When it came to unsanctioned pugilism, Freddy had been cheated.

Though he had not been taught hand-to-hand fighting skills, received any training in grappling strategies or a hint of competitive spirit for such an arena, he did have one quality to his name that could occasionally prove beneficial in physical confrontation.

Thanks to the irregular frustrated smacks from the burdened hands of his older brother, Freddy had developed a high threshold to pain. However, when he reached his terminus, he lost control of his pacifist (or pacified) temperament. He would become enraged, in a defensive tantrum, his arms flinging out at any opponent within his nine-year-old grasp. After experiencing several of these counterattacks, Gordon found that he could still easily tackle his younger brother to the ground and threaten to drool on him. As Gordon allowed a cord of saliva to creep from his mouth and descend to within scant inches of the boy’s writhing face, Freddy slowly regained his dominated composure. Not once did Gordon’s slime ever make contact.

In the fifth grade, Freddy had been challenged to meet Vince, a minor league player in the sport of bullying, in the yard after school. As he walked down a school hallway that had already been vacated of classmates wishing to ensure a good view of the match, Freddy was in a dream-like state of mind; the only after-school fights he’d seen were in after-school specials on the local ABC affiliate. He didn’t even know what had sprouted his conflict with Vince, who had set the stage with the threat, “You’re dead, kid. After school, you’re fucking dead.” Freddy seriously doubted whether Vince even knew his name.

Amidst a circle of sixty fellow students, the bully stood, cracking his knuckles, waiting for his prey. Freddy stood inside the school’s side door, looking through the thick wired glass at the group that awaited him beyond the domed climbing apparatus. And before he could change his mind, Freddy found that he had already emerged from the school and was standing in the middle of the mob. A synchronous chorus around him chanted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

With fists clenched in anger and the thought of his drunken father riding his subconscious, Vince came at Freddy – a boy effigy at which he could direct the strains of the domestic violence he’d incurred.

Fear stuck a dagger in Freddy’s heart and, for the life of him, he could neither raise forearm in defense nor turn and scamper in shame. Vince’s eyes gleamed on the verge of tears; his crooked teeth foamed; every freckle on his body raged as if it had just endured an afternoon of Antarctic sunlight. Freddy could but witness his ferocious attacker’s swift approach.

Then.. God… or something else that Freddy would never comprehend… intervened.

An unforeseeable bolt of lightning struck from a cloudless sky and quite suddenly there was another participant in the fray. Freddy had the best view of a seventh grader who had been unaffectionately nicknamed “Gus the Bus”. His robust figure surged with unprecedented vehemance, his wiry hair mussing in the gallop, his Mediterranean nose a bowsprit guiding him to the next port of call. Gus the Bus was the only student in the K-8 school who had the ability to grow a full moustache.

It seemed that Gus the Bus also had a bone to pick with Vince. He broke through the chain of spectators and with the cliché force of a Mack truck, tackled the farm leaguer to the hard yellow grass, circumventing by a mere half-second the bruisin’ for which Freddy had been cruisin’.

Freddy witnessed the sack with all the wonder of seeing a baby being born.

Though stunned at first, the blood-thirsty audience of eight- to thirteen-year-old’s quickly recovered from the switch-up and continued their chorus of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

It occurred to Freddy that all they wanted was a fight, fight, fight. He looked down at Gus the Bus pummelling the shit out of his former sparring partner. And he could not help but feel cheated. His opportunity to atleast be placed somewhere on the ladder (if only at the bottom) had been whisked away. He turned, broke through the circle and walked home, wondering “How could this have happened to me?”

Freddy’s next opportunity came three years later, in the eighth grade, at a different school. This time, Freddy had been around the block long enough to acquire a few coaches in his corner. Whereas in his encounter with Vince, he’d simply been another nameless fall guy, he was now the underdog. For his competitor was the perennially malicious Eric Creighton. Though Freddy did not exactly have a large contigent of friends at school, Eric Creighton had a fundamental bridge-burning quality that verged on mad genius.

Despite crowd sentiment, Eric was almost eight inches taller than Freddy, his arm’s reach almost five inches longer. Freddy’s other, perhaps more primary, problem was that he still lacked basic skills in the art of the street fight.

He asked his bespeckled 13-year-old slacker friend, Leonard, “How do I make a proper fist? Do I put my thumb on the inside or outside?”

For a moment, Leonard wondered if Freddy was joking; then he stared at his trainee with concerned conviction. “No, man, if you put ’em on the inside, you’ll break your fuckin’ thumbs.”

“Okay, on the outside, thanks.”

