How Robin Forced Me To Start Dying My Hair

[mallorys_camera]

So where was I again? I forget. Oh, right – in the opening days of the twenty-first century, one of those strange little towns that's outlived its usefulness, and so is forced to prey parasitically on a past that never happened. At least not the way they pretend it did.

(Please don't ask me who "they" are. I told you the first time: I don't know.)

Here's Max at the feet of one of those giants of the past, a sardine fisherman. The Poet writes how one morning the sardine fisherman rose his fist and cursed the gods over having to pay dues to the Cannery Row Business Improvement District equal to the amount he was charged in municipal taxes. (The Cannery Row Business Improvement District is a consortium of deep-pocketed businessmen who collect money, sit on their fat asses and do nothing to improve the economic climate of this dead little town.) The gods heard this blasphemy and turned the fisherman into stone! Well… not stone exactly. A fog-resistant, rustproof metal alloy actually.

This is why I confine all outcries against municipal ineptitude to this tiny little cul de sac in cyberspace.

Here is an Edsel! It really has no bearing on your life, or mine either, but I thought it was cool to see one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the American automotive industry parked across the street from me – so lovingly restored too! It's not all that ugly. Why did it fail? Ah, the mysteries of the tipping point…

Anyway, it's been kind of a blah week. Business at the Little Store fell off sharply after Labor Day – to be expected, of course, but still a bit unsettling. Max has been headquartering here for the past three weeks. It's been terrific to have him here, I just enjoy the hell out of the kid, but all his friends have already started school so he's been kind of at loose ends.

"I'm not all that good at amusing myself," he told me drily yesterday. That was his excuse for watching the entire Beauty and the Geek marathon on VH1.

Every 15 minutes or so he would murmur plaintively, "I really need to get my orientation reading done." (Orientation at Stanford starts tomorrow.)

I did manage to drag him out in the early afternoon on a glass bottom boat tour of the Monterey harbor. Here are two sea lions hiding out under the commercial wharf:

Also I spent three hours looking for Alabama 3's cover of These Boots Are Made For Walking which used to be on my hard drive and now mysteriously isn't. And I went to ____ ________'s birthday party, redeemed from awfulness by the presence of an old blues singer, Broadway John Tucker, who is just a totally amazing performer.
Here he is, a little out of focus, wondering why his wife and his woman can't get along. More men should wear porkpie hats.
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So. Maria.

By the time I met her I was over my Lesbian phase – meaning I still fantasized but the objets of my fantasies were always girls about the same age I was myself at the height of my Sapphic experimentations.

But there's no denying that I had an intellectual crush on her.

Me and everyone else.

After some downward negotiation of salary expectations, I was duly hired by People Magazine and flown to the great glass Time Life building in NYC for orientation. I carted Robin along in an infant car seat.

Robin was two weeks old, only recently discharged from the Intensive Care Nursery where he'd been rushed mere seconds after birth, a casualty of meconium aspiration. In the hospital he'd developed a mild aversion to being touched which made cuddling problematic. Also when they finally started feeding him by mouth, they'd used bottles – against my objections – which meant he'd also developed an aversion to latching on to my breast.

During the meetings with my new corporate masters, I attempted – unsuccessfully – to breastfeed him.

The corporate masters were actually cooler about this then you would have guessed. It was the week that the Susan Smith story first broke. I guess everyone was especially sensitized to the demands of motherhood.

The meetings lasted for four days. Every meeting began with Jim Kinsella striding purposefully up to the whiteboard, scribbling a bunch of illegible words on it and then scowling at us meaningfully while Maria beamed from the front row.

I'd never seen a whiteboard before.

"Get used to them," murmured Hala, sitting next to me. "You'll be seeing a lot of them."

Hala was the ambassador to People Online from the publishing side of the magazine. She was fabulous and more than a little scary. Hard-working, chain-smoking, bullshit detectors set on high. There was an interesting backstory that I never became privy to – her father some kind of rags-to-riches business tycoon, a Polish emigrant who made good. Of his four children – two daughters, two sons – only Hala seemed to have inherited ruthless drive and ambition. She'd been on the fast track for a Time Inc corporate vice presidency – high priestess in the pantheon of brands! – when she'd jumped ship to join People Online because she saw clearly that the Internet was the future of publishing.

She didn't have much use for Maria. And even less for Jim Kinsella.

This was the first time I'd been back in New York City in many, many years and I was loving it – the crowds on the streets! so many lives engulfing mine that I would never touch! – and I was so enthralled by the endless possibilities of the new job, so pleased that this was a realm I knew more about than the highly paid executives who had hired me.

"The most interesting thing about the Internet is the way it gives the lowliest web publisher near parity with corporate image wranglers," I told them. "With less than two thousand dollars of equipment, anyone can make their own stab at defining the cultural zeitgeist."

Kinsella peered at me with disdain. "But we have the brand name," he said.

Every night in my expensive hotel room I would have marathon phone conversations with my best friend Tom Mandel back in California during which I'd deconstruct the day's events in great detail. Tom was a brilliant strategist, used to living his life over telephone wires – he was the Well's most notorious addict after all – a tendency only heightened and rarified by his recent medical diagnosis with Stage IV lung cancer.

The diagnosis had come the day before Robin's baby shower, two months prior. I'd been sitting in front of my computer, logged on to the Well (naturallement!) when Tom "sent" me – arcane jargon for the system's IM technology: Very bad news. The worst possible.

He'd shown up at the shower the next day anyway, and I remember feeling so touched, so moved, by this show of support.

I couldn't imagine the world without Tom then and find it hard even now though it's coming up on thirteen years.

Tom also fancied himself in love with Maria, so in addition to reporting on corporate strategy, I would also do fashion reports and up-to-the-minute breaking stories on goo-goo eyes with Kinsella.

Kinsella was openly gay so that was safe.

"He's such a prick," Tom would say. "An arrogant prick. Who knows nothing. Who's not even interested in making love to her. I don't get it."

Then it was time to go home.

Car services were another new thing and I was all country mouse over the shadowy black limosine that dropped me off at JFK. They'd bought me a business class plane ticket too!

Something weird happened on the flight home though.

I was cradling Robin, unsuccessfully trying to interest him in my left breast when two air marshals strode purposefully into the business section.

They stopped right in front of us.

"That baby," one of them said. "Can you prove that it's yours?"

Gotta love that "it."

Well, I didn't have a birth certificate. Alameda County hadn't even issued one yet. And the baby was squirming, obviously annoyed with my tit. And I was 42 years old and still enough of a hippie to disdain coloring my hair which had started to go grey in my early thirties.

No, I couldn't prove that it was my baby. Unless…

"Well, I draw the line at showing you my episiotomy," I told them. "But I can squeeze some milk out if you want to watch. Here –"

"That won't be necessary," said the taller of the two hastily. They turned tail and fled.

Later one of the stewardesses told me there'd been a kidnapping scare in the airport. I suppose the air marshals were just doing their job.

But I felt as though the universe was saying, You're too old to be a mother.

As soon as I got off the plane I booked an appointment with a hair colorist.

Comments

[nokomisjeff.livejournal.com]

My lovely wife started getting gray hair by the time she was 26. By the time she was 45, her hair was a mishmash of gray clumps, brown, and auburn highlights. I found it kind of sexy, as her hair went down to her butt. Her mother was constantly bugging her to color her hair(my MIL is 79, and a bleach blonde), but my wife always balked. Since her chemo, she's adopted the Sinead O'Connor look...which is kind of sexy. I'm probably going to go to hell for thinking that:)

Aloha,

Jeff