A Tale of Two Donnies

My brother had two friends named Chris: good Chris and bad Chris.  Good Chris was a regular kid, played sports, spoke normally, ate large amounts of pizza and played video games with my brother.  Bad Chris wore lederhosen.  You read that right, he was a thirteen year old kid, living in Queens in the twentieth century, and he wore lederhosen.  Frequently.  He also mumbled a lot, looked moist, had a vacant stare, and seemed to stumble around the streets while playing roller hockey with the other kids.  He was a nice enough kid, if you could get him to speak coherently, but he was a grade A goof, ergo Bad Chris.  Fortunately, for me, my brother spent a lot more time with Good Chris as he got older because he was allowed out after dark and didn't bring headgear to sleepovers.

Since my experience with bad Chris, it seems that I have a preternatural sense for goofballs and losers; people I refer to as strays.  I lose patience easily with these societal castoffs and tend to steer clear.  This is not true of the rest of my family who is decidedly nicer and more patient than I.  Members of my family have been known to drag around with whomever they find out in the streets, inviting them to dinner, holiday celebrations and to live in the basement in some cases.  I remember visiting my parents for the first time after their move to Colorado, when a guy I'd never seen before ambled down the stairs (from the bedrooms above) to fix himself a garden burger.  No one seemed to notice this guy but myself and I watched incredulously as he sat down at the dining room table to eat his meal.  I had to finally ask who the hell he was.  While my immediate family is ridiculous in their stray pickup, no one can beat my husband for his uncanny ability to attract and become entangled with the sorriest of human creatures. 

Years ago my husband worked for UPS in the middle of the night.  He drove every night to and fro by himself and put up a notice on the work bulletin board to see if there was anyone interested in carpooling.  This innocuous notice brought a couple into our lives who I came to refer to as the Chubbs.  I don't know what their actual names were, but they were a young couple who approached my husband about the carpool.  They asked if he would mind driving every other week, with him beginning the rotation.  The first week of his driving went without a hitch, they lived close by and he didn't mind the company.  When their turn came around, it was revealed that they didn't have a car.  THEY DIDN'T HAVE A CAR.  What they really wanted was someone to drive them to work and later someone to drive them to work after waking them up by flashing his headlights at their window.  Sometimes he had to bang on the window because they were in too much of a stupor after partying all day long to get up with just a flash and a horn toot.  Most people, and by most people I mean me, would've washed their hands of these meth addicted messes as soon as their end of driving fell through.  Not only did he continue to drive them, but he had them to our house for Christmas Eve one time.  They brought us a really nice bottle of scotch as a gift, which the male Chubb proceeded to drink until it was empty.  The female Chubb also got extremely intoxicated and they had some sort of disagreement during which the female fled and the male had to  be carried home.  My husband stuck by them until he no longer worked for UPS and checked in on them every once in a while afterwards.  We haven't seen them in years, but if you ask my husband, he will refer to them as his friends.

While the Chubbs are part of our history, my husband has more recently acquired a man we call Ron-Don.  On either side of our house, their are men named Donnie.  There is a good Donnie who lives with his girlfriend, tells funny stories and is nice to my kids when they're out playing in the yard.  Bad Donnie reminds my husband of Sally Struthers, if Sally Struthers were strung out on heroin and aimlessly roamed the streets talking to herself.  I think he looks more like an old, white version of the disadvantaged children Ms. Struthers works to raise money for.  My husband mistakenly called this Donnie Ron once, a mistake for which he has been verbally abused going on three years now.  Ron-Don is a drunken, mumbly mess who likes to stop by, holler at my husband and borrow money.  My husband has driven this man to the store, to see his father in the hospital, loaned him money and invited him in for vodka and Pepsi cocktails (this combination alone offends me on many levels).  On one such visit, Ron-Don insulted our paint choices and commented that our fishbowl was dirty.  This from a man who wears his hair in bobby pins.  Ron-Don had moved away for a about a year, but has recently returned to his family home (he is in his fifties).  I think I saw him and my husband out for a joy ride last night.

This weeks tip: Changing your phone number is free if you tell the phone company that you are receiving a lot of solicitor calls or calls from creditors that are not yours.

