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This is about the afternoon of my most expensive haircut ever, an afternoon that occurs in Victoria, British Columbia, during the Feast of Tabernacles. It is a Feast marked by hair and a Feast marked unintentional sadness of my own creation. I could, in recounting this afternoon, return to my journal from that trip. For several years, I kept journals at the Feast, but each year, the journal became longer and longer so that eventually, its length was eclipsing the Feast itself. I would return from the trip and have two more weeks worth of notes to write up. When I went over the hundred-page mark one year, I gave up. Details had overwhelmed my ability to tell a story.
Years ago, I reread these journals. Most of them were rather embarrassing, as they usually are, to look back on the writing of the past, so juvenile. Although I was probably trying to prevent the juvenile feel from taking hold in putting as much detail down as possible, as the years went on, the journals, in their detail, actually managed to become less interesting. Some years, they are incredibly personal; others, as was my more typical "safe" stance, lest someone find them and reveal all, they are strangely almost third person recountings of events. The year in British Columbia's journal, as I recall, was the most personal of all--and the only one that had a theme, one almost self-imposed, one that colors all that occurs in it, and that, in turn, actually makes it the most interesting of the various journals I kept but that also makes the times recounted seem sad.
We took the trip to Victoria with my parents' best friends' family. This meant that their children Keith and Michelle came along. And this also meant that Dana, Keith's girlfriend and my sister's best friend, also came along.
Keith, known as Butch when he was a kid, had grown up to become a fun, funny, great-looking guy. Dana was a tall great-looking girl, with a personality I never felt quite at home with. My sister was nice looking enough as well that she attracted a suitor that year, an unwanted one, that only added to my own misery. And then there was Michelle, a high school classmate and a girl I had an unspoken crush on.
And then there were the other characters that year: my friend Mike who had re-immigrated to Canada to go to college; Diana, a girl Mike had an interest in who was incredibly attractive, incredibly fun, and incredible trouble; Cheri, another high school classmate and a friend of Michelle's, as well as, I believe Shawna, a college classmate of Michelle's who would later marry Joe, a former high school classmate of ours.
This was the year that 90210 was finding its audience, the year that the show went from being some stupid television show about the struggles of rich kids to do good things in high school to being a stupid television show about the struggles of rich popular kids in high school to have fulfilling love lives and remain hip. And hip they were. Jason Priestly and the guy that played Dylan had brought back the long sideburns, and as a result, long sideburns were everywhere. Keith, in an effort to grow said sideburns, was, during this week in Victoria, not shaving. He figured it looked cooler to have stubble than to just let the sideburns grow in. At the end of the week, the sideburns sufficiently hairy, Keith took the stubble away and became Jason Priestly hot.
Meanwhile, grunge had not yet taken hold, but it was about to, although in my mind at the time people are already wearing extremely baggy clothes and flannel button-downs. Nirvana may have just been hitting the charts (or maybe not), but Pearl Jam at that time was just a relatively unknown struggling band that we were to see one night at a little club in Victoria--were to see, being operative here, for I missed the performance, though Michelle and her friends managed to see them. The band they were compared to, however, was not Nirvana but the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for the latter band at the time was way hotter.
In my photo album, there are several photographs of our two families, Keith, Michelle, Dana, my sister, me, our parents, on the fairy over from Vancouver. Michelle, who was typically unhappy at the time, wears a smile in the one candid photo I have of her. She is sporting her new haircut, one that greatly became her, but then, for me at that time, any haircut was becoming to her. This one was not big. Rather, it was short, like a boy's. Big, as her hair was in the late 80s, was on its way out.
Here was the source of the sadness in the journal: I liked her, but I would never say anything about that to her. Instead, I moped about, hoping to spend as much time with her on the sly as I could. And that year, as miserable as she was, stuck in a room with my sister and Dana, in a room meant for two people not three, she ended up spending most of the Feast, not in the room next door to Keith and me, but with her friends Cheri and Shawna in another hotel altogether.
I lived to run into her. One night, I agreed to hang out with Mike and the girl he liked. I ended up liking her too, and the fact that she was so fun and that this was my friend Mike almost made up for the fact that that night I had not gotten to spend time with Michelle and her friends. Later in the evening, we ran into them downtown. They were coming from a cool little club (that night, it was a headbanger's club), and they were full of energy, and I was torn between a desire to be with them and a desire to be with Mike and Diana.
