The Truth About My Bad Haircut

I stumbled across my yearbook from my freshman year of high school the other day. Leafing through the pictures of my former classmates, all looking fourteen and awkward, I found me. Yes, there was the little black and white square of me in a Forenza sweater buried among the other black and white squares of all the other freshmen, each of us on the brink of the beginning of something. So completely clueless.

In that picture, I have a round face and chubby cheeks. Because I’ve seen the 5x7 color version of that photo, I also know that I have a fresh sprinkling of zits lining my forehead and a sad attempt at a red headband ribbon to match my sweater. The look on my face says do we really have to do this?

Also, it’s not a picture of a girl who could pull off short hair. As a freshman, I was not sporty or perky or edgy or mod. But my hair was short, shorter than it has ever been. And that’s because the summer before my freshman year of high school, I cut my own hair.

Yes, I realize that cutting one’s own hair is something most people do at age 4, not 14, but my Seventeen magazine had arrived in the mail and it had a how-to article on cutting your own hair. It looked easy enough. And I totally needed a trim.

I grabbed the scissors from the knife holder in the kitchen (yeah, I didn’t have real shears and I was using the same scissors my mom used to cut off strips of duct tape. So what?), and propped the how-to article up against the mirror on my dresser.

I leaned over, brushed my hair forward so that it hung like a curtain in front of my face, and started cutting.

After I’d gone all the way across, I stood straight, flipping my hair back behind me. I picked at it with my fingers, trying to style it. It wasn’t half bad. Some of my natural curls even bounced back up. Cutting hair was fun!

I decided to go just a little shorter.

Flopping my hair forward again, I went back to cutting. I couldn’t see anything in the mirror so I just tried to go by feel. Note: “going by feel” is not a good way to cut your own hair.

When I stood up the next time, my hair was uneven. I panicked for a second but then I collected myself and decided I had no other choice but to keep snipping.

Cut.

Mirror.

Cut.

Panic.

I quickly entered the point of no return as my hair stuck out in a mish-mash of clumps.

I started to cry. Big fat tears, plopped down onto the magazine soaking through the pages, making the directions unreadable.

Clumps of my hair lay across my carpeted floor and on my dresser. The hair on my head was just bits and pieces sticking out everywhere, like a psycho ward escapee. My bangs were rounded along the brow line, almost like a bowl cut.

I’d fucked up big time.

And I was 14. Not 4.

I tried mousse and Aqua Net, trying to give my new hair some oomph but it was just too short. There was nothing I could do. I swiped the hair remnants into a trash bag, vacuumed my room and waited for my mom to come home.

About an hour later, I heard the thump of the automatic garage door shut, then the jingling of keys as my mom messed with the lock. By the time I got myself downstairs to show my face, she was in the kitchen, unpacking groceries. I stopped short of the linoleum and waited for her to look at me. She turned and froze with a carton of milk in her hand. Her mouth dropped.

“What did you do?” she cried.

I burst into tears. She yelled some more. Eventually she told me to get in the car because we had to go see a professional.

The hairdresser kind of picked and pulled at my hair as she looked at me looking at her in the mirror. She wore blue eye shadow and a sweatshirt that hung off her shoulder. Her own hair was bleached, feathered, hairsprayed and ratted high enough to look like she could be one of the girls tearfully singing along in the front row of a Mötley Crüe video.

She went to snipping bits and pieces of my hair. The last thing I wanted was to go shorter but there was really no other choice.

“We just have to even it out,” she said, sounding more confident than I was sure she was.

She tried to be helpful in a twenty-something kind of way. “You can wear big earrings to, like, draw the eye away from the face.”

Yes, she actually told me that the best thing I could do for myself would be to find a way to tease everyone’s gaze away from my hideous visage.

My eyes were swollen and rimmed with red by the time we left the hair salon. I went home and rifled through my jewelry box to find the biggest pair of earrings I had. It was the ‘80s so I easily found some huge red and black striped hoops that would’ve gotten caught in my longer hair just hours earlier. Not now. Now they just dangled off my earlobes, begging people to look at them instead of me.

That night, it was Dollar Night at the local movie theater. Every teenager in town showed up for Dollar Night, no matter how crappy the movie, so it took every ounce of courage I had to get myself out of the door that evening. I so easily could’ve faked being grounded, leaving me free to spend July and August locked up in my room waiting for my hair to grow out, but I didn’t.

