Hairstyles of the Damned (2 page)

“Do you want to go get something to eat?” Gretchen asked. “I am fucking starving, because I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’m a big fat cow.”

“Whatever,” I said, turning the radio down so we could talk. “Where do you want to go eat? Haunted Trails?”

Haunted Trails was on 79th Street, this monster-movie-themed miniature golf course and video arcade, really the only place we or any of the other stoners and punks hung out. “No, wait, forget it,” she said. “All those kids’ll be there and I look so gross. I’m supposed to be on this diet where I only eat white foods, it’s like racist or something. Seriously. I am disgusted with myself, you know? I practically
am
a boy. Look at me. I practically have chest hair. I could join the football team or something.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You just said that so I’d say how you look OK, so I’m not even saying it.”

“Oh, you figured me out, douche-bag. No, I mean it, look at me:I’m practically a boy; I practically have a dick.” And as she slowed the crappy blue Escort to a stop at the next light, she bunched the front of her jeans up so it looked like she had an erection. “Look, look, my god, I have an erection! I’ve got blue balls! Oh, they hurt! I need help!Give me some porn, hurry! Come on, let’s go rape some cheerleaders!Oh, they hurt!”

I laughed, looking away.

“Forget it, though, seriously. I am so disgusted with myself. Hey, did I tell you that I’m in love with Tony Degan again?”

“What?” I asked. “Why don’t you forget him? He’s like fucking twenty-six. And a white power asshole. And, I dunno, that should be enough.”

“I’m not really in love with him. I’d just like for him to totally devirginize me.”

“What?”

“You know, just have some meathead who doesn’t give a shit about you, just get it over with, you know, so you wouldn’t have to talk to him ever again? That way, it wouldn’t be like uncomfortable afterwards.”

“Yeah, I could see how being like raped by some white power dude wouldn’t be uncomfortable.”

“Exactly,” she said. “That’s why you’re like my best girlfriend.”

“Gretchen, you know I’m not a girl, right?”

“I know, but if I think of you as a guy, then I have to worry about what I eat in front of you.”

“But I don’t care how you look,” I said, and I knew I was lying.

two

i am in love with a white power thug . tony degan. tony degan, you’re all i can think of. i know you’re a burnout. i know you’re a racist jag-off. but i can’t stop thinking about you. the way you smile , like you’re already unsnapping my bra, i don’t know, you’re all i think about . you make me feel ok. you make me feel less lonely. i think about you and i know i’ll never be lonely. no one’s going to make me feel gross . no one’s ever going to call me fatty again. tony degan. tony degan. the next time . the next time i’m alone with you i’m going to let you do it. i’m gonna let you do anything you want to do.

three

At the video arcade later, Gretchen was crying. It was something I’d never seen before in my life. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I was in the middle of a high-scoring game of Phantom Racer and not really listening. I turned and saw her cheeks were pink and shiny with tears, and she was biting her bottom lip to keep from sobbing. She had on her black hoodie and in the light it looked like her bright pink hair was washing away to white-blond again. I hate to say it, but thinking about it now, standing there with her arms crossed and looking sad, looking down, with the flashing lights from Galaga and Bonn Scott from the great AC/DC wailing about “TNT” through the arcade speakers, all of it mixing in with the
click, click
of the air hockey machine and the blips and buzzes and outer space noises from the other video games, well, I dunno, she looked really gentle standing there. Real pretty.

“Tony Degan asked me to go for a ride with him,” she finally said.

“So?” I said, looking back at the blinking screen.

“So, I didn’t.”

“So?”

“So, I just saw some fucking skank making out with him.”

“So? Big deal.” I shrugged my shoulders and zoomed past a stalled-out race car, downshifting to regain speed, but two red-eyed pixilated demons lurched into my path. I looked over and Gretchen was gone. In a moment then, from the parking lot outside, I could hear someone let out a scream. I finished that level and watched as my score was totaled. Some dick with the name RAD1 had blown all of my old scores and it seemed pretty pointless to even try for first place, because RAD1 had to be some retarded video game genius who worked for the video game company, you know, kind of like The Who’s Tommy? I mean, who scores 1,500,200 points anyways? Retarded video game playing geniuses. I dunno. I heard the scream from the parking lot again and since my score wasn’t shit, I just turned and walked away.