A small crowd of spectators were sprinkled around the paved schoolyard outside one of the doorways. Eric was larger, stronger and dumber. Freddy was twelve-years-old and Gus the Bus had relocated to a juvenile hall in Sacramento, California.

“No hard feelings,” Eric said with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

Freddy took the first punch on the bone of his left cheek. A twinge of pain spread across his face. It shook his head, shocked the balancing liquids of his ears. He could no longer hear the cheers and jeers of the crowd; all he could hear was his own ventilation system.

Freddy shook off the impact and, testing his own punch against Eric’s chest, missed and stumbled to the left.

He took a breath – Creighton 1, Long nothing.

Freddy could see his trainer, on the other side of Eric; he didn’t hear the words that were being screamed at him, but he thought he might be able to read Leonard’s lips.

Eric took advantage of the distraction to lay a powerful blow to Freddy’s nose. It stunned him; he staggered backwards and tried to keep his legs from crumbling beneath him. The noise began to filter back into his ears —

“Kick him in the nuts, Freddy!!!” Leonard screamed.

Then, the others: “Punch him! Hit him! Get him!”

Freddy felt his nose and spots of blood appeared on his hand. His vision turned grainy. Spurred by the crimson drip of his olfactory cavity, Freddy quickly attained his emotional breaking point. With as much rage as he knew, his clenched fists flailing wildly, Freddy came at poor Eric, a non-stop pummelling which even startled the surveyors so much that some took a step back, afraid and amused. There was no concentration or talent in the barrage; it was punch, punch, punch, quickly, as quick as he could. Eyes, jaw, nose, ears – every feature became a target.

Then… Sweet Intrusia, the Goddess of Intervention, returned.

The whole fray came to an abrupt end when a large mitt of a hand (missing half of one finger and a smaller fraction of another) grabbed the back of Freddy’s collar and hoisted him away from his victim. It was Mr. Rose, the industrial arts teacher; trouble had heard the commotion and had come to investigate.

He kept hold of Freddy and grabbed Eric by the ear, instructing the mob to “Break it up! Go home! Or you’ll all be sent to detention!” He led Freddy by his neck and Eric by his ear (still stinging from one of Freddy’s blows) down to the Vice-Principal’s office.

Rose sat both boys down outside and went in to tell the Veep what had happened. A moment later, Rose emerged, grabbed Eric and yanked him into the office. As he awaited his own punishment, Freddy could hear the two adults inside berating poor Eric: “How could you let a little shrimp beat you up?! Don’t you have any guts?! You need to take a self-defense course! What the hell’s the matter with you?! You’re atleast a half foot taller!”

Then, finally, the Veep said, “Detention hall, room 203, Mrs. Burke is waiting for you, young man.” Eric emerged with Mr. Rose. The boy’s head was low with shame; Freddy averted eye contact as poor Eric was ushered off to the Satanic Mrs. Burke.

A moment later, the Veep popped his balding oversized head out of his office. “Young man, I don’t want to hear about any more fights with you. You should know better… Now go home.”

And once again, Freddy found himself walking home alone, wondering, “How could this have happened to me?” For the life of him, he couldn’t develop a bad reputation. That’s really the only kind, he thought; if you haven’t got a bad reputation, you haven’t got a reputation. The public showers more opinion upon the mean guy than the nice guy.

I work in a government office for the government. And I do general office labor for a certain set of fellow government workers. And one day, one of the other government workers asked me to send out one hundred and sixty booklets. And I was to send them to the four different regional offices, forty to each office. So I needed four boxes.

So I went to the mailroom and I told them that I needed four boxes to send four packages to the four regional offices. And they stared at me. And they said that I would have to go talk to Rodney, the box guy I guess.

So I went and found Rodney and I told him that I needed four boxes to send four packages to the four regional offices. You have to make it very simple for these people. So I asked Rodney for these boxes and he said, “Four boxes, okay.”

And then he started wandering around the office looking for four boxes. Like I couldn’t have done that myself.

So I stopped him and I said, “Look, Rodney, isn’t there a place where you would keep boxes stored?”

“Yeah, the storage room.” he said.

“Should we look there?” I asked him.

So Rodney took me to the storage room. And he went in and started looking around for four boxes. And I could see two boxes right down at my feet that were the right size. So I asked him, “What about these boxes?”

And he said, “I thought you wanted four.”

Now I didn’t want to pressure him. So I said, “Well, I’ll take these two now and you can get back to me with two more.”

“Two more? I’ll have to go downstairs to get them.”

“Okay, no problem, you go downstairs, you get back to me.”

