Haircut. Matches. Plastic Surgery. Swine. Braless. L Cohen Redux.

...M, a friend of mine, she doesn’t like my hair. Too poofy on the sides, she says.

Yes, yes, I know.

I’m trying to grow it out. Trying to get by with trims and thinning, those little shears that take uneven clumps.

It’s always hit or miss.

It can be a forty dollar haircut or a ten dollar haircut, but only accident will make it good. Even a woman who cuts my hair once in a way I like will not do so the next time.

And so I’m always getting my hair cut.

And I hate it.

I hate to be touched by somebody I don’t want to kiss.

I can’t bear to have somone, some strange person, wash it, me leaned back, open throated, completely vulnerable, no thanks.

Her hands rubbing my hair right down to my scalp, no way.

I leap from the shower, drive like a maniac, get to the haircut place, say: I’ve just washed it. No wash please. Just a cut, just a trim. I don’t want a wash, though.

This little panic that has more to do with the operation than the prep I know she’ll gladly skip.

Then it’s her, whoever she is, whatever her age, whatever frame, this woman who I’m supposed to remain still against while she touches and examines me.

The smell of the cigarette she’s been smoking.
The smell of cigarettes she will smoke.

This one, she talks over my head to another hairdresser and the client of the hairdresser about an accident a workman had on a freeway bridge.

He fell off.

A 20 year old Mexican, she calls him.

Did he live?

She says, If any gray matters shows, you can’t live. And she chuckles.

And I think: This is all so close to home, your home, the place you work, doesn’t it make you more reverent?

But I say nothing. I sit stiffly, almost the way I do at the dentist, with my fists tight, my abdominal muscles restricted, my eyes jittery.

…Grocery store afterwards, and I’m pleased to remember to buy matches.
I’ve not been to a bar in so long I’m out.

The other day, I took four off the school secretary, kitchen matches from a box.

Then home, wanting to light candles, I couldn’t find the right surface. I remembered how I’ve seen in movies or maybe even real life somebody light a match on the zipper of a pair of pants.

I put on my jeans.

I run the match up and down the zipper, wondering, vaguely, about the flammability of jean.

It doesn’t work.

Outside, I huddle over the sidewalk, holding the glass encased candle, holding the match. I switch the match across the asphalt. The red breaks off in chunks, but there’s not even a flash, not even the promise of fire.

Inside again, I turn on the burner of my stove, an electric burner, thinking maybe it will be so hot that it will ignite the tip of the match.

I remember the camping trip, years ago, me and RC and DL in my Suzuki Samurai, driving into the rez mountains, up old logging roads, miles and miles, then parking at the base of a hill, hiking up it, setting our tent, building our fire.

No matches.

Dipping tatters of paper bag in the gastank. Rolling them up. RC holding one a third of the way up the hill and DL another another third of the way up. Me holding a final gas dipped paper bag tatter rolled up to the cigarette lighter, that beautiful glow they get after the magic POP, the glow that made me once, as a child, so fascinated I stuck my finger against it, wanting to touch…

And nothing. No flame.

Just like now, with the matches against the burner.

But I’ve bought, for ninety nine cents plus tax, a whole box of my own matches, with its own strike chord.

I think, what a perfect and beautiful thing, a match. How lovely, how strange that so many can be bought so cheaply, this little stick of crafted wood, its decorative red top, the stuff of dreams, really.

…I burned our bathroom up when I was four. A lit match thrown into a wicker clothes hamper. An immediate thrill and an almost immediate sense of guilt. I wandered out to the living room. My mother, in those days that she drank, sitting up on the couch, asking me if I smelled smoke, me saying No, her going back to sleep.

I had to see again.
To watch.

Realizing when the flames were as big as I was, that I ought to blow it out. And really trying hard to do so, filling up my lungs, blowing the air out hard, the fire dancing in it, like a stripper to dollar bills.

…Candles burning in the apartment. They smell better when you blow them out.

…And M, who doesn’t like my hair, she tells me she’s going to meet with a plastic surgeon on Friday.

If it’s odd, it’s because she has a porn star body already.
That’s how I would describe her.
In fact, that’s how I have described her. Depending on the audience

That almost too rich perfection of breast and ass and all those things Larry and Kung-Pow have been talking about.

…And I think about their conversation, on Larry’s blog.
The apologetic way they are calling us, boys, pigs, our desires.
The way men have recently been trained to think of themselves.

As if women don’t do the same thing.
As if a woman who comes across you in a bar isn’t making split second decisions based on something she gleans off the surface.
As if a woman isn’t aware of the shape of your ass, hasn’t tried to imagine you naked.
As if she isn't trying to think of a way to get inside of you.

As if there is some hierarchy of connection, with that of the flesh being somewhere very low.

This puritan country.

And Bill Maher, the smartest man speaking loudly, he tells you that we live in America now that is phasing out male values.

…Incidentally, Bill Maher is a wonderful animal rights activist.
And a real “pig” when it comes to his choice in women.

…M, she tells me she doesn’t want to have to wear a bra.

And I’m thinking, Well, you really can. Now, before a surgery. If you want boys to follow you down the street, to carry memories of you home, over which to work themselves out, you can do it now.

It would be lovely and dangerous, I tell her.

…And I know I’m supposed to suggest that plastic surgery, especially when it appears so unnecessary, is a bad idea.

But I think about the things we buy to maker ourselves feel happy. To make ourselves feel armored. To make ourselves believe we have voices.

Our visits to the gym, our collections.

I’ll have a thousand dvd’s before summer. My flat screen televisions, my addiction to these things that really do little for me.

…M, she tells me over the telephone that she’ll meet with this doctor, and her voice is strange.

She says, I’m bleaching my teeth, I’m wearing cups on them.

And I tell her, Your teeth, they’re so white already.

And they are.
Porn star teeth.

And she says, Every few months.

…And I think about this quest for perfection and how you and I, we’re all on it, to some degree or another. What we despise in others, what we see them do that we reject, it’s just because it won’t solve our own self image problems, that method, or we haven’t got the means.

And if you don’t believe it, ask yourself again, the next time you touch up your lipstick, or re-tuck your shirt, or check your ass in the mirror and make a mental note to do more lunges; the next time you can’t decide if the top button should be done up or left undone; any time you put your fingers to your hair.

The next time you choose a cracker over a Twinkie, and not because you don’t like the way they get the milk out of the cow and what they do to the baby that was supposed to drink it.

The next time you shave your legs or anything else.

No, I’m just making myself presentable, you’ll argue.
But that’s all a matter of perspective, what you think presentable is.

Well then, you’ll suggest, Moderation.
Another matter of perspective.

…Doctors, dentists, who is to say what moderation is. Personal trainers, nutritional experts, therapists, psychologists, analysts, all these ways we try to make ourselves better.

Who is to say where to draw the line?

And I think of the Leonard Cohen song, these lines:

I asked my father,
I said, Father change my name
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
with fear and coward and shame…

…let me start again, I cried,
Please let me start again
I want a face that is clear this time
I want a spirit that is calm.


…And so on.