Instead, my new hair and I went to the movies.

People didn’t recognize me at first. It wasn’t like I’d told anyone I was going to do it. I’d never talked about wanting to have short hair. My new hair was a surprise to pretty much everyone. And while my friends didn’t tell me it looked like shit, they didn’t tell me it looked good either. They just said what fourteen-year-old girls say to a friend with a bad haircut: it’ll grow out.

And it did grow out.

Eventually.

By the time the yearbook came out at the end of the year, my hair had gotten long enough to fit into a small ponytail at the nape of my neck. But seeing that picture there, from September, in black and white, brought all the horror back. I remember wishing I’d never had my picture taken. I wished that, instead, I’d been one of those names listed at the end of the freshman class section underneath the “Photo Shy” banner.

But that’s what a yearbook is, right? A constant reminder of every stupid fashion mistake you’ve ever made. It’s a log of every boy you ever liked who didn’t like you back. Proof of every sport you played but sucked at. And a collection of autographs that never really say what you want them to.

Sure, there are always those people who have their pictures on every page and the yearbook serves as this time capsule of them in their prime. But for those of us who call high school something we’d like to forget, our yearbooks get shoved into a box in our parents’ garage, underneath a pile of old newspaper clippings and trophies, as we dare ourselves to forget.

But now, as I stare at that poor girl with the bad haircut, I decide to embrace her. I’ll take all of my yearbooks, painful as they are, middle school through high school, and find space for them on my bookshelf to serve as a gentle reminder of all that I’ve overcome. 


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved.

The Truth About the Daylight

There was a school dance. There was a boy. There was him asking me for only me. There was a number one song called “I Got You Babe” by UB40 featuring Chrissie Hynde. There was a slow dance sway under crepe paper streamers. There was the singing of lyrics into my ear. There was holding me tight.

I was a freshman in high school, almost 15, and I wanted it to mean something.

Post-dance tequila shots shut down inhibitions and by the end of the night there were kisses on street corners and against the metal fence of the baseball field as we wandered around town. Eventually, because of curfew, there was a bike ride home, with me on the handlebars. And, finally, at my doorstep, there were promises of phone calls and tomorrow afternoon.

The next day came and we were drunk and making out again in the middle of the day. Other friends had paired off, too. There was nowhere to go besides the playground of the elementary school—two in this corner, two in that one, and the odd girl out (usually me, but not that day) on the swing set, alone.

On a Saturday afternoon where sunlight seeped in and bounced off metal monkey bars, things were clear. Focused.

“You have a little moustache,” he said, pulling back from me, studying my face, running the tip of his finger across my upper lip. There were smiles like it didn’t matter.

But it did.

Mortification set in. Kisses went out the window. A hand shot up to cover my lips. The other arm draped across half-lidded eyes so I couldn’t look at him looking at me. He pulled my hand away. Sighs seeped out, caught in the air between our mouths.

By Monday, there were nicknames. There was a made up language that involved a joke about BIC razors. Everyone at school knew they meant me.

There was a lunchtime crying jag behind the graffitied door of a bathroom stall. Sobs that made it hard to breathe, catching air in my lungs but just barely. There were hugs from friends and sandpaper-rough paper towels filled with snot from blown noses. There were encouraging words. There were raucous cries from 15-year-old girls high on chick power.

“He’s an asshole! Fuck him!”

There was cold water splashed on my face, the smoothing out of a mini skirt. A ponytail readjusted. A head held high with the vow to make it through the next two hours. There was the slam of lockers shutting closed, a book shoved into a backpack and the endless drone of a fifth period history teacher.

But there were more whispers and giggles throughout the day, leaking into the week, becoming the month, representing the year.

There were desperate attempts with Sally Hansen facial hair bleach and an Epilady nightmare. Way off in the distance, out of my reach, there were solutions that I wouldn’t learn of until years later, in college.

Until then, there was me. There was him. There was that. There was this. My memories come and go. They quicken then fade. I hadn’t thought of this moment until today. And by tomorrow it will be gone again.


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved.

How to Get a Tap in Coronado in the '80s

1.  Pick your liquor store: Central Liquor, Avenue Liquor, Bottle Shop or Park Place. If you’re a trinket, you're probably near Rotary Circle flirting with the cute skaters so Not-So-Central Liquor on 2^nd Street is too far away to be a viable option. But if you are on that end of town, Bay View Park is always a good place to take your beer once it’s been purchased.

