posted October 15, 2005 (revised November 17, 2005)
We had our first date the next evening at that Ethiopian restaurant popular with every incense-huffing, arts-foundation airhead in the gallery and fashion district two blocks from the abandoned cork factory that's turned into the drug lair known as the Cracktory. Over a vegetarian sampler heavy on chickpeas (my new least favorite vegetables�they tasted like sooty phlegm), the restaurant playing wheezing ambient music with occasional sitar flourishes (gotta pander to the clientele), she said (apropos of nothing) that she suffered from trichotillomania, or the compulsive pulling-out of one's own hair. Before I could say "Oh really?" with unfeigned-looking empathy, she told me she'd started pulling out her hair in 1992 at age 12. She said in an authoritative voice that "trich" (pronounced "trick") tends to begin around puberty. (Yes, this disorder has its own official cute nickname.) She'd pluck out a strand at a time, rubbing each strand across her cheeks, rolling it slowly between her thumb and forefinger, collecting the hair between the pages of an old hardback copy of The Bully of Barkham Street she'd permanently borrowed from her middle-school library. She'd pull out her hair during times of stress: her menstrual period, final exams, prolonged seething between her parents, and especially worries that someone would notice her patchy scalp.
But no one did at first. When the hair loss grew too large to hide with creative combovers, Emily started wearing ballcaps everywhere. She didn't even have to attend gym, the only class to require bare heads; she had that golden ticket known as a medical excuse. (A heart murmur, in her case.) She got away with her trichiness for six months, until her parents finally caught her sans ballcap and false eyelashes. (She'd started pulling out her real eyelashes by this time.) Her parents ceased their seething long enough to send her to a psychologist named Dr. Portia Hickman-Miott, who won her over immediately, because the doc wore acid-washed jeans and pink fingernail polish.
Emily saw the doc off and on until graduation. The doc taught her Habit Reversal Training, in which you learn how to recognize your naughty hair-pulling urges and to think about something else when you get them. Emily told me the hour-long sessions had cost a hundred bucks each (worth every penny, of course) but wouldn't tell me what she'd think about to conquer her urges. Those thoughts were too personal to reveal this early in what she called "our possible relationship." I didn't say that I feel the exact opposite. I'd rather conceal financial matters from the opposite sex. What if your sweetheart turns into a greedy liar who wants to screw you over? Why use your big mouth to make her job easier?
Anyway, years of therapy (and a few tons of Prozac, one of the magic pills used to treat trich) decreased Emily's hair-pulling but didn't eliminate it. She still pulled out hair from time to time, keeping each strand in that purloined library book she still has, a book she still hasn't read. She'd even had a T-shirt with the words TRICH BABY on it made a few years earlier at a previous public radio arts festival. I didn't ask if she'd ever lacked enough sense to wear the shirt in public, or if she knew that "trick baby" is a slang term for a prostitute's child.
Ordinarily I'd have nothing to do with a nutcase like Emily, but I couldn't pass up her magnificent body, top-heavy with that porcelain skin that makes me turgid even before foreplay commences. (I could see the blue veins in her cleavage.) Also she had that academic spinster look I love�tiny round glasses, creased face, pinched lips, dingy red hair pulled tight into a bun the size of Lake Champlain. She was 25 but looked 50, making me even more turgid, not that I'd have to wait long (say, for the second date) to access her orifices. (I can't attribute my taste in women to anything Oedipal; my mother's scrawny and swarthy and has had so much work done on her face her plastic surgeon sends her two chocolate Advent calendars each December, though I do appreciate my mother's help in paying for my legal bills during that last, shall we say, inappropriate physical contact imbroglio.)
END
Fiction. Home. Whee.
� 2005 David V. Matthews