Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman

Author:Francisco Goldman [Francisco Goldman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2021-04-13T15:26:45+00:00

A few days before I left for college, I went with my mother to a hair salon in the next town. The hairdresser applied a smelly heated paste that burned against my scalp, smeared and tamped it into my hair with a plastic palate knife, and massaged it in with rubber-gloved fingers, up to her wrists in gooey tangles. This is a big job! she exclaimed. I sat under the hairdryer for a long time, then the hairdresser went to work with her scissors. The whole operation took a couple of hours, and my mother patiently sat there, sometimes idly leafing through a women’s magazine or staring primly at some apparently invisible point in space. When we left the salon, I had straight hair falling nearly to my shoulders, silky and thick. I remember how it tickled my collarbones and how thrilling that was. The hairdresser said I looked like a baby-faced George Harrison. I thought my hair was more like Todd Rundgren’s, but when the Godard movie Masculin Féminin was screened at Broener College on a weekend night early that fall, I realized it was more like Chantal Goya’s. After we came home from the hairdresser that afternoon my father’s disgust didn’t bother me because what did I expect? It didn’t stop him, the day I left for college, from giving me a present, a meerschaum briar pipe, with a tin of tobacco and pipe cleaners, from Leavitt and Peirce in Harvard Square, where he bought his own pipes, tobacco, and cigars. A college man has to have a pipe, said Bert.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.