Extreme Elvin (25 page)

“So,” I said in nonresponse, “you’re a Jesus guy then?”

Ma switched quickly from her airy voice to her growl-sigh. As a guy in a peanut butter helmet, what did I care?

“Sure,” Alex said confidently. “Jesus is a friend of mine.”

“And so you’re going to introduce your friend to my mother.”

“Alex,” Ma said, tugging him toward the door, “you don’t have to hang around to be grilled by my impolite son. We’ll be late.”

“No, that’s okay. Elvin, you are a sharp, inquisitive boy. Healthily skeptical. I admire that no end. Like your father.”

I was still trying to figure out how I felt about that. I zip-banged in every direction whenever he said that about me and my father, but I could not for the life of me tell you whether it was a good or a bad feeling. Only that it was a big, fast, shake of a feeling.

“I like Jesus, and Jesus likes me; that’s a fact. It’s a relationship we both keep in perspective, though, if you know what I mean.”

Of course I did not know what he meant.

Ma opened the front door, blew me a kiss, and headed out. Alex pulled a tweed cap off the coatrack and mercifully covered his head. I stood there, making sure to look him in the eye because that seemed somehow important, even though I was still a little off balance about things.

A relationship we both keep in perspective, if you know what I mean.

He came back and patted me on the cheek. His hand was very warm. “That’s right, keep repeating it. You’ll work it out.”

“Keep repeating what?”

“We’ll talk later, okay?” he said. “Just you and me. About stuff. About everything. You can grill me all you want. And maybe I can grill you.” As he said the last bit, he did the thing, backing away and sticking me with one more poke in the belly.

“If you do that one more time...,” I growled.

Right,
growled
. I didn’t sound anything like myself. I kind of scared and impressed myself.

He grinned hard, and for the first time I noticed he was missing most of the teeth along the right side of his mouth.

Grilling Alex didn’t sound like a bad idea at all. Who was he, poking me in the belly all the time? I knew I was a little portly. But that was my issue. I didn’t need any reminders, and I didn’t need any help, either.

Why was I such a lightning rod for people wanting to improve me all the time? Was I so offensive that people had to come back from the dead to try and fix me up for the greater good of this world
and
the next?

Anyway, who was he? Just because he was skinny, he could offer me tips on living? Because he was skinny and because he used to be related to my dad who used to be alive and used, also, to be related to me? And because he was also good buddies with God?

I happened to be good buddies with God. I was cool with God and God was cool with me. I know, there was the issue of my good buddy’s kind of cruel sense of humor, but from my experience a friend is no friend if he cannot dig the needle into you on a regular basis. Like this:

Me: Mikie, I don’t know what it is, but I am eating like a horse lately.

Mikie: Like a horse a
day
, from the looks of it, El.

Mikie, as in my best earthly friend, said that. But that was okay, because my next-best earthly friend was right there to jump in. Watch:

Me: I don’t care. I have decided to live with it and embrace my inner fat guy.

Frankie: That’ll come in handy, El, ’cause I don’t think anybody’s gonna embrace the outer one.

So there, you see, was my frame of friendship reference. That’s what friends did. Therefore, I think I was one up on most people in being able to perceive the Almighty, because while most folks went flailing around and chasing signs and worshipping crying statues and ooohing and ahhhing at stigmata and the like, I knew profoundly that God loved me because he mocked me. I, in turn, praised him by being his straight man. That is why I was not required to go to church or confession or anything else. God and I had a more intimate thing, based on humor. And that, I could understand.

But I didn’t have to like it all the time.

“Ahhh,” I shrieked as I caught sight of myself in a big plate-glass bakery window. You know that morning bakery smell when all the different stuffs, the various bagels and birthday cakes and muffins and donuts and breads and rolls and danishes and baklava and cannoli and apple pie and blueberry pie and strawberry rhubarb pie and cherry custard tarts are all firing up at the same time and all become one unbelievable, inseparable, satanic, majestic smell?

