Until I became I really cheap Jew I never dared to try my hand at cutting my own hair, not even my thin brown bangs. The thought of my trembling hand holding a foreign silver steel object of scissors was a recipe for crooked bangs , a disastrous cut. Crooked bangs were supplied to me free of charge my whole life, courtesy of Babushka Polya. You see, her father, or as mom and me call him Dedushka Motya was a barber , so that is where Babushka learned how to cut, but somehow I feel like she always cut me with a masculine hand, a manum dextra trained to cut short straight, military, haircuts. Neat and swift the scissors went in a one dimensional manner. But as I was growing up, getting a haircut and actually paying for it was out of the question while we had a capable hairdresser in the family.
Babushka was always passionate about cutting my hair, she always claimed 2 things for my entire childhood. One , that I was too skinny and she would take upon herself to feed me enough so I was a plush , rosy youngster and two my bangs were always too long , and a young girl should look neat and long bangs were perhaps a gateway into rebellion in her views. So that is what cyclically happened, I ate well at Babushka’s house and my bangs were always too short. The truth is I was a chubby elementary schooler and junior high schooler, hell Im chubby period. But to Babushka , who lived through the war , food was important, that was the bottom line. I wouldn’t dare leave any unfinished food, every action had a proverbial cultural, superstitious saying. For example, if you left a morsel of food behind, and I often left the butt of a sausage in the plate, the creased asterisk in the end simply did not esthetically please my pallete. Babushka would threaten that the morsel would haunt me old day by meticulously, hop skotching behind me on every move I made. So I would eat it for her, with slight disgust. Rule number 2, “ bez chleba, ne obed !” that is “ without bread, it is not a meal” A meal without bread is impossible, bread keeps you alive, you must respect bread and therefore it accompanies your every meal like a best friend always by your side. So even if I was already eating the starchiest, carbiest meal imaginable , potatoes or macaroni, bread had to be consumed. That was that. After I was well fed, and watched 30minutes of television with Deydushka on the valore olive tone loveseat, that had beveled and embossed circles of our butts that were a lime green shade from hours of sitting in the past few years,Babushka meanwhile would finish all the dishes and tidy up in the kitchen.
Dedushka was always free to sit and watch tv after dinner, so was I, and Babushka always washed all the dishes herself. She never requested my help, in which case I would have helped, but neither did I once volunteer to help her, I still have guilt for being such a selfish,lazy child, ignorant of how truly hard both my mother and grandmother worked. So after she had cleaned our mess, she would invoke me into her personal, hairdresser seat and salon, that is the small bathroom near the kitchen. The toilet seat was placed down and as soon as I sat down the on the foamy, flowered embroidered toilet seat cover, Babushka would carefully whisk a towel around my neck to catch the falling hair. She turned the faucet on, cool, water but never to brisk, and after holding her inner palm for 2 seconds she would reverse to splash the top of her hand as well, then it felt like wet pancakes were slopped onto my forehead, she matted my bangs with her wet hands. Next she instructed me to close my eyes, eyes had to be closed for the duration of the haircut, and no squinting, I always squinted as a reflex. The hard fractioned, coil sounding metal made its way across my forehead, the cold edge of the scissors languidly traversed the landscape of my forehead. She went across with her father’s old scissors once and then returned back to straighten any mistakes. Therefore, my bangs were one layer, and lay perfectly parallel to my eyebrows, perfect Mary Jane bangs, before they became a trend in Hollywood. Then Babushka would admire her job and me, and say now, you look like a nice girl, the way a girl should look. What did I resemble before the reputation saving haircut, some sort of vagrant , loose moral filled girl? I was never happy with the result, the always too short bangs that were 3 inches about my eyebrows, only 3 weeks later I would approve of the length and by then pressure for another trim would be imminent ! It would only be in high school that I would regularly go to a hair dresser.
Finally to the reason I began speaking on the topic of haircuts, I started to give careless trims to my bangs since I have been In Prague. I have not been to a Salon here, only in Kiev. So some nights if under the possession of Bachuss I will give myself a friendly trim and try to rock the imperfections of it and the crookedness…. But to give another a haircut was a joke, out of the question. My hands are untrained , period, I took art and still I can not draw for the life of me, its just not immanent to my creativity and soul. So when I returned from Kiev to Prag in January I spent a week living with my Austria friend, Dominik, in the neighborhood of Zizkov. He lived on the highest floor, on Husinecka, and we would go out on the Balcony for flat vacations aka smoke circles. From his balcony we could see Zizkov park with , the Mausoleum on top, with Zizkov planted atop a jumping horse. Olivia who was also living there at the time had no apartment so we were a team, pseudo homeless and just messy. So when Dominik went out for Dinner with tereza, the anal , bitchy , selfish, pretentious Austrian girl , who through temper tantrums.
Olivia & I stayed behind because we had no money for dinner, we lived of rice and random Mexican dishes that she had the gift of conjuring up from just flour and left over meat and beans. But I was glad not to go, all because we would have the flat to ourselves and I could pretend like I lived there and Olivia was my flatmate. Also Dominik had a great record player and tons of records, hundreds between his collection and tereza because both of them DJ’d at Blind Eye , a bar up the hill from them. So we put on Simon & Garfunkel, Parsley, Saige, Rosemary & thyme and Pavement and Two Gallants which became my favorite and rocked out. We went on a flat vacation, this time with some weed, soon we found Nutella in the kitchen and started eating out of the container with a spoon. Olivia had been wanting to get a haicut and as a joke I said “ I’ll cut you’re hair” and she said Yes! Then I revoked my comment, Im just jokig I explaied ive never cut anyones hair in my life and her hair was not this Wasp, stringy, no fuss no muss hair she had beautiful thick curls, powerfurl Mexican follicles. But she was already immersed in the idea, she ran to the bathroom and got tereza’s scissors who had preciously cut her hair. Come on, she encouraged. I was laughing, almost peeing my pants, as I always do when I get too high. Ok, why the fuck not I thought? I got so into it, I felt like Edward scissors hands, but I pictured he hair like a bush and tried to dimension it in a round bushy shape, but don’t worry it had edgy choppy layers, very hipstery trims too. It had no strategy behind it, I tried to emulate the way professional did my hair, dividing sections of hair and working on each at a time for a uniform length at each level but then I just chopped where I pleased, it was beautiful it was art. Sometimes I would burst into laughter because I cut too much, and Olivia being so down would only ask what’s up, whereas I would freak-out and leave the seat. I said its ok and shoved a spoon of nutella in her mouth.
Ultimately, the bathroom floor lay covered in her curls, now there was nothing left of them. She looked in the mirror and actually like her hair cute! Success! I don’t think most people would have appreciated such a haircut but it suited her personality and way of life. It was asymmetrical, unpredictable, yet followed a generous pattern in most placed, it was itinerant, and ephemeral, it was out of time, it reflected a collective subjectivity. By collective subjectivity is that whomever Olivia encountered would instantly be drawn to her, people could relate, and even if they couldn’t they tried and if that failed she would relate to them, even if not a single tangible thing was in common. I emphasize this because of my inability to relate to people, in fact there are very few that I do feel I connect with, nevertheless the ones I do connect with ,it a real and strong connection, mercurial connection but connections nonetheless. So I think that is what I both envied and admired, I do not wish to be liked by everyone, there is no fun in that-I don’t care enough for that, all I ask is to be understood by more people.
