Keratin is the root of all evil. It is the reason why hair burns. It is the only chemical rooted inside the finely-calculated details of the strand of hair in the human head, the focus being on the popular locale of a bush, unless otherwise stated, that burns easily. Spontaneous human combustion is justifiable in every sense of the word if only scientists would stop to realize that the human body is made up of finely tuned and calculated in denominators chemicals that are a hundred per cent flammable material. Do not stay near fire. Do not play with fire, my mom said. Matches, they are not a toy. Fire, this is not a joke.
When I first met Mrs. Nola, she seemed to be the most jovial, convivial and extravagant in the most literary sense of the word, kind of woman. Her hair was auburn and lengthy, falling all the way down to her hips. She had fine long strands which were adequately and painstakingly hand shampooed, conditioned, and moisturized with Dove. When the scientists discovered ceramide and what it could do to the keratin in hair, they forgot to realize that unless seen under light, customer’s, or lab mice hair will not be as glossy as that of models in hair ads and hair will not respond to product if sensitive. Product may vary according to condition of hair. Sometimes, I do not know determinately how Mrs. Nola’s hair reacts to the Dove products because her hair seems to look drier on days when I do not see any sunlight reflecting off her car windows in the library car park, giving her hair the extra sheen it needs to blind my human realistic vision and to give me the false sense of illusory perception that her shampoo has indeed given her the desired hair ad effects the customer had initially trusted in. Fucking Capitalists.
How sweet that would be: Insert Magnum Ice Cream and Eva Longoria with shiny silky skin, hair, face, hands and legs with silky black low-cut cleavage baring dress.
All they need are words like Ceramide, and Protein, and Effective Hair Fall Protection. I wonder then, sometimes, if capitalism has an underground network of copywriters that work solely on the topic of hair products and how to sell the chemicals to our scientifically educated customers. They employ little space monkeys, in reality, humans employed to an underground military organization with links to all forms of ideology involved with selling and buying, and being formally educated in the cruelest form of talkistry. Our country has reached again, AN ALL NEW HIGHER STANDARD OF LIVING. Throw away the newspaper, connect your television cables to two dead cabbages and dump your transistor vintage radio into your fish tank, together with your sad and dead goldfish named Bob floating upside down with his stomach bloated with desalinated and purified-from-urine-and-shit-water. Poor Bob. I forgot to change the water, feed Bob and still keep up with the stinking reek of the overflowing rusty brown sewage-smelling water in my desolate master bedroom toilet. The plumber is getting expensive; I have sold nearly all my paintings. I have sold every painting except one.
I need to keep the Mona Lisa, it is the closest thing I can get to being inspired to live my life everyday. She has no eye brows. The artist that draws a painting like that, now, he, definitely does not like hair. How about the hair on her head, asked Mrs. Nola, when I invited her to my apartment to look at my only painting, on a bright and music-embellished evening. It is hard to explain that she has hair on her head, since the background is dark, though it has been clearly separated with calculated and defined color contrasts, because it helps define what it means to be a woman. The long, superfluous hair, it completes the face, it protects the face from spontaneous combustion. The lack of eye brows mean you burn less, or you hurt less if you were to burn anyway. Mrs. Nola was intrigued by my passion to resist burying Bob, because he was the only thing that kept me going. Bob was the reason why I went to the library to see Mrs. Nola every single day. She taught me once that the burying or cremation of any mammal, or animals with hair, would cause the hair to stop growing or be destroyed completely. But what is the point of Bob having hair? He is not going to be on a Da Vinci painting anytime soon with his eye brows removed. I decided that he needed the hair because when he dies, his gills would stop functioning and he would need something closely resembling some sort of gill, in order that he might breathe on in his upside-down death float in the now algae-ridden water. I could feel its taste in my tongue, rolling itself cruelly down my throat, the salty, tangy, zingy taste of the piss mixed water and the seminal fluids of Bob, molecules hitting against each other in random motion, until they hit the hydrochloric acid in the pit of my stomach. Churn, churn, churn till they become now new fluids, purified and demystified, clean and safe for the human body to consume and retain in the cells in order that metabolic rates may be maintained. Heart rate: one hundred and seventy two. Mrs. Nola deserved to be given the Nobel Peace Prize for her kindness to Bob’s death, the Oscar Award for the best supporting roles in all my life’s major decisions and the Woman Booker Prize for being the only living woman who has not read a single book written by a male writer.
