Good Vibrations Magazine

I finally made an appointment to get my hair cut today, at the trendy little salon in my suddenly trendy neighborhood. I have been trying to hold out for long hair, in spite of the fact that I haven’t successfully grown long hair since I had it cut off, against my better judgment, in high school. My compromise this time was clipping it up, rhinestone clips if I was up to something fancy or little plastic jaws when I was just trying to do the librarianesque “you can have me if you take my hair down” kind of thing. Granted, I wasn’t making it easy on you: I always wore four or five clips, adding another half-dozen plastic butterflies if I was really playing hard to get. But it’s too late for that now. I can’t catch the fine hairs, brown in back, going splendidly silver up front at my temples, in a clip anymore. No more showing off my nape, unclasped strands tendriling down. The kiss spot will be just barely hidden by a demure sweep of hair.

My hair girl is way too young to remember firsthand the slick magazine pages I have in mind when I say, “My partner likes it when you cut it Breck Girl.” She grins, though; all the hair people, even the ones who weren’t born yet, must know about those pastel pictures of women with hair too good to be true, or maybe she’s remembering the TV commercials of the ’70s. No, I couldn’t even pray for hair like that, but maybe she gets it anyway as she lifts the limp wisps away from my face and then leads me to the long communal basin. She leans me back. She’s femme, but has a trace of the mistress too: she puts my head in the basin’s groove, moves me bodily until I’m at the right angle to shampoo. Then, familiarly, she washes my hair, using four times as many sweet, slick hair products as I ever do at home. Her fingertips find tight muscles and rub them looser. It’s so intimate, and though I know everyone at this salon gets the same treatment or some variation of it, it still feels like I’m being taken to a place of great openness, like I could open my eyes and an erotic adventure would have started instead of a haircut.

But she’s still dressed when I get up to go to the chair, all the other salon workers and customers too, and I settle in. For some reason I don’t open my eyes once during the whole cut and style, no chatting today, just reverie and feeling her hands. She is really quite masterful: moves my head around to suit herself, hands right on my neck and scalp or else using my hair like fine pony reins, putting me where she wants me. I always like that. It’s one of the reasons I want to have long hair, giving my tresses up to a lover so he or she can grab the reins and ride. I like having my hair pulled — not yanked, usually, but just like I love it when my limbs are positioned for me and I’m turned into a fuck-doll, I love having my hair treated like it’s there for the taking. In real life it won’t grow long or thick enough, it’s too fine to really haul me around by, but I can dream.

I’m not a hair fetishist, not really. I love Robert’s hair as it is now, daddy-short in a flat top, and as it was when it was so long that he, too, wore it all gender-fucky in plastic clips. It was softly curly then. His hair now is animal, especially when wet, some indescribable place between bristly like a hedgehog’s and soft like a cat’s, I think more like a seal though I’ve never touched a live seal so I can’t be sure. My first girlfriend had a perfectly straight, thick drape of strawberry blonde

hair; it obscured her fingers moving on her guitar’s strings, obscured her face as she sang. Another girlfriend had hair so much finer, even, than mine that it was like spun silk, the only remotely femme thing about her; when we drove in her old Peugeot with the sunroof open it would fly crazily skyward as if trying to escape. It haloed her in gold, an angelic sign on a woman whose hands were always stained with motor oil.

I can’t even feel the hair girl’s hands on my head or in my hair. Although I feel my head changing positions so I know she must be adjusting me, exposing my nape so she can snip it bare, side to side where I can read her deliberation in the slow sni-i-i-ick of the scissors. She’s delicate, though, precise. I’m sure it’s going to be a good haircut. Even Shakespeare had a thing for good hair: “Only God, my dear/Could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair,” he reminded someone whose tresses inspired not just him, but everyone in the region, perhaps to these same thoughts of pony reins I have now — a blonde Elizabethan pony that everyone in town wanted to ride.

I’m not a hair fetishist, not really; I’ve never chosen a lover specifically because of her hair. I’ve never turned on to a man just because his hair was long, straight, curly or fuzzy, as we used to sing way back when, when hair was, if anything, even more important than it is today. I’m not really a hair fetishist, but I can be impressed. Our girlfriend J’s hair was thick and hennaed red, luxuriant and somehow just begging to have hands sunk into it, palms cradling her cheeks. I’m not very toppish in real life, but hair like that — or maybe it was the look in her eyes the gorgeous red hair framed — just made me want to fist my hands in it, pull her in, devour her.

And then the last time we had a date with Jack and Linda I started marveling at their long hair, each so different — hers dark and sculpted, laying down her back like a smooth waterfall, and his long, light, wild, a silvery cascade.

Linda’s not really tall though she seems that way sometimes, and the hair adds to her length. Her limbs are slim in my hands, such a good fit, the way it felt the first time I held a woman in my arms, realized sex would have whole new dimensions now that I would sometimes be the same size as or even bigger than my lovers. Linda’s touch is so sure, so practiced and cool, and she is so practiced in her body, too. I know what works for me but don’t always ask for it, would prefer to take the train ride into the magic tunnel to see what will happen, if the stars are lining up. If they’re not, I can always reach down and touch my own clit. Last time a nirvana moment happened while I was lost under a curtain of Jack’s hair, like mosquito netting in a tent in paradise, another place and time. He fucked me into such a perfect arc of taking it, of I want it, that somewhere mid-yell the talisman he wore around his neck, which had just been tapping and teasing my nipples before he rose up higher, slipped into my mouth, and suddenly I was fucking it too, lost under that wild sweep of hair.

Of course it had to occur to me, lost that way, that his hair would make perfect pony reins, head thrown back and back arched, rising over him and fucking his ass. For that matter, so would Linda’s. For that matter, Robert could do it while I watched, making the kind of perfect circles on my clit that Hair Girl made when she did my temples, hands slick not with cunt juice but shampoo.

I carefully skirt the notion of using Hair Girl’s hair like reins because I think hair girls and boys, captive audiences as they are, should be the ones to make the first move. So a cascade of possible images that might otherwise sweep through me when she pulls my head back again by my hair are kept at bay, barely.

I finally open my eyes. Oh, what a cute haircut, a sleek sweep over my eye, a completely different look than I walked in with. I’m in a rather different mood now, too. My dad, who used to be a barber, would call this “pixie-ish.” Are there still pixies? Am I one, even sometimes?

At home Robert says, “Oh, I always want to fuck you when your hair is all Breck Girl.”