bobby

So I bobbed my hair Saturday night. I could say I “cut” my hair, but because I just hacked off twelve inches without any further shaping or layering, it really was a bobbing. I had many bobbed hair ideals swirling in my head: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Gong Li in To Live (the female Maoist phase), Natalie Portman in Closer, Julia Fordham in the “Porcelain” video, the dancer Slam from Madonna: Truth or Dare, Louise Brooks, Renée Zellweger. So as the hacked braid sat on the table pulsating with its last breaths, I felt no sympathy for it and no remorse.

However, Sunday morning was a different story. I had a major crisis of regret because my hair suddenly felt too old lady: it felt less “bobbed” (as in flappers: Zelda Fitzgerald and Joan Crawford circa 1929), and more like “a bob.” Specifically, it was the hairstyle of my mother. When I want to look like my mother, I want to look like her when she was my age (in her 30s), not necessarily the age she is now (some years over her 30s). As it is with most girls, hair follicles are attached some major emotional circuits that are as yet unchartered by medical science. So near tears, I called my sister to wail: “I HATE MY HAIR! I HAVE MA’S HAIR!!”

But as soon as I started to tell her how depressed I was about this new hairstyle, I started cracking up and laughing. My sister joined in on my laughter, and after snorts and giggle tears, I hung up the phone no longer sad that I have my mother’s hair. Now I think: Jeez, there are worse things than having your mother’s haircut. After all, when Lenny Kravitz first cut off his dreads and looked in the mirror at his (chic) mini afro, did he think: “Do I have my middle-aged mother’s hairdo?” Which he does, by the way: in the years before she passed in 1995, his mother, the actress Roxie Roker (incidentally, I have the same birthday as her) also wore the mini-afro.

But even if he saw his mother’s middle-aged hairstyle in the mirror, I’m sure Kravitz was OK with it, because he’s an avowed Mother’s Child, which I am too. Is this not the ultimate achievement of an androgyne, when your mother possesses your head so that you may present a sleek, unexpectedly male physicality to the world? And while my mother may not be Roxie Roker, Jeung H. Kang is still a pretty chic lady. So why is it that Lenny Kravitz’s wearing the hairdo of his middle-aged mother looks automatically chic to me and my wearing the hairdo of my middle-aged mother makes me feel...like a middle-aged lady?

It has something to do with the inherent chic of blackness. The afro itself is an androgynous style, but it wasn’t always chicly androgynous. On the scalps of women, it was the mark of a certain working class of people too busy for lye and hot irons. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the Black Power movement’s infection (some would say “dilution”) into mainstream African-American style, that the short afro became chic. The androgyny of the mini afro went chic because first, militant women adopted the hairstyle of their male comrades, and the resultant androgyny allowed “Black is Beautiful” to become “Black is Chic.” Thus, it took a bodily detour—men, Black Panthers, Black Panther women—for the middle-aged black women to rock the short afro as a carapace of femininity rather than the byproduct of work-weary bones. The men gave back to their mothers.

So maybe my bob, my bobby, is a similar opportunity to give back to my mother. As a fetus, I vampirically sucked energy from my mother from within, demanding strawberries in winter and raw white rice chewed through and through. Now, I have a chance to bare my neck so that she may construct a fun femininity for herself through the blood of mine.

The reason for cutting off my hair was, as Miranda Richardson’s IRA soldier declares of her own bobbed hair in the film The Crying Game: “I needed a tougher look.” Of course I miss my twelve inches, and the soft and intimidating aura I put out with hippy-dippy locks. But now I want to be something else. The long hair I had, a result of three years’ growth, had begun to feel slack and crumply. I wanted to be reconnected to my neck and shoulders, and the bobby does that: I’m stretching out my neck more, putting my chin up more, and my general slumpy posture feels slightly more balletic now. Monday morning, when I greased and my hair back and slung on my trusty biker jacket with my APC Petit Standard jeans, I felt feminine in a way I never did when I wore the same outfit with my long hair. I was somewhere between David Bowie and Wanda Jackson: I felt tough...and sweet.