I once drove her to a bar in a Pennsylvanian town, where there were people who wanted to be vampires and strange bizarre characters exchanging chalices of unknown red liquids with other wannabe vampires. Mrs. Nola made a very important discovery about the Pennsylvanian people that night. She pointed out that according to scientific calculations made by a certain Pen Macy, a female anthropologist whom she has made taxidermy of in her bedroom toilet, it has been discovered that the Pennsylvanians are prone to have the most amount of hair growing on their backs. This means, on the flesh covering their spinal cords. The numerical range of hair strands growing on their backs begin with a minimum of one thousand and have amounted to a maximum of five thousand, two hundred and sixty-four in the past globalizing decade. That is probably the same number of times a non-Pennsylvanian has to be reincarnated in order to get a similar count of back hair. But Mrs. Nola has stretched the argument to a new level. If the Pennsylvanian was not originated from the vampire, and was similarly, like the Homo sapiens, originated from Uncle Big Foot or The Darwinian-looking Ape, then it is possible that we are all inherently vampires. Personally, this is equivalent to saying that the trisomy of the twenty-first chromosome which causes Downs Syndrome when active in children born out of older mothers is also the same reason why, when it is inactive, it causes mischievous, rude and bratty normal children in kindergarten to discriminate against the DS Kids.
Think: Ku Klux Klan. The government conspiracy to create a disparate black and white world so colour blind people can be given a chance to assimilate into the society, according to which colour they are blind to. A monochromic limbo. It is always a choice, they say.
I never told the angels in my Grandmother’s grave that they should serve to protect her hair from atrophy. Programmed Cell Death. Then, I came across an episode on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, when Angel, Buffy’s boyfriend, dies. I was tearing because now poor Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to fight Spike the Vampire, or choose to make love to him on another episode, both of which were not her decisions but the director’s anyway. I wondered seriously then that, if Angel were dead, then there is no hope of Gran ever having her hair in the after-life. I served to protect Mrs. Nola, my new Gran-figure, who could never understand how unperceptive I could be to call her that. I served to protect her hair from atrophy. I prayed to no Angel, to no Slayer. In every case, I was the Da Vinci of Mrs. Nola. Bob floated in the Salvation Army of cyberspace, waiting to be saved and forgiven, for no fault of his. Mrs. Nola and I spent one night at White Castle, trying to count the number of blonde colored hair in the burger patties. Some of the customers were convinced that White Castle burgers, according to a certain Harold and Kumar, the worst weed-stricken adults of American Disneyland, were the real deal. It is the bizarre ingredient of blonde hair which gives it the spicy-devil, Marilyn Monroe with skirt flying and Coke spilling on the camera cables feeling. Anyway, we later found out that the Downs Syndrome cleaner who was manning the dustbin near our corner table, was the only crew at White Castle that had blonde hair. He was giving us a crooked-teeth Benzedrine smile.
Mrs. Nola has never been married and I feel that a decision otherwise on her part would break my heart. This is not because I think the world should hate all males and confer everything feminine. There is a difference between capitalists and communists. And the fact that Bob has to be floating in shit-and-piss (now his own) water when he could be with Mother Nature (coincidentally female), and enjoy the pristine waters and crystal clear molecules of aitch-two-oh and the bubbles that he would love to pop with his huge pooly eyes. She needs to preserve the growth of her hair, and besides, she told me once that, “Children should not be born to see the light of capitalism.” I argued with her on an equal level, telling her that communism has not made us richer in any way and that the recession is still called a recession and the income disparity in our nation still makes the poor poor and the rich rich. Nothing seems to have changed. It equates then, that when one is added to one, one plus one, we only get one and not two. Because if the answer were to be two, then we would have seen a change. Mrs. Nola is very practical she thinks that if capitalism were never around, I would never really have thought of adding one with one. Lately, she has been distracted with something, I feel. Her hair is still glossy and I cannot doubt for once that her hair has been giving off the wafting incense of a mixture of her Dove products. All in the required steps listed out on the back of the bottle. Step 1: Apply Shampoo. For best results, follow with Conditioner. Step 2: Apply Conditioner. Rinse. For complete results of treatment, follow with Moisturizer. Step 3: Apply Moisturizer to root ends. Do not rinse. Leave on. Capitalists try to neglect the fact that they are borne out of the same generation of men and patriarchs who want to control us, who want to make us enhance the sheen on our hair roots so that they will be able to create an ideal world where Eva Longoria is forever on the Magnum advertisement, where even the gloss of the advertising print paper never corrodes because rain droplets always roll over it, like they were seeking comfort in her cleavage baring dress, and fall to the bottom of the ice-cream freezing refrigerator at the grocery store near my apartment.
When I found a long break from my constant voluming in a thick and heavy book over capitalism and communism to sacrifice to be spent with Mrs. Nola, I smuggled her out of her librarian desk and into my car, where we took a long trip down to the middle of California and Nevada – Lake Tahoe. While leaving in a haste, I had completely forgotten to remember, or in a bout of amnesia brought on by the orgasmic high that I reach whenever I am so close to Mrs. Nola (unconscious to her) through human skin contact, that the gas cylinders in my apartment had been switched on and they were leaking gas into my apartment slowly. Nanometer by nanometer. Every single phase of our lives are being determined by the measurements of gas, hair length, shampoo servings for bathing dependent on amount of dirt present in hair, and the amount of water required for Bob to be preserved together with the static electricity of the vintage transistor radio bobbing in the continuously aerated aquarium. The universe is shifting and the hummingbirds are singing in your hair, but you are stuck in a constant reverse, a constant going back to where you started from. Square one. The answer is one. My theory is not perfect, but it is close. The mesmerizing sight that beholds the viewer at Lake Tahoe does not plead propinquity with anything else even vaguely familiar on Mother Earth. As Mrs. Nola lay beside me on her rainbow-striped cotton towel mat on the soft clayey sand, I could smell the aroma of Dove wafting from her hair and through the pristine salt water vaporized air clinging to the stratosphere around us. I enjoyed the way she would spring her head back and forth on her mat, performing abdominal exercises which she had learnt from her personal female body trainer and tai-chi instructor at a Women’s Fitness Program near her residence.
I wanted to be here forever. Lake Tahoe looked and felt like the hair of a really beautiful woman, just that I would never really witness the real physical body of this woman who had such naturally beautiful hair. Hers was the hair that did not require Dove shampoo, conditioner or moisturizer to give it the natural gloss and shine which it required for my aesthetic appreciation. If forever was spending my face buried in the deepest core of the bosom of rich, lengthy, wavy and beautiful hair of a terrific woman such as Mrs. Nola, I wanted forever to be forever. Every rise and fall of the wave in Lake Tahoe felt like heaven had sent down a new decree for our destruction. I rolled over on top of Mrs. Nola and lay my right palm on her left breast. It felt warm, a mirror to the moon, stranger things have happened. I could feel her shallow breathing, coming towards me in cadences of quiet, unrequited lust. I reveled in the warmth of her breath blowing intermittently in my face; it touched my retina with a finger full of soft yoghurt that refused to lift the veil which covered the vitreous humor. This was the hour, this was the date. I remember.
As I stepped on the gas pedal to drive a drowsy Mrs. Nola back, I became vaguely disturbed by a vision of White Castle. At first I thought I was just having those déjà vu days when everything that you ever hated came back to you in a flash so you would regret thinking them and turn over a new leaf. The hour of death. However, the crooked-tooth Benzedrine smile and the drugged yellow eyes kept flashing in the white spaces of my mind. These prominent images clouded the cerebral fluids and I could not prevent them from manifesting their cruelty in the deeply drowsy and saline spaces of my soul complex. There he was, up ahead, twenty metres from the vehicle, the blonde-haired Downs Syndrome cleaner from White Castle we had met earlier in the year. He looked vaguely familiar in the darkness of the narrow asphalt that stretched for miles with nothing but lush green forests on both sides. As I slowed the vehicle down to a crawl, he seemed hesitant to smile as he always did, with the crooked-teeth Benzedrine smile. Sometimes I wonder if they did that purposely. The DS Kids. I felt deficient when I kept smiling without any regard for his fear of my vehicle lights and kept reaching out to him with my left arm as he edged back on to the kerb. “It’s okay, you know me. I was counting the blonde hair in the burgers. Remember? I was with Mrs. Nola,” I accounted, while pointing my right index finger to the back of the car, to a sprawled lady, now harshly recognizable with her legs spread in an awkward angle onto the two sides of the window frame. He was a black man, presumably in his early thirties, in the White Castle uniform and tattered shoes, which were so worn out that I could see the fibers of the cloth that made the shoes sprouting out in different directions. And then, he smiled his crooked-teeth smile, the smile which had charmed Mrs. Nola and me from the beginning. The smile we knew meant he knew we knew about the blonde hair strands in the burgers we investigated in White Castle.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” I inquired with the monster looking straight back at me with his hollow eyes, not understanding anything I have been doing for the past few minutes. I wish Mrs. Nola did not sleep at all the wrong times. I felt like I was the one dreaming all of this.
