Simon Fraser (IV)

When it was overcast in Los Angeles, it sometimes came as a welcome respite from the dreary monotony of sunshine and stable temperatures. Freddy described it in this way: “God decided to be original today.”

It was for this very reason – originality – that depthless low clouds frightened and confused the mass subconsciousness of those who wielded any kind of power in the California fairytale – it meant they had no originality of their own. Anything new or different or beyond their comprehension frightened them, some more than others of course.

But the source of their terror was always consistent – the other, the unqualified. There were (and are) no real artists in Los Angeles, only artists’ reps. And Freddy had at long last begun to understand the universality of old Tommy S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. He was in it, and he’d sold his soul long ago. He’d cut it up in his own abatoire and practically gave it away from free. And what had he now? But for his memory, which he knew would someday fail, and his health, which he never fully had and what he did have was dwindling with the years.

He’d discovered a 24/7 hair salon four doors down from his 24/7 donut shop. And at 3AM on a Friday morning, he found himself walking to the salon to have his head shaved clean.

He didn’t know why. No one knew why.

The first and previous occasion that Freddy had radically altered his lid was at the age of seventeen. He was living with his mother on the eighth floor of an apartment building (they would live there for a year before moving to the cheaper building beside it). It was three in the morning and Freddy had been tossing and turning for five hours, unable to sleep, without reason.

Everytime he closed his eyes, his brain would go into third eye overdrive. Images and memories flashed at him, something he heard that day, someone he saw, something he smelled, a haunting valve that would not turn off. It confounded him until, at 3AM, drastic measures were needed.

He rose out of bed, stumbled to his bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “What’s your problem?” he asked his equally-frustrated reflection. “Why can’t you go to sleep?” he pleaded.

He turned on the hot water and cupped his hands beneath the faucet. Lukewarm, warm, warmer, hot; he bent over and splashed the water in his face, hoping its liquid heat would calm his nerves. He wiped his hands over his face and ran his fingers through the dark brown mop on top of his head. He grabbed the strands and yanked at them with frustrated intensity. And somehow, for some reason that only a wise man would know, that seemed to provide Freddy with an answer.

If he cut his hair, he could get to sleep.

It made absolutely no sense – what one had to do with the other, Freddy did not know. He only knew that he had to try.

He grabbed a pair of scissors from the top left drawer of the small desk in his bedroom. He stood facing the three-sided mirror in his bathroom; he looked at each of his reflections and asked them, “Are you gonna stop me? Are you? What about you? I defy any of you to stop me.”

But none of his reflections could stop him from methodically cutting off lock after lock of his rich beautiful hair, his only true vanity, his hair, the first love-hate relationship he ever had, his flowing uncontrollable hair. Cut, snipped, chopped, hacked, beheaded like royals in 18th Century France, with extreme prejudice. He didn’t know what it was, disguised in self-destruction.

In ten minutes, he was done with it; he brushed the remnants off the counter top, into the sink and sent them packing down the drain with a splash of lukewarm, warm, warmer, hot. He turned off the light and returned to his bed. He then very promptly drifted into the ether he’d so been craving.

Freddy woke up five hours later and prepared for school, not noticing the clumps and clippings of hair that were laid to rest upon his pillow. He went into the kitchen where his mother was pouring herself a cup of freshly-brewed coffee. She took one look at Freddy and, aghast, screamed and spilled her mug of joe on the floor.

“What the hell have you done to yourself?!”

“Oh I cut my hair,” Freddy replied plainly.

“When?!”

“Around three this morning.”

“Why?!”

“I couldn’t get to sleep.”

“And you thought chopping your head to shreds would help?!”

“It worked.”

“You look like you’ve been to a cancer ward!”

She was right. He did look like he’d been to a cancer ward. He’d never cut hair before, let alone his own. There were wildly different lengths atop his head, clumps and chunks missing, too short here, too long there. As the old self-effacing saying goes, he looked like he’d gotten into a fight with a lawnmower and the lawnmower had won.

“Whatever. I don’t care,” he told his mother, “I’m gonna be late for school.”

“You’re not going to school like that. Come here,” she instructed him, setting up Freddy’s old childhood high chair for the ceremony. “Sit down, I’m going to try to make you look presentable.”

She did the best she could to give his hair a more common length. There were still four or five large craters in his fallicle topography but the salvage effort was relatively successful. Rodin could not have sculpted the damage better.

Freddy went through his morning classes to the snickers of teenagers who knew no subtlety. But then, neither did Freddy by the looks of things. He stood out like chum stains on a wedding dress (don’t ever get married on a fishing boat).

Some of the “popular kids”, in all their glorious weakness, teased him about having cancer. “And what if I do?!” Freddy sniped back at them. Dumbfounded and skeptical, they had no answers. Even one of his teachers asked him if he had cancer. “No, I don’t have cancer,” he replied, flabbergasted at the teacher’s tactless stupidity. He had only wanted to get to sleep and couldn’t understand or condone the curious attention he was receiving as a result.

By lunchtime, someone had scrawled in black marker on Freddy’s light orange locker, “Keemo!”

The bourgeois insolence!

The unmitigated gall!

The poor grammar!

“It’s spelt C-H-E-M-O, you fucking morons!” Freddy yelled down the crowded hallway and echoed throughout the school. “Learn to spell!!!”

He was maverick at the worst of times.