Kabul Beauty School (8 page)

But after a few months, I was on compassion overload. I was just too much of a bleeding heart to work in the prison. I thought that lots of the inmates were really nice people—some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life—and that some of the guards were just bullies who used their power to abuse. I didn’t want to become like them, but I could feel myself changing. I didn’t like the way my mouth was starting to sound. And I think other people could sense that I was changing, too. One day I walked past the cell of a lifer who had never spoken a word to anyone in the whole time I had been there. He usually just whistled all day, as beautifully as a song-bird. He put his face against the bars.

“This is not a place for you, Miss Debbie,” he whispered. “You don’t want to turn out like the rest of them.”

About a year after I started working at the prison, I was driving to work in the rain and dreading it. I was working second shift and weekends, never seeing my children, and I felt like I was selling my soul to the devil for health insurance and paid vacations. I walked into the warden’s office after roll call and quit. On my last day, the prisoners lined up to say good-bye. Some of them were crying. “Good luck, Miss Debbie,” they said. “You’re going to have a good life now.”

But I didn’t know how to find that good life. I was working in my mother’s salon again but was often depressed and wondering why I wasn’t happy. I decided that I needed more fun. I’d gotten married and had children so early that I’d never done the high-energy dating and partying most of my friends had been through, so I decided to became the best party girl in Holland, Michigan. Whenever I do something, I do it to the extreme, so in a couple of months I knew every club in the area and every person on every barstool. Soon that wasn’t enough, and I bought a sailboat—even though I didn’t know how to sail and had no intention of learning—just so I could keep it docked at the bars on Lake Michigan, in Saugatuck. People from all over partied on my boat every weekend, and the good times were always wherever I was. When I was by myself, though, reality would sink in. I was out partying so much that I wasn’t being a good mom. Most of these people weren’t real friends anyway—they just liked my boat.

So I thought about getting religion. I had never been an atheist to begin with, but I didn’t have much of a faith structure or community to deepen my spiritual life. So I went and found a Christian church to join. Not just any church, either—this one was a full-gospel, be healed, and hallelujah kind of church. Soon it consumed all the time that I used to spend being lonely and depressed. It gave me an opportunity to use my creativity and a little bit of my musical talent, too. I forgot my disappointment that I was never going to sing Aïda on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and became the star of the church’s drama department. I wrote plays, directed them, and acted in them. They weren’t stodgy productions, either—I loved
Saturday Night Live
and
Mad TV
and put as much of that kind of humor into the church plays as I could.

Even though some things about the church made me uneasy, I met people there who opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. I had always liked to travel, but I’d quickly lose interest in whatever tourist destination my friends talked me into and wind up spending time in an area that most tourists shunned. When I went to Jamaica, I was bored with riding Jet Skis and drinking margaritas on the beach of a walled-off hotel, so I grabbed a bus into town. I wound up meeting a twenty-year-old mother with five kids who invited me to her home, where we ate soup made out of not much more than fish bones. I spent the week visiting her, bringing diapers and groceries. That was where I felt content. At the church, I met a retired man named Herb Stewart, who was traveling the world working on humanitarian projects of one kind or another. He invited me to go with him to India for a month.

I had been known around town as Crazy Deb for a while. As in Crazy Deb with all the weird hairstyles and the long nails and the showgirl makeup. Crazy Deb with the boat and the all-night parties. Crazy Deb who worked in the prison. As in “I’m getting my hair cut next week—you know, by Crazy Deb.” Now I became Crazy Deb because I started to travel around the world to work on humanitarian projects. That first time in India, Herb and I traveled from village to village helping people put in new wells. In one of the towns, I heard that the people had been suffering from a terrible famine. I got to know one of the families, and they told me that the worst time was during the three-month dry season. I asked them what would help, and they said rice. So I found someone with a truck and got him to drive me to a market in an area where the drought wasn’t so bad, and we filled the truck with rice. How could I buy for just one family? Back at the village, we dumped the rice on a concrete slab and called people over using a bullhorn. For about a hundred dollars, I was able to feed the people in this village for three months.