In “How to Conceive (of) a Girl,” Luce Irigray writes: “mother-matter affords man the means to realize his form.” I want to do the reverse! Of course, not that my mother needs my help in realizing her form, but wearing the same hairstyle, I think of as gifting her with the aura of the Thin White Duke-meets-the Queen of Rockabilly. Maybe she can feel like she is turning into a slice of her androgynous son, and maybe it will make her feel unexpectedly tough, sweet, and ageless.

popovers

When you are feeling hollow inside, make the kind of bread that is just as hollow inside. If you must, line the insides of the popoovers with honey before you eat them. Best just out of the oven, though. They have no real no flesh to burn your mouth, though the air within may feel like the moment before a sincere kiss.

it’s not the weather

I’ve given up eating cow’s flesh but returned to wearing blackened cow’s skin. I’ve recently, and perhaps only temporarily, but then again, perhaps permanently, given up my cardigans for black leather biker jackets. I have almost as many of these black babies in leather as I do of the woollies, but they had been stowed away for a few years now. It is October in New England, so it may seem perfectly logical to throw on thick black leather over thin numb bones, but actually, I started wearing leather again this summer, in the Bay Area. Again, because it is Northern California, wearing leather in the summer is not so crazy. But I doggedly wore the black leather biker jackets, even through the intermittent days in the mid 70s, sweating against the padded lining and still refusing to trade it in for something thinner and circulation-friendly.

I’m wearing the leather jackets now as I wear my angora sweaters: to make me feel warm and feminine. But in both temperature and femininity, the warmth of a leather jacket is not the warmth of wool. The sweater warms you by cozying up to you: when yarn fibers drill into your pores, it’s like the sweater is a lover who wants to fuck you. The leather biker jacket doesn’t cling to you: it keeps you warm for sure, but it is a warmth that makes you feel more hollow. The padding separates your skin from the carapace of the jacket, and you feel more tender and forkable in your warmth. Wearing the leather stylizes the empty feeling I carry with me so it feels more like a hole rather than a void. What I am doing when I wrap myself in a tough black biker jacket is turning myself into a handbag.

When I’m surrounded by the laminated skin of something killed, my own skin melts away, my own flesh melts away, and all I am is not the squishiness of my sweetmeats but the steam that would rise from them should I ever be gutted for the sake of a small leathergood. But that is a heat of sorts, and a heat that makes me forget the vacancy of love foreclosed. The thick black leather that surrounds me turns my entire body into the black hole, the rabbit hole, the wishing well to kiss and tell. It is a place in my head where I long to suck in that boy I love. It isn’t forever, but then, it’s not the weather, either. It’s a way of drawing expensive hearts and flowers around the emptiness and calling it an ideal, a vulva in my brain, a dream:

I was in a big loud house party full of twentysomethings. I was at the party with the particular boy I’ve been in love with for the last year. The boy told me he wanted to spend the night with me and we snuggled together on the floor amid cushions and cheap throws. In the pit of my stomach, I felt 22 years old (instead of 36). We smoked up a bunch of mind-numbing stuff. Then amid the giddiness of fully-clothed cuddling, I blacked out. When I woke up, the party was over and the boy was gone. I wandered around the house and someone familiar was yelling at me about being irresponsible. I missed my boy but all I could do was worry about having blacked out. I walked up to the rooftop of the house and this familiar angry person accused me: “Look what you’ve done! Now they think it is OK to do this!” I looked up. I had thought it was morning but there were stars. The black tarred rooftop was covered with broken glass. Neighbors in a higher house next door were throwing bottles out their window onto our rooftop. The moment the bottles hit the roof they shattered into powder. I know glass doesn’t break like that but it was my dream, and bottles bypassing shard directly into sand made the whole idea of breaking seem not violent, not destructive, not a loss. But I still had a feeling of dread. So I hugged myself hard and I felt a bit better. The neighbors continued to launch bottles and the angry familiar person was still yelling at me, but all I wanted to do was take my shoes off and press my feet into the ground glass. But I didn’t because I woke up. It was 2:00 AM, September 8, 2010, and there were indeed stars out still.