Hairstyles of the Damned

by Joe Meno

  “Did you hear about prom?” he asked.

  I rolled my eyes. I had been thinking about it all week, specifically who the hell I was going to take. I didn’t know anybody. I mean, there was Gretchen, but, well, that seemed kind of out of the question, and, well, Dorie, who I had tried calling a few times but would never answer, so it seemed like here was this momentous occasion again, you know, and, well, there was still nobody for me.

  “No, what’s up with it?” I asked.

  “You’re never gonna believe this, man. But they’re talking about having separate proms this year.”

  “Separate proms? What do you mean? One for juniors and one for seniors? That’s how they always do it, dude.”

  “No, man, no. Separate senior proms: one for white kids and one for blacks.”

  “What? You got to be kidding me. It’s fucking 1991—who has separate proms? You got to be fucking joking.”

  “No. That dude Marcus, the one with the afro on the basketball team, he just made me sign a petition.”

  “Why are they gonna have separate proms?” I asked.

  “Well, the student council kids, the seniors, can’t agree on the songs, you know, the theme song. It’s fucked up.”

  I thought if the pasty-white suburban student council kids couldn’t agree on something, what hope was there for the rest of us? Fucking Christ Jesus.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re juniors,” I said.

  “I dunno, I was thinking of maybe going,” he said. “If I could.”

  “To the black senior prom?” I asked, and I could see the answer was killing him, his soft black lips turned down. His eyes got very small, and I thought for a moment of all the kids who ever fucked with Rod, not one of them had been white because, even in that messedup school, you know, no white jock was stupid enough to fuck with a black kid, tiny and faggy as he might be.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Maybe you could come too.”

  “To the black senior prom? What the hell are you talking about? I wouldn’t fit in with them either.”

  He sighed and then nodded and we walked off in separate directions down the hall.

  By the end of the day it was all over Brother Rice. Apparently, the story was this: The fucking seniors on student council, which was made up of all geeky, wanna-be politician-types, ran the senior prom. They picked the DJ, the menu, decided on what the theme song would be. So apparently the student council kids, who were almost all white, decided the theme song would be “Wonderful Tonight,” the fucking Eric Clapton song, which had been the fucking senior prom theme like every fucking year. Well, a few of the other kids, seniors too, two black dudes and one Hispanic kid, suggested another song, “Make it Last Forever,” which was a black R&B hit. The two opposing parties brought in their songs, played them for the student council, and the black kids were of course out-numbered and out-voted. The black kids tried to appeal, but the white kids weren’t having it, and so the black seniors said, Fuck it. We’ll have our own prom, and that was what they planned to do, I guess.

  Bill Summers told me all about it after school, standing at his locker, which was right next to mine. He was the junior class representative to the student council, a prep—so white it hurt—in a blue shirt and blue tie, blond hair cut perfectly. After he told me about it all, he looked at me and said, “Isn’t that fucking stupid?” and I said, “I think it’s fucking stupid,” but I didn’t know exactly why.

  I wasn’t sure if I thought it was stupid that the white kids would pick some song that had been the theme like eight hundred times already, or if it was stupid that the black kids were so pissed that they were going to go do their own thing, or if it was stupid that the moderator, Mr. Helman, couldn’t think of some other fucking solution. The more I thought about it the more angry and confused I felt. I mean, the white kids had followed the rules. They brought their song in and everyone voted. The black kids had lost, fair and square, so maybe they were just being fucking babies. Or maybe not, I wasn’t sure. I mean, maybe, since the student council kids were all mostly white, the black kids never even had a chance in the first place. I mean, once I thought about it, like if there were all black kids on the fucking student council and one year, one fucking year, I wanted the song to be “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and I knew no matter what there was nothing, not a goddamn thing, I could do to see that happen, I dunno, maybe I would be pissed too. And if that shit happened to me all the time, I mean day after day, with everything—like if every song on the radio was rap or every person in every fucking movie was black, if the whole fucking world was black and staring at me and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it to make it fair, even—well then maybe, maybe, I’d be fucking sick of it after all and say, Fuck it. Fuck it. The senior prom only happens once and I want it to mean something to me, and so maybe, maybe, I would want to go out and do my own thing. It still seemed really fucking wrong and sad to me, though, like, well, like all those preppy student council kids had, well, just given up on something.

