Sarah McElwain

Word Count 1533

In the 1990s, I dined out frequently on the fact that I’d once lived so close to CBGB-OMFUG, which stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers,” I crossed the street to avoid CBGB, spying on the scene from the safety of the opposite corner. The costume was black leather, chrome studs, chains, fourteen-hole Doc Martins, ripped fishnets, extreme eyeliner, thick Kabuki make-up on both girls and guys, and betel-nut red lipstick from the three-for-a-dollar bin at Manny’s Variety on Second Avenue. 

Hair had taken a U-turn. In the 1960s, hair was natural. With the invention of neon dyes, super-strength Aqua-net hair spray, and cheap water-soluble adhesives like Elmer’s glue, as well as new uses for Knox gelatin, hair went to places it had never been before. The scene, which began in London, was flourishing in front of CBGB. 

I called the punk who lived above me Thud, based on the sound of his boots hitting the floor upstairs. One night there was a knock on my door. Sketching at the drawing table, listening to Charlie Parker, I switched off the radio. More knocking. I tiptoed to the door. 

The tapping turned to pounding. “It’s Rat. Your neighbor upstairs. I need help.”

This was how robbers and rapists played on women’s sympathies to get them to open their doors. Unlocking it, I opened it a crack—there was no safety chain. It was Thud. “Do you have a knife?”

I shut the door and locked it.

“I’m not gonna hurt you. I need help. A knife or scissors.

“Why?” I peeked out again. 

He pointed to the spikes. “To cut them off.” 

In the glare of the fluorescent light, the spikes were a brilliant gelatinous green. Thud looked more like a cartoon dinosaur in his plaid shorts and stained SLAM t-shirt than an urban street warrior. “Please,” he begged again. “I can’t sleep!” 

It was hard to refuse this plea. Opening the door, I let Thud in. 

He pointed to the paring knife on the cutting board that I used to cut cucumbers and apples. I shook my head. It wasn’t the right tool for the job. Picking up the double-edge razor blade on my drawing table, I handed it to him. “Use this.”

He looked at it like he’d never seen a razor blade before. “Here, I’ll show you,” I said, pulling out a chair. He sat, and I touched a spike. Very creepy, more solid than I’d expected, like hard jello. Looking at my fingers to see if they were green, I smelled them. “Really?”

“Do it!”

I tentatively sliced into a spike with the razor blade. I saw how hair like this became your life. All that dyeing and sculpting was a full-time job, it was hair that needed to go out every night. Sacrificing for beauty was one thing. This was discomfort for ugly. The first spike landed on the floor with a thump. It was hard work. Twisting around, pressing closer, hot and sweaty, my arms ached as I sawed off more spikes while Thud moaned with relief when each one hit the floor. They lay scattered on the linoleum like horror movie vegetation. 

“You got a bag?” 

I handed him one from the bodega. “What for?”

“I’m selling ‘em.” He stuffed the spikes into the bag and then looked in the mirror over the sink. His skull was covered with green tufts like the terrain on some weird planet. “I need to shave my head. You got a razor?”

“Blades, but no razor.” I was a feminist who shaved her legs, and I wasn’t about to give him that one.

“Ok, thanks,” he sniffled. “You did me a solid.” He walked into the hall with his bag of spikes. I patted him on the back, closed the door, and locked it. 

I wasn’t surprised when Thud knocked again the next night. “It’s Rat.” He was a different person without six neon green spikes jutting out of his head. They’d created a distraction from his chubby cheeks and large, even white teeth. His freshly shaved skull was pink and tender. Without hair, he looked more like a chipmunk than a rat. I let him in. “Here.” He held out a twenty-dollar bill. “I got $70 bucks on St. Mark’s Place. It’s your cut.”

“Someone bought the spikes? For what?” An art piece? Or was there a market for punk impersonator wigs? Pretenders from New Jersey and Connecticut who roamed the streets of the East Village at night? 

“That’s their business.” He was wearing a clean, white T-shirt and the same plaid shorts. “Here, take it. I’m paying for the haircut. You look like you can use it.”

