Love Lube
My hairdresser asked me what I have learned about myself during quarantine. He was making conversation.
It can be hard, getting your hair done. It takes an insufferably long time. Most men don’t understand. Color, highlights, cut, wash, blow dry — heaven forbid you want a scalp treatment or need extensions. Might as well bring a tent and a camp stove because you’re in it for the long haul.
Anyway, sometimes he and I just coexist together with the uncomfortable silence hanging between us, electro-house music cutting through the quiet — “I don’t want your body but I hate to think about you with somebody else.” I kind of like that one. I might actually sing along to that one.
And sometimes we make conversation. We may start with politics. He’s a bit of an unpredictable one, my hair guy, so you never know exactly what you’re going to get when you wade into the political realm with him. He’s a sometimes self-hating gay and/or bisexual, Iowa-born, Kansas-bread, California-dwelling white man who grew up in an artistic, creative yet politically conservative and occasionally xenophobic family of meat-eating ballet dancers and macramé makers. He’s a hard one to pin down, politically. But we can and do talk about our dislike for our current president — at least that feels safe.
We might move on to talking about my mom. He used to do my mom’s hair, before she died. And my mom, reclusive and beautiful woman that she was, often crossed boundaries with her beauty people. She might invite them to the opera, or to the museum, or to dinner, or to Italy. She would most certainly invite them to lavish candlelit Valentine’s Day parties she would throw, filled with young strangers she met around town, where she would serve heart-shaped canapes on tables laden with bouquets of roses and peonies and strewn with sequins that spelled out phrases like “Hot Stuff,” and “Wink-Wink” and “Be Mine.” So the hairdresser and my mom were sort-of actual friends. He was even a friend to her when no one else was, when she was so floridly manic that all of her electronic communications were shouted in ALL CAPS, and she would go on and on to anyone who would listen about how she was going to open a salon/nursery/café/bookstore/intellectual event space on Rodeo Drive that was going to take over the world. It was going to be called “SERENITY PARK!” she would YELL! on Facebook or Insta.
Shann (sounds like “Shaun” but apparently he felt he needed a more interesting spelling: S-H-A-N-N), was a friend to her even when the rest of us couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, and I kind of love him for that, even though it also stokes my deepest and most virulent cynicism about what his intentions might have been. He always had his eye on my mother’s grandfather clock, and maybe just maybe he was trying to play the long game until mom finally willed that clock to him. It currently sits in my dining room, and no matter how much he continues to talk about it he will never get it. Never. It’s mine now, and I feel a little bad because he keeps talking about it but fuck him, it was my mom’s and now it’s mine. The clock is not up for grabs.
Shann loves to talk about my mom — how they had a little joke that they wanted to open a salon together called “Gorgeous,” because wouldn’t it be so fun to answer the phone and say, “Hello, Gorgeous?” Which is how they always greeted each other. “Hello, Gorgeous!” And he tells a story about how once she was on one of her jewelry-buying trips up north, and she brought him back a snow globe thingy that he can shake up, after which glitter magically flutters around a golden sign that says “Hello Gorgeous!”
My mom would go up north on her own occasionally, ostensibly motivated by the need to visit my grandmother and my aunt, but maybe actually motivated by the opportunity to visit this estate jewelry shop up there that she couldn’t get enough of — lots of old cameo charms and garnet bracelets and golden lockets and enameled cufflinks that she had big plans for repurposing, which unfortunately she never got around to. Now I’ve got a big plastic bag filled with old cufflinks, shoved somewhere in the back of my closet, because I wasn’t born with cufflink-repurposing-vision.
At this particular hair appointment, Shann and I have already talked about politics, and my mom, and Shann’s impending financial meltdown (which he always, since I have known him, laments is just around the corner, but which so far he has managed to stave off), so after a period of awkward silence, Shann asks, as if starting a party game:
“What have you learned about yourself during quarantine?”
And I don’t know how to answer this. I start with the superficial. “I like Los Angeles with less traffic,” I say. “I do better on seven or eight hours of sleep a night than I was doing on six.” But I want to answer this question with depth — I want to impress him with my hard-won wisdom. So I think a bit more.
I tell him that I realize my kids don’t need me as much as I would have liked to believe that they did. Sure, they needed me when they couldn’t get from point A to point B without me. But otherwise, the truth is, if I were not here, they would be ok. They would be sad — devastated maybe, they’d need lots and lots of therapy and be forever changed and all of that — I’m not saying I’m not loved. Just that I’m not as necessary as I used to reassure myself that I was. I used to fancy myself kangaroo-like, packing my children away in my warm fuzzy pouch, thereby also warming myself with the self-soothing idea that somehow, if they were this close to me, nothing bad could happen to any of us. I guess, over the course of this period of relentless togetherness, I have come to realize that at this point, I might need them more than they need me. They have things to do that are more important than hanging out with me, while I’m not sure the obverse is true.
They still have their youth to give them an illusion of purpose, but I’ve learned my old-lady lessons by now. I’m pretty sure that none of us is here for any particular purpose, not even the Obamas, or Madame Curie, or Tolstoy. I think we’re all here to experience joy, to love and be loved, and to be as decent as we think we can be, whatever our definition of decent may be. And maybe that’s it.
There are these pesky roadblocks that might sometimes get in the way of our love and decency. Vanity. Ego. I only have to look at the small diamond-encrusted “K” hanging around my neck to know that I suffer from the affliction of self-involvement. But the truth is, I’m glad for it. Because occasionally it allows me to indulge, even nurture, my love for myself, and the radical idea that while I am here, I am bringing something useful or valuable or insightful to the table, to this party we call life. And maybe others might actually benefit from my rubbing my light and my love all over them, like the slick oil the massage therapist lavished all over me back during the days when humans who were strangers were allowed to touch each other. Yes, I tell Shann — that’s it; that’s the ticket. I think that’s something I’ve learned. That while we’re here, we need to pour our love all over each other, like that lovely lavender-scented lube that makes the kneading and the pushing and the struggling a little easier, gets rid of some of the friction, and allows us to dig in to the knots and the kinks and the problems and work on smoothing them out, together.