  I said, “Later,” to Bill Summers and decided since I was a junior and the junior prom was still going on fine and it was only the senior prom that was going to be split up, it was not really my fucking problem anyway, because, well, fuck that school.

  three

  Like always, I met Gretchen and Kim in the parking lot after school. I got out fifteen minutes earlier than them so I would wait, lying on the hood of the Ford Escort, staring at all the hot Catholic girls in their soft, white, see-through blouses and super-fine flannel skirts as they walked past, while I winked at them, kind of growling. It was hot outside, the very beginning of May, and I had taken off my dress shirt and was sitting in a dirty white T, lying on the hood of the Escort, waiting, the sun beating with white speckles and fuzzy circles onto my bald, shaved head.

  OK. Junior prom was indeed coming up quick, and shit, I wanted to go. Why? Because, well, I hadn’t gone to any high school dances yet and after this one there were like only two left for me in my whole high school career ever, and, well, I guess I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else, I guess, that I wasn’t still a dumb quiet kid and a loser. But since I didn’t know any other girls, really—I mean, Dorie would not take my calls and that girl Esme was dating the drummer for Jim’s band, The Morlocks!—I thought about asking Gretchen, but, seriously, just as a friend. To be totally honest, I had no interest in her like that anymore.

  OK, so that is a total fucking lie. I think, to be really honest, I wanted her very, very bad again, because I knew she had lost her virginity, which gave her a kind of, well, adult quality I found really fucking hot. I had tried to act like it wasn’t true, but it was. I liked her more than ever.

  Finally, Gretchen and Kim came out of the side school entrance, Gretchen with a load of books, Kim fooling around and pretending to be limping when she noticed I was watching. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Gretchen. In her plaid gray skirt and white knee-socks and white blouse, with two small yellow barrettes in her hair, she looked really, really lovely.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting up, kicking my feet off the hood.

  “Hey,” Gretchen said, lighting up a cigarette. She offered me one and I waved it away.

  “Hey, Brian,” Kim said, grabbing my arm. “How have you been? Wow, have you been working out?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, squeezing my arm. “Look, look at these muscles.”

  We all got in the Escort as Gretchen started it up. Kim and Gretchen put on their sunglasses, big black plastic jobs you get at like carnivals or something. I put my dress shirt over my head, blocking out the sun.

  “Hey, Brian, Gretchen and I were talking and we were wondering if you’ve ever screwed a girl in the ass?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “But see, Gretchen and I have never been screwed in the ass and we were wondering if you would do it to us? One after the other or at the same time? Which one works for you?”

  “Brains f
or dinner, brains for lunch,” I mumbled, which was also from one of my favorite Misfits songs, “Braineaters.”

  “What? What does that even mean?” Kim asked, giggling, turning back to me.

  “Well, you can go try and figure it out,” I said.

  “Just leave him alone. If you keep talking about sex, he’s gonna get an erection back there,” Gretchen said, and it was as if I hadn’t gone anywhere the last couple of months, as if I had never stopped hanging out with them, and somehow almost everything was back to normal for me.

  “So are you going to junior prom, Brian?” Kim asked.

  “Yeah, I dunno. I didn’t ask anybody yet,” I said. “I mean, I’d like to go with someone I like know, you know? But it doesn’t look good right now.”

  “Why the fuck do you wanna go?” Kim asked.

  “You know, because it’s fucking normal. I feel like I missed out on like everything, you know, all that normal high school shit. It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime thing and all.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Gretchen said. “All those kids, all those kids that go are assholes. They’re the kids who used to pick on you. And now you want to party with them and spend like hundreds of dollars to get dressed up and everything? It’s a fucking waste.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “I just want to have a nice time. I just want to go for myself, you know. I think it would be a lot of fun.”

  “Well, good luck,” she said, looking at me, rolling her eyes.

  “Good luck to you,” I said back, nodding.

  “What for?”

  “Well, maybe Tony will take you.”

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  “No, like the two of you can go and he can be like Prom King. You can tell them he’s like your dad.”

  At that moment, Gretchen pulled the car over in the middle of fucking 95th Street, cars honking and swerving as she threw the transmission into fucking park. “OK, that’s it. Get out.”

  “What?” I said, laughing.

  “You think you’re like some bad-ass now or something. You got all this attitude now so you think you can, like, talk mean to me?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just joking around. You two fuck with me all the time.” Gretchen shook her head and then threw the car into gear and started driving again. In a moment, she turned back to me and frowned.

  “I still wouldn’t go to prom,” she said. “Even if he was a junior. Even if he asked me.”

  “OK,” I said, because I had heard her say it, though we both knew she was lying.

  In a moment, we pulled up to the mall and Kim got out and Gretchen and me were driving around together again, just Gretchen and me, and she asked, “Do you want me to take you home?” and I said, “Not really, I can drive around for a while,” and she said, “Well, I’m meeting up with Tony,” and I said, “Well then, I guess take my ass home,” and we were heading over to my house and listening to the Ramones and I just wanted to blurt it all out and say, You’re like my best friend in the whole evil universe and I want you to go with me, just go with me to this stupid fucking thing, but I didn’t say a damn word. I didn’t say anything.

  We pulled up in front of my crummy fucking house and I said, “Later,” and climbed out and watched her drive away, thinking how badly I wanted to ask her to go with me, knowing she’d laugh and say no, because it wouldn’t seem “cool” or because she was so in love with Tony Degan, and also knowing I could never ask her because of how much I actually liked her, and then she was pulling away and the Escort was just a funny dot and I thought, Maybe things haven’t changed at all. Maybe nothing in the world’s changed for me.

  four

  We got these rubber Halloween masks and started wearing them all the time. It was Nick’s idea, mostly. We would put them on, the Wolfman and Frankenstein, and ride around on our skateboards, breaking into parked cars in the mall parking lot. In order to silently save the world, we’d remove the bad cassette tapes from ordinary people’s brainwashed lives.

  Like I said, it was all Nick’s idea, mostly. It started out simple enough: He had asked, after school one day. Nick, the kid from the Dean’s office, was leaning against my locker, his dress shirt off and tied around his waist, an Independent black and red and white T-shirt on, black backpack slung over one shoulder, shiny white skateboard resting behind his head. “You ready or what?” he asked me.

  “For what?”

  “Let’s go tear shit up,” he said.

  “Um, I didn’t bring my board,” I said, lying. He looked at me like I was slightly crazy, kind of tilting his head.

  “You didn’t bring your board?”

  “No, I forgot it,” I said. “You know how it is.”

  “What kind of board did you say you had anyway?” he asked, squinting, kind of sizing me up again.

  “I dunno,” I said, kind of dumb and embarrassed. “What kind do you have?”

  “Dude, do you know how to skate or not?” he asked, staring at me like I was very fucking funny, his eyes wide and his mouth parted a little.

  “Not really, I guess,” I said.

  “Fuck,” he said, nodding and smiling. “It’s very fucking easy. Let me bring you a board tomorrow, OK?” and like that, he did.

  On the skateboard there had once been an old school Tony Hawk drawing, in red and gold and black, this cool hawk skull screened on the deck’s bottom, but now it was almost completely covered in magic marker that read, “I love Jennifer Bradley” and “JENNY” and “I love JENNY,” which was the reason the deck had been out of commission, because apparently Nick was no longer in love with Jenny. The board did have brand-new trucks, wide Spitfire wheels—good for learning, Nick said—and grip tape that was cut in the blackish gray silhouette shape of a ghost.

  “It’s easy. Just stay on the board and, like, don’t try anything funny,” he said, and we walked out into the parking lot, leaving our shit in our lockers. I put one foot on the board and started to push off and fell on my ass right away.

  “I think I broke my ass,” I said.