Did I look like someone who needed twenty bucks? Reaching over, he stuffed the twenty in the pocket of my jeans. It seemed natural after the intimacy of the haircut, not just the physical nearness but the intensity of each spike thumping to the floor and lying there in eerie weird greenness, that we started kissing. We made out for a while then I invited him up to my loft bed. 

In the morning, my thighs were burning from the roughness of his stubbly head. I rolled over. He traced his fingers along the contours of my body. His hands were softer than mine. I’d forgotten that I had a shape, that I was curvy. Our clothes were hanging on the plywood steps. His plaid shorts, my jeans, two T-shirts, my underpants. The radio was still on. The room was full of hazy blue music, lonely scattered notes. He gave it a bad look. “What kind of music do you listen to?”

I didn’t want his disdain to touch Chet Baker. I turned it off. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of music he listened to. He hung out at CBGB. “Let’s go get coffee,” I said.

“Don’t you have any?”

I had no pot and depended on powdered Nescafe, strong and effective. Buying coffee out was a treat. 

We left the building. It was early morning, and a mist was coming off the garbage that would burn off later. My grim apartment made the trash-filled streets seem full of color and possibility. 

“I can’t do this,” he said as we crossed Bowery. “What if someone sees me?”

At first, I thought he was ashamed to be seen with me. Then he pointed to his head. I saw without his spikes, he was no one. “Nobody’s out this early,” I said. We stopped at the coffee cart on the corner. Two punks staggered up the street after a night of partying. “Maybe they won’t recognize you.” Digging the twenty out of my jeans to pay for the coffee. 

The vendor shook his head. It was too early in the morning to change a twenty. Thud didn’t have any money. “We’ll give it to you tomorrow.” 

“You kids,” sighed the vendor, handing him the cups.

In Tompkins Square Park, we sat on a bench. People rushing to work looked at us with envy, leisurely drinking our coffee. I wanted to be one of them, hurrying off to a paying job. “What do you do?” I asked Thud.

“Do?” Like he didn’t know what the word meant.

“I mean, how do you pay the rent?”

“My uncle gives me money. He’s a rich guy in a wheelchair. A cripple.”

This sounded so callous that I turned and looked at him. “He gave me a year to find myself.”

“So what are you doing?” We were back where we’d started.

“Doing?” He shrugged. “Hanging out.” Thud clearly wasn’t burning with ambition. Wasn’t a painter or in a punk band, activist group or improv troupe. “The year’s up,” he added.

“What’s next?” 

He shrugged and drank his coffee. 

“Where does your uncle live?”

“Westport.”

“Connecticut?” I saw who Thud was. A lost rich kid, who in the early morning light without the benefit of six green spikes, looked very young. I thought about his soft hands. No one was paying me to find myself in the city. If I didn’t get a job this week, I’d have to leave. He stood up. “See ya later. Oh, and thanks again.”

I was glad to see him go. I saw regret in Thud’s future. He’d look back at this year as a wasted one. I finished my coffee. The park was shimmering and green in the dappled early morning sunlight. A switch inside of me had been turned back on. Sex was good. My senses were thrumming with afterglow, those glad-to-be-alive, post-sex hormones. I needed to look for a job, but couldn’t make myself do it. Returning to my apartment, I turned on the radio, made instant coffee, and sketched trees all day, listening to Bill Evans and for the sound of Thud’s boots overhead.

The next afternoon I went upstairs. The door to his apartment was slightly open. He’d moved out, leaving behind a pile of old clothes and take-out containers. His year was up. Without spikes, he couldn’t be Rat. He’d have to reinvent himself again. Mostly, I was relieved. I wanted more but didn’t even know his real name. I took his coffee pot downstairs.  

Sarah teaches tutorials at Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Philip Schultz’s Writers Studio. She is editor of Namaste, the Integral Yoga Institute of New York Newsletter. For ten years, she co-hosted Writers Read NYC, providing performance venues for writers in Greenwich Village. Her essay, “Fingertips Part 3, With Thanks to Stevie Wonder,” about teaching yoga to the blind is forthcoming in The Art of Touch, University of Georgia Press (September 2023).