FicBlurt™ #3: The Hair Fairy

So, the mullet. If you ever need an example of the incomprehensibility of human taste, go no further. I know, I know. You can natter on about how Rod Stewart, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney had mullets in the 1970s. You could tell me that lesbians favored them in the 1980s. You could persist annoyingly and harangue me about hockey players with mullets in the 90s and, yes, even Superman lost his mind coiffeurishly speaking but then he had just come back from the dead, so maybe that’s excusable, but what is not excusable in any way, shape, or form is Mattel giving his action figure the same DAMN DOO. I suppose you could go way out on a limb and tell me that a certain person/deity critical to a major world religion also favored this hairstyle. I would rebut that it likely was in evidence only briefly on one of those down days when another certain person/deity, this one of the slithery variety with a liking for cider, had more influence than usual. Whatever.

Did you perhaps notice a common thread running through the preceding sentences? Yes, yes, mullets, right, and how much I detest humans opting to wear the hair equivalent of a throw rug on their heads. But that’s not what I’m getting at.

Got it yet?

No?

Need a hint?

Okay, here’s one: verb tense.

Still don’t see it?

All right. Let me — what’s that word we learned in junior high English? Conjugate? Defenestrate? Castrate? I don’t know — let me just spell it out for you. Every mention of mullet above is in the past tense, meaning this so-called hairstyle is long dead and gone and should never darken our optic nerves again. Oh, you understand now, do you? Great. Could you maybe pass this information on to my boyfriend?

It started yesterday. Someone other than Jock (boyfriend — not his real name but rather the one I tend to give him when he’s away and I’m left to my own devices, if you perceive my meaning)…someone other than Jock came through our front door after work. After recovering my chin from its sudden resting place on the floor, I had two thoughts. No, wait. First you must know that Jock has great hair, the Afro-American equivalent to, say, Yanni or Michael Bolton or that cover-model guy who got uber-rich by swoonboozling boredom-stupefied women in checkout lines across America, heck, the world. Fabmeister? Fablvious? Frobio? His name escapes.

This someone other than Jock I was now staring at, as noted, prompted two thoughts. The first one: Huh. I didn’t know there was a black Rick Springfield. The second: what’s he doing here and what has he done with Jock? Then black Rick spoke in Jock’s voice: “Hey, babe.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s me. Jock.”

“You’re not Jock.”

“Come on. Stop fooling around.”

“The person I know as Jock, the one on whom I bestow vagina access privileges every second Tuesday, would not put a ratty beaver pelt on his occipital area.”

“That’s a rude thing to say about my pubic hair. I thought you liked it.”

“I’m talking about your head, idiot. Your bean, block, dome, noodle, nut, etc.”

“I knew getting you that thesaurus was a mistake. And, for your information, what’s on my pate, cranium, skull, dome, noggin, etc., is not a beaver pelt.”

“Ferret?”

“No.”

“Muskrat?”

“No.”

“Gopher?”

“No way.”

“Hairy-nosed wombat?”

“Stop it.”

“Is this because I put Twinkie soap in your lunch this morning in place of the real golden sponge cake with creamy filling?”

“Wait, that was soap? I thought maybe they were just trying out a lilac filling. And, get this, I didn’t swear once all afternoon.”

“Right. This is your revenge, isn’t it?”

“Nope. I’m not vengeful. You know that. This is just me getting ahead of the fashion curve. Mullets are making a comeback. Look at Kanye. Look at Lionel Ritchie, Aaron Neville. It’s cool.”

“It’s not.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“Like I got used to the guinea pig who chewed his way into my underwear drawer and converted my lingerie into stuffing for a rodent couch pillow?”

“You mean Thor?”

“Have we owned another guinea pig?”

“Ah. You do mean Thor. Is there beer?”

Shit. It is Jock. No one else I know bails from a rapidly death-spiraling conversation with “Is there beer?”

Several hours and more than a few beers later, we lay in bed. Jock was dead to the world. I, however, was stuck looking at the back of his head from about four inches away, still seething with mullet-induced stress and the fact that Jock has never apologized for Thor doing his guinea-pig version of raping and pillaging my often-mentioned unmentionables. It was at this moment that I got a brilliant idea.

You probably know the story. That guy in the Bible who could kill lions and massacre armies as long as his he-man mane was intact and what happened when Delilah had a servant shear her supine sleeper. I would just Samsonize Jock. But I would have to be clever about it. I didn’t want to piss him off. I thought about it for a few minutes and then it all fell together.

I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and retrieved my styling kit. Did I tell you I’m a hairstylist? Sorry. Meant to. I took my tools of betrayal back to the bed and proceeded to de-mullet Jock. It was easy. Nothing short of a meteorite dropping on the house next door would wake him. I turned his head this way and that, snipping along, until I once again recognized the man between my sheets, albeit one now with much shorter hair.

Next, I policed up the clippings, making sure to get every follicle. Then, the piece de resistance. I grabbed my bag, found my wallet, pulled out the lone ten-dollar bill that occupied it, and slipped it under his pillow. Game. Set. Match.

The next morning, I’m in the bathroom doing bathroom things when I hear Jock scream.

“What the fuck!”

The bathroom door bangs open a few seconds later.

“Hey!” I say, doing my best WTF-back-at-you look. “What happened to your hair?”

