*Excerpt from The Life She Sold
Last night, someone made the comment that dyeing my white hair would be no different than when I dyed it all those colors back in my early years. And she was correct.
My mother dyed my hair the first time. Bottle of SunIn in hand, she sat me down on the picnic table behind our house and sprayed long streaks down the length of my hair, then instructed me to sit in the sun until my hair dried.
As a child, all I ever wanted to wear was cutoff blue jeans and T-shirts. It wasn’t because I hated the frills or the pretties; I was terrified of tarnishing or ruining such beautiful things. I think, even then, I didn’t feel deserving. Wearing dresses meant altering who I was out of fear. I couldn’t run without showing my panties. I couldn’t shake my hair in the wind without worrying my ribbons would come loose and fly away. Around me, little girls in dresses seemed to have a grace I did not which prevented them from destroying carefully constructed, beautiful things.
It was so easy to slide my feet into combat boots and ripped up fishnets when I was thirteen. Embraced by kids who took sandpaper to the elbows of their new leather jackets, who took pocketknives to the knees of their new jeans, who immediately went outside in their new Chuck’s and scuffed the toes, I found comfort in all things worn and used; my outside reflected what I felt inside.
My first Mohawk was shaven in a roach-infested house on Harriet Street. Chris ran the clippers down the side of my head and at my feet, atop empty cigarette packs and broken cassette cases and burned dirty carpet, lay long red locks. I dyed the Mohawk flat black with a two dollar can of spray paint. Once I had given up on pretty clothes and shiny shoes, I felt had nothing left to shed besides the hair on my head.
I was sixteen when I realized I still had one beautiful thing left that needed to be expelled. He was twenty-three, had his own personal table in the mall food court, rode a blue crotch rocket motorcycle, and modeled for a local agency.
Everyone says your first time should be special because you will always remember it. I played sick so I could stay home from school. He parked on the other side of the apartment complex and sneaked up the stairs. He never looked at the books on my shelves or the posters on my wall. He never kissed me. I can’t recall if he even looked in my eyes. Everyone says your first time should be special because you will always remember it.
There is comfort in what is worn. There is no fear of the first stain or the first tear. When something is borrowed and returned, you are less likely to notice small damages that might have been inflicted.
Correct. Dyeing my white hair would be no different from all the other times I dyed my hair in my youth. I would be hiding. I would be afraid. I would killing the beauty I have inside, what is me, what I was, what I have learned.