Right, well, I didn’t shriek, exactly, but I did take in a sharp breath of air that made a sound. I had lost myself in the bakery scent and stood there gawping at the window like a cross between a Norman Rockwell scene of wholesomeness in which I would eventually be handed a cruller by a kindhearted baker, and a Grimm fairy tale where a long, twisted, gnarly hand would instead reach out and yank me into an Elvin potpie.

I didn’t look too good. I was showing the signs of lack of sleep, of a poorly chosen T-shirt that had fit me a couple years earlier when Bart Simpson might possibly have still said “Cowabunga” like he was now on my belly, and of the mysterious madness that still swirled on my head. I forgot, I was out to get a haircut.

Peeling away from the bakery window, I assured myself that all that was required here was the proper styling. I had seen the shampoo and conditioner ads. A snip here, a flip there, and you achieved a new confidence that changed everything, put a bounce in your step and removed it from your belly.

Not to mention putting a little distance between your look and your uncle’s.

I must have wanted this bad, to go out looking randomly on a Sunday for a haircut. Sal, my regular barber, was closed on Sundays, but I suppose that was part of the plan. I didn’t want my regular barber. Not because I normally only went to him because I had done so all my life and he was three doors down from us. Not because he was well past retirement and I had to wake him up sometimes and when I did he usually couldn’t find his glasses and then he usually just went ahead with the job anyway. Not because I sometimes went in and got a haircut without needing one just because I was passing his window and he was very alone and wide awake and he waved at me like he was my grandpa and happy to see me. And not because he still gave me lemon or root beer lollipops in the clear wrappers that I don’t think you could get without going to an old barber.

I didn’t want to go to Sal because he always made me look like me. I didn’t want that.

Without much to go on, I cruised the streets of town, finding that there were not only an alarming number of hairdressers, but that most of them were open on Sunday. I thought about going into one and panicked, then walked the whole route again to casually look the whole bunch up and down again.

I didn’t know what to look for. It could be hard to tell whether they did guys, for example, although I supposed that in the twenty-first century, everybody probably did. I couldn’t take a chance. I decided to consider only the ones that said “Unisex” right there in the window, and had guy pictures alongside all the girls,
and
the guy pictures could not be prettier than the girl pictures. This whittled down the field surprisingly quickly.

Then I eliminated the one where my mother went. And the three others on the same street. Then I crossed off the ones where the hairdressers themselves had scary, large, dry, white and/or sparkly hairstyles. Why would a place that wants your hair business show you atrocities like that if they had the first clue of what to do with your hair? Asymmetrical styles, out. Too many stylists, say five, with two or fewer customers, not—

“Listen, kid, if you pass by once more without coming in for a haircut, I think it’s harassment,” said the man with the perfect black, straight-back comb job. His hair came down kind of long on the sides, hanging softly on either side of his face, but the middle bit on top stayed miraculously still, holding the whole show together. He had a sort of pirate mustache and beard, and altogether looked far cooler than I ever figured a hairstylist was supposed to. He stood in the doorway, under a sign that read “Mysterious Ways Hair.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not sorry. That hair is sorry. Get yourself in here right now.”

“Yes sir.”

“Now,” he said when he had me in one of the two available chairs, “you have done the right thing. Now it is up to me.” There was a third chair, where someone was sitting under one of those Martian helmet dryers, with some kind of towels swirled all around her face. There were no other stylists around. “What is your name?”

“Elvin.”

“Good. I like it. I am Nardo. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Elvin.”

We shook hands. He had a good firm grip, but mostly from his first two fingers and thumb. From all that scissors work, probably.

“How old are you, Elvin?” He was looking me over now, walking around, crouching low, then boosting up on his toes to get angles on my head.

“Almost fifteen.”

“Almost? Almost fifteen. Does that mean that you are fourteen?”

“Yes,” I said, my chin dropping guiltily to the navy polyester cloak I now had wrapped around me.

“Well, you look fifteen, I must say. Carol,” Nardo said, poking the other body with a comb, “doesn’t Elvin look quite mature for fourteen?”

