“Who flirted with him through high school,” I added.
“And now we are in college. When’s Lucy going to realize that Tom is so crazy for her? Oh, I forgot to tell you, Lucy and I drove by the new place downtown. Ben, it’s going to be awesome. You must have come into some money to get a place in the Old Market.”
“Yeah, I’m loaded. Actually, I got the last deal before prices went up on prime real estate in the downtown area. I was pretty relieved when the ink dried on all of the paperwork. I bet I signed ‘Benjamin H. Keller’ one hundred times at the closing.” I motioned for Theresa to walk over to the sink so I could wash her hair.
“H? Your middle initial is H? Harold? Henry? Hamlet?”
“Howard…don’t ask.”
Theresa laughed. “Howard is a great name. A solid name. Why Howard?”
“I’m named after the man who used to be married to my mother.”
Theresa was quiet. I knew she was sorry that she had stumbled into awkward territory. Most people backed away from that piece of my life like a kid finding a bug under his bed. Ignore it; maybe it will crawl away.
“Have you ever heard from him, Ben?”
I shook my head as I tested the water’s temperature and then gently moved Theresa’s head to the water.
“Do you ever think about him? Ever?”
“Nope.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Theresa said.
I stopped and looked into Theresa’s eyes.
“Are you OK, Ben?”
“What do you mean?”
“With this move? With doing this whole hair thing?”
I massaged Theresa’s head as I shampooed her hair. After I rinsed it clean, I put in a conditioner.
“I could think of a million jobs I would rather be doing than doing hair. I kind of fell into this whole mess when Mom pretty much abandoned it.”
“You’re good at the ‘mess.’ You’re good with hair and the business part, but is this what you really want to be?”
“I thought about what I wanted to be when I was young, but I haven’t thought about it in a while…I never wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut.”
“Football player?”
“Oh, sure. But with my lanky body? I know everything about the game, but I’d get killed out there.”
“Sports announcer?”
“Big fantasy. Big.”
“You don’t have to do this. You know that, right?”
“If I can make a go of it, I think I could make some pretty good money.”
“And if not?”
“Haven’t thought about it.” A final rinse. I helped Theresa up to go back to the pink chair.
“Your dad was crazy to do what he did, Ben…”
I took a towel and dried her hair. I grabbed a pair of scissors and started checking out the ends of Theresa’s hair. I looked up at her in the mirror with a goofy look on my face. “Speaking of crazy. Who is this new Darrin guy? I mean Dagwood?”
“His name is Michael.”
“Right, Michael. That’s what I meant.”
“Michael is awesome.”
“I’m sure he is,” I replied with one raised eyebrow.
“Really, he’s great. I met him at the Ocean Wave.”
The Ocean Wave was a seedy little bar just on the other side of the mighty, muddy Missouri. It was both humorous and horrifying to realize that all of the college-age kids—and a few high-school ones, too—who were unable to legally drink alcohol till the ripe age of twenty-one in Omaha could just cross over a bridge to drink in Iowa, where their eighteen-year-old souls were deemed ready and legal to drink. It only took another three years before the adults discovered this bizarre discrepancy. Hey, our children are going to bars. This had been going on since 1973 when Iowa changed its legal drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen. Evidently, some eloquent eighteen-year-old had convinced governmental officials that eighteen was a great age to go to bars. Voila! Eighteen it was. In 1978, one or two officials wised up and thought, “I don’t know, maybe we should go with nineteen.” Finally, in 1986, with pressure from a few neighboring states, they joined the twenty-one club. Until then, the upper youth of Omaha went on secret road trips every weekend to the other side of the river.
I replied to Theresa, “Now there’s a fine place for a lady to meet a guy.”
“He’s from a little town in northwest Iowa. He works at First National Bank. He’s a great guy!”
“A great guy from Iowa? Sounds like the kiss of death.”
“Ben!” I started cutting off a short amount from the ends of Theresa’s hair. “He’s not at all like Chewey…I mean, Chewey was good guy, but…You’d like Michael.”
“Then we’d better get to work on your hair. You want to look good. And we’re gonna need some big hair to do that. Big.”
The door at the top of the stairs opened. A voice yelled down, “Hey, who’s down there?” The voice sounded like Lovey Webber, loud and sensual.
Theresa recognized the voice, “Lovey, it’s me! Come down.”
“Theresa’s here!” Hope sang out. “I didn’t know Theresa would be here, Ben.”
Lovey and Hope rushed down the stairs. Hope Webber had begun cleaning my mother’s shop and helping out with little odds and ends after I started getting busy with clients. As I inherited almost all of Mom’s clients, I had less and less time to do the little jobs that I had done growing up. I liked having Hope around. She came in twice a week now, leaving with towels to clean at an independent-living group home for adults with Down syndrome. Usually Mrs. Webber picked her up and dropped her off at the salon; Hope would then walk over to the Webbers’ house and have dinner, and Mrs. Webber would take her home.
Lovey chimed in, “Theresa, I haven’t seen you in, like, forever! Ben, don’t hate me…I’ve been cheating again…” Lovey hugged me, pressing her body against mine. Over the hug, I glanced at Theresa. We exchanged a can’t-believe-we-were-just-talking-about-her glance.
“Can’t believe you strayed again, you little hair whore.”
“Mom was so busy, so I told her that I would get Hope here. Why is this place such a mess?”
“Lovey, that’s not nice. We’re moving; I told you that.” Hope was part of the whole moving deal. Package deal. The boxes, pink chair, and Hope would carry me to my new place.
Hope turned to Theresa and touched her hair. “Theresa, you are so beautiful.”
“Thanks, Hope. Hey, what is Faith doing these days?” Theresa asked both Hope and Lovey.
“Yeah, where is Faith?” I added before I realized that I’d said the words out loud.
Everyone looked at me.
“Faith is everywhere,” Lovey said, annoyed. “It’s like she needs to travel the whole world, but she can’t get back to visit us. Whatever.” In a nutshell, Lovey talked to everyone, bouncing around like the pinball in an overused pinball machine. Hope was always by my side. But Faith. Faith was elusive.
Hope filled in a few holes for us. “Faith is graduating from TCU this year.”
“And then she gets a teaching job overseas with her friend Thomas, or something like that.” Lovey, growing tired of talking about someone other than herself, continued, “Hey, guess who I’m dating now?” Before we could even take a stab, she exploded, “Jim Kinney! Remember him. We all thought his dad had died or his parents were divorced or something ‘cause he was never around…”
Lovey looked more at Theresa but sensed all of our confusion. “Jim Kinney. The guy who could do triple flips off the high board at Brookhill.”
“Oh, Jimmy.” Theresa and I both remembered Jimmy Kinney. Why hadn’t she just said so in the first place? Hope began sweeping up the areas of the floor where I had moved furniture out.
“Well, his dad was in prison that whole time we were growing up. Not sure why. Don’t even want to know, but I’m going as Jim’s date to the welcome-home party. Can you believe I am going to a back-from-the-slammer party? Hey, Ben, did you go to see your guys
when they were in town?”
Keeping up with Lovey was like riding bumper cars. You might think that you were going one direction when suddenly something bumped you into a different direction.
“My guys?”
“The Police. I thought I heard that you and A.C. were going to a concert or something.”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” A.C., his girlfriend at the time, and I had seen The Police at Rosenblatt Stadium in August the previous year. “My guys” had won a Grammy the year before for the song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” The song is about a girl who has a crush on her teacher while the teacher is not very comfortable with the situation. Sting has never confirmed if the song was based on a personal experience from his years of teaching.
Lovey bumped us all again after she looked at her watch. “Oh, I’ve gotta run. Hope, you know you need to go over to Mom’s after you finish.”
“I think I know that, Lovey.” A perturbed Hope started pulling towels from the hamper. “I know.”
Lovey bopped out of the messy basement. I’d be seeing her in a few months, probably.
Hope looked at me after Lovey left. “Thomas is not Faith’s boyfriend. He’s just a friend.” She started putting the clean towels she had washed at home into an empty box, then turned back to me. “Hey, what are we going to name our new place?”
“Yeah, what is the name of the new place?” Theresa asked.
That question I couldn’t answer yet.
Hadn’t even thought about it.
16
A.C. in the “New Place”: Entire Head Shaved
Saturday, February 4
1984
“Her name is Angel, and she’s beautiful.”
A.C. was in love again.
I was wiping the shaving cream from the different areas of A.C.’s head as I tolerated another love story. Because A.C. had helped me move boxes and equipment from my mom’s basement salon to the new space in the Old Market one cold Saturday morning in late February of 1984, I had given him a free shave. The “fro” was out; the shiny skull was in. I guess the deal also included me hearing about his love life.
I looked in the mirror at my best friend admiring his new look and shook my head. No matter what he did with his hair, no matter what different and sometimes bizarre clothes he threw together, A.C. always looked good. And he always had a girlfriend. The short, skinny kid I had grown up with had hit a major growth spurt our sophomore year in high school and now stood six feet three, fit and trim, and appealing to girls of all races. A.C.’s green-gold eyes framed with dark lashes and not-black, not-white skin came together in a look that blended the best of both races together. I wouldn’t call him cocky, but I am pretty certain that A.C. knew he was attractive. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. He rubbed his head and looked around at my new place in the Old Market.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about. I bet Angel will love touching my head…”
Because A.C. and I had helped move every Mangiamelli boy out of the house on Maple Crest, A.C. decided to call all four of them to ask for help when we moved everything from my mom’s basement to the new salon downtown. They all said yes and showed up that morning, all except one brother: Will. Stephano mumbled something about a hangover, and we got right to work so that the entire move on a fourteen-foot by seventeen-foot U-Haul truck took only two and a half hours on one of the coldest days in Omaha that year. Anthony made a few predictable comments about me going into a field that he thought was a bit “girly,” but he changed his tune after he saw the new place in the Old Market with high ceilings, one brick wall, and big windows, floor to ceiling, looking out on an outdoor mall a few blocks from the Missouri River. He thought the place looked like something in downtown Chicago. I bought the guys lunch and a couple pitchers of beer at the Blue Jay Bar near Creighton, and they all took off for their Saturday afternoons.
Except for A.C. He stayed to help me interview the last few applicants for the two chairs I needed to fill when I opened the following week. The three candidates I had interviewed the week before were eager to learn but inexperienced. As much as I would have loved to help them out, I needed help that would bring loyal clients with them from the last job. Before the applicants came, A.C. helped me unpack while he finished the Angel story.
“She’s like an angel dropped down from heaven.”
“Whatever happened to Butter Face?” I asked about the girl from Texas in his theology class he had been dating a month earlier.
“Butter Face?”
“The girl you said you loved everything about her…but her face?” I laughed. “I thought you said that she was the one.”
“I know I always say that this one’s the one.”
I raised my eyebrow.
“But this one is the one. I mean it, Ben. Angel gets it. She gets me. She gets everything about me. About why I’m going into law. About why I’ve decided to convert to Judaism…”
“You what?”
“Well, I haven’t yet, but I’m researching it. I need to explore my roots. She gets that.”
“Weren’t you just a Methodist, yesterday?” A.C., the guy who had announced he was going to be a priest at his First-Communion party over fourteen years ago, had recently gone on a world tour of the churches of Omaha. He wasn’t angry with the Catholic Church, he told me; he was just curious. The hunger that drove him to experience as many different religions as he could was that same hunger that drove A.C. in anything. His ravenous appetite to “know” was exhilarating and draining as he read everything he could get his hands on—even while going through law school. A.C. had read anything and everything by C.S. Lewis, whose words he looked to for inspiration and guidance just as I looked to Sting from the Police for my direction in life.