“Okay.”

So I took these two boxes back and started getting two of the parcels ready. And then I realized that the booklets were already in two boxes, different-sized boxes, large enough for eighty booklets, but they would do. I didn’t need perfectly-sized boxes.

So I called Rodney back and I said, “Look, about those two other boxes, I don’t need them anymore. I already have the two boxes the booklets came in. So I don’t need any more boxes.”

“What?”

“I don’t need the two boxes.”

“Okay,” he said, “whatever.”

So I packed up the four boxes, two of the small size, two of the large. And I put them on the dolly, the large ones on the bottom because, you know, gravity. And I took them to the mailroom and I told them, “I need you to send these four boxes to the four regional offices.”

And as I was about to leave, the lady stopped me and said, “Well, they’re two different sizes.”

I said, “Yeah… so?”

“Well, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“And?”

“Well, we can’t send them, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Well, you’re the mailroom; you know, the mailroom handles the mail. What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Well, you’ll have to go talk to Rodney about this.”

So I went and found Rodney again. And I told him, “Look, alright, I’m sending these four boxes to the four regional offices and the mailroom won’t take them because they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Why are you telling me?” he asked. “You should talk to the mailroom about this.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I took them to the mailroom. They won’t take them. They don’t fit in the bags. They told me to come to you.”

“Come with me,” he said. So I followed him… to the mailroom.

And then he started arguing with the lady. “These boxes are being mailed.”

“Well, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Well, we’re trying to mail them.”

“But they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Why not?”

“They’re too big.”

“They’re different sizes.”

“Well, two of them will fit but those two larger ones won’t.”

“Can we send two?”

“Yes, two of them will fit.”

“What about the other two?”

“No, they won’t fit.”

Suddenly, in a fit of impulsiveness, Rodney walked off. So I was left alone with the mailroom lady.

“Look,” I said, “can I atleast put them in the mailroom? You know, this is the mailroom and these are mail. Can I just put them in here until we figure out–”

“Yes, fine, bring them in here.”

So I picked them up and they’re pretty heavy. And she guided me in and said, “Um… okay… um… put them… um… here!”

So I dropped them in the middle of the mailroom, wondering if in a few hours later, they would be covered with, with, with a tablecloth and a deck of cards.

And do you know what the mailroom lady said to me? Do you know what she had the gall to say? She said to me, “You know, we’re going to have to send these out regular mail.”

“Fine!” I screamed.

“Whatever!” I screamed at her.

“Send them however you want, you dumbfucker!” I cursed her.

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know who I am?!” I asked her.

“I’m the Anti-Christ!” I informed her. “I’m the goddamn Anti-Christ!!!”

And then, that was when they fired me.

But that’s okay.

That’s alright.

Because now I’ve got a new job now.

I’m working at the post office.

It was 4:34 in the morning. Streaks of indigo were reaching from beyond the Eastern horizon to mix with the midnight blue still hanging over the Pacific. Two magpies were atop the neighborhood’s trees, calling out their morning duties. There was no snooze button to make them stop.

Freddy was sheltered from the natural alarm, inside his small dim bedroom, his body stretched out under two thick duvets, his head softly surrounded by four pillows, unconscious, dreaming of a message he would forget as soon as…

The phone rang.

James, Freddy’s roommate, would not answer the phone. James always disconnected his phone from its jack before going to bed.

In his dream, Freddy had been in the produce section at Rock’n’Roll Ralph’s, 7257 Sunset Blvd., tolling the number of pretty girls, when suddenly a head of lettuce began ringing. He looked at it strangely; he’d never heard lettuce ring before. He reached for the head of lettuce and suddenly found himself…

Awake, naked, standing at his desk, halfway between night and day, with a phone in his hand.

“Hello?” came a recognizable voice from the other end of the line.

“Hey,” Freddy replied, wiping the crust from his right eye. There was a pause.

“What the fuck are you doing?” It was Max.

“Hey, I was… uh… sleeping.” Another pause.

“Oh. What time is it there?”

“Four-thirty. Where are you?” The conversation ran at an octogenarian pace, as satellite communicated with satellite over the Atlantic Ocean and into two different sets of civilization.

“I’m at Heathrow.”

“Oh ya, you’re… in Britain, right?”

“Not for much longer, thank God. I fly into Kennedy today.”

“What’s wrong? You don’t like the rain?”

“No, I don’t like the cops.”

“Bobbies got you down?” Freddy asked, wiping the salt from his left eye.

“No, man, the friggin’ parking cops. Lemme tell you –”

“Hold on,” Freddy said, laying the receiver down on the desk, grabbing yesterday’s underwear from the floor and hoisting them up around his crotch.