  Nick skated over and slid to a stop over me, shaking his head. “You better get used to that feeling quick,” he said. “Check this out.” He lifted his black field pants leg and showed me a huge red, white, and pink scar shaped like a strange insect covering his entire shin. “I got that shit two days after my first board.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “It was the first time I got hit by a car,” he said, proudly.

  “First time?”

  He nodded and smiled, lifting both of his sleeves, then his shirt, pointing to all the different scars and bruises. “This is from a pickup truck. This is from a 1985 Corvette. This is from my mom’s minivan when she backed over my ass.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Well, when was the last time a car hit you?”

  “I ran into the back end of a Plymouth this morning.”

  On the skateboard, I was total shit. I mean, after a couple of days I could stay on the board most of the time, but I could not go over cracks in the fucking sidewalk or major bumps without kicking through them, having to push forward over them with my right foot. I could not go down or up curbs. I could not stop without almost fucking wiping out. But I could stay on the fucking board itself for a long time, I guess. Nick tried for like four hours one day to teach me how to fucking ollie—you know, kick the nose of the board up just enough to clear a curb—but I couldn’t do it for the fucking life of me. I liked being on the board, I liked how I felt. I mean, I could get around from one point to another for the most part, I was just not very good at it. Which was OK, because it didn’t seem to bother Nick, I guess.

  OK, very quick, Nick and I were like skating almost every day after school, all over the fucking south side where skating was not cool at all, from the bus stop to Chicago Ridge Mall, mostly. We’d skate around the enormous parking lot and I’d practice my ollies onto the lower curbs and I still couldn’t get enough fucking air to clear them and Nick would kind of skate around by
himself, trying different tricks, rail slides, frontsides, shit I didn’t even know the names for. Sometimes other skater kids would show up and they would kind of show off, you know, for each other, rail-sliding off the lower bike racks and trying to fucking jump on the stone benches. Mostly, I just watched them.

  What we really started doing was this: We’d skate up to the mall, cruise around for a while, wait until the parking lot started filling up, and then we’d skate very carefully in between the parked cars, looking for people who had left their car doors open, which, believe it or not, was like tons of people, and then we’d kind of like help ourselves to what was inside. It was mostly nickel-and-dime stuff: an engraved silver cigarette lighter that said Stubby, a nudie girl cardboard air-freshener that was hanging on a rearview mirror which Nick wore around his neck all afternoon, a dime bag of very, very seedy weed which we tried to smoke but which was like totally cashed. And then we hit the fucking jackpot of all time. In the backseat of some blue Chevy minivan, full of toys and games and kids’ jackets and shoes, there were all these rubber Halloween masks, one of the Wolfman and one of Frankenstein, and a few others like a monkey and a hobo which we didn’t bother to take. Because I had found the minivan unlocked, I got to pick first, so of course I took the fucking Wolfman. We put them on and began to skate around, laughing like fucking crazy.

  It became our thing, then, you know, riding around in the Chicago Ridge Mall parking lot on skateboards wearing these stupid Halloween masks after school like every day; the Wolfman and Frankenstein darting between parked cars, scaring the fuck out of the shoppers, popping out from behind vans and trucks and making monster sounds. It was pretty fucking funny to us. The fat-ass security guards were not amused, however. They would watch us skate around for a while, them standing under the rainbow-color canopies smoking or mumbling into their walkie-talkies, then two or three of them would come charging at us from out of one of the entrances, a chubby blur of blue, and we’d laugh and howl at them, making spooky sounds, skating to the other side of the mall before they even had a chance to nab us. It made it more fun, I guess, having them chase after us. It gave us something to look forward to, maybe. Once, Nick and I were sitting on our skateboards, him trying to light a fart with a Malibu Beach lighter he had just stolen, and we were both laughing and not paying attention, and from around the front end of a parked white Mustang convertible, this security guard came hauling ass toward us, making a grab for Nick. He got ahold of his shirt, a white Ramones T with their American Eagle In-the-Ramones-We-Trust logo, and Nick just jerked the shirt off over his head and started skating off, the top part of him naked as he laughed and snorted, pulling down the rubber Frankenstein mask while we made our getaway. “I really liked that fucking shirt,” was all he ever said about the whole thing.