Hairstyles of the Damned

one

The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat. We were in her crappy car and singing, and at the end of the song “White Riot,” the one by the Clash, I realized by the way I was watching her mouth pucker and smile and her eyes blink and wink, we were way more than friends, at least to me. I looked over at Gretchen driving and she was starting to sing the next song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” by the Clash again, and I said, “I love driving around with you, Gretchen,” but because the radio was so loud all she could do was see my mouth move.

It was a Tuesday around four in the afternoon, the first semester of our junior year in high school, and neither one of us had anything to do, because Gretchen had just recently been fired from the Cinnabon at the mall for flipping off a female customer when she asked for more icing, and I wasn’t allowed to work because my mother was very overprotective of me and insisted that I only focus on studying. I yelled something to Gretchen again and she nodded at me and then turned her head back to drive and kept on singing and I guess I looked over at her, at her short blondish-pink hair—some of it hanging in her face, some tucked behind her ear, some dyed brighter pink than the rest—and I watched the way her mouth moved again and I noticed she didn’t ever wear lipstick and it was one of the reasons I think I liked her; and also I smiled at how she was holding her small white hands on the steering wheel very seriously, like she was a new driver, which she was not, because she was seventeen and had been driving way before she had gotten her license last year. I also looked at her breasts; I looked at them and they were big, very big, more than I knew what to do with, and I guess the truth of the matter was they were big because she was fat, and it didn’t matter to me then, not the way it would if I was like hanging out with Bobby B. or some other guy at the mall, and he’d be like, “Check out that porker,” and I’d be like, “Yeah,” and then I’d laugh. Gretchen was fat, I mean not like obese, but she was definitely big, not her face so much, but her middle and behind.

Worse than that, she was known for kicking other girls’ asses on a regular basis. It was not very cool. There was the awful hair-pulling incident with Polly Winchensky. There was the enormous black eye she gave Lisa Hensel. There was the time Gretchen broke Amy Schaffer’s arm at a Halloween party—you know, when Amy Schaffer had rolled her eyes at Gretchen’s costume, when she came as JFK post-assassination, with the black suit and blood and bullet holes, and Amy Schaffer said, “You really do look like a man,” and Gretchen just turned and grabbed Amy Schaffer’s arm and twisted it so hard behind her back that Amy Schaffer’s school drama days were ended right there, just like that, so that poor Amy Schaffer had to go around for the next two years milking sympathy, like a fucking martyr wearing her aircast everywhere, long after it could have possibly been needed for anything recuperative.

Also, well, also Gretchen wasn’t the most feminine girl in the world, sincerely. She swore a lot and only listened to punk, like the Misfits and the Ramones and the Descendents, especially when we were in the car, because, although it had a decent stereo for a Ford Escort, there was a tape that had been stuck in the cassette player for about a year now and most of the time that was all it would play, and you had to jab the tape with a pen or nail file to get it to start, and the tape was the same handpicked mix Gretchen had thought was cool a year ago, which according to the label on the tape was what she had called White Protest Rock, version II.

Gretchen’s mix-tapes, her music choices, were like these songs that seemed to be all about our lives, but in small random ways that made sense on almost any occasion. Like “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” Maybe it meant I should tell Gretchen how I was feeling. Or maybe it meant I should just go home. To me, the tapes were what made me like her, then love her so much: the fact that in between the Misfits and the Specials, she would have a song from the Mamas and the Papas, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” or something like that. Those mix-tapes were the secret soundtrack to how I was feeling or what I thought about almost everything.

Also—and I don’t know if I should mention this or not—Gretchen always called other people, even our friends, “douche-bags” or “douche-holes” or “cunts” or “cunt-holes” or “cunt-teasers” or “cuntwads” or “cunt-heads” or even “cunt-asses,” which doesn’t even make sense when you think about it, things like that. The way she swore amazed me and again, it probably made me like her a lot more than any other girl I had ever met because she didn’t ever seem to mind hanging out with me.

OK, so the thing of it was, the Homecoming Dance was like in three weeks and I hadn’t asked anyone and I wanted to ask Gretchen, but I hadn’t for good reasons: one, I didn’t want her to know I liked-her-liked-her; two, I knew she liked Tony Degan, this white power dude; and also—and this is the worst thing so I hate to admit it—but well, I didn’t want the photographs. You know how they make you take your picture and everything? I didn’t want photographs of me at Homecoming with a fat girl so that in fifty years I’d have to be reminded of what a loser I was because, well, I hoped things in the future were going to change for me.