“Theress.s.sss…noo. Theressss no more….,” sputtered the grime-covered creature at my face. I was revolted but I made no attempt to show any temptation to the grotesque. They feel proud of it, I feel.
There is no more what? I wondered. I tried to think of all the things that could possibly disappear from my life. My eyebrows. I checked the rear view mirror and unfortunately the grime seemed to be referring to something else other than my eyebrows. Could it be…? Could it be? I had to spring back to reality. And fast. I had to wake up. I had to wake Mrs. Nola up. This was not happening. The crooked-teeth smile appeared again. That sonofabitch with the fake blonde hair and the grime-covered-mustard-festered White Castle uniform! I knew he had done it. I could not leave him there. They would blame me if he killed himself. They always do. I got out of the car.
My mind was a constant wave, a rush, a swirl of the unforgiving days when someone would steal my favorite toys and hide them in a closet I could not reach.
Insert: the mind clicks the picture of a young child-like female Vietnam War refugee running away from the nuclear fumes of the bomb, her body naked and burning with the acid poring through her innocent skin.
What would it be like to be without hair? Does makes it easier for the acidic fumes to reach your skin? Cyanide holocaust. I seethed in anger as the man moved his rump in the back seat, trying his best to avoid the slapping hands of Mrs. Nola, who was now sprawled top half of body on the seat, with her mouth open, uttering the silent phrases of a long abandoned slumber. How did he have the black cheek to do that? I knew something was up when all these proletariats began dying their black hair blonde. The hair was in the burgers, half the crew at White Castle were black and ninety-percent of the customers were always buying the cheapest combo meal. How could I not have seen it? How could I have not put them together? It all fit perfectly now, like a mathematical equation. As the vehicle approached the driveway near my high-rise apartment, I saw an unusual crowd milling about the lobby. The valet, Mr. Dobber was walking around with his worn gloves still on; attempting to calm a hysterical old woman whom I never knew lived there. Some residents were covered in thick ambulance-type blankets, their faces half-covered and their phalanges trembling with a Styrofoam cup of hot liquid, the vapour rising into the air till it fused with the black smoke that was billowing out of my apartment window.
My apartment. The apartment I had spent adorning with IKEA furniture and the environmentally friendly German containers made from human skulls found after the holocaust. The lampshades made of human jewish people skin. My expensive comforter made of human jewish hair fibers. My human jewish fat body soap. Nothing. Nothing left. But the smoke, the ash, the cinder, floating, billowing in the air, like a shallow breath without vapour. Bodies that will never be found.
Bob lay near the door, his body now roasted, not a single hair of article left in the apartment, not a single hair left on his scaleless body. Poor, poor Bob. All the movements aspired to this. To the ultimate cremation of everything I had made with my own bare hands. I walked through my apartment; I was the Vietnamese War refugee, now naked, my eyes splintered with tears, my body burning with the coursing pain of acid through my pores. As I reached the window through which smoke had been previously billowing, I saw the man beside Mrs. Nola, who was now wide awake, searching the crowd of faces for mine. He was looking straight up at me. I could feel his cold, steely glare, shifting the winds beneath my feet. At that instant, the cold winds of the night blew something onto my wet face. It first clung to my face in its wetness. I used my right index finger and right thumb to pinch it off my nose. It was a blonde strand of hair.
