Hairstyles of the Damned (26 page)

“Let’s go shave it then,” and that’s what happened to all my hair. Just like that. All of it gone. Just like that.

twenty-three

In the end, we opted to do a skit for our Final History Project, because Mike thought it was the best way to disguise that we didn’t do any real research or anything. It went like this: Mike was the detective telling the class about historical facts, reading from his poorly written yellow note cards in his slightly stoned voice, “So this is a skit about not belonging, right. It, um, is meant to show you how terrified our nation was of itself, you know, and like how distrustful, and also, how it was like a turning point, you know? Like people not trusting other people, some people feeling like not part of other people. How like it was like our nation growing up, you know, facing some real bad things, but then like that is part of it, you know, bad things and being alive is part of like being in America, maybe, which people didn’t really think about much. So it was like America learning there is bad things out there and that is part of America and like still trying to be like happy and trustful anyway. OK. Right. So the year is 1962, Albert DeSalvo works at a rubber press during the day; at night he tracks his quarry all over the city of Boston.”

So I was the Boston Strangler and I had a stocking cap on because he had one on in the book Dorie got me, and Ms. Aiken—the lovely Ms. Aiken, the only one who believed in us in the whole world, maybe, which was probably a mistake—well, she was the victim, and she was sitting at the head of class, filing her nails and pretending to chew gum and doing whatever victims do before they get strangled, and right there I decided to do something different. Instead of going to strangle Ms. Aiken, who was looking bored, and lovely, man, really lovely, well, I crept up the side of the classroom and strangled this twerp, Frankie Manning, and the kid started screaming, but I covered his mouth and Mike saw what I was doing and shouted, “See! The Boston Strangler has struck! No one can tell where he will commit his evil deeds next!” and he ran beside Frankie and said, “Another victim of this unpredictable killer who is impossible to predict!” and by then I had strangled Blaine Reed, who, because he was a theater fag, got the drift and fell out of his seat, playing dead, and Ms. Aiken started shouting, “OK, guys, that’s enough, that’s enough,” but I didn’t stop until I had my hands around Ms. Aiken’s neck, and it was long and soft, and I thought I could feel her breathing, oh God, I could actually feel her breathing, and there, there were two brown freckles popping out of the top of her shirt and I wanted to try and kiss her more than anything in the world, and she could tell, probably, because she looked up at me and blinked, but like a high school girl, with all her eyelashes—which was something she never did, because if she was one thing, it was classy—and so I decided not to murder her, and thought,
Fuck it
, and instead, well, I just ran out of the room and took off the stocking cap and sprinted with my bare head down the hallway, and then I hung out in the cafeteria the rest of the day and didn’t get busted because the lunch ladies there knew I was cool.

one

The Album That Saved My Life was
Walk Among Us
by the Misfits. It was thirteen amazing songs with B-movie horror titles that seemed to howl about the very weird disintegration of my own life:

1. 20 Eyes

2.I Turned into a Martian

3.All Hell Breaks Loose

4.Vampira

5.Nike A Go Go

6.Hatebreeders

7.Mommy Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight [Live]

8.Night of the Living Dead

9.Skulls

10.Violent World

11.Devil’s Whorehouse

12.Astro Zombies

13.Braineaters

At that time I was feeling exactly like each song title, as out of place on this earth as a fucking teenager from Mars. I was so angry all the time and looking for a fight, any kind of fight, because I felt so seriously furious for some reason—well, mostly because of my folks always arguing and fucking Catholic school trying to constantly brainwash me and Dorie breaking my heart like that, and, well, every song on that record seemed to be about me feeling just like that: “Prime directive: exterminate the whole human race.” Recently, Gretchen had made a tape of
Walk Among Us
for me and, like two days later, I went and took a bus to the mall to buy another one of their records,
Legacy of Brutality
. It was just as good. “Hybrid Moments,” “She,” “Some Kinda Hate,” and the greatest anthem of all, “Where Eagles Dare,” where a young and skinny Glenn Danzig shouted, “
I ain’t no goddamn sonovabitch,”
which I would mutter to myself all the time, walking alone to school, cruising down the hallway, eyeballing Catholic girls, eating dinner with my zombie family, shaving my head with the electric clippers over the bathroom sink. That record, that one,
Walk Among Us,
meant everything to me.

