The Night She Found Her Beat

If you’d like to listen to my reading of this story, scroll down to the link.

I’m pretty sure I was there that night when he learned to be beautiful. Only it wasn’t called The Oscar. It was Johnny Angels. It had the same layout and I danced all night. Instead of being a teenage boy, with a fake id expressing his sexuality, I was a woman who let her kids live with their dad in Texas, had two abortions, and could be anyone she wanted to be in her avant-garde hair salon wearing a black polyester jumpsuit with a rhinestone zipper and black handmade cowboy boots.

When Bradley, who booked his haircut appointments under the name Adam Stills, came in, she asked him if his mother was a poet. He asked why. She said, because your name is so poetic. He answered, no, and asked her to cut his hair so it would look like he cut it and she said, well then why don’t you? Later, when he showed her the long black silk nightgown he just bought, and  even though she had no idea he intended to wear it she said it was very nice.

All her young gay clients loved the haircuts she gave them. And they loved her, especially, when she got a Grace Jones cut. That night in 1980, they gathered around her as though she was their mother come to see their beauty. She wore a black, polished cotton trench coat, walked up to the bar and the architect whose hair she had trimmed took her collar and turned it up giving her a dramatic style. He ordered a drink and the bartender said, here darlin’ as he handed it to her.

She walked toward the packed dance floor where the music never stopped and little bottles were passed around and everyone took a whiff making the pulsating music even more intense as a couple, high up in the bleachers, was moving and gyrating.