The pursuit of the Jewish religion threw me off a bit but didn’t surprise me. A.C.’s father came from a strong Jewish background. When he fell in love with A.C.’s mother, his family, overwhelmed by racial and religious flags waving in their strict culture and society in general at the time, decided to part ways. Grandma Perelman did send A.C. and his sister Elizabeth a birthday card with money each year. Evelyn’s family was really not much more supportive, and so Evelyn and John were alone on their island of diversity. Familial influence was infinitesimal. I was the closest thing to a cousin for A.C. growing up. Early on, A.C. embraced the Catholic religion. Around the time of high-school graduation A.C. began questioning the Catholic Church—not attacking, just questioning.
“Now don’t make fun. Growing up Catholic was an education of sorts…but I know that I need to check out a few things while I’m on this earth. Besides, there were some awfully attractive women in the Methodist church. You wouldn’t know. You haven’t even been to check out the women in your own church.”
“OK, so is your little Angel someone you met at Creighton, Arthur? In a law class or something?”
“Not exactly. She works in the cafeteria. She is a bit younger, but that doesn’t matter. She gets it more than the older women I’ve dated. And don’t call me Arthur.”
Here’s where A.C.’s hunger or passion annoyed me as a lifetime observer of what, occasionally, could be considered impulsive or even reckless. “A.C., is she in college? How old is she?”
“She’s eighteen, almost. Her birthday’s tomorrow. And she’s saving money to go to college.”
“Angel may get you, but I don’t get you. You’re converting to Judaism, you’re robbing the cradle…Is there any other bomb you want to drop on me today?”
“We’re getting married.”
Even the shampoo was silent.
I took a deep breath after this sucker punch. No music was playing since I hadn’t set up the new sound system yet. I looked at A.C., but I felt I was looking at a stranger. The fluorescent lights of the new place shone on the side of A.C.’s bald head.
“I really love her, Ben. I want you to be my best man.”
I looked down at the box I was holding and placed it on the g
round. I walked over to the pink chair from my mom’s old shop. The “beauty chair,” which had been outdated in the sixties and seventies, now held a retro look that I was incorporating in the new place. I’d bought two other chairs for the new, yet-to-be-hired employees, but I would use the pink-and-black chair for my own. I stooped down to look under the chair and noticed that the scapular from Octavia was missing. In the move from Maple Crest, the little Catholic charm must have fallen off along the way.
I walked over to another box that I knew held the black radio Mom had let me take, kind of as a housewarming gift. For me the archaic radio held comfort and memories. For the new place, it would provide a conversation piece; I plugged it in and looked for a good station.
“Angel and I are going down to the courthouse next week. I’d love for you to meet her. Come down. Stand up for me, Ben. Her sister will stand up for her. We’ll take you both out to a little wedding lunch after…”
The excitement of my moving day had fallen like a weak balloon following a long party. I felt tired as I considered all of the flags waving in my face right now. No church wedding. No Mr. and Mrs. Perelman. I had never met this girl, and I was to stand up for a marriage I didn’t really support. I found a clear station playing Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” I turned the song up.
A.C. stared at me, his green eyes waiting curiously.
“Sure. What time, Arthur?”
A.C. exploded. “My man!” He jumped over several boxes and shook my hand. “My best man! I’ll get the details to you…You’re gonna love her. I just know it. Love her!” He looked around the room, and as if to ensure my answer, he started moving boxes and emptying them without knowing where things went. “Now, we’ve got some interviewing to do.”
“Yep.”
“Looks like we have about fifteen minutes before candidate number one shows up. What do you need me to do? Do you want me to start putting these things over there?”
A.C. wanted me to talk. To say something, say anything. His energy was really starting to annoy me.
“Well,” I slowly said to A.C. without looking at him, “you could help me come up with a name for the place.” He did owe me.
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