In the middle of all this, I wound up getting married to a traveling preacher associated with the church. I knew his personality and mine were very different, but I wanted to be married again. I liked being married. I thought that, since he was such a religious man and since I was headed in that direction, it would work out. But shortly after the wedding, he went from being intense and brooding to being just plain mean—and insanely jealous. If I went out to the grocery store and came home fifteen minutes later than he expected, he’d be waiting at the front door fuming and follow me through the house to question me. He seemed to think I’d been off having an affair in those fifteen minutes. At first, I would try to tell him that this wasn’t true, but I realized it didn’t do any good to protest. So one day I tried to leave the house when he started shouting. He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me back inside, slamming me against the wall. I pushed him away and lunged toward the door, but that just made him angrier. He slapped me across the face, hard.

After that, I tried not to do any of the things that set him off, even as I hated myself for having gotten into this situation. My mother had raised me to be a strong woman; how could this have happened? It was a tense household. My boys tried to spend as much time as possible with their grandparents. I managed to keep my husband from erupting into violence by acting like a docile, obedient wife. Then one day after church, he and I and a friend of his went to McDonald’s for breakfast. His friend and I laughed over some story, and I remember thinking that this was the most fun I’d had in months. But when we got home, my husband went crazy.

“I saw the way you were looking at him,” he shouted at me, spitting his fury all over my face. “You’re nothing more than a whore.” He chased me into our bedroom, where he backhanded me across the face and knocked me over. I hit my head on the foot of the bed. When I opened my eyes, I saw my kids and my mother standing at the door. She had just brought them back from an overnight. I remember thinking to myself how awful this was—not just because he had attacked me but because my kids and mother had had to see it. Then my tiny, little mother stepped between us, and my husband shoved her.

That did it. I was so angry that I managed to push him out of the house, and then I called 911. When the police arrived, my husband was standing on the lawn shouting so loudly that all the neighbors came out to watch. I packed suitcases for me and the kids, and walked outside with my face averted, like a gangster leaving the courthouse. My mother drove us to her place.

I wanted to stay there and never return, but my husband started to harass my mother—as if she didn’t have enough on her hands, taking care of my father, who had dementia and was dying of congestive heart failure. My husband called her at home, he called her at work, he’d show up in his car and block her in the driveway, demanding that she tell me to talk to him. I finally realized I couldn’t stay with my mother because my husband wouldn’t leave her alone, so I left my kids with their father and moved back home. I figured I’d bide my time while I saved money and made plans to get away. For about five minutes I thought that the church might help me out. I met with some of the leaders and told them what was going on. But though they said they were sorry about what I was going through, they told me it wouldn’t be right for me to leave him. After all, he hadn’t committed adultery. I really wished he had.

Then I heard about an organization that was giving disaster relief training in Chicago. I told my husband that I wanted to take a course, and to my amazement, he agreed to let me go. He thought the training would give me something to do if I traveled with him to third-world countries. So in August 2001, I drove to Chicago for two weeks of training with the Care for All Foundation. I learned what to do in a fire, earthquake, landslide, flood, hurricane, and bomb attack. I learned how to decontaminate myself if chemical weapons were used. I learned how to care for infants with malnutrition and how to protect people from illnesses caused by contaminated water. I learned about the real crises going on in different parts of the world. For the first time, I learned where Afghanistan was. On our last day, we were tested with a mock crisis. In retrospect, it was eerie: it was just three weeks before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, and we were being presented with the scenario of Chicago being attacked by terrorists using suicide bombs and chemical weapons. We had to work in teams, set up tents, triage the victims and carry them to the proper locations, even set aside the people who were going to die no matter what you did. It was all very realistic—and frightening.

Then the terrorists crashed the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One day I found a message on our voice mail asking me if I would join a disaster relief team that was headed to New York. I said yes without even consulting my husband. I left as soon as I could.