Carol grunted.

“So who did this to you? You can tell me,” Nardo said as he began taking exploratory snips of my hair.

“My uncle,” I said grimly.

He stopped clipping. “Oh. Well, I usually don’t get an answer, since it’s actually just a joke question. But okay. Is this uncle of yours the devil, or just a very, very bad hairstylist?”

“He’s...”

What was he? I didn’t know what he was. And what was it about getting your hair cut that made you feel obligated to answer questions?

“I don’t know what he is, actually.”

“Close family, huh?”

“Well, no, I guess not.”

“What do we have in mind today, Elvin? Something radical? Bold? I’m guessing you are looking for something new, because that’s why the winds brought you here. Do you have something in mind? Or see something you like on the walls?”

The walls had dozens of pictures, divided equally among men’s and women’s styles, with very little difference between them. They could have all been the same mannequin with the wigs switched for each new picture. And the truth was, not one of them looked remotely as slick as the maestro himself.

“Can you make me look like you?” was what came flying out of my mouth. I felt myself turn red with embarrassment, but was glad it came out anyway as long as the result was going to be that I was as devilish cool as this guy.

“No.”

I deflated. Not in any good way, though.

“You can’t?”

“I can, of course. But I won’t. Nobody gets to look like me. That’s the rule.” He pointed dramatically toward the back of the shop, to a sign posted on a door, that read “We are sorry, but nobody can look like Nardo.”

“Anyway, my friend Elvin, you are a very handsome young man in your own right. You do not need to look like me. We just need to find the details to complement what you already have.”

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the picture. Of Frankie. It was his most recent class picture. He gave it to me for my birthday.

“Can you make me look like this, then?”

He took the picture from me, stared at it, and expressed himself.

“Oooh, mama. Isn’t he nice. Do you know this boy? I mean, he’s no Nardo, of course, but he is awfully nice anyway.”

I slumped. “That means no, then.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to stop studying the Greek god in his hand, but he could spare me a thought at the same time. “Hey, hey, didn’t we already have trouble with this? No more of this low self-esteem nonsense, or I will make you ugly. I can do that, too, you know.”

“Sorry. We wouldn’t want that.”

“No. Now about this. You don’t have curly hair, for starters.”

I tugged at a corner of the picture. He wouldn’t give it up. I craned. “It’s not curly, exactly, though. It’s wavy, really.”

“Yes, true. And it isn’t as... dark as yours, or... quite the same texture. And his hair is thick....”

“I have seen the picture, Nardo. Many, many times. Seen the real thing a lot too. I understand the gargantuan nature of the request. I just thought maybe if you were really talented...”

“Hmm. An awfully big challenge to set a person for a slow Sunday. But I do like a challenge. You have come to the right place, Elvin. Probably the
only
place.”

“Great,” I said, clapping my hands, buzzy with excitement now.

“First we’ll need to wash this mop.” He pulled me out of the chair, led me to another chair, and leaned me back all the way over till my head was in the sink. “So this uncle who did this to you...,” he said as he began running warm water and his fingers through my hair.

“Oh, I guess he’s probably all right. I’m still getting used to him. I thought he was dead, but he’s not. He’s out with my mother right now.”

“Your uncle goes out with your mother? What does your father think of that?”

“Not much. He’s dead.”

“Are you sure? You were wrong about the other guy.”

“Pretty sure.”

“Oh,” he said, working some honey-smelling shampoo through my hair with an extra-gentle motion, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. They’re not really out-out; they’re at church.”

“Oh,” he said again, stopping even the shampooing to sympathize. “I am sorry. They always have the worst hair of all.”

He went back to his very fine work of shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing my hair. It was a pretty relaxing treatment for a haircut, a whole different world from old Sal. I was nearly asleep by the time Nardo revealed that his mother went around telling people that she had had affairs with Jimi Hendrix and Ernest Hemingway and at least two Beatles, but she wasn’t certain which ones.

“They will screw you up, your relatives, if you pay too much attention to them.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Good. And take better care of your hair.”