OK, I was at the mall, walking past the food court toward the Aladdin’s Castle video-game arcade and killing time until Gretchen came by to pick me up, because, well, I was avoiding being at my house as much as possible since things there were getting much worse, with my dad not coming home for a couple days at a time and my mom becoming more and more crazy until finally, during dinner one night, she smashed a plate over my fucking head and so, well, I decided to spend my Saturdays at the mall and hang out there until Kim got off of work, at which time Gretchen would come pick the both of us up and we would all drive around together, complaining. Good old Mike Madden, who had been my best pal for months, had disappeared, totally. It was all him and Erin McDougal now,
Mike and Erin, So Sexy 1991
, and when they weren’t having sex, they were busy fighting. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. I mean, school was just about over and it was warm out and girls were everywhere—in the mall, walking down the street—they were like very lovely, strange-looking flowers, and he was practically fucking married to Erin McDougal already.

OK, I had kind of started really listening to punk, at least the Misfits anyway, which happened right after I got my head shaved and Mike and I had stopped hanging out, and that day I was at the mall, flying solo, and I had on my black hoodie, a Misfits “Crimson Ghost” T-shirt, and my dad’s black combat boots. I was done with metal and hard rock, I guess. Why? Because all the kids who were still into metal kind of seemed, well, ignorant to me. All the metal songs were about either fucking girls or worshipping the devil, which was fine and good, but, well, it was all a joke to me now. Without Mike around getting me to listen to Ozzy, I had decided the Misfits would be my band. Why? Well:

1.
They didn’t take themselves too seriously. I mean, they sung about old monster movies, but they were cool, kind of gruesome and a little cryptic without being like the wanker new metal bands, who were fake Satanic in order to sell fucking records. They were angry like metal, but kind of fun too, I guess.

2.
Their music was the fucking best, kind of like pop from the ’50s but loud, angry, full of references to the Devil and demons and dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy, which made you want to sing along. To me this was a big deal: They had songs you could sing along to. Who the fuck can sing along to Ronnie James Dio? Not even Ronnie James Dio.

3.
Also, the Misfits had a fucking song, “Braineaters,” in which the chorus was: “Brains for dinner, brains for lunch, brains for breakfast, brains for brunch.” I could not think of anything better than that.

OK, so I had three Misfits T-shirts which were in heavy fucking rotation; that day’s was the Crimson Ghost, a white ghost-skull face, which glowed in the dark. I still had my head shaved and I had a Band Aid above my eye where a piece of the plate my mom had hit me with had cut me badly.

I was just passing the Orange Julius where Kim worked, and she rolled her eyes and held up her watch, tapping it, pretending to check to see if it was still working. I walked beside the rows and rows of plastic blue and yellow tables and chairs, over toward the Chinese Wok food counter, and just then these four dirty-looking metal kids started laughing at me as I walked past. They were your typical stoners, one with a black baseball hat that read “F.T.W.”—which stood for Fuck the World—long brown hair running down his back, some other taller kid in like a black duster climbing like a cloak down to his ankles, a bigger-looking dude with long blond hair in a ponytail who looked stoned, and some other shorter kid with fuzzier, curlier long hair who was wearing a Deicide T-shirt. I kept on walking until the one with the F.T.W baseball hat mouthed the word “faggot” at me, laughing and elbowing his buddies.

I had never really been in a brawl or fistfight before. I mean, in grade school I had, kind of shoving fights mostly. Because I had been so short and tiny, I was like an instant target and everything—especially with my big glasses—all the way up into eighth grade, where high schoolers would, you know, take my stocking cap and toss it back and forth, laughing, then, getting bored, they’d throw it onto the roof of a house, and, well, I guess I never really did anything about it other than cuss them out. But I guess I wasn’t a fucking grade-school kid anymore, you know? I had put on some weight and grown about a foot in the last year and shaved my head, and these dicks, well, they were like these little metal twerps, the kind of kids I knew because, well, I had been just like them. So when I saw him, the kid in the F.T.W. ball cap, laugh and mouth the word “faggot,” I stopped, turned around, walked over to their table where they were finishing up their Burger King or whatever, and just stuck my fucking finger in his motherfucking face, not saying anything, just holding my finger there, grinning, until the kid in the baseball hat kind of leaned back, freaked out, I guess, and was all like, “What? What the fuck?” and I didn’t say anything, I just sat there pointing at him, holding my finger out and nodding. The kid was young, maybe only thirteen, and he had a kind of budding mustache on the top of his lip which wasn’t really coming in, he just probably had never shaved it and was maybe hoping it would be enough to kind of hide his age, also to make him look cool, more mature, I guess. He had a wicked bad case of acne and a monobrow and an upside-down cross earring in his right ear. He was a kid, you know; he could have been me, four years before, fucking ignorant and dumb, scared of not being cool, scared of not fitting in. He really could have been me. That was what I started thinking. And I didn’t like the idea of being made fun of by someone I used to be, some kid who was scared and who wanted to be something, anything, anything but himself. The thing of it was, I was really fucking angry, I was really fucking angry about a lot of things: about my mom and dad, about what happened with Dorie, I was angry Mike had kind of ditched me, and I dunno, I was really feeling very fucking angry, feeling really fucking bad, and didn’t have shit to lose anymore. So, well, I just kept staring at this kid, holding my finger in his face, nodding, and he kept looking up at me, scared now, seeing I was bigger than him and kind of angry, kind of pissed-off already, and I wasn’t saying anything and, well, he looked like he might start crying and was whispering, “What? What the fuck do you want, man? I’m sorry, OK, I’m fucking sorry,” and so then I just turned and marched off, not looking back, the sounds of the mall hot in my ears, kids complaining, dance music from the record store blaring, the sounds of announcements on the loudspeakers. I kind of felt good and kind of felt like crying, my legs were all shaky and my heart was beating fast. I decided not to go to the video arcade, I would just walk around until I calmed down, and finally I ended up sitting on this carpet-covered mall bench, holding my hands on my knees to steady them.

I sat there for a while, watching the people come and go, looking to see if the four metal kids would walk by. They didn’t. I sat there for a while, counting my change, and then two punk girls, one very short and one kind of chubby, with their punk guy friend who was skinny and young-looking, all of them with bright, dyed hair, the spiked chokers, the plaid skirts, the dude in a Dead Kennedys T, well, they all walked up to me, smiling.

“Here’s a flyer,” the short girl said. She was very tiny, almost like a little kid, with blondish brown hair that had been dyed blue, but kind of poorly. She was wearing a leather jacket and looked all dolled up, with tons of glittery eye shadow and black mascara and everything. She handed me a small yellow photocopied slip of paper. “Do you like 7 Seconds?” she asked.

“I dunno,” I said.

“They’re cool,” she said. “They’re playing at the Cubby Bear like in a few weeks.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Downtown. Not downtown, but by the ballpark,” the guy said, nodding at me.

“Cool,” I said.

“They do a cover of ‘99 Red Balloons,’” the short girl said, nodding excitedly.

“That’s cool,” I said.

“You like the Misfits?” the guy asked. He was taller than me, but kind of skinny, his head shaved up to the top where his hair was like spiked with four different colors.

“Yeah,” I said.

“
Earth A.D.
is amazing, huh?”

I nodded, not saying anything, because I did not actually, technically own any of their records except
Legacy of Brutality
. Everything else was on tapes and I did not think I had ever even heard of
Earth A.D.,
which was kind of silly considering how I had decided the Misfits would be my band and everything.