Author: Jeremy Ray Jewell

“Do you know how many women would kill for your locks?” I thought for sure that the stylist was going to reject the appointment to preserve my dead cell protein accretions. I had to lean in and whisper, “Do you mean they want to scalp me and wear my follicles around like Ed Gein’s bonnet?” I was partially hopeful. “No, no,” she said, “maybe they would want to touch it, maybe they would hate you and all you stand for but feel inexplicably drawn to you via hair-envy. But I don’t believe there will be any Wisconsin nipple-belts involved.” I folded my arms and squeezed my chest until that, too, felt like cracking a lobster. “I meet my Jungian female anima regularly in my dreams and we get along just fine,” I reflected, “and I suppose that if she were around when I’m awake then I wouldn’t feel sentimental toward any woman at all, ever again. I don’t feel sentimental towards her, actually, I just feel complete. There can’t be any higher freedom than that! Ultimate reconciliation! Aristophanean soulmates, like conjoined twins, like mutually dead cell protein accretions in the form of the opposite gender!” I saw a stem cell floating in the barber’s blue disinfectant jar, and I saw faded clipper hairstyles of baby-faced owners of extensive automobile sound systems, and I saw facial hairs of soft-palmed lumberjacks who ride the timbers of finance down the mighty Colombia River singing their mighty, soft-palmed lumberjack songs: “Yo-ho-ho, the redwoods our fathers, let’s put on their jackets, it’s the lumbering life for me!” Floating out to the Pacific, they crack lobster chests with the dull ends of axes. “Say,” I continued, “maybe someone feminine with an English-looking face could slap on my bloody headdress and talk to me about poetry and America and the wild edibles of the Carolina Piedmont and I’d call the approximation adequate. You have the blades, sister. This could be a new source of revenue for you: Jungian makeovers and Wisconsin nipple-belts. And you can serve Pacific, mustachioed lobster, too. You can crack their claws with the backs of scissors, hot butter lubricating beards…” But before I knew it, the deed was done. And like a secular circumcision in the bowels of a Baptist hospital, there fell my accretions to the floor. Swept up and away to decompose before me, there went my locks, pursued to the landfill by a herd of ethnically ambivalent women eager to braid what my mother incidentally gave my daughters. “Do you know how many women would kill?” — back to the lumber camps, for me, man. Man. Man.