His Shrunken Head Is On My Wall
Fact or Fiction?
I can remember as a boy looking at the advertisements at the back of those glossy American magazines that circulated in the UK. Not the girly magazines I hasten to add.
Alongside the offers for exploding joke cigarettes and the Charles Atlas, body building course, you could order a shrunken head. To grab your attention there was usually a small, black-and-white image of a wizened, crumpled face with a topknot of hair. Send off your $10 and he or she could be yours.
Gruesome, but true.
Whether these heads were real, perhaps from the warring tribes of South America or from some other remote corner of the world, I am uncertain. I never had the funds to buy one and, as a UK youngster, I was unsure how to pay for the item in dollars by post. This was long before the Internet and PayPal.
But my curiosity was aroused, and I contemplated asking my parents for one of these macabre items as a Christmas present. I definitely wanted to impress my friends at school.
Fast forward to 1991, the last year of the Cold War and when Bryan Adams was top of the music charts, and we find the shrunken head phenomenon surfacing in the gang culture of the United States. But with a more deadly significance.
