In the late 80's and early 90's, the phenomenon of street hockey invaded cul du sacs all over the Midwest. Kids ages five to fifteen united in neighborhood games in the street. We set out cones to mark goals, picked teams, strapped on our roller blades and kneepads, and, in that less safety-conscious time, left our helmets and elbow pads at home. Scrapes and bruises were battle wounds, not law suits. The street hockey ball was the size of a tennis ball, but made of tough plastic. Some of us had special hockey sticks made to withstand the pavement. Some of us whose mothers wouldn’t buy those expensive street hockey sticks were perfectly skillful with a broom instead. Entire summers were spent checking each other onto the hot asphalt, directing traffic around our games, and barely taking our skates off even to go in for lunch.
At the height of my street hockey career, around age eight, my mother insisted that I needed voluminous hair. Just as street hockey was taking over the streets of subdivisions, big hair was conquering malls across the nation. From the local news anchor to David Bowie to my third grade teacher, everyone seemed to have large hair. There were big bangs, big fros, big mullets, and big combs to keep it all teased. The answer to every woman (and man's) flat-hair dilemma was the body-wave perm.
My mother’s hairdresser, who I will call “Dr. Frankenstein,” lived just an unfortunate two houses down the street. The day my mother scheduled as the day my hair would lose its simple, flat, straight shape, I was pulled away from a heated game of street hockey and into Dr. Frankenstein's kitchen. I stepped into her house and was knocked over by ammonia-smells of permanent chemicals mixing together. On the table were tiny rollers, pieces of parchment paper, and rubber gloves. Had I been a little older, maybe I would have had the sense to run screaming right then.
Instead, I bent my head over the sink and let my mother wash my hair. Washing my hair in the sink was an un-welcomed bit of grooming she often did when I was a kid. It was a fascinating ritual that always began with a dramatic showdown.
“Your hair still looks dirty,” my mom would say when I came downstairs just out of the shower, “Are you sure you rinsed all the shampoo out?”
“Yes. It’s fine,” I would respond and slink toward the back door before she could tell me to go fetch a towel. I was usually missing out on a street hockey game, already in full swing, with the neighborhood kids.
“Wait just a minute,” she would call after me.
I froze. Within seconds she was behind me, draping a dish towel around my neck and leading me toward the kitchen sink.
“Mauumm,” I would whine, “The sink reeks!”
“Oh, it does not. I just cleaned it.” She would bend my head forward so that my nose was inches from the stainless steel basin where all the family’s discarded food was thrown into the soggy hole and ground and flushed away forever.
While my mother scrubbed at my scalp, I tried not to drown as shampoo and water streamed down the sides of my face into my eyes, nose and mouth. After episodes of kicking and gagging, scratching and trying to wiggle free, I was finally “clean,” standing up straight with a dishtowel wrapped around my head, the front of my t-shirt soaking wet.
“Doesn’t that feel better?” mom would ask, her voice a deviant and breathy high-frequency.
“No.” I would pout for the next few hours about the trauma I had experienced in the sink.
I knew better, however, than to put on this display at the neighbor’s house, and therefore silently suffered the shampoo in their foreign sink, where god only knows what leftover soggy food had met its end.
Dishtowel perched on my head, I climbed into the tall chair that brought me to the right height for Dr. Frankenstein to create her monster. She draped me with a large plastic poncho that fit like a christening gown, and combed out my natural, straight, perfectly-fine-as-it-was, long hair. Then she pulled out her scissors.
“Wait. I don’t want it shorter,” I said.
“She’s just going to trim it so that the perm will take,” said my mom. Again, devious lies. Long strands of hair fell from my head onto my lap. My heart skipped up a few beats and I felt like I might throw up.
Then she chose her next weapon. The roller. One after another, she parted out sections of my hair and tightly rolled them into the round pieces of plastic lined with papers. All I could hear was the crunching of the parchment next to my ears as she wound each one tightly toward my crown. Each time I moved my head, I felt a new pinch where hair was pulled nearly out of my scalp.
My mom just stood there and smiled.
“This is going to look really nice,” she said.
