The 60’s: Chapter 7

Victoria Easterday
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

And Then I Shaved My Head

Courtesy Google Images

Upon my return to Boulder Creek everything was the same. My friends, the parties fueled with weed, LSD and small talk. I wasn’t there anymore. I had gone into another land and no one that I knew could possibly understand the territory I was living in now.

Within in a week of my return from Alan’s house I shaved my head. The red hair that had been my clarion call to the world simply needed to be gone. It represented my past, I was writing my own life now and my history was no longer relevant.

On the day, I shaved my head head I had noticed myself in a plate glass window from a store in town. My bright red hair just jumped out at me and I thought “What’s the deal with all this hair?” In that moment, I knew. That mass quantity of red hair was tying me my other life, a past that no longer existed in my mind.

I was hooked on impulsivity which bore a compulsion to hitchhike home hunt up a pair of scissors and start cutting.

First I made a braid and lopped it off. It fell to my bare feet like a silken copper rope.

I continued by pulling out the sections that were left and cut them as close as I could to my scalp. The last red feathers of my mane slipped through my fingers and cascaded gently to the floor where strands gleamed in a shaft of late morning light.

My lost tresses came to rest on the floor with my braid.

I did not regret my actions, not even for a moment!

The result of those actions? I was bald in some places and longer in others. I ended up looking like I had been living in a razor blade factory and my hair had been caught in the works.

I checked out my handiwork in the bathroom mirror said “ Shit oh dear!” and proceeded to hitch back into town to visit the local barbershop.

When I walked in the door, I could see the look on his face which said,“ What in the blue fuck do we have here!”

I potzed myself into one of the two empty chairs and said, “Would you please take the rest of this off.” He silently picked up his electric razor and shaved off what was left. I surveyed the situation and said, “ Would you please clean shave it with soap and a razor?”

Without a word, he got out the shaving cream, rubbed it onto my head and began running the razor in smooth steady strokes. He cleaned off the shaving cream with a hot damp rag which revealed a pink billiard ball that was shiny as a clean pane of glass.

I thanked him and when I went to pay him he said “ There will be no charge little lady, this is a first for me.” We looked at each other for a moment, I thanked him, turned around went out the door.

I walked into the soft California Winter sunshine as a new woman starting a new life.

1968 was a few weeks away and it would bring with it new revelations of joy and cosmic unity and the entrance of unspeakable horror and destruction.

Chapter 8: December 31st 1967

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The Scheherazade of the Appalachians. Notes from the air around the donut hole.

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