He sat down on his wonky office chair, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the desk, lit it and returned to the long distance call.

“Go,” he told Max.

“So I’m here for four weeks, right? The production puts me up in this flat in Stepney, really nice place. Jacuzzi bathtub, a little balcony, great view, and, I was told by the production co-ordinator, I had parking so if I wanted to rent a car –”

“Right,” Freddy blurted in mid-satellite transmission.

“I could. And they would pay for it,” Max finished.

Freddy yawned. “So what’d you get?”

“An MG.”

“Nice,” Freddy commented.

“They were paying for it,” Max continued, “so I figured, ‘What the hell? I’ll go all out.’ Now this parking space is actually a pad, y’know, a little area in front of the flat. Used to be grass and dirt, now it’s interlocking bricks.”

“Yeah, I know what a parking pad is.”

“Okay, so I’ve got the MG parked down there and the second day I have it, I go down to drive to set and I got a ticket. They call them Penalty Charge Notices. The infraction says I was parked on the boulevard.”

“Were you?”

“No, the pad is small but the car fits. I wasn’t blocking anything. It’s not even a fucking boulevard; it’s a road. So I figured the ticket weasel made a mistake for some reason, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s in his nature. Anyways, I go to work, come back, go to sleep, wake up, next day, I got another ticket. Same infraction: parking on boulevard.”

“What the –”

“I’m like ‘What the fuck? I’m not on the boulevard. I’m on my parking pad.’ I go to work, come home, I leave a note for the prick on the dashboard: ‘Warden Gupta, Stop giving me tickets for parking in my parking space. Your truly, Max Rasche, Resident, 49 Old Church Road.'”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah for about a week. Then I get another ticket for parking on the boulevard; this time it’s from Warden Smythe-Roy. They switch them up, huh? To keep it fresh.”

Freddy ran his hand over his face, seeing where circumstance was taking his friend.

“So I changed the note. ‘To All Parking Wardens, I am not on the boulevard. I am on my parking pad. Inquiries can be addressed to Simpleton Lanes Productions…’ And I left the phone number for the production office.”

“Right.”

“Anyways, another week goes by, no tickets. Then third week, Monday, I get a ticket for parking on the boulevard, Tuesday, I get a ticket for parking on the boulevard. Wednesday, I wake up. I go downstairs, fully expecting to see a ticket for parking on the boulevard. Guess what?”

“Car’s gone.”

“They fucking towed me. Out of my parking pad! And the only way they could have done that is by trespassing on private property. So I was just fuming. But I had to get to work so I put off all those emotions, got to work late, finished early, luckily, took the tube back home – and what a joy that is. You want proof that dental care in England is non-existent? Take the subway.”

“So what happened?”

“I get home. I open up the phonebook and start looking for who I should call about this – the Transport Committee. I call the number. They say, ‘Oh no sir, we handle the parking meters.’ I call the next number: ‘No sir, we handle the parking lots.’ Third number, parking enforcement – these are the pricks. I get the guy on the phone, I say, ‘I’m trying to find out if my car’s been towed or stolen.’ I give him the plate number. He goes away, comes back a minute later, tells me that the computers are “on the blink” and he doesn’t know if they’ve towed my car or not. So he gives me the phone number for the towing company.”

“Jesus.”

“Right, so I call the towing company, give the lady the plate number. She comes back ten seconds later, ‘Yes sir, we have your car, that’ll be 120 pounds and I’ll need to see your license.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa! Whoa! Slow down, Speed Racer.'”

“She probably didn’t get that reference.”

“No, you’re right, they never had Speed Racer over here. But I was at a loss. One second, I have a car; the next, someone else has taken it and is demanding 120 pounds for me to get it back. I was about to go off, y’know, I was ready to lose it. But then I realized, ‘Y’know what, this lady is just another wage slave, getting rammed by taxes which eat up fifty percent of her income. The towing company is outsourced by the municipal council; there’s nothing she could do for me even if she wanted to.’ So I got the address of the impound lot and hung up.”

“120 pounds?! That’s like 250 bucks.”

“Yeah. But even if I got the car out, I still didn’t have anywhere to park it. I wasn’t gonna park downstairs again and get towed tomorrow and rack up another 120.”

“I don’t understand why they wouldn’t let you –”

“Oh it gets better.”

“I’m listening.”

“So I needed to find a parking spot. And the neighbors across the street, they have a parking pad just like mine and they aren’t getting any tickets. So what’s so damn special about my parking pad? So I called parking enforcement back, the guy with the computers on the blink. Someone else answered, a real prick, he was really short with me.

