Twisted : My Dreadlock Chronicles (9781572847491) by Ashe Bert

Author:Ashe, Bert [Ashe, Bert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781572847491
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

Fuzzy Phase (i)

Standing at the bathroom mirror, a scowl on my face…

My hair sucks.

At least, I thought, it sucked as far as I could tell. I was trying to figure out why I didn’t like it. Saturday night, hanging out with Mark, I had been in heaven. I loved the way my dreads-in-training lay on my scalp, just so. I was, remember, fresh from both B.J.’s inaugural twist on Tuesday and her retwist earlier that Saturday afternoon. My hair looked exactly the way I wanted it to look. I wish I could have frozen it in place. Because by late July, just a few days after coming back to Worcester, my head looked like a blurry, annoyingly out-of-focus movie. The individual strands—not the twists themselves but the tiny, particular hairs that were gathered up and rotated into twists—were loose and roaming all over my head, as if they were restless, as if they’d suddenly gotten wanderlust. I looked awful. I accosted Val in the kitchen, complaining bitterly: “Look at my hair, Val—what is this?”

She smiled reassuringly. “Well, they’re dreadlocks, aren’t they? Surely you don’t expect neat dreadlocks? They’re supposed to be fuzzy, right?”

Well, yes, of course she was right. But still, the fact was, some dreadlocked heads looked better than others. And right now, my hair looked as if it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be dread or not. It looked, well, dreadful. And I had an interview at Brown University for a visiting professorship midday Wednesday. I needed to set up an appointment with someone at Roots ’n Locks so I could get twisted on Wednesday morning. This meant I’d also be testing Roots ’n Locks for future hair maintenance. They were closed on Monday, though. So either they’ll have an opening, I thought, or I’ll just have to float to Providence naked as I am.

•••

I finally figured out why my hair looked so shabby. I touched it! B.J. emphatically told me that I was not to touch my hair, and her brochure said something similar. And I hadn’t—all day long. It was itching like a rabid rash, too, and still, I had faithfully left it alone.

The night before, like a lunatic, like an idiot, I had placed a baseball jersey over my pillow and then tossed and turned on it all night long. Roughed up my hair but good. The woman expressly said not to touch it. The whole time I had been in LA, I used a pillow wrapped in silk, thanks to a blouse my mother let me borrow. Here, I apparently thought I could withstand the equivalent of rubbing my head with a scratchy polyester baseball jersey for six or seven hours straight. I might as well have used my fingers to scratch it—hard (at least I would have gotten some satisfaction, some release, if I had).

I’ll have to suffer through tomorrow, I complained to myself, get twisted the day after that, and then go back to doing what I did in LA. I

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