Another night, the night we were to go see Pearl Jam, I ended up stuck with Keith and Dana and my sister, while Michelle and her friends did their own thing. We did not rendezvous at the club we had agreed to meet at. Keith and Dana, my sister and her unwanted suitor, and I ended up at the same club that Michelle and friends had been to a few nights before. Now it was a dance club--perhaps the first one I'd ever been to--and it was a cool little club, and exciting, and fun, and Dana and Keith danced with each other, and my sister and this guy she really wanted to get rid of danced with each other, and I danced alone or with one of the two couples, the awkward third wheel.
Another night, that blessed night, I, along with Mike, got to hang out with Michelle and her friends. We went to a string of bars on the main drag. Michelle was moody, and her lack of enjoyment was intensified by the fact that one of the bars was skeptical about her being over nineteen on her driver's license, when in fact she was twenty-one and far past the legal drinking age in Canada. No one seemed very happy. We sat at an empty bar at a dance club, and not knowing what was proper and not wanting to be ungentlemanly I asked if anyone cared to dance, but no one wanted to, which disappointed me, as I'd have liked to have danced with one of the girls, any one of them, to make up for the few nights before. On our way into one bar, a door guy made fun of my looks by saying, "I want to see what this geek looks like on his ID," which got all the girls laughing ("Actually, that's not bad," he said, once he'd seen my photo--I often look better on film, particularly those made for institutional use, than in real life). And so the night went, one disastrous incident after another. I wouldn't get another chance that Feast.
Somewhere amid all this club-hopping, Michelle went to get her haircut refreshed one afternoon and thus did not share lunch with our two families. The cut had seemed great before, and now it was even better. But she had had to leave us to get it done. This, along with the various forays among her friends, proved that she had a life outside of us, outside of her parents and her brother--and me. Perhaps what I longed for wasn't as much her as the "outside" life, this idea that I was too busy to put up with these people around me.
And so, my hair a bit on the longer side for me, I decided I needed a haircut too. The afternoon of the haircut, I took off early from lunch, dismissing Michelle and her family and mine and striding into my own independent future. I was in a strange town, downtown, and I was therefore not free to choose a regular barber. And in my line of thinking at the time, that was a good thing, although I felt slightly uncomfortable, as I mounted the steps to go into the salon. "Salon"--the word itself suggested a certain snootiness, a certain finery, that I had never been a part of. Rich people. I was rich for an afternoon. The haircut cost me fifteen or something dollars, twice the usual.
I was asked how I wanted it cut. I didn't know. I said it could be a simple business cut--the same old cut I usually got. Did I want my hair washed? Sure, I said. I'd never had that done before. I scooted over to the sink and push my head in front of me. That wasn't the way, though, and a bit embarrassed, I turned around so that my head as behind me. My hair still wet, the woman cut. At the end, she rubbed mousse in it; I never wore mousse. I left her a two-dollar tip, twice my usual.
I walked the town in my new haircut. It was different, even if it was just the same old, same old. Over the past year or two, my hairline had begun to recede in the corners so that my hair would look much like my dad's. Now short, my hair combed back, not only on the sides but also on the top, I thought myself somehow renewed, somehow smarter looking than before. I walked the town, stepped in at a few retail establishments. I took a photo, which I still have, of my reflection in the window. The photo could not show my face, but it could show my new hair.
I ran into Michelle and her friends at some restaurant, but I didn't stay. I was different now. I wasn't going to mope and pine for her. I was independent. I couldn't just sit around wanting to be with her all the time. (And besides that, later that night, I would probably have the opportunity to see her again.) Now was my time, my time away from these people, my time to do my own thing. I too was a busy person. If she could live a life away from me, so could I away from her.
I went to the docks overlooking the bay and sat down and watched the sunset. I don't know how long I was there, but it seemed liked a long time.
Note
Memory transforms. A search of the journal reveals that the day of the haircut was indeed the day that I sat on the pier. But I did not meet Michelle and her cohorts at a random restaurant that afternoon; rather, I spent the rest of that day on the bus, trying to get to a singles activity. The bus, as it turned out, did not go to the place the activity was to be held. The afternoon wasted, I headed to the pier to mope.
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