There was one magnet with which I was well acquainted. It resided in the next room, in the lower left quadrant of the kitchen island, securing the liquor cabinet door. It produced a sound— Poomp —when the twin metal strips on the cabinet door connected with the magnet in the cabinet itself. Poomp meant the liquor cabinet had been depleted. Poomp meant it had started.

I felt a twinge. Then relaxed. It was okay — I'd devised an exit strategy when I saw the chicken in the sink.

I haven't gotten to the layout of our little hideaway yet. The beach house was a ranch bungalow my grandparents built in the late '60s. Long planks stained a deep, earthy red covered the exterior, and the roof sloped at a narrow angle, like a book that had been set facedown. The two small bedrooms faced the street; walk out of them and you were in a hallway with a bathroom on your right before things opened up into the living space. The TV area and encircling couches on the left, kitchen and dining on the right. The north wall was glass, facing the deck, and beyond that stretched the beach and the bay. Visitors coming up from the beach used the screen door, and those from the street used the side door next to the stove. The clomping up the side stairs was an invaluable early-alert system, allowing us to scurry into the back if we decided to pretend not to be home. Which was quite often.

We'd spent three summers there. We used to stay on Hempstead Street, in the old house my grandparents put up when the developments started going. My mother and her sister inherited the two houses, and then in some intricate bad-blood transaction our family got the beach house and my aunt got the Hempstead House. Obviously, from an objective real estate point of view, the beach house was the better property. Location, location, etc. But I'd spent my true childhood at the other place, and I never got over leaving it. My laundry list of psychic injuries aside, the Hempstead House was just bigger. In the new place we were on top of each other. My sister got the second bedroom whenever she came out, forcing me and Reggie to sleep in the living room, waiting for her or our parents to get up so that we could stumble off into their rooms for the short but important stretch of late-morning sleep.

The beach house was still big enough for you to sneak around in, slink into the bathroom, and generally get your shit together before you had to say good morning. This day, I heard my mother talking to one of her friends out on the deck, so I dashed into the bathroom, checked that the coast was clear, and then made a break for it to my parents' bedroom to use the phone.

“James going to barbecue today?” I heard NP's mother ask.

“You know James,” my mother answered.