“I said to him, ‘Listen, I’ve got these five parking tickets plus the one waiting for me at the impound lot and they all have the same infraction – parking on boulevard – but the thing is I’ve got a parking pad in front of the place–‘ He says, ‘You’ve got a pad?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘It exists, right now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it exists, I’m looking at it, right now; there’s the road, there’s the sidewalk, there’s my parking pad.’

“He says, ‘Well sir, the boulevard is our enforceable area. It’s ten meters from the middle of the road.'”

“Metric bastards,” Freddy piped up.

“But here’s the thing – ten meters from the middle of the road is actually inside the house! So if I was to sit on the sofa for too long – say I’m watching Braveheart – they could give me a ticket. Y’know?”

“Right.”

“So he tells me that if I want to park there I’m gonna need a permit. I’m like, ‘Why do I need a permit to park my car on my parking pad?'”

“What’d he say?”

“‘Because it’s the law, sir.'”

“That doesn’t answer your question.”

“I know! Then he starts in, ‘Without the law, sir, anarchy, anarchy –‘”

“Aw Jesus.”

“So I hang up on him, I look in the phonebook again, I find the phone number to call to apply for a front-of-house parking permit. I call the number, out of service.”

“Typical.”

“I call the main parking permit number. They tell me I have the wrong number. I’m like, ‘Yeah I know, your other number is out of service.’ She asks, ‘Did you get it out of the phonebook?’ I say, ‘Yeah I did.’ ‘Well that’s the wrong number, sir. There’s a typo in that number.’ So she gives me the right number, it’s one digit off the number in the book. I call them – the front-of-house parking permit people.”

“Finally!”

“Yeah, y’know that feeling you get when you go through this bureaucratic bullshit and you get the last number and you know this is the number that matters. Whoever answers this number is the man or woman who can actually do something for you. Well I got that feeling. The lady answered and I was the nicest guy in the world, ‘Hello how are you today? How is your day going? I have something maybe you’d like to help me out with.’

“I give her the address, she goes away for a minute, she comes back: ‘Well sir I have some bad news for you. We can’t let you park there, you can’t apply to park there and you can’t appeal this.'”

“What?!”

“Yeah, they won’t let me park there, they won’t let me ask them to let me park there and they won’t let me complain about not being able to ask them to let me park there.”

“Their ass is covered and their hands are tied.”

“Exactly. So I said, ‘But the neighbors across the street –‘”

“The Joneses.”

“Right. ‘The Joneses across the street have the exact same pad and they park there fine and dandy.'”

“You used the word ‘dandy’?”

“Yeah. I was speaking her language.”

“So what did she say?”

“She said, ‘Well sir, they probably got their permit before the Road Traffic Act was passed in 1991 and your local council took over parking enforcement.’ Apparently, one of the councillors in Stepney thought it would be a brilliant idea to ban parking on all front-of-house parking pads from then-on-in.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?! Maybe he’s a fan of unobstructed interlocking brick. So I said to her, ‘Let me see if I understand correctly… According to the City of London, according to the Grand Dame of the Western hemisphere, I’m screwed?'”

“What’d she say?”

“‘For lack of a better way to put it, sir, that is correct.'”

Freddy laughed and butted out his cigarette, “That’s classic.”

“So for the past week here, every time I’ve left the flat, I’ve had to look at a car-sized waste of space.”

“You didn’t go get the car?!”

“No, I didn’t have anywhere to park it. Plus I couldn’t have gotten it out anyways; it wasn’t in my name. Plus the international driver’s license I’ve been using is hot. I bought it off one of the P.A.’s on the first day of shooting.”

“So the car’s still impounded?”

“I dunno. I told the co-ordinator what happened and she said she’d get someone to take care of it. So I dunno. I’ve been taking the tube to work for the last week.”

“So you don’t have to pay for anything?”

“Oh I have to pay. Y’know what I have to pay for?”

“What?”

“All the local fucking phone calls I made to try to find out why the municipal government here sucks royal ass. They charge you for local phone calls here! Can you believe it?”

“What a rip-off.”

“I fucking hate this country.”

Bing-bong, Freddy heard in the background of the line.

“I think they’re boarding me now.”

“Alright, well thanks for waking me up,” Freddy said, yawning again. “You’re back in New York tonight?”

“Yeah, this afternoon, New York time.”

“Have a good flight home.”

“Thanks. I’ve got a couple prescription muscle relaxants from one of the other actors so I’m going to have a very good flight home.”

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.