In the newspaper the judge of the writing contest remarked on how mature my story content was.
My mother and father took me out to dinner at the Brown Derby.
We didn’t talk. We ate.
It was the first story I ever wrote.
About Hair and Skin
THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT HAIR AND SKIN.
In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love.
I have my sister’s. My own when I was a kid. My son’s. My dead infant’s almost hair. The hair of my best friend in high school. In college. I have Kathy Acker’s hair. Ken Kesey’s hair. My first husband’s hair. The hair of a longtime woman lover — several different colors of it. My second husband’s hair. My third husband’s hair. The hair of two of the dogs I owned. The hair of cats. The hair of- and this one is kind of random — my high school English teacher — who was over the top Christian — so I have Christian hair. I have Buddhist hair. I have atheist hair. Gay hair, straight hair, the hair of a post-op tranny who used to be a Scientologist. The hair of a white wolf. Seriously.
I have my mother’s hair.
What?
I can’t help it. When I get the chance to own the hair of someone important to me, I leap forward a little too zealously.
Ken Kesey’s hair between your fingers feels like lamb’s wool. If you hold it up to the light you can imagine shapes in clouds — like the touch of dreams kids have when they look up into the sky.
In anthropology the word fetiches was popularized by C. de Brosses’ Le Culte de Dieux Fetiches, which influenced the current spelling in English, and introduced the obsessive desire part.
A nicey way to say it would be to say “something irrationally revered.”
Fetishism in its psycho-sexual sense first cropped up in that swank sex writer’s work, Havelock Ellis, around 1897. Have you read Havelock Ellis? Was that guy high or what?
Kathy Acker’s hair is like blades of bleached grass — sharp and stiff — and smells like swimming pools.
It’s not just hair.
There’s the hair, and it’s true to this day if I meet someone with beautiful hair I want to put my face in it and lose myself, and one other thing.
Scars.
I like to run my tongue along them like mouth Braille.
Buddhist hair smells like smooth stones taken from a river. Whereas Christian hair has a cross between new car smell, dollar bills, and after shave. Alternately like chocolate chip cookies.
There is a woman I want to tell you about.
Right after I tell you about my mother. Which is where everything gets born.
My mother was born with one leg six inches shorter than the other. In my life it meant something completely different than it did in hers.
In my life as a child it meant that the pearled gleam of her scar appeared exactly at eye level. So white. So beautiful. I wanted to touch it. Mouth it. When she got out of the bath I hugged her leg and closed my eyes and saw it and saw it and saw it. I saw the crossed white tracks, the too-white non-skin on her misshapen leg, the dark wire of her pubic hair. It made me dizzy enough to see stars.
And that’s not all. My mother wore her hair wound in a never-ending spiral at the back of her head. When she let it down, it reached her calves. It smelled like fir trees.
Every desire that flickered alive in me as a child came from those two images.
My mother said that as a girl, she let her hair grow long enough to cover her body, her deformed leg, her scars. So that there would be something about her that was beautiful to cover a crippled girl.
When I was 13 my mother became an award-winning real estate agent. More and more she left the house. More and more alcohol entered. The bathroom closet full of vodka jugs. She cut her hair off in that 1970s real estate agent on the go way. The long trail of her hair sat curled in a box like a cat in her bedroom closet. Sometimes I would sit in the dark of her closet and smell it and cry.
Harder
“NOW ASK ME FOR WHAT YOU WANT.”
Maybe it was because I only saw her three times a year. She lived in New York City, I lived in Eugene, Oregon. Maybe it was her stature — so high up in the academic echelons that it was like being awarded a very important prize to be with her. It could be it was that she liked my brutal and unruly stories. Or that I had no place in her daily life. Maybe it was her scar, her hair, my pathologies. But mostly I think it was what she taught me about pain.
When I was 26 a big time academic came to give a talk at the University of Oregon. I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was being all grad student faux smarty butt. I was all Sontag and Benjamin and Deleuze and Foucault. I was talking the talk of Barbara Kruger and Roland Barthes and … who the fuck gives a shit. Point being: I was not prepared to psychosexually regress fast enough and hard enough to make me leave a puddle in my seat.
In the auditorium, when she walked out onto the stage, even though I was sitting fairly far from her, I could see that her silver and black hair traveled down the entire length of her back in a braided rope, past her ass. The skin on her face and hands was the color of Albuquerque. When she turned to face our jackastic applause, I saw something. Beginning just underneath the infant thin skin of her left eye was a tiny white gleaming. I had to strain to focus. I had to sit up and lean forward on the edge of my seat.
When they dimmed the lights, only a podium lamp illuminated her face from below. I saw then a web of thin white scars that curved around her cheekbone, cupped her jaw, and continued down her neck into the plunge of her shirt.
I went instantaneously deaf. I mean I didn’t hear one word of her famous hour long photographer talk. It was like being underwater. Occasionally I was able to wrestle my eyes away from her to look at the stream of photos behind her, but not often. My breathing began to go wrong in my lungs. Sweat formed in lines underneath my tits and between my legs. My face got hot. My scalp felt as if it was leaving my head. My mouth filled with spit. I wished everyone in the room dead.
By the time her talk was over and I’d made my way down and through the idiotic academic sycophantic throngs, by the time I penetrated the clone army and reached my hand out to shake hers, to introduce myself, to look at what my body was begging for, I already knew.
She was the same age as my mother.
A few hands before mine I noticed that she wiped her hand off vigorously enough on her pant leg to create the beginning of what would be a stain when she got back to her hotel for the night. A stain on the thigh of her pants from the multitudes of greedy hands. I felt a tinge of shame.
I gripped her hand a little too tightly, as I recall. Desperately thinking inside my skull don’t be desperate don’t be desperate don’t be fucking desperate.
When she looked at me she had that glazed look of a speaker handling the hands and faces of adoring morons. When she let go my hand I thought, that’s that, I’m an adoring moron. Probably I’m drooling.
Her hand in mine was wet. Wet from the effort it takes to speak to a desiring crowd when you are meant to be off gloriously and unapologetically alone in the world with your only beloved: a camera. Point and shoot. Wet with all of our slobbering projections of who we wanted her to be dripping from her hands. Wet with the sweat of hundreds of numskulls just like me.
I don’t know why I did it, I just know I couldn’t not. While I was holding her hand I leaned in close to her face and said my name is Lidia. I am a writer. Which I said exactly to the scar underneath her eye, letting my eyes and voice travel down her skin. I saw stars as I let go. Her hair smelled like rain.