2.  Find a swab. It won’t be hard if the Kitty Hawk or some other aircraft carrier just docked at North Island. Regardless, you will have the best luck at Park Place Liquor because you can wander over to the laundry mat next door and, most likely, find a sailor doing his laundry. Wear a mini skirt. Lick your lips so they’re glossy and saunter in. Don’t laugh at the tighty-whitey underwear that he’s folding. Don’t bother to read the first initial and last name stenciled onto his military-issued duffel bag. Just walk over and say hi. Note the look of surprise on his face. Realize he’s not that much older than you and you are only fifteen. Quickly shush that thought.

3.  Explain, sweetly, that you were wondering if he would buy you and your friends some beer. Or peppermint Schnapps. Or wine coolers (if you can’t handle your alcohol, like, at all). Point out the liquor store next door, then point to the parking lot behind the bank across the street and explain that you’ll meet him there. Tell him you have cash.

4.  Pull out the wad of bills that you and your friends collected (mostly dinner money handed over by unsuspecting parents so you could get a slice of pizza uptown). Don’t think about the fact that you feel the tiniest bit guilty about stealing some of the money from your mom’s purse.

5.  Walk out of the laundry mat only after the sailor you gave your money to has left the premises. Run across the street to meet your friends in the parking lot. They will be ducking down in the corner by the bushes. Exaggerate! Tell them that it took a lot of convincing to get that guy to buy you beer when it really only took about five seconds. Tell them that a cop drove by just as you were leaving the laundry mat. Say you think the cop might know. Convince them the cop will be coming around the corner as soon as he’s done harassing the skaters at Rotary Circle for no apparent reason whatsoever. Make everybody be very quiet. You all are nervous now. Hope the cops don’t really show up.

6.  Let ten minutes pass. Be sure that sailor took off with your money and your peppermint Schnapps. Cuss. Send someone out to peer across the street to see if they see him. Have that person come back and tell you that they can’t see anything, but some senior girls just drove up in a black VW Jetta to talk to the guy that your friend, the one crouching down next to you, hooked up with last night. Drama. Drama. Drama.

7.  Finally see the sailor who bought your tap cross into the parking lot. Call out “pssst” so he can see you and your friends through the dark. Watch as his eyes bug out when he sees the cluster of 15-year-old girls in mini skirts that promise to be wasted within 30 minutes. Elbow a friend. Giggle. Roll your eyes. Think: Gross. Be ready for him to ask if he can come with you. Explain that you’re going to a party, even though you’re not. Because seriously? You can’t have people accusing you of being swab bait for chrissake! If he’s insistent, give him the address of a house where the party isn’t (maybe even the address of someone who has wronged you in the last 48 hours).

8.  Go to Wendy’s at the Coronado Plaza. Order one all-you-can eat salad bar for you and five friends and ask for six cups of ice. Go into the bathroom and fill your cups with peppermint Schnapps. Sit in the middle of the Wendy’s dining room to drink your peppermint Schnapps and eat your salad until you start acting stupid. Get kicked out by the manager.

9.  Wander around town, either on foot or beach cruisers, to look for boys. Pee somewhere in public. Be aware that one of your friends will eventually throw up. Be ready to hold her hair up as she leans over and pukes into the bushes by the Hotel del Coronado. Shrug at tourists passing by with looks of disgust on their faces. And if it’s you who’s throwing up, go back to the liquor store to get some peppermint gum to get the bad taste out of your mouth.

10.  Realize, years later, how truly obnoxious you were. How entitled. How gross. But so lucky, too. You’re lucky that you grew up on an island with nice military families, too much money and little crime. The worst thing that happened to you was that someone stole your beach cruiser. Be glad that you made it home all those nights, and nobody ever took advantage of you as you stumbled drunk down the sidewalk or through a dark alley of your hometown. Vow that the kids you know now will never get away with anything because you’re too smart. You’re onto them. Know that you are a liar. And a hypocrite, too.


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved.

