Well, you know my mom is a hairdresser.  When I was growing up, she ran a little shop out of refurbished basements in two different homes where we lived.  It wasn’t completely legal.  In fact, it was pretty much completely illegal.

“You need two licenses to have a hair salon,” I remember my Dad telling my brothers and I.  “One says you know how to do hair.  That’s the important one, and Mom has that.  The other is says that you are zoned for a business.  She doesn’t have that.  If Mom had one of those, instead of just dealing with people she knows, anybody could just walk in off the street.”

We more or less knew most of Mom’s customers (though they all knew us) and since on their way to and from the basement they came and went through our living room (while we watched cartoons in our pajamas) or through our kitchen (while we ate breakfast in our pajamas), the idea of TOTAL strangers violating our pajama sanctuary was something my brothers and I probably wanted less than anyone.

All my life people have told me how great it must have been to have a ‘personal hairdresser’, and it maybe would have been if she had actually done our hair the way we wanted it. Well, if she had done my hair the way I wanted it.

"Bring me a picture," she'd always say, and I would, and then she'd cut it exactly the way she thought it looked best to her.  Every time.  When I'd say, "this doesn't look like the picture!"  She'd say, "Your hair won't go like that."

It happened so many times that, looking back, either I was obsessively stuck on a series of hairstyles that were each coincidentally far beyond the scope of my hair's abilities, or she had no interest in doing my hair ANYTHING like the way I wanted it.  As my teenage 'hair heroes' were Adam Ant, Sid Vicious, Synchronicity-era Sting, Mickey Rourke (greasy pompadour era) and Dave Vanian of The Damned (c. 1986, with the long hair), I'll leave it to you to decide which was more likely the case.

I can't even remember whose hair I wanted when she first tricked me, but maybe it was Adam Ant from the Strip LP.  It was a perennial favorite, so this was easily the fourth or fifth time I had brought that particular record down to the basement for her reference.  So far, we had been unsuccessful in replicating it to my satisfaction.

"Your hair doesn't have enough body for that style.  You need a body wave, then I can do it."

I had no idea what a body wave was.

"It will make your hair fuller, give it more body.  We'll be able to do your hair like his."

That was all I needed to hear.  Soon I was draped in a plastic apron and watching her mix chemicals in reusable plastic squeeze bottles, producing a familiar smell of ammonia.

"Mom, are you giving me a permanent?"

"No, it's a body wave."

"Then why does it smell like a perm?  Mom, I don't want an afro!" (Although looking back, it would have been pretty amazing if I had.)

"You're not going to have an afro!"  She said as she started wrapping my hair in curlers and paper.

My brothers smelled the perm solution from upstairs and wasted no time in coming down to the basement salon to torment me – as I certainly would have done to them were our positions reversed.  In fact, I’m sure I probably did when they were.

"You’re getting a perm!" 

"It's not a perm, it's a body wave!"

"You're going to look like Mrs. Fantucci!"

Mrs. Fantucci.  Mother of my grade school friend Paul Fantucci, wife of...  I don't remember Mr. Fantucci’s name, but he was a funny, good-humored guy with a bushy moustache who worked as a contractor and had a voice like Father Guido Sarducci without the accent.  I know it’s at best an only occasionally accurate recollection, but naturally I can only ever remember him in a wife-beater undershirt and polyester pants. 

The Fantuccis were true blue East Coast Italians.  The blood in their veins ran red, white and green.  In fact, even though a significant chunk of my Mom's side of the family was straight-off-the-boat-from-Naples Italian, the Fantuccis out-Italianed us by a mile.  The name alone!  They were THE most Italian family since the Chef Boyardees.  Carmine from Laverne & Shirley could have taken a seat at the kitchen table and no one would have blinked.

“Hey Carmine!”

“Hiya, Mrs. F!  Ya wanna pass the meatballs?”

Mrs. Fantucci was a seventies-slim woman with a voice like an air-raid siren off the Jersey Coast who I remember as always cracking gum.  And if she never did, she should have.  She had a real take-no-shit attitude, a great sense of humor, and enough giant hoop earrings in her jewelry box to make a gypsy jealous.

But the thing that really stayed with you about Mrs. Fantucci was her hair.  She had the single biggest, frizziest afro you’ve ever seen or could possibly imagine on a white woman; she was the Angela Davis of the St. Philomena PTA.  It was easily the disco-est hair Lansdowne, Pennsylvania had ever seen, or probably would ever see again.  It was a goddamned landmark from the air, a majestic beacon from the sea.  Occasionally she would press a hairband into it, and comparisons to Moses and his miraculous parting of the waters were not inappropriate.

It was some head of hair.

So when I was told by my brothers that I was going to have Mrs. Fantucci hair, that was a lot to lay on a spotty seventeen year-old kid who just wanted to look like a rock star.

But it turned out alright.  It was actually just like my mom had said – my hair was fuller, and no longer flat.  It wasn’t Adam Ant’s hair, but I was pretty pleased with it anyway and I bragged to any of the girls at school who asked that yes, it was a ‘body wave’, and I felt very sophisticated about the whole thing.  It looked good.

And it only smelled like an angry cat pissed on my head for the first week or so.

But no permanent is truly permanent, and after a while my hair was slipping back into its old habits; so it was back to the chair for round two, and it was all good once again.  I suddenly had a regular hair routine with my mom - just as she bleached my older brother’s ‘hair metal’ tresses and collaborated with my younger brother on a number of elaborate hair experiments throughout the 80s.

The second perm started to wear off close to the end of the school year, which for me meant the end of my high school career.  I got the last one a few days before graduation.  By this time I wasn’t even sweating it, though I never became comfortable with the sight of myself in the chair under the fluorescent lights, a plastic cape draped over me and a wet towel around my neck, dabbing occasionally at my forehead to keep the stinging solution from running down into my eyes, positioned in front of a massive mirror for an eternity while the permanent ‘took’; my head a pile of curlers, small pieces of paper and white foam.

It’s not fair or appropriate to say it was hell, but for a seventeen year-old boy, it was pretty bad.

Eventually my mom gave my hair a rinse and sat me back down in the chair.  It sure looked… curlier than usual.

“It always looks curly when you first wash it out,” my mom assured me as she started brushing and blow-drying.

But I didn’t need to wait for her to be finished to realize that this time something had gone horribly wrong.

I looked at myself in the mirror.  My hair looked like Shirley Temple’s might after a tumble in the back of a pickup truck.  A vigorous tumble.  What was on top of my head was unmistakably a mop of curls, and there was nothing that could be done about it.  I washed my hair twice a day for the next several days, trying to rinse it out and hoping for some improvement, each time without success. 

As a result, in every picture from my graduation – probably the most photographically documented occasion of most people’s lives, outside of maybe their wedding - I looked about as terrible as I could possibly look without, say, also being caught on a toilet.

My mother was never able to explain how, after two previous successes, my body wave suddenly became a permanent.  Not that it mattered; I was finished.  I never had another one.  But where that particular disaster is concerned, I have always suspected she knows more than she is telling.

copyright,  © 2006 Wyatt Doyle

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