Dead Heads

I went to get my hair cut by a friend of a friend yesterday at Palm Beach Academy. I didn't like the idea of sitting in as a crash-test dummy for an aspiring hairstylist, but my friend assured me that the person cutting my hair wouldn't leave me looking like my 7 year old nephew mistook me for a piece of construction paper.

When I arrived, I sat down in the lobby. I looked to my left, where there was a row of six styrofoam heads, each sporting a trendy haircut. Their lifeless eyes stared at me, and I felt as though they were challenging me to be bolder with my hairstyle, maybe to try out a faux hawk or go a shade darker. I felt a little bit insecure as I reflected on my middle school days, when my grandmother would take small, calculated steps around me in her kitchen as she breathed on me and crafted my hair into a bowl cut, leaving me looking like the love-child of Toad from Mario Brothers and Carrot Top.

It was finally my turn, and I escaped the prying eyes of the mannequin heads to the safety of a barber's chair. When asked what kind of haircut I wanted, I just said "Oh, you know, just clean it up a little bit." I was perfectly satisfied with my hair as it was. If I could have frozen time yesterday, so that my hair stayed that length until the human race went extinct, I would have. That's not a good attitude to have when you're sitting in a barber shop, and asking someone I barely know to freeze time seems kind of unreasonable. I just decided to go short, right then and there. I tried to go "finger length," and discovered that what finger length actually looks like all depends on the size of your barber. The finger length haircut given by the large Italian ex-marine that usually cuts my hair with his giant, meaty fingers, is very different from the finger length of the dainty friend of a friend who shared a mirror with me yesterday.

I noticed a duffel bag on the floor, and asked what was inside.

"Those are my heads," she said. I thought that things could get ugly if you got pulled over and searched with that in your trunk.

"Is there real hair on those things?" I asked.

"Yes, it's dead people's hair. Nobody would donate that much hair," she said.

"Do you think this place is haunted?" I asked.

"No, they didn't die here," she said.

I was uneasy with the knowledge that all around me, people were grooming the hair of corpses. Suddenly, the brightly lit salon became eerie to me. I started to think about the people there more as morticians than anything else.

"Do they smell like embalming fluid when you get them?" I asked.

"No, they wash the hair before we get them," she said.

"Do you ever put their hair up in cornrows?" I asked.

"Yes, all the time," she said.

I thought about how my hair would look in cornrows, and decided that when I die, I'd rather not have my scalp donated to further the cause of beauty. In fact, I'd be more comfortable if nobody did. They should just shave horses instead.