Guest Post: The One That Got Away

Please welcome guest blogger, Mariano Svidler, on Young Adultish this week. Mariano is one of my besties from grad school at USC. We met when we worked in the Dean's office of the School of Cinema-Television (now the George Lucas School of Cinematic Arts, which sounds way more impressive). We bonded over writing thank-you notes to donors and helping famous people park their cars during fundraising events. Mariano is a screenwriter, trailer editor and fellow Trojan football fan. 

There was this girl in third grade and I'd tell you her name if I remembered it (maybe it'll come to me in the next 800 words, but I doubt it).

Man, was I in love. I was, at that age, I swear. As in love as I've ever been, I promise. That's how I remember it, anyway. She had these eyes, and this smile, and this nose, and all the other features you'd find in just about any ordinary female (human) face.

Truth is, if someone called out her name to me, I wouldn't pick it out of a lineup. But the face I might.  Or maybe I'd get her mixed up with some other hot third grader from my past that I once wanted to nibble on.

I just remember being in love at eight years old. I remember the bottle being spun and wishing I'd had the balls to get in the game. I remember girls being taken into closets; and though I doubt any boys were getting too lucky, Iwoulda killed for two minutes of alone time with the girl of my dreams. Especially if it was dark, she didn't have to see me, and most importantly, wasn't allowed to run off.  

It's the only birthday party of my youth that still holds a place in this memory bank. But instead of partaking in the fun, all I did was lurk, beer in hand (not true, I've always hated beer, even back in third grade), not one kid in attendance even knowing I existed.

Perhaps you might think we were way too young for all that romantic/sexual crap, but I did grow up in a faraway land, an exotic place called Argentina, where the women are hot, the men are still men (or were when I left), and even the ugly ones ain't uptight about their sexuality. My Argentine father used to bring home brand spankin' (wink, wink) new Playboy mags for me to "read"when I was in high-school. And when I was done with 'em, I'd recycle and pass the periodical back to my dad.

In retrospect, his intentions were fucking awesome. What teenage boy wouldn't want that from his dad?  I'm talking pre-internet here. Still, I have to count it as another one of our totally uncomfortable father/son bonding experiences. But shit, at the time I wasn't gonna let a little uncomfortable handoff get in the way of enjoying the monthly.

So maybe I was normally sexual. Well, normally based on where I was raised and who raised me.

But third grade?

I never thought much of it until my wife made me self-conscious by pointing out that our teenage sons, up until days ago, thought girls were not only gross but extremely fucking annoying (they're stepsons to me, so they weren't lucky enough to get my overly sexual genes).

Truth be told, I actually prefer to think I was an abnormally sexual third grader (though I don't think I was). Makes me feel like more of a man somehow. It doesn't matter that my crush didn't know I existed, that she was head over heels with not one, but two (slut!), infinitely more popular third grade lowlifes. It doesn't matter that I wouldn't find success with the opposite sex for many years to come.

I wonder where that girl is today. A few years back I heard she'd married into money. Which means she's lacking love, and void of sexual harmony. But in her defense… she's fucking rich.

Or was. Before our great Depression. I wonder if they've lost all their riches. If she now realizes money ain't the most crucial craving in this world (a thought I force upon myself for breakfast each morning).  If she's had to resort to selling nude photos online, and if so, where I may find them.

I wonder if she's laying in bed next to her hubby, thinking of the good one(s) she let get away. If I'm at the top of that list or way down at the bottom. I wonder if she remembers me. If she remembers pretending she didn't know I existed. If she remembers playing hard to get by pretending to like those two popular assholes, simply 'cause she couldn't wrap her brain around the intense sexual (and obviously emotional) feelings she felt for me.

I'm sure she's doing just fine for herself, in love, in heat, and still filthy rich.

But if the guys at Google someday release the time travel machine they're working on, I'm riding that baby back to the third grade, and I am making sure my young self gets the girl (and you better believe I'm gonna kick the shit out of those two other boys).

Is it wrong that that's my ultimate fantasy?

Don't judge.

Question: What event from childhood would you go back and change?


© Copyright 2012  Mariano Svidler. All Rights Reserved.

The Truth About Where I Came From

Not to pull one of those backhanded Facebook-style brag sessions, but when I was a kid, I read at several grade levels above my own. Because I was a kid who navigated their way through advanced reading groups, I sometimes stumbled upon things written for adults. Some adult reading choices were fine. But others? Maybe not so much.