Outside, it was very bright in the daylight and also very quiet. I had to cover my eyes to let them adjust to the sun, which was just starting to go down. It was around five o’clock. Outside, the Haunted Trails Miniature Golf and Amusement Arcade was pretty much empty. There were all the usual weird horror-themed miniature golf obstacles—the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hole 3, the green monster rising out of the middle of a blue-green swamp, a coffin with a crappy plastic mechanical hand that rose and fell sporadically, dancing skeletons that you had to putt past—but no one was really around. Some dad and his two little girls were arriving at Hole 8, which was a big wooden haunted castle, in which you had to hit the ball through the drawbridge. The dad was lining up his shot; he had a shiny black patch over his left eye. They all looked like they had been in some kind of accident. Both of the little girls had bandages on their faces and one had a broken arm. It made me wonder for a minute. Then one of the girls kicked a blue golf ball with the tip of her shoe into the hole and they all laughed.
Everything is good when your dad bothers to be around
, I thought to myself. Across from the miniature golf course, some overweight jocks were hitting balls in the “fast pitch” batting cages. One guy had on an American flag baseball hat and a T-shirt that said “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor.” He knocked the hell out of an inside pitch and shouted, “He shoots, he scores!” and I decided I did not like that. Across from the batting cages, a Mexican guy was selling hairy-looking hot dogs at the Spooky Snack Shop. There were exactly two fat kids speeding along on the go-cart drag way behind that; they were twins in yellow paper birthday hats. They both had the same joyful expression on their round, tubby faces and I thought how nice it would be to be a kid again. But not fat. At the gates, there was the giant plastic Frankenstein statue rising up to the sky, brandishing his axe. His expression seemed to say,
Yes
,
I am just as lonely up here
. I waved to him and walked around back.

I lit up a cigarette and looked across the parking lot to where all the stoners hung out. I was trying smoking—what the hell, everyone else did it. I sucked in a mouthful and coughed like a war veteran, then flicked the cigarette behind me, doing my best strut across the parking lot. At the end of the lot there were two or three cool-looking cars: a rebuilt blue metallic-flake Nova, an Impala which was rusty but still sweet, and two decent-looking vans. The guys with the best mustaches and the best cars all hung out in the parking lot. They were kids who were still in high school but because of their fine mustaches and fine cars got some pussy and looked old enough to buy beer. Also, there were older guys like Tony Degan, who had to be like twenty-six but still hung out with high school kids, you know, to sell them dope and talk shit and to try and get some teenage trim. Tony did well, mostly because he was older and knew what to do to get a girl to believe whatever it was he was saying with lines like, “Hey, I really feel like I can open up with you,” while jamming his hand down the poor girl’s pants. Or so I had heard anyway.

As I got closer to the lot, I saw Bobby B.’s purple wizard van and he and Tony Degan were standing in front of it, leaning against the hood, laughing. Bobby B. was a kid from my street, a senior, a year older than me, with long black hair, gold sunglasses, and acid-washed jeans. He would sit out in his garage all night, smoking and drinking and trying to get the goddamn starter on his van to fire. The van, a ’77 Dodge, looked good—it was bright purple and had this magnificent wizard airbrushed on one side of it—but it ran like shit. But it was still a van, his van, a good-looking wizard van. Sitting in the glove compartment, Bobby B. always had about five pairs of girls’ underwear, from girls he had made it with. He called it his “trophy case.” I would open the glove box and the panties would all seem to sing a hymn to me—
Hallelujah!
—glowing with golden light. Also, with much gratitude, I must mention Bobby B. was the one who had turned me on to AC/DC when he loaned me
High Voltage
in eighth grade. For that, I would be eternally grateful.