The next two weeks were among the hardest in my life. I was one of the many people taking care of the firemen who were deconstructing the collapsed World Trade Center and carrying away the bodies—often, bodies of their own colleagues. I did massage therapy and trauma counseling. I held them while they cried and washed their stinking, burned feet when they finally took their boots off after hours of climbing over hot rubble. I helped out in a dozen other ways, too. Sometimes I would have to go and hide in the Porta-John to cry, because I didn’t want to break down in front of them. My husband called me about seventy times a day on my cell phone, and I finally had to shut it off. The whole time I was there, I was afraid he’d find out that I was touching other men and come after me. When the Discovery Channel came in to film the relief effort, I hid under a massage table until they left so that my husband wouldn’t see me around the firemen.

At home again, I sank back into dread. I couldn’t stop watching television coverage of Afghanistan and the Taliban. I was especially struck by the footage of the Taliban executing women in Kabul’s Ghazi sports stadium. I read book after book about Afghanistan, and I felt like I was leading a life that was nearly as contained as those of the women there. Then I heard that CFAF was sending a team to Kabul the following year. I called them every day, telling them how much I wanted to go. When they finally told me that I could go, my husband heard about it and forbade me. I locked up my passport and my tickets in my mother’s safe so he couldn’t get at them. There was nothing anyone could have done to stop me. I knew that, for the first time in my life, I was going to the right place at the right time.

The day my friends came to take me to the airport, my husband leaned against the wall as I carried my suitcase out the door. “I hope you die in Afghanistan,” he said.

“I’d rather die than live here with you,” I replied. A door in my heart opened, and the tiny piece of him left inside tumbled out. I flew to Afghanistan, where my heart would soon fill with new people to love.

A
large woman whose head bristled with highlighting foils tapped a tapered blue nail on Roshanna’s face. “Is that your little Afghan friend?” she asked.

“Let me see!” Another woman reached for the pile of pictures balanced on the first woman’s knee.

I congratulated myself for having the good sense to have had duplicates made of the pictures from my trip and continued sectioning another woman’s hair for a cut. I didn’t have time to sort out the pictures again. I had a perm coming in the door in just a few minutes.

My customers back in the States had waited until I returned from Afghanistan to make their appointments, so I was swamped with work in those first few months at home. I told my stories and showed my pictures over and over. And I kept talking about going back there to help the Afghan beauticians. My idea at that point was to set up a teaching salon, where I would provide services to Western customers and hire Afghan hairdressers as apprentices. My customers at home didn’t snicker at this idea or tell me it was too dangerous. They were as excited about it as I was.

But I had no idea how I’d actually go about doing something like this. I’d never even set up my own salon in the States. I’d always worked in my mom’s. If I was going to set up a teaching salon in Afghanistan, I’d need to rent a space, of course—and I’d heard stories from the NGOs about how rents were beginning to soar as landlords figured they could get New York prices from Westerners, even in Kabul’s bombed-out neighborhoods. Then I thought about the salon I’d visited where they were using ten-year-old perm solution and scissors the size of hedge clippers. I would need to bring a lot of hair care products and equipment over to Kabul, especially if I wanted to send my trainees back out into their world with some good supplies of their own.

“Do you think I could get donations of this stuff from some of the hair care companies?” I wondered out loud. Then I thought, What the heck? I picked up a bottle of Paul Mitchell styling gel, looked on the back, and found an 800 number. When someone answered, I asked if they had a department that handled requests for donations. I bounced from one person to another and finally got an answering machine. I rolled my eyes at my customers but left a long message about who I was and how the Taliban had closed all the hair salons in Afghanistan and how the women were now trying to open them up again and what I wanted to do for them. The recording said to leave a detailed message, but I doubt they expected anything like these details.

But two days later, the phone in the salon rang. One of the other girls answered and then waved it at me. “Who is it?” I yelled over the noise of a blow dryer. I was right in the middle of smoothing someone who had about ten pounds of long, red, curly hair, and I didn’t want to give it a chance to frizz up. “Can you take a message?”