There were about thirty kids who lived on the cul-de-sac on which I grew up. We spent afternoons outside, riding bikes around to fake gas stations and racetracks, building forts in the canyon or roller skating. But sometimes, we ended up in a place we shouldn’t, like in the upstairs rec room of someone’s house watching a horror movie (that would end up giving us all nightmares) while our parents hung out at a barbecue in the backyard. Because we often ended up in places we shouldn’t, it’s not surprising that I found things to read that I shouldn’t.

Case in Point: Where Did I Come From?

This would have been all well and good if my mom had been reading this book to me when I had questions about how my baby brother got inside her tummy, but that’s not how it happened.

As a born lover of books, I pretty much stopped to peruse any bookshelf I ever passed in any house or store ever. So as I ran my fingers across the spines of all the books on the bookshelf at a friend’s house, it’s not surprising that my fingers stopped on the smooth, glossy spine of the one that had a pretty interesting title. Surely this was a book I’d like. It had a cartoon baby on the front of it for God’s sake!

I pulled the book from the shelf and settled down on the carpeted floor to read. By a few pages in, my eyes bugged out and my brain swirled. I bargained with myself—even though it all makes sense, please oh please don’t let it be true. Let this just be another whack story someone like Dr. Seuss made up. Surely my parents never would have done something so horrifying!

I shut the book and carefully replaced it exactly where I’d found it. I returned to my friends but I was too distraught to play Barbies anymore. I had to go home, drink some chocolate milk and ponder this horror in the privacy of my bedroom. I excused my Disco Ken doll and myself from the Barbie pool party and headed home.

“Hi,” my mom said as I passed through the front door. “Whatcha doin?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled, then climbed the stairs to my room.

Surely, surely this newfound information could not be true.

As I lay on the pink-and-white-checkered bedspread of my twin bed, staring at the ceiling, my barely-out-of-kindergarten brain tried to wrap itself around the concept. But it couldn’t. Maybe I did need to talk to someone about it. I could ask my mom but that would be uncomfortable. I probably just needed to ask my friends. I could hear the neighborhood kids outside again. There was a T-Ball game going on and I thought I heard the scrape of roller skates against the low din of The Mighty 6-90 playing from a boom box. Yes, this was definitely a discussion I needed to take to my peers.

Armed with my skates, I headed outside to share the story I had read. And share it I did. Groups of kids encircled me, like we were roasting s’mores around a campfire. I recited, in great detail, where we all came from. Many argued that it couldn’t be so.

“No way!” said my best friend with the freckles and the bikini with the purple hippopotamuses on it. “My parents would never do that!”

“Yes, they would,” I insisted.

Dammit, if I was going to be horrified, I was going to take every kid on the block with me.

We soon dispersed for lunch and my brother and I shuffled into the kitchen for hot dogs. (It was the ‘70s and parents didn’t get their panties all up in a wad yet about feeding their kids hot dogs for lunch. To be honest, my brother probably ate hot dogs for lunch for two straight years of his life.) I sat down at one of the stools that lined our kitchen counter and put it all out there. I told my mom about the book I’d read that morning and asked whether or not it was true.

She hedged a little but finally said, “Yeah. Yes, it is.”

Shortly after that, the phone started ringing. Apparently every other kid on the street had gone home for lunch and asked the exact same question. Only when their parents asked how they’d heard, they didn’t say they’d read it in a book. No, their answer was simple: “Marisa told me.”

My mom spent the afternoon fielding phone calls about how her evil daughter had told every kid on the street about how babies were made. She apologized profusely and hung up only to have the phone ring again. Eventually, she got frustrated.

“What? Was I supposed to lie to her?” she asked. “She read a book! She asked me if it was true and I said yes!”

That day is the perfect example of what I have always admired most about my mom: her honesty. She didn’t sugarcoat shit for her kids. Some people might’ve criticized her for it, but I always appreciated it. My brother and I were nine and seven when our dad died so we learned at a pretty young age that the world isn’t sugarcoated. And S-E-X doesn’t have to be sugarcoated. Making a baby isn’t evil or wrong. And my mom let me know that. Of course, she didn’t get into all the details about how adults also did that for fun. As far as I knew, my parents had done what that book said two times and two times only—once to get me, and once to get my brother. They sucked it up and did gross stuff like that because they had to. And surely my brother and I had been worth it.

Yes, even I, the one with the advanced reading skills and the blabbermouth, had been worth it. 


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved.