Stories

The Day I Stopped Loving My Hair

Vincent A. Alascia

5/5/2023

The rain came down in sheets that Thursday evening in late June 1972. We’d had four straight days of rain, another couple and lower Manhattan would be swimming. I stood outside the Biltmore theater remembering the last time, we were here. November 1968. I had wanted to surprise you. Our last night together in the city we grew up in. You wouldn’t have it. Afterall our next stop was the recruitment center. I had begged you.

“Rolf, don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what? Make a decision on my own for the first time? Accept who I am?”

“Bullshit.” I grabbed you by the shoulders. “This ain’t you. We’ve been together since the fifth fucking grade. I would know you. I do know you.”

You shook your head. “No. You know the me you made. The me who was your shadow, right hand man, lover. You know the me who dropped out, who tuned in, who fit in. But you never knew the pain.” A gust of wind swept the sidewalk blowing your long blonde hair across your wet eyes. “I’m not you Wade. I’m not one for this scene. I can’t fake it anymore.”

I shook my head. A crowd had moved past us looking for tickets for this evening’s show. I tried to coax us toward the theater. You wouldn’t have it. I took a step back. Folded my arms. I wanted to scream. Scream to the whole fucking shit of a world that would put me in this situation. Then I wanted to roll it all up in a ball and set fire to it. Burn it all away. “They really fucking got to you, man. It’s just a bad trip you know. A shit spell. We’ll get through it. The war is gonna end, man. We’re making it happen.”

You looked at me. Your blue eyes clear as ever. The dimple in the center of your chin so far away. I longed to kiss it. Hold you beside me and kiss it right off his face. You drew in a long breath of the wet carbon dioxide soaked air. “You’re living a dream man. Do you remember this past winter? The winter in which we nearly froze to death huddled up in that flat? They didn’t have heat, shit they didn’t even have a functioning window. The cold just tore into me rending my bones brittle with it. I can’t face that again. I can’t go home and I can’t stay like this. Winter is coming again. And the war…” You looked off, as you often did, into something only your eyes could see. “War is never going away. It’s just a dream. A selfish dream.”

I put my hands up framing my face, inches from covering my ears. “They really fucking got to you.”

“Who? Who got to me?”

“Your fucking parents. That limp dick teacher, Mr. Carlson.”

A smile brushed past your lips. “You always hated social studies.”

“No man, don’t make this about school. We left that scene. School is gone. Done. It’s just us and if you do this it can’t be us. You don’t want another winter here, then fuck this whole crooked city. Let’s go to New York. We can sell some of our shit and get a Greyhound west. There’s sun there, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, man. And the drugs, I hear they got stuff there that makes this shit look like kids stuff.”

“That’s you, run away and do more drugs. What are we running from? The drugs haven’t taken us from it yet, nor have they taken us someplace better. They’ve just taken us. I want more. I want a reason I draw breath every morning. I want to know that I count, that I’m important.”

“How can you say that?”

A woman in a fine hat and far too clean shoes stopped to look at us. I glared and she moved on. I lowered my voice. “How can you say that to me? You once said I gave you meaning? We were the reason you got up each morning and greeted a new day. Was that all a lie?”

You reached out for me for the first time. In silence you shook your head. “I meant it then.”

“Then?”

“Then.” You nodded as if you’d just said a dirty word. “It’s not enough anymore.” You wiped your face. “Maybe that’s not an answer, and maybe I’m just a selfish prick. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want you to think this is some way to attack you, attack us. It’s just something I have to do. Once it’s done,” you took a deep breath. “Once it’s done, we can see about us.”

I had known I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. They were taking you from me and then they took you all the way. I heard about it in March, your cousin from Brooklyn told me at a party in the village. There wasn’t even enough of you to fit in a box. Oh, how your mother cried, your cousin said. Yeah, she cried the tears she wrapped herself in.

I looked up. Curtain time was approaching and in another couple of weeks the show would be closed. The signs on the wall said so; Hair, Final Performances. I drew in a deep breath, the last of the tears, the last of the snot clogging my nose. It wasn’t just the end of a show. The end of a life. A life that was taken from me by a system, an ideal that cared for only one thing. Blood. Blood, and the lies it wraps the bodies that succumb to it in. I walked into that theater knowing I wasn’t walking out. I knew this was closure. This was the end of all the nights, of all the days, of all the memories and faceless partners. It all ends here. Curtain time.

End

My Fist collection of Stories

My first collection of short works is out now. The title of the anthology is, The Hole in Your Mind. The idea for this title came to me from one of my favorite lines from the Sci-fi series, Babylon 5. In this case the hole in your mind represents those times when reality appears more bizarre than your consciousness would allow. The situations and events in these stories fall into a hole they are never likely to emerge from. Here is a picture of the cover.

For a sample here is one of the stories from that collection. A tale of a little girl on a distant planet who’s dream comes crashing down around her.

Charlotte

Charlotte’s eyes didn’t work anymore and her synapses came unglued as the circuit board she thought was a brain continued to deteriorate. Her muscles convulsed, causing her arms and legs to twitch. Finally she put together her final words and looked in what she thought was Dr. Oney’s direction.

“Were there a God, I’d hope he damn you for a thousand eternities.”

“Charlotte,” Dr. Oney said with a chuckle, “were there a God, we would have no need for Spheres.” A tear darted down the old man’s cheek. It was not for the little girl he held in his arms but for the Calosian people. This petulant headstrong child was their best chance for surviving the coming calamity; now she was no more.