“He says he wants to talk to you in person.”

So I left half this woman’s hair pinned to her head and went to answer the phone. “Hey, Ms. International Hairdresser,” the voice on the other end said. “This is J.P.”

“Who?”

“John Paul DeJoria, the owner of Paul Mitchell. So, tell me about this beauty school or teaching salon or whatever it is that you want to start in Afghanistan.”

So right there in the salon, with one of the customers’ kids crying and another customer who was a little deaf talking too loudly and the door opening and closing, I told him about my idea. He didn’t need much convincing that it was a good plan. He told me to call his general manager, Luke Jacobellis. “Just ask Luke for whatever you want,” he said. After I hung up, I went tearing back into the middle of the salon screaming. The place was in an uproar for days.

I found a quiet spot and called Luke later that afternoon, after I’d finished with the rest of my customers. “How much product do you think you’ll need?” he asked.

“I don’t really know,” I told him. “Enough to last a couple of years, but I’m not even sure how much that is in a country where you never know if you’re going to have water or electricity. I’ve only been there a month.”

He told me to make a wish list, so I pulled out a catalog of Paul Mitchell products, telling him—oh, how about a dozen of this, three dozen of that, four dozen if you can spare it. We made a pretty sizable list, with shampoos, conditioners, gel, sprays, color, and perm solution as well as color capes and hand mirrors—basically, everything they sold. I was well familiar with Paul Mitchell products, because my mom had used them in her salon for years. I kept remembering all those frizzy perms I had seen back in Kabul and thinking of products that would make the Afghan women’s hair healthier. Just before we hung up, Luke started rattling off the names of a lot of other companies in the beauty industry that I should call. Takara Belmont for salon furniture, Redken for more hair product, Orly and O.P.I. for nail care products, and so on. Almost all of them were eager to donate.

About three weeks after I talked to Luke, a semitruck full of Paul Mitchell products pulled up outside my house. The driver looked confused when he knocked on my door. He assumed he was dropping off his load at a warehouse or at least the back end of a very big store. “Do you have anyone to unload this stuff?” he said, jerking his thumb at the huge truck that was fuming at the bottom of my driveway.

“Just me,” I said.

He looked me over and sighed. “You don’t happen to have a forklift, do you?”

“Just a wheelbarrow.”

I moved the cars, the snow blower, and the lawn mower out of the garage. Then, together, we moved all ten thousand boxes out of the truck into the garage as my husband watched from the living room. I’m not sure if it really was ten thousand boxes, but it felt like that many or more. They completely filled our two-and-a-half-car garage. As the truck finally pulled away, I stared at all the boxes. It was a little bit more than I could fit in my suitcases, even if I paid for overweight.

Over the next few months, more trucks arrived, bringing salon stations and chairs, combs, blow dryers, hand mirrors, perm rods, and other basic supplies, but I had these delivered to a storage unit. My husband had started to taunt me about the hair care products in the garage. He said that if I tried to leave him, he’d burn down the garage with everything inside it. Then where would my so-called Kabul beauty school be? He also told me that, if I wasn’t careful, he’d leave the front door open and let my dogs run into traffic. So I bided my time. I tried not to cross him, but I secretly rented an apartment and found a lawyer.

I still had no idea how I was going to get everything to Kabul. Then one day I called another of the companies that Luke had suggested to ask for a product donation. To my amazement, this person said that someone else had already called her about donating supplies to a beauty school in Afghanistan. I asked for the phone number of this person and followed up with a call. And that was when I first heard about the legendary Mary MacMakin, an American who has been living in Afghanistan for nearly forty years.

