Hair Apparent

I asked Alex several times if he wanted to get his hair cut. He is 14, and even though he is severely autistic he kept saying “No.” He says no to almost everything these days.

 

“Haircut, Alex?” This inane repetition worked wonders when he was still in the single digits. Instead now he just repeats “No!” (didn’t you hear me the first time?), whips up his hand and sweeps his hair back from his forehead – as if imagining what he’s going to look like when he’s 50, if he makes 50 – and opens his mouth like an alligator to grin into the bathroom mirror.

 

“Haircut, Alex?”

 

“Noooo.”

 

He has Jill’s hair (lucky him): thick dark-brown strands, almost like wire when I pick a lock from the floor of the barber’s and roll it in my fingers. Alex, sit still. In the mirror, Alex. Look in the mirror.

 

We get his hair cut at a hole in the wall at 3^rd Avenue and 93^rd Street, I think it is, a place Jill liked the looks of for me eons ago and then forgot, a place where I went (and still go) and a place I brought Alex.

 

“Alex, do you want a haircut?”

 

“Haircut!” he says one day.

 

Wasn’t the first place. “I can’t cut his hair if he won’t sit still,” said one barber. “No, no,” said another, I think I remember. Strange how there’s no place that has the patience to cut the hair of a lot of people like Alex. So we walked in and out of places until we found a place where some of the name is “Lucky.” Every time I walk by in my unemployed wanderings I glance through the window and wave; they usually wave back. I’d tell you the full name of the place except I’m afraid every silently desperate family in New York with a kid like Alex would make a line out of the door.

 

Like last Saturday. I walked down to Lucky’s with him and shadowed my eyes with my hand and peering into the window to see every seat occupied along Lucky’s six-foot padded bench. “Alex, let’s walk around the block.” “Nooo!” and he shoved me (did they see this through the dark windows?) “Alex, let’s just frigging walk around the block.”

 

“Nooo.”

 

We go in, while the place is still here. There’s the boss in glasses (his mother cut my hair once), the guy in salt-and-pepper hair who usually does Alex, and some guy I don’t recognize. They have the local news on the big TV atop the counter of the center seat. The place is so crowded one customer is sitting in the chair of a barber who isn’t in there today. “Alex, there’s nowhere to sit.” Hi, Alex! They know him here. Jill was once struck by that.

 

“Alex, there’s nowhere to sit.” Alex runs to one of the barbers’ chairs, but it isn’t his turn. “Do you want to sit here?” a woman at the end of the padded bench said. She moved to our side, where two people with grey hair sat. They both looked like women. “I’ll sit in the moms’ section,” she said. She had a blonde pageboy and was kind of hot. “Thank you,” I said. Her son was soon in a chair. He had blond hair and said nothing while the man with the salt-and-pepper hair clipped away. The young man’s eyes weren’t there, but still he didn’t tip his head up and stare at the ceiling like Alex. I pretended to watch the news in the TV.

 

A chair opened, the chair of the guy who didn’t know Alex. Alex took it. The man we didn’t know whipped the maroon apron around Alex and fastened it behind his neck. The man tucked a white paper napkin behind Alex’s neck. And it began. Alex would pitch his head forward at the sound the electric clippers and bite the maroon cloth and I’d get off my mother-donated place on the padded bench and say, “Alex, no. Look in the mirror. Look in the mirror.” I swiped my palm of my hand across Alex’s temple the way I saw one of his special education teachers do it once. “Look in the mirror.”

 

“How do you want it?”

 

How in hell do I know? I don’t know this man and he’s never cut Alex’s hair, and Alex can’t tell me how he wants it. The man we don’t know cuts and snips fast – that’s the only way you cut Alex’s hair – but during some time as I stare at the local news the guy who’s in charge and whose mother once cut my hair comes over to Alex’s chair. He starts snipping and clipping, and who the hell am I supposed to tip now as the guy who’s in charge comes in with the clippers and finishes Alex.

 

“When are you guys moving?” I ask him as I pay (a 20 percent tip – standard here as far as I’m concerned). “Still November?” Still November. They’re ripping down the block to presumably make room for yet another high-rise apartment building that will have nothing to do architecturally with the other high-rises in the area of 93^rd and 3^rd. They say yes, November. They mumble a street. I don’t speak Russian, but I will, it seems have to hunt down the place where my son can get his hair cut.

 

The Car Ads

 

Jill and I want to buy a car, the first for us since Alex was about 2. I found our last car on a street in Queens on one Mother’s Day with a smashed rear window and a raped dashboard where they’d yanked the radio.

 

Last time I bought a car I thumbed classifieds that left my fingertips inked. I wound up with a dark blue Ford Taurus the automatic transmission of which ground itself to silvery dust on a freeway one afternoon while Jill happened to be behind the wheel. Jill picked the next used car based on what to this day I regard as common sense that I’m happy I married: low miles.

 

Now she wants a car so we can strap the guys into the backseat and press the accelerator and just go. We read the ads on Craigslist (which didn’t exist last time):

 

“2008 KIA SPECTRA MANUAL 68K MILES LIKE NEW LOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKKKKKKK - $4999 … PERFECT CAR; 67K MILES.......POWER WINDOWS, LOCKS, KEYLESS ENTRY; NON-SMOKER … MANUAL TRANSMISSION … AFTERMARKET EXHAUST … MAKES A NICE SOUND … RUNS NEW- NEVER IN ACCIDENT. NO ISSUES AT ALL.” Makes a nice sound? Once upon a time I did, too.

 

And another ad: $2800. Manual 5 Speed. 149K mileage. Mew water pump and timing belt just installed. New brakes. Price is Firm $2800.

 

So Jill – she’s the one who actually wants to buy a car, which I think I mentioned  – harps at me via email. I know nothing about cars – I moved to New York City so I wouldn’t have to know squat about cars. But my old friend Tom up near Boston knows cars. He used to fiddle and clank around with the cars I owned a lifetime ago in Ithaca. God, he could lift her up on the, well, lift and twist something around and around and cut new groves that those nuts that go on when you get a flat tire.

 

I question him about owning a car now. He says plan on paying five or 10 grand for car that will fit our purposes. He recommends Kias or Hyundais (crap when I shopped last for wheels). I tell him that we have been using Zipcar, where you rent by the hour and Zipcar even pays for the gas. “Oooooo,” Tom groans, letting out the relief of not having to deal with the fullness of the tank.

 

After a few days of looking I’m already sick of car ads, and get giggy with them in email.

 

HEY!!!!!!!!!

 

BUY THIS CAR!!!

 

BUY THIS FRACKIN' CAR!!!! $7,800, cash only. In tens.

 

RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

RE-BUILT EVERYTHING!!!!!! NEVER TOTALED!!!!!! NEVER WRECKED!!!!! NEVER SET ON FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

 

2 billion miles, but one owner (a Klingon). BUY THIS CAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

(... why aren't you calling? ...)

 

“This posting has been flagged for removal,” CraigsList says about one of our hottest prospects. This ad mentioned “rebuilt title.” Tom, reading that, said he wanted to know what a “rebuilt title” was. Stolen? Totaled?

 

“Sorry,” Tom emails back, “no time to react. I gotta go buy that car. Anybody lend me a few tens?”

 

2 NEW TIRES!! NEVER HIT WITH A PHOTON TORPEDO!!!!!! RUNS LIKE NEW!!!!!!!!!!! NON-SMOKER!!!!!"

 

Jill emails that since we’ve been shopping online for a car “suddenly all my ads are about buying cars. Every single one. BUY THIS CAR RIