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Introductory Text

Oh, tragic haircut!
The Author's Narrative Part 10 80th Post Posted 7 June 2016 at 23:37:34 EDT Link to original

I am 24, and it's a Friday night in early summer. The sun is settling down into a haze beyond the mountains, and the city's concrete is beginning to cool after a baking day. The signs for all the bars are on turning on. The windows of stolid office buildings become a wild collage of reflected neon. Yes, everybody wants to party tonight. Even the Central Insurance Bank is looking festive. Oh, you minx!

I've drunk six beers. I am right in the zone. Active. Playful. Charming. Oh so charming. I am actually charming myself right now with my internal monologue, reeling off clever little observations about the people who pass on the sidewalk. I can see a glowing doorway in my mind. All I have to do is walk through it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Who's calling me now? Maybe it's my usual gang of friends. Or the Swedish friends I drank with until 6 A.M. last weekend. Or one of the dozens of girls who are saved in my phone with thoughtful pet names like "brownhair2" and "metinpark." But I'm not going to answer my phone. I don't want to make any plans. I am simply going to walk down this street, and something is going to happen. Because the door is open. The world awaits.

I stand by a food vendor and watch people pass. I smile, nod, make funny comments. Most people smile and pass right by. Others linger for a while. Two girls and guy start talking to me. They're tourists from out of town. What are they looking to do? A nice place or just somewhere cheap? Do they like saké? I know just the place. Sure, no problem.

And we're off. Soon we're sitting in a booth, and the saké is arriving at regular intervals, and I'm telling crazy stories and snapping off jokes, and I'm listening to them, and they're telling me about themselves and one of the girls keeps glancing at me when she thinks I'm not looking and

I am 30, and I am in a darkened apartment, hunched over the glow of my laptop screen, jacking off. I finish and go to the bathroom to wash up, and there is that moment, that same moment, where I have to look at my blotchy face in the mirror and say, "Well, not my proudest moment," in my head, the same joke I make to myself every time. When I'm done, I stand in the doorway of my bathroom and look at the tiny studio apartment: a desk, a laptop, a futon, a small window with the curtains closed against the summer glare, a crowd of empty bottles on the floor by the door. The stink of old sweat and beer.

I whimper. The door is closed. The door is closed forever. I am locked in this apartment, this little box, closed off from the world.

Now that the jerking off is done, the jitteriness starts to creep back in. Oh nightmare. I want to drink, but is only 3 PM. I have only been awake for half an hour. I should wait until at least 8 before drinking. At least 6. But this is torment. I need some now or I will have some kind of fucking seizure. Just two shots, that's it, and then no drinking until

I am 33, and I am sitting in the 24-hour club, listening to a man talk about a mouse that changed his life. He had been living out of his car for a month, and it was so full of a trash that a mouse started living there too. This was this problem that finally broke him, that finally showed him the absurdity of it all, that finally made him get sober: how do you set mouse traps in a car? It's a pretty good story, but I've heard it before.

Stolid Haircut walks into the meeting late again. I call him Stolid Haircut because I don't know his name, but he has a respectable Republican haircut: silver and gray and sculpted into broad curves that recall the body of a pre-gas crisis American sedan. He wears the uniform of a retiree: bright blue dad jeans with running shoes and white socks and a plaid shirt buttoned up to the next-to-top button.

Stolid Haircut walks with the wide, clumsy steps of a hesitant toddler. Years of alcoholism have damaged his cerebellum, resulting in an abnormal gait. This and his reddened, venous nose make his weakness for alcohol plain for anybody to see. At a glance you can know his most painful personal shame. His lips are permanently pursed into an embarrassed smile.

I watch him ease into the chair and go back to listening about the mouse and find myself looking at him again.

Oh, tragic haircut!

The haircut calls to me from some golden past. It is the haircut of a man who once was. In days gone by, it was thick and brown and belonged to a man who walked with a purposeful stride, a husband and father, the kind of guy who hoisted his son onto his shoulders to watch passing parades, who played softball and relaxed with a few beers after work, and a few whiskies after that, but always woke up bright and early the next day, who worked hard, who knew who he was, who knew right from wrong, who know how the world ought to be.

I stare at his soft, shining, embarrassed eyes and feel my own filling with tears. How it has all slipped away from him. The young son is grown. The job is done. The wife doesn't talk. Everything that was once strong and sure is now frail and shaky.

How many nightmares has this ordinary man seen? I saw so many in just ten years. And I am nowhere near the point of an abnormal gait. This man has seen unutterable things. How bewildered was he when it first came for him, the scuttling darkness? Did he think he was going mad? He comes from a generation where this sort thing is not discussed. How he must have suffered.

O haircut! haircut! haircut! O the bleeding drops of red.

I am staring at him openly. The rest of the meeting is not there anymore. A halo of light pours out around his face, and he becomes a vision. Doves and cherubim swirl around him, Escher staircases extend in every direction, mandalas expand and overlap and spin and

The door-- my god. For a moment, the door is open again.