During countless encounters with her mane, she avoided trying to control its erratic growth, until the day she was discovered by a buoyant hair talent scout. Once she found a skilled manipulator for her estimable hair of the loins, The Cowgirl Bible became the most committed participant in the national contest Shave Your Triangle. She won various awards in the ingrown hair category. At fifteen, she won the contest’s most important honors: The Golden Porcupine, the equivalent of the Hotsprings Award for the Radioactive Bud.
When a competitor is awarded the top prize, she should retire. Traditionally, Goodbye My Love plays at these affairs. And because pubic hair was her life, The Cowgirl Bible said that telenovelas and hosting would not be her path. A change of scene meant only one thing: to go under the knife, to invest in plastic surgery the way one does with horse racing. She decided it was better to follow the example of certain ex-baseball players who become minor league coaches upon retirement. She would impose herself in stylology, specializing in the pubis. She had memorized the exact manipulation of the mini mini electric shaver they used to shave her before every catwalk competition.
The Cowgirl Bible was a living legend. She had been inducted into the hall of fame at fifteen. She was the youngest ever to conquer the big screen. No one didn’t know who she was in the Guorl circuit®. But that didn’t keep her from signing up for the hair removers’ union under the snooty alias Ms. Las Vegas. As was tradition with novices, her first razor was a used one. A red Yamaha with white frets.
The secret to being a virtuous master of the blade, according to the first lesson from her virtual instructor on The World’s Great Epilators DVD, not only resides in worshiping the divine mandate of shaving, but also in never forgetting the fundamental principle: that the music is in the wires. Handling an acoustic razor is not the same as handling an electric one. Check out the style. The style is the man (or, in this case, the gluttonous little girl, or whoever occurs to me). That’s the trick, the plan, the gift. It might come from heaven or as a spark of ingenuity. Some people say the key is in the tube amp, others lift the strings with their hands as they arpeggio or use a homemade instrument.
From the Yamaha, she went on to a Fender Stratocaster, which she called Lucille. She dreamed of shaving next to the greats. On the wall above her bed she had a giant poster of her hero, her holy moly, her one and only: Jaimito Hendrics. As a pre-celebrity teen, she’d go out on the streets with her razor hanging off her back and get together with her buddies, all aspiring virtuosos, and they’d watch video clips featuring Hendrics, this dude who played the razor with his teeth, threw it against the speakers, and lit it on fire.
Already marked as a product of the ghetto, she made her first public appearance at Cabelo do Porco, the PopSTock! interracial fair. Before, as was the case with all the aspirants, she’d taken part in small jams at highway bars and in neighborhood garages. She’d even had a small trio called Confessions of a Fried-Chicken Peddler. The power trio, rock’s analectic formation, was the gospel she needed to follow. As models there were two of the most reputable groups in history (now gone): Cream and The Experience.
The interracial show consisted of lining up prospects before they went up onstage, as if they were waiting at a bank. On the stage, a group — razor, bass, and drums — was improvising on the pubis of a top model. The novice had to better, or at least equal, the rock and roll rapture of the stationary shaver going at another bush. Whoever managed to advance to the next phase, to be decided by the auditorium crowd, would compete in the last round for a Marshall amp, a car, two thousand pesos cash, and a Sony Ericsson cellphone.
As if she was getting in line to cash a pension check, The Cowgirl Bible took her place in that long queue. Just before it was her turn, the girl in front of her warned her not to go onstage. She’d only make a fool of herself. But our girl didn’t give a shit. Decided, The Cowgirl Bible climbed the backstage steps.
— What is your name? asked the house band’s razor player.
— The Cowgirl Bible.
— Where have you played?
— Around.
— Ladies and gentlemen, The Cowgirl Bible, from around.
The competition started. First up was the local, then the visitor. The local organized her model’s pubes into a tiny pair of angel wings. The bass and drums never stopped improvising. Then The Cowgirl Bible launched into her performance.
She started calmly, too sweet for rock and roll. But then the performance went out of control. The Cowgirl Bible was out of this world. She was operating on a whole other beat, which, because it was new, sounded out of tune and awkward. The bass and drums interrupted the song. The model feared for her parts. The audience was disconcerted. The Cowgirl Bible hadn’t realized there was absolute silence in the room except for the hum of her instrument. Everybody was completely focused on her, and she was completely focused on playing. To make her come back, the drummer took a plate from a pile and threw it on the ground. The sound of it smashing on the floor brought The Cowgirl Bible out of her abstract pyrotechnics. The test was over. The audience started laughing and jeering, and The Cowgirl Bible came down from the platform sad and lonely, as if she’d just swallowed some matches.
The Cowgirl Bible first heard about Crossroad in a documentary. If, as I suspect, her biographer is Latino, then her story will be titled Encrucijada. Perhaps they’ll also make a movie. It will star Karen Bach. The soundtrack will win a Grammy®. Then there’ll be a tribute by some black blues players. A street in the Bronx will be named after her and, finally, they will erect a statue of her along a path in Central Park and the inscription will read: The Cowgirl Bible Parker Iniesta Herbert Novo. The cursed poet of electric shavers.
But I am getting ahead of myself, being too cute for words, and a little nasty. Before The Cowgirl Bible appeared on the covers of all the magazines, before she became the great mother hen, godmother to all the girls, mother of Marianne Faithfull, she suffered for a second time. She suffered from the futility of being a fledgling. And this is off the record: After her failure in the contest she thought about abandoning — definitively and without the option of Methadone, like a beautiful trauma — her love of the bush-sculpting art.
That night after the concert, when all the bars had closed like wounds, she discovered Crossroad on TV. The documentary showed a mephitic location in the midst of a mythic nothing. It featured two paths that came together to form a cross. Or an X. Depending. On one side there was a bar attended to by a blind man, where they only served cola. Out in front, on a humble veranda, a deaf black man pretended to play guitar on a stick. They say a few meters up ahead there used to be a boot store called El Infierno, but nothing in the registers indicates such a thing. There is absolutely nothing there now.
Everything I’ve told of so far is relevant to the story because legend has it that if you can’t figure out the signs, you won’t be able to make a deal in Crossroad. If there’s just one missing scenic element, then the journey will be harrowing, like dealing with a bureaucrat. If, by a stroke of bad luck, the bar is closed or the black guy is just meowing, then it will be necessary to return during lobster season. If by virtue of the Holy Child Jesus of Peyote, patron of PopSTock! the requirements are met, then the devil will present himself at Crossroad at midnight, and you can make a deal. In exchange for your soul, you can even ask for press credentials.