In 1996, Mary had started a small nonprofit called PARSA to help Afghan women who were widowed during the wars and had been forced into begging—a new and cruel development, because Afghans had practically no history of begging. Mary is one of the heroes of Afghanistan, and
Vogue
magazine did an article about her back in 2001. The New York hairstylist Terri Grauel was assigned to do Mary’s hair for the photo shoot, and they had kept in contact. After the Taliban fell, Mary saw that Afghan beauticians were hastening to open up storefront salons again but were hindered by limited resources and skills that had gotten rusty. She suggested to Terri that American hairdressers could help Afghan women become successful business owners by opening up a beauty school. So Terri and some associates galvanized the New York beauty industry to launch and support a school.
Vogue
and Estée Lauder kicked in big cash donations, and then other companies directed a flow of money and products to the project. It was going to be called the Beauty Without Borders Kabul Beauty School, and it would be run as one of PARSA’s programs.

I was actually relieved to find out that someone else with more clout and connections was working on the idea. I had been doing all I could in Holland but realized deep down that I probably couldn’t do such a huge thing all on my own. I quickly joined forces with the PARSA group and pledged the half million dollars’ worth of beauty products in my garage and storage unit to the school. They were planning to open in July 2003 inside the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs compound, a location Mary had recommended because she thought the women would be safe there. She knew there were still plenty of people in Kabul who agreed with the Taliban that beauty salons—and anything that made women stand out or stand on their own—were an abomination. I volunteered to be one of the instructors at the school, along with a handful of other Western beauticians.

The PARSA project was putting together a shipping container of beauty supplies that would be leaving the East Coast for Kabul in December. I had to get my stuff there well before then. A local salon owner had a friend who owned a shipping company, and he volunteered his trucks and time to move everything from the storage unit. Now all I had to do was get the stuff out of my garage and into the storage unit. The only problem was that it wasn’t my garage anymore, because I had finally left my husband.

One cloudy day, my sons, Noah and Zach—at that point, both in their late teens—got together a bunch of their friends and rented a big U-Haul moving truck. My girlfriends and I followed in our cars with wheelbarrows hanging out of the trunks. When we backed the truck up to the garage, my husband came outside and told me he had a court order preventing me from removing anything from the property. He called the police when we ignored him, and squad cars pulled up a few minutes later. Despite the rain that began to fall, neighbors ambled over to get a better view of the excitement.

Two police officers walked up, but I was like a madwoman; I wasn’t about to let anything stop me. “This is my stuff, and I’m moving it!” I shrieked. “You have three options: you can shoot me, arrest me, or leave me alone.” They backed off and stood there watching as my sons and our friends moved all the hair care products into the truck. And that was it—the last big hurdle before I left for Afghanistan early in 2003 to meet the shipping container.

Well, there was the beginning of the war in Iraq. I guess most people would consider that a bigger hurdle.

The shipping container was supposed to arrive in Kabul in late January. I was planning to meet it there and help unload its contents at the Women’s Ministry. I told all my customers to hurry up and make their appointments two days before I was supposed to leave or else they’d have to wait three weeks until I got back. They streamed in, many of them bringing donations to offset my expenses or baked goods that I could sell at the salon to raise money. I had lots of festive farewell gatherings with friends, as well as many weepy moments with my mom and kids. And then came the first letdown: it turned out that the container hadn’t even left port. The departure date had been postponed because of heightened activity around the Middle East—including, I later learned, the maneuvering that U.S. and British forces were doing before their invasion of Iraq in March. So instead of flying to Kabul, I wound up flying to New York for a week of special training in makeup application at M.A.C. Cosmetics, which had donated about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of makeup to the school.

In mid-February, I heard that the shipping container had finally left the United States, and I got all fired up to go again. But a week before I was supposed to fly out in early March, I got the news that the ship carrying our container was stuck in the Suez Canal. Again, it was sidelined by war preparations.

By that time, I was wild to leave Holland. I had already said good-bye too many times to my family and friends, and I didn’t have any customers scheduled until late April. I had heard that relief organizations in Jordan were expecting an onslaught of refugees from Iraq. So I offered my services to one of the organizations there and left for Jordan in late March. A few days after I arrived, I heard that our shipping container wasn’t stuck in the Suez Canal anymore but had already been dropped off in Kabul. And off I went to join it and the other women who shared my dream.