This stops Jock cold. I could tell he was all set to unload on me about his new doo, storm clouds raging about the brow and all that. Now he just looks confused.

“Wait. You didn’t do this to me?”

“Honey,” I say, trying to sound sincere and look dignified even though I’m sitting on the commode with one of my few surviving thongs wrapped around my ankles. “I would never do such a thing without asking you first. You know that.”

He looks at me for a moment, probably deciding whether that’s true. I win this time.

“Well…someone…or something took my hair.”

He starts to ask me who and then stops, realizing, to his credit, that this might be a stupid question. I seize on that hesitation.

“You know, I’ve heard about this.”

“Heard about what?”

“People waking up with much less hair than they went to bed with.”

“How is that possible?”

“The Hair Fairy takes it.”

“The what?”

“Hair Fairy. You know, like the Tooth Fairy.”

That stymies him for a moment. I take the opportunity to flush and cover and then walk past Jock into the bedroom. As I look at the bed, it strikes me that the time of our Zombie Apocalypse duvet may have gone past. Jock follows me, sitting on the mattress in such a manner that he seems to have a bloody dismembered undead arm up his bum. He has that look on his face that appears when a eureka of some kind hasn’t quite slid into home yet.

“What?” I ask.

“The Tooth Fairy only takes teeth that have fallen out, right?”

“Right.”

“So, some of my hair fell out last night in a way that just happens to make me look like a black Tom Brady?”

I shrug. What can I say?

“The Hair Fairy works in mysterious ways” is what.

“Does the Hair Fairy have a name?” he asks.

“Tressa,” I say without missing a beat. I feel a smile sneaking out around the corners of my mouth, but I stifle that mother quickly. Sometimes I’m too clever…wait, I don’t like where that’s going. Nipping that thought before it gets legs.

“Tressa?” Jock is looking at me.

“Yes.”

“Is that Tressa of the North or the South?”

He’s getting too inquisitive now, looking to pull out details that will unJenga my story. I need to distract him. “Who knows? But you’re forgetting the most important part. What else does the Tooth Fairy do?”

His eyes light up instantly. He turns and reaches under his pillow, grins, and pulls out the ten-dollar bill I’d planted there. Suddenly it’s Christmas morning.

“Wow,” he says. “That’s way better than the Tooth Fairy.”

Operation Mullet Vanquish accomplished, relationship havoc avoided. All is well in the world. At least so I thought.

Now it’s evening again. I’m lounging in bed, feeling relaxed and sated, it being a second Tuesday and all. The fact that a zombie claw seems to be reaching for my naked left breast bothers me not in the least. What does bother me, I realize, is that Jock’s post-coital washup is taking longer than normal and that a curious buzzing noise has been coming from the bathroom for some time now.

The moment I become aware of the noise, it stops. Then the door swings open and out steps Mr. Clean wearing nothing but a pink steampunk chihuahua bath towel around his waist.

For the second time in two days I say, this time out loud, “Who are you and what have you done with Jock?”

Mr. Clean grins and holds out a quart-size Ziploc filled with, as you might have guessed, hair.

“Look what I did!” Mr. Clean exclaims in Jock’s voice, grinning from ear to recently exposed ear. With his previous long hair, I’d forgotten that Jock had audiopendages. I’d especially forgotten how big and Mr. Potato Head sticky-outy they were. I could almost swear that the one on the right was wiggling impishly at me and that his goofy, crap-eating grin was a little less guileless than it endeavored to be. Shit and double shit.

“Wow” is all I have.

Some men look good bald, smooth and shiny and symmetrical all around. Denuded, Jock’s head looks like someone put eyes, ears, nose, and mouth on the moon and called it macaroni. I wanted to point at it and say, “Look, there’s Tycho, there’s Thebit and Theophilus and Plinius and Rheita.” I didn’t, however. I do have some self-restraint.

Jock appears oblivious to all of this.

“Your birthday’s coming up,” he says. Thanks for that reminder. “And I’ve always wanted to take you somewhere really nice and we never can afford it but now we can! If Tressa gave me ten bucks for my hair last night, she’ll probably give me a hundred or more for this!”

I see where this is going now and, I have to admit, my heart melts more than just a little. How sweet is that? My gut, on the other hand, seems headed south of the Marianas Trench.

Still grinning, Jock jumps into bed, shoves the bag of shorn locks under his pillow, and plunks his head down. I almost expect it to bounce once or twice, but it doesn’t. And then he’s asleep. At least I think he’s asleep. He’s got this annoying little smirk on his face and, as I watch, his left eye twitches in a suspiciously wink-like manner.

What’s that saying from Shakespeare? Hoisted up by your own leotard? That’s me, for now anyway. For a moment, I have a sincerely unselfish thought. I wish I had a hundred dollars to put under Jock’s pillow. I get warm in various bodily regions just imagining what his face would look like when he found it. That would have been something.

But, no. I’ll have to tell Jock the truth. And so, in the morning when he finds his hair gone and no money left behind, I’ll be brave. I’ll be forthright and direct. I’ll fess up and tell Jock about the Hair Fairy’s evil twin, Gulldelocks, the one that takes hair but selfishly leaves no cash and that, for some unfathomable reason, also paints her victims’ toenails bright pink.