Tuesday, July 26, 2005
I have an unusual face. I’m not saying this to sound humble, or worse yet, to sound proud. My face is asymmetrical, which is something that women find undesirable, according to textbooks on biology and human social behavior. I have jowly cheeks, and a lazy lower lip that hangs open when I am not actively trying to correct it.
I also have a bumpy, sloping head. My mother used to cut my hair, and called my head shape organic, which I tried hard to take as a compliment. My organic head has trouble with hats, because when I wear one in the way that the average person might, my ears balloon out from my skull, which gets smashed beneath the fabric and then appears disproportionately small to the rest of my body.
I tend to find one hat and wear it to death, literally. My hat in high school was famous, because by eleventh grade it was skeleton of ribbing and sweat-soaked fibers that crisscrossed my hair in an effort to hold the bill upright. I had never seen how the hat looked on me from any other angle than straight on, if you can believe it, so eventually a friend took me into her bathroom and showed me what people had been seeing for the last two years. It looked like I was wearing a hair net, and without too much ceremony I retired the exhausted thing to my bedroom closet.
I wear a different hat now, ten years later, sitting on my porch listening to the rush of the freeways and the clinking of the neighbor’s dog’s collar as it trots around their concrete yard. I pull the front upwards, like a hayseed, so that a light breeze might tip it off the back of my head if I am not careful. The brim does not protect my eyes from the sun, and I can’t wear it to do anything where I move too fast. The new hat used to be red, but is now the color blood turns when it stains your shirt and you don’t wash it for two weeks. My mother says that sweat is the only thing that holds it together, and my girlfriend will now make me take a shower if I have been wearing it for too long. My ex-girlfriend says that the hat smells familiar, and that she likes it even though it’s probably gross to most people. I usually listen to girls when they have an opinion on issues such as this, but now that my ex and current girlfriend’s opinions cancel each other out, I am free to wear my greasy, rusty hat for the time being.
My drug dealer Shawn says my hat is awesome. He thinks there is some fashion behind it. Shawn has a suit made of bath-towel material that is covered in logo-patches of professional basketball teams. He usually shows up in a car I do not recognize from his previous visit, sometimes driven by a sullen-looking Asian woman with those thick sunglasses that every girl in California seems to like. I used to imagine that the woman was his chauffeur, perhaps hiding a .28 beneath her shirt and sizing me up as I stood curbside like an idiot in broad daylight on a weekday, forty dollars palmed in my hand as I tried to think of conversation that would make our transaction appear to be ordinary and innocuous.
She didn’t have her glasses on today, and without them she became a regular human being. Crouching beside the passenger door of the idling Monte Carlo, I got her into a conversation about dentistry (I just had my wisdom teeth removed) and we all pretended to be comfortable in the relentless afternoon sun, Shawn clumsily shaking my hand, pressing spit-sealed baggies of marijuana into my fist while I told the girl with effervescent honesty that the pain from wisdom teeth-removal is mostly hype, and that any good dentist would prescribe pills that you can save for later if your mouth heals normally. She even laughed at one point, and for a few seconds we all seemed to sit in the interstitial happiness that leads up to the end of good conversation. I watched the kids down the street playing cricket and said my goodbyes, and just like that I am standing on the curb again with my goofy hat tilted and my hands stuffed deep into my pockets. Then back inside, to the chair by the AC vent, silhouetted by the screen of my TV.
During the commercials I imagine the Asian driver, her breasts tensing the fabric of her t-shirt as she shouts into the cellphone fixed to the dashboard, smiling across the empty distance at Shawn, whose face is titled against his window, tongue probing teeth as reflections of the real world flicker against the glass.
I also have a bumpy, sloping head. My mother used to cut my hair, and called my head shape organic, which I tried hard to take as a compliment. My organic head has trouble with hats, because when I wear one in the way that the average person might, my ears balloon out from my skull, which gets smashed beneath the fabric and then appears disproportionately small to the rest of my body.
I tend to find one hat and wear it to death, literally. My hat in high school was famous, because by eleventh grade it was skeleton of ribbing and sweat-soaked fibers that crisscrossed my hair in an effort to hold the bill upright. I had never seen how the hat looked on me from any other angle than straight on, if you can believe it, so eventually a friend took me into her bathroom and showed me what people had been seeing for the last two years. It looked like I was wearing a hair net, and without too much ceremony I retired the exhausted thing to my bedroom closet.
I wear a different hat now, ten years later, sitting on my porch listening to the rush of the freeways and the clinking of the neighbor’s dog’s collar as it trots around their concrete yard. I pull the front upwards, like a hayseed, so that a light breeze might tip it off the back of my head if I am not careful. The brim does not protect my eyes from the sun, and I can’t wear it to do anything where I move too fast. The new hat used to be red, but is now the color blood turns when it stains your shirt and you don’t wash it for two weeks. My mother says that sweat is the only thing that holds it together, and my girlfriend will now make me take a shower if I have been wearing it for too long. My ex-girlfriend says that the hat smells familiar, and that she likes it even though it’s probably gross to most people. I usually listen to girls when they have an opinion on issues such as this, but now that my ex and current girlfriend’s opinions cancel each other out, I am free to wear my greasy, rusty hat for the time being.
My drug dealer Shawn says my hat is awesome. He thinks there is some fashion behind it. Shawn has a suit made of bath-towel material that is covered in logo-patches of professional basketball teams. He usually shows up in a car I do not recognize from his previous visit, sometimes driven by a sullen-looking Asian woman with those thick sunglasses that every girl in California seems to like. I used to imagine that the woman was his chauffeur, perhaps hiding a .28 beneath her shirt and sizing me up as I stood curbside like an idiot in broad daylight on a weekday, forty dollars palmed in my hand as I tried to think of conversation that would make our transaction appear to be ordinary and innocuous.
She didn’t have her glasses on today, and without them she became a regular human being. Crouching beside the passenger door of the idling Monte Carlo, I got her into a conversation about dentistry (I just had my wisdom teeth removed) and we all pretended to be comfortable in the relentless afternoon sun, Shawn clumsily shaking my hand, pressing spit-sealed baggies of marijuana into my fist while I told the girl with effervescent honesty that the pain from wisdom teeth-removal is mostly hype, and that any good dentist would prescribe pills that you can save for later if your mouth heals normally. She even laughed at one point, and for a few seconds we all seemed to sit in the interstitial happiness that leads up to the end of good conversation. I watched the kids down the street playing cricket and said my goodbyes, and just like that I am standing on the curb again with my goofy hat tilted and my hands stuffed deep into my pockets. Then back inside, to the chair by the AC vent, silhouetted by the screen of my TV.
During the commercials I imagine the Asian driver, her breasts tensing the fabric of her t-shirt as she shouts into the cellphone fixed to the dashboard, smiling across the empty distance at Shawn, whose face is titled against his window, tongue probing teeth as reflections of the real world flicker against the glass.