Beside Bobby B. was Tony Degan, who, on the other hand was, like I said, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six, tall but lanky, wearing a yellow T-shirt that said, “My grandparents went to the Bahamas and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.” He was smoking and nodding and shaking his head. That was what he did: nodded to himself and smiled, like there was a joke about you that you weren’t really getting. He looked high most of the time—maybe he was, I dunno. He had blond hair, which was longer in back, combed-up with grease of some kind, and two black wristbands just above his hands, though he wasn’t a jock or in a band, but he had that look, like 1-2-3, he could kick your ass.

As soon as I made it around the corner, I heard the scream again and saw Gretchen holding some girl I didn’t know in a headlock. Like always, Gretchen was winning. The other girl’s eyes were big and bugged-out with panic. She was very skinny and very slutty-looking. She had on spiderweb nylons, which were torn, and a black jean jacket with a huge Megadeth patch. She was on her knees and having a hard time breathing. Drool was pouring over Gretchen’s forearm and onto the cement. It was not very cool.

“Dude, what’s the malfunction here?” I asked.

“Brian Oswald, what’s up with you, dude?” Bobby B. asked with a nod. He had a nice mustache coming in: thin, but it extended around his narrow lips all the way down to his chin, biker-style. I had been trying for months to grow a mustache but there was nothing; not anything: no stubble, no shadow, not anything. I was a junior in high school who still looked like a junior-high kid. “So what’s fucking going on?” Bobby B. asked again, slapping my hand.

“You know, nothing,” I said.

“You break that high score on Phantom Racer yet?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Fuck. They must have some fucking expert come in and reset it every week.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So what’s the deal here?”

With an amazing thud, Gretchen slammed the girl’s head off the side of a parked LeBaron. “Ohhhhhh,” everyone moaned.

“Fucking chicks,” Bobby B. said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Chicks.” I turned to Gretchen and shouted, “Dude, Gretchen, fucking relax.”

Like always, she just ignored me.

“Aw, let her go already,” Tony mumbled, still grinning. He ran his hand through his dirty blond hair, which was thick with grease, and rubbed his own neck. “She didn’t do nothing.”

Gretchen’s chubby face was pink, turning red, and she gave in finally, shoving the girl against the hood of somebody’s station wagon. She held her finger up to the girl’s face and said, “The next time … The next time, your ass is grass.”

Everybody standing around said, “Ewwwwww,” and clapped, and Gretchen picked up her hoodie and wiped her nose, which was running. The other girl limped away, her mouth bleeding, while Tony Degan kept on laughing and nodding.

“You’re fucking dead,” the girl shouted from across the safety of the parking lot. “I’m gonna get my friends and we’re gonna kick your ass.”

Gretchen just turned to me and said, “Let’s fucking go already,” and I nodded, without a word, which was my way at the time, because I chose to live my life like fucking Zatoichi the blind samurai, you know, the samurai dude from the ’60s movies? I was going through that phase, watching nothing but samurai movies and horror flicks. That was some serious metal, you know, the blind swordsman with his flashing sword. If you don’t know, you need to check those movies out. Anyway, I was deadly fucking silent—
deadly fucking silent
—most of the time. I was a shy kid and I was afraid what I said sounded stupid, so I hardly ever said anything. I was the third wheel. Fifth wheel? I was the fucking wheel you didn’t really need, but I still hung around. I thought maybe my silence would one day impress somebody. As of yet, it hadn’t done much for me. Most people, when they thought of Brian Oswald, probably said, “Who?” Then someone might say, “That dude, the quiet one that is always hanging around.” Then the other person would probably say, “Who?” again. I was invisible to most people, I guess. For example, when Gretchen and I hopped back in the Ford Escort, the radio was working—a one-in-a-million chance—and we motored away to the tune of “Dirty Deeds” by the great AC/DC, before Gretchen switched the radio station on me without asking.