Headless (7 page)

Wilhemina said she didn’t think Baby Hairs would like ex-friend Carla, because ex-friend Carla is difficult and troubled, kind of a freak or lunatic, depression prone, that she can be a scary psycho at times or every second. And then I said—I addressed her as Lil’ W, thinking maybe if I pretended that we were both truck drivers talking on CB radios I could get through this conversation without crashing headon into another semi-tractor trailer—I said something to the effect of, Lil’ W, that’s music to Baby Hairs’s ears. That’s exactly what he craves, really and truly. He desires the mental-ward girl, the smart, cute, sexy fräulein with black hair blunt-cut in a 1920s Berlin style. Plus she has a cleft chin that makes her sort of masculine. Baby Hairs’s last girlfriend, a person he met on his own, turned his car off while they were driving on the freeway and threw the keys out the window. He had to roll to a stop, guide the car to the shoulder with the steering wheel locked in place, climb the low concrete barrier, and retrieve the keys while oncoming traffic zoomed close and threatened manslaughter. Desperate maniac love, that’s what he likes. Fighters.

When I informed Baby Hairs a few days later, at lunch, while he ate his high-protein cottage cheese scoop and hamburger patty with multiple squirts of catsup, that Wilhemina was running interference with my matchmaking, that she said,
No, no, no
about hot, sultry Carla, his first reaction was a simple,
Why,
and then he, child of Freud, asked the million-dollar questions:
Did Wilhemina say no because she craves sex with me? Is this not a classic case of displacement? Does the young lass want me all to herself?
This is one of many reasons why we love Baby Hairs and why we’re working overtime to find him conjugal happiness and why he holds the Kraft-Ebing Chair in the Psycho-Sexual Dept. at Fontanel University. He is prone to insightful observations such as, “The ego which has discarded all ethical bonds feels itself at one with all the demands of the sexual impulse.”

I was quick to say,
No, she does not want you all to herself,
before I really had a chance to mull over the intriguing possibility of Wilhemina, a lifelong dyke, breaking lesbo rank and lusting after the flat hairy ass of Baby Hairs. One year, 10 months, 14 days ago Wilhemina fell in love with The Angel, the greatest little femme our earth has ever known, and they are happy together, perhaps ecstatic is the appropriate term, which is why they recently acquired a talkative Mexican Parrot that repeats the phases
Shut up
and
Eat me
all day long. I also said
No
because I didn’t think we should get sidetracked, and
No
because I didn’t believe Wilhemina was thinking,
Must retain Baby Hairs as hetero side dish,
but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get me thinking in another direction: Maybe Wilhemina the Selfish, Wilhemina the Jealous, doesn’t want to see Carla, her skinny, pale friend with the dented chin, win the prize.

This is a difficult predicament for someone like me, a person with a discrete halo over his head, pusher of all things fair and true, to see Wilhemina hogging an inordinate amount of life’s pleasures for herself. Understandable if one were to see things from an adolescent’s point of view, but still not right at all, something the Bible warns us about repeatedly in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, and Genesis 33 where Jacob conciliates Esau.

Am I good?
Baby Hairs, the cryptic, asked during a moment of low self-esteem. We had just hiked to the top of a giant snowfield. It was late spring; the snow was granular and melty. We were playing chess on a tiny magnetic board. Each move had to be done carefully, the tips of our fingers functioning like tweezers. He was sad, his blood sugar low. He’d just lost his queen.

He reached down and scooped up a layer of snow and put it on his head, then rubbed it briskly into his scalp. Tiny fragments of snow remained in his thin wispy hairs. I removed a small camera from my backpack and took his picture.
Yes, you are good,
I said,
you are solid in every way.

Solid like a stool?
he asked, just as he smeared a cracker with liver pâté using his Swiss Army knife.

No,
I said,
like a solid friend, a reliable horse, a monument.