Hair it Loud

My cousin Terri cut her hair with a hole punch when we were kids. She hid under a coffee table crying and refusing to come out, so afraid was she of what my aunt would say or do upon discovering the ridiculousness that was her hair. I don't remember if there was any punishment (other than looking kind of foolish) for her; mostly I remember that we laughed. Terri was maybe four or five, definitely no more than six when she made this bold gesture that one can only can blame on the folly of the young; it grew out eventually and she remained the cherubic little cutie she always was. I, on the other hand, spent nearly my entire childhood with hair that made others scratch their heads and remark "aww, look at that nice, little slow girl".

Now my mother could braid (double french braids being a specialty), and do pony and pig tails like nobody's business. Beyond that, it was as if I had committed a grave crime that my mother was hell bent on revenging with continuous hairtastrophes. She offers her left-handedness as an explanation for the sadistic acts performed, repeatedly, on my unsuspecting head, but honestly no one who makes such errors in hair styling would continue to do so unless there was a genuine dislike for the victim.

The first such horror found me at the age of three or four nearly shorn bald due to my mother hacking away so much. One of my aunts had to intervene, at my father's insistence, and I feel certain that people asked my mother if was recently returned from some sort of work camp or on the mend from a horrible illness. Like I mentioned previously, one would think that my mother would stop there; no dice. She claims she kept it so short at a young age on purpose, so that it would grow in thicker when I was older; downright suspect if you ask me.

The haircuts continued through my childhood, and while not quite as drastic as that first one they were absurd in their own right. My mother is left handed, however she did not own a pair of scissors made for left handed people, nor did she even own scissors meant for cutting hair. What she did have was a cutting implement left over from my grandmother's house that in size and rustyness resembled civil war era pruning shears(we could have carbon dated that mess). This was the tool with which my mother performed her magic. She might have better served her purposes with a plastic butter knife.

Other than the time in the second grade when my mother sent me to get a Dorothy Hamill cut - you know if Dorothy Hamill was a lesbian living in the Eastern block - my mother kept my hair style simple: long and straight with bangs. I'll grant you that long and straight is not difficult to maintain even for the seriously inept at cutting hair. Even if cut sloppily (as mine always was), it is not that noticeable and can be 'covered' up with the creative use of barrettes and bobby pins. Bangs are another story altogether as they sit at the top of your face. My mother never learned to cut them straight and in an attempt to straighten them out, she would go shorter and shorter. The cutting only stopped when I bore a striking resemblance to someone who was just released from an insane asylum. The little bit of bang left was an uneven tuft of hair, approximately six inches from my eyebrows, giving me a look of perpetual surprise. I want to say that this was the worst of it, but I do not like to lie. It was far from okay, not by damn sight. The antiquity of the cutting implement coupled with my mother's left-handedness added a succession of dents in the skin on my forehead. Affectionately called 'poke holes' by my mother, my forehead would remain battered and remarkably red for days following a haircut.

Unfortunately, for me, the cutting of my hair was not nearly enough for mom. My mother was a fan of using curlers and hot rollers on my head as well. Picture days at school, holidays, family parties - all of these events found me the night before with hard plastic gnawing at my tender skull. Here's a headful of plastic and metal, now go to sleep. That's right I (and every other girl who grew up in the seventies) had to sleep at a sixty degree angle giving one a crick in the neck and a headache at best. If it wasn't the innocuous looking pink curler with a styrofoam like material wrapped around my hair and clipped in, then it was very large yellow rollers (looking like wiffle balls that were made into cylinders) held in place with metal pins and clips. Whoever is responsible for the creation of these beautifying implements was a sick, sick puppy. Probably the same bastard who came up with the eyelash curler.

Thankfully, my mother put down her scissors (or they gave up the ghost) when I entered the sixth grade. She took me to a real haircutting salon and allowed me to pick my own haircut. I chose the mullet.

This weeks’ tip: For someone who was so abusive to hair, my mother believed it should be soft and shiny. When she was a kid she says she used beer for shine and mayonnaise for silkiness, and there was some mention of eggs. Above all these home remedies, however, she recommends a product made by Alberto V05, which has apparently been in use since the 1960s. It is called conditioning hairdressing and comes in a tube. It has the consistency of vaseline and a little tiny dab will do ya - shiny, soft hair achieved for under five bucks. The tube lasts forever too (the tube I have currently has been in my possession since the 90s), and it has different sets of directions on it depending on the outcome you're looking for.