“Close your eyes,” said Frankenstein. My sinuses cleared as she poured the ammonia mixture over my head. While it dripped down my face I shut my eyes tightly. I knew I would go blind if even a drop seeped between my eyelids.
“Okay, now we just have to wait thirty minutes… Almost done!”
Thirty minutes! This was NOT part of the deal. I could never keep my eyes shut this tightly for that long. This was it. I was going blind.
I imagine Mom and Frankenstein sat at the kitchen table, ate Hagen Daas, and talked about who was getting fat, but I'm not sure because my eyes were shut so tightly I lost my hearing too. No more street hockey for me. I was going to be blind and deaf. I had heard that beauty was pain, but thought in this case we were overdoing it.
A dull ache in my forehead began to form and I felt dizzy. I saw flashes of light dancing on the insides of my eyelids and studied the shapes that formed. From now on this would be the world I would see. I was trying to get used to it when my hearing suddenly returned.
BUZZZZZ!
A kitchen timer made me nearly jump out of my chair, and worse, relax my eyelids so that a tiny trickle of ammonia oozed into my eyes.
“Mmmm!" A sound snuck through my unyielding lips and I panicked, but then remembered I could still speak. "Does that mean I’m done?” I asked?
“Finished. You weren’t baking.” Leave it to my mother to correct my grammar while I endured pending blindness, deafness, and almost lost my voice to boot.
“We just need to rinse you out in the sink and you’ll be all finished,” said Frankenstein. Two sink-washes in one day? Again, not part of the deal.
This time the neighbor did the washing. It was probably the only time in my life that I prayed for a sink-wash from mom. If my sight wasn't damaged from the drop of ammonia that leaked into my eyes when the timer buzzed, I was certainly going to be blinded completely by the rush of steam and chemical that flooded both lids. Frankenstein didn't pay any attention to the water temperature and my scalp smoldered under the rage that poured from the spray gun. My neck muscles strained as she pressed my head down and I pushed upward for air.
She pulled my head back and wrapped it in a towel. She squeezed out the remains of tap water, but not before they drenched the collar of my t-shirt. My eyes still clenched shut, I felt the warm blast of a blow dryer on my neck. Hair tickled my eyes and cheeks. My head felt lighter. No longer did I feel the comfortable weight of my hair down my back.
When it was all said, done, and blow-dryed, Frankenstein and my mom stood and stared.
“That’s weird,” said Frankenstein. Weird. Exactly what I wanted to hear. “It didn’t take quite like I thought it would, but I think it looks cute.” Cute. Should have stuck with weird.
“Here, look,” said my mom, handing me a mirror. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
I opened my eyes, fully accepting my new fate of blindness. To my horror, I wasn't blind and was able to see my reflection, clear as crystal, in the mirror. My hair didn’t have “body” so much as it had transformed into tumbleweed. It looked like someone stapled a startled cat to my head.
I knew I should be polite. Perhaps the combination of chemicals and the hour of holding a firmly compressed face had done more damage to my tear ducts than I originally thought. Sure enough, my eyes turned the bright shade of light blue they turn every time they well up with tears. I tried to look up, to the left, down, south by southeast, but I couldn't keep the tears from dribbling down my face.
"Honey, you really do look cute," said my mom.
"You don't like it?" asked Frankenstein.
"It'll relax in a few days," said mom, "After a few shampoos the curls won't be so tight."
"Can I wash it out now?" I asked.
"No, that would be a waste. It wouldn't take at all then," said Frankenstein.
"So?" I said. I was getting desperate.
"By September it will be just right. Just in time for school," said mom.
She took the mirror and lifted the poncho over my head. Street hockey games don't usually stop except to let a car pass, but as we walked back home the neighborhood kids halted their game to come see my hair. I tried to pull it back into a ponytail, but it was too short and curls kept bouncing out of place. I put on my skates, grabbed my hockey stick, and joined the game, taking solace in the fact that even though I now looked and smelled like a mad scientist after a bout with a hazardous waste spill, I could still skate faster and score more goals than any boy on the street.
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