Baby Hairs is nothing like The Angel, who’s perfect to the extreme with sparkling blue eyes that actually twinkle, as if lit by God. The Angel: soft, little, smelling like a bar of Ivory Soap, a sergeant of Sappho’s army. Baby Hairs, the opposite, wanted to know how he seemed to people in the outside world. So I told him he was mad and loopy like Carla, this girl who he may never meet as long as he and she both shall live, that he’s generous and brilliant, possibly even a catch (a fixer-upper might be more accurate), that he has more humor inside him than all the suffering comedians of the world; he’s self-deprecating, doesn’t talk about himself all the time (girls appreciate that), he dresses down, almost to the point of looking like a gentleman with no source of income. I’ve seen him wandering the streets in his bathrobe (girls do not appreciate that). Baby Hairs is tallish, six-foot-one, almost handsome, bordering on cute, with funny little hairs that poke straight up from his head like pin feathers on a newly hatched duck. Doesn’t drink. He’s macho, but not murderous. Comes from old Plymouth Rock (rip-off-the-indigenous-people) ancestry, born in D.C., his great-grandfather the governor of New Hampshire. On more than a dozen occasions, I’ve heard him say that his mother is a liar (i.e., hundreds of hours of therapy, 10 years twice a week, substantial emotional progress, yes, unfortunately continued pain and suffering). Baby Hairs, the spotted lamb with bitten off fingernails who was shipped off to boarding school as a young lad, was put on earth to love and be loved. Also petted, scratched, kissed, teased. That much is certain.

I, a simple matchmaker, an agent with a magical gift of bringing people together, am trying to spread and smear love around as often as possible or whenever it seems appropriate, but I’m having trouble accomplishing this vital task. I could’ve signed off in resignation, saddened as an oppositional force tampers with my ability to work wonders, a rival, the anti-matchmaker, a shrew who will stop at nothing to keep her frisky ripe ex-friend away from my lopsided amigo, but I didn’t. I violated certain trusts and statutes and side-stepped the human barrier and set up a clandestine meeting with Baby Hairs and Carla.

The three of us met at a diner owned by the brother of dead Mafioso John Gotti where the matzo ball soup has big pieces of chicken, carrot, and celery. Baby Hairs looked perfect. His dirty torn up Carhartts gave him working-class appeal, like he knew how to hammer nails. Carla wore a tight black T-shirt and nothing else. Correction: She wore pants and shoes, too, also black. She was ready to go undercover, to kill for love. When they shook hands, Baby Hairs revealed his perfectly broken smile. Carla leveled a deep smoldering gaze that seemed to suggest come hither, or come as your are, or come again? One eyebrow darted up and her upper lip curled slightly. If I said it was love at first sight I wouldn’t be lying, though it could’ve easily been fear or repulsion. Those initial reactions are hard to gauge even for a professional like myself. You gather data and then you wait.

I took a deep breath and went to the bathroom and examined my own friendly face which seemed less green, more yellow. Why did I look like I was about to cry? My lips were parted. I was panting. Couldn’t I breathe with my mouth closed? My ears were bright purple, new hairs sprouted at odd angles. My nose hairs were equally rude and Brillolike.

The bathroom air vent was right next to our table. Carla was speaking. I overheard a mumble from her wishing I was gone—she called me
that creepy dude
—she said I took up too much air, that I smelled like a cheese product, that my interest in other people’s lives was well-intentioned, but also intrusive, and kind of disturbing. She said I was kind of a loser. That’s what she called me. She said it would be cool if our little matchmaker could disappear.

Not to worry. Been called one before. Losers are experts at being called losers. We know how to handle it. Special defense procedure in place.

Rule #1: Keep moving. Stay afloat. Mustn’t injure self.

Rule #2: Stay cheerful. Smile through it. No tantrums. Breathe in love. Exhale hate.

Rule #3: Remain standing. Exit bathroom. Don’t fall.

The uncomfortable silence, heavy as concrete, was poured across the table. I sat back down and looked at the two ingrates. Fine, have it your way, I thought, try and make it on your own. Without saints like me to set tables and jam napkins into your lap you’d be nowhere. You’d be eating out of troughs in a barn.
Oink
would be your primary verb and noun.

Okay farm animals, pick up the hot-seeded sesame roll that the waiter so graciously put in front of you. Try and butter it without clomping your hooves on the table. I must leave now, with my halo intact. The matchmaker has suffered a deep flesh wound. But he will survive and prevail and continue to service the community in ways no one will ever truly appreciate.

I gazed at Carla (she should really dye those unwanted facial hairs), tilted my head to the right, and smiled bold and brightly. I shared the same glowing expression with Baby Hairs. Make sure you use a condom, you fool. I closed my eyes dramatically, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, and let the full meaning of what I have just done for them sink in. And then I rose to my feet, turned on my heels, and walked home.

MARNIE

The first time I saw Marnie naked, she was lying on her back in an ambulance while two paramedics cut her yellow Burton shell off her torso. The zipper must’ve been caught on the fabric. The medical boys sliced her jacket and all the fleece underlayers right up the middle with a razor-sharp scissors as if she were a fish. They needed to get to her heart. Didn’t we all? I stood a few feet from the sliding door of the ambulance in full ski gear, gawking, mouth open, the ultimate perv. Red ski patrolmen floated by, big white crosses on their backs. They nodded at me and turned away.

Marnie had huge amazing tits, bone white, with nipples as pink and ripe as guava pulp. It was the only time in my sex-crazed life that I stared at a naked girl and wanted to look away. We weren’t together or anything, we were just pals, both obsessed with mountains and snow. We probably skied together 25 days a year, hiked, played softball in the summer with a gang of friends, drank beer, ran into each other at art openings and the occasional barbecue. She liked to throw parties. She had a backyard with lots of trees and places to sit. Maybe we were like brother and sister; at least she treated me like that. I was the advice guy, giving her counsel on books, and sexual strategy for boys she lusted after—and now I was freaking out on this rad view of her body, clothes peeled back, revealing the blinding treasure within.

No one told me to move. I wasn’t Joe Sleezoid violating an injured woman’s privacy. I was an indeterminate blob, a confused idiot watching his friend be manhandled by rescue guys. I was going to report all this shit back to her. Tell her that boys handsomer than Jonny Moseley—who knows what they actually looked like, I just knew that’s what I was going to say—were rifling through her privates. She’d be creeped for life if she knew paunchy lumps were tinkering with her body while she was out.

Marnie was the best female athlete I’d ever known: strong, fearless, stubborn, smart, prickly, generous, humble, blah blah blah, freckly, and very flirty. She’d stand in the middle of the room in a tight thermal shirt, squeeze her boobs like a stripper, and say how much she loved them.

We met at Cal Arts, in the Grad. Program. One night after a screening of some Belgian art films (mainly Bas Jan Ader), a pack of us went out to Canter’s for liquor and matzo ball soup. Marnie and I were both wearing the same Air Jordans. That was kind of it. We started talking about sports, a giant relief from art babble, and within an hour we had more than one ski trip planned. She made tons of badass sculptures and photographs. I painted sexually deprived robots with pitiful captions about tenderness. She wrote this corny love story she claimed she didn’t show anyone but me about two inseparable cacti. She also took photographs of cacti and Photoshopped them into these lush sci-fi landscapes, and treated them like male/female dolls caught in a romance. I’d like to say that we were super suited for each other but we weren’t. There was a stubborn brat in her that could stretch to infinity. When her behavior got particularly rank, she’d reach deep into the barrel and remind me of her only-child status, as though that was some kind of excuse for her acting like a tantrum-throwing freak. She was spoiled to the core via a pampering Pittsburgh granny. I was, and steadfastly remain, a morose gloomster, which is another way of saying: On occasion I irritated the crap out of her. But when I saw her lying there on her back all perfect like a netherworld deity my heart and whatever else went bonkers.

I expected her to wake up any second; all she needed was a little smelling salts or a few wet kisses applied by me. I’ve passed out a bunch of times and pretty much got off on the blurry disorientation. You think, who unplugged the projector? And the cool spacey thing is, something inside you yanked the plug. What you need when you disappear into the darkroom is a sober audience member to explain the missing minutes when you wake up. I was all set to get in her face about how rad her crash was as soon as her eyes fluttered open. Our tumbles were never embarrassing, they were spectacular Indy 500 car wrecks—loud football grunts, huge explosions of snow, multiple somersaults, skis and poles twirling in orbit, hat and goggles just part of the debris. But this fall of Marnie’s wasn’t like our usual crowdpleasing highlights.

That morning we’d assembled our all-important turkey sandwiches with cheddar and avocado and four kinds of mustard that we meticulously prepared on the floor of our tiny motel room to the accompaniment of blasting Pantera, as if we had entered the World Heavy Metal Sandwich Competition, and, no surprise to us, we were heavy favorites to win. We wrapped them in foil and wrote
eat me
and
fucker
on them. The sandwiches hung from a tree in a plastic Vons bag, as per usual, but this time would never be eaten by us.