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I don't know how I first became aware of the salon. I might have received an advertisement in the mail. I might have seen an ad in the Pasadena Weekly. Or I might have just happened upon it one day while searching for the San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe. In those days, working at a bookstore as I did, for something to do on days off, I often visited other Los Angeles booksellers I hadn't been to--Chatterton's, Dutton's, the Alhambra Bookstore, chain stores in off-the-wall locations. I could see the address of the San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe, which, as I recall, I never found, being near the salon.
Whether the ad came first or my seeing the salon doesn't really matter, though. In the end, it was the ad that made the impression. It promised to sculpt a cut specifically for your particular head type. The cut was thirty-five dollars. I thought about it. Thirty-five dollars for a one-time trip didn't seem bad, but I wondered if I'd have to make follow-up visits; that would bankrupt me. I wondered if, once I had the haircut, I could the next time walk down to Supercuts and explain to them exactly how I wanted it, exactly like it had been the time before. And I imagined what such a haircut would look like and what it would involve.
This was the deal: I didn't have a girlfriend, and I didn't know how to go about getting one. And even if I could, why would someone I'd be interested in be interested in me, as ugly as I was--or felt I was? I was short. I was skinny. And beyond that I had nothing to offer--or at least, I hadn't been able to figure out what I had to offer. But a haircut--a haircut, I figured, might make the difference, might transform me into the Adonis other men were by nature. And so I dreamed of it, but I never went.
Thirty-five dollars was a lot of money to someone scraping through college. Thirty-five dollars was 35 percent of my grocery budget for the month. Thirty-five dollars was my entertainment budget for the month, all but five dollars of it. Thirty-five dollars for a haircut. What, possibly, could such a haircut offer? And if it did not transform me (and how could it, with my hair as short as it always was), if I walked out of there with the same business cut and the same receding hairline, what would I have gained, other than a lesson in stupid spending? And if it did transform me, how would I afford the dates that would result? And how could I then afford to go back to Supercuts, to my life before?
I drove down to the location at least once after seeing the ad--perhaps more than once. Days off, in addition to scouring bookstores, I traveled to parts of the city I had not visited since I was a child. I walked through the huge Sears building we had seemingly shopped at regularly as a kid and that I hadn't been inside of for years. I hiked a trail up into the San Gabriel mountains to a place where a hotel used to reside, as I had done many times with Brian. I went to the Santa Anita mall, which I had stopped shopping at once Pasadena opened its plaza. I went to San Marino, scouting the hair salon and looking for DeLacey Park, which we had loved so much as kids (the park, as it turned out, was now closed to all but San Marino residents--and you had to show ID to get in).
Saturday nights, reassigned to me now that my sole remaining best friend Brian had moved, I drove the highways down to Hollywood and Los Fuentes, but only rarely stopped. On one such stop, I looked over the city from the Wilson Observatory and thought about how this would be a nice place to go on a date--if and when I finally managed to ask a girl out, or more specifically THE girl who I had had my eyes on for two, then five, then ten, years. (I never did take a girl to the Wilson Observatory, for on a return visit I discovered that the location was usually too packed on Saturday nights to find parking. And reservations for the laser show inside had to be made months in advance. But I did manage to ask THE girl out, three times over the course of three years--a year, each time, for me to work up the guts--but by the third time she was already beginning to date the man who she would marry.) Or I walked the streets of Old Pasadena, staring at the lights and at the various couples striding by, hand in hand. And then, on most nights, except on the rare couple of evenings during those years when I ran into a set of girls I had known in high school, sometimes THE girl among them, and hung out for a few minutes, flirting, though not aware of it, and feeling terribly self-conscious, and finally, despite their invitations to join them, walking on, leaving them, their invitations taken by me as in no possible way sincere, and coming home eventually to read, both thrilled at the moments of conversation I had had, reliving them in my head for weeks into the future, and wishing I had stayed or that I'd had money or that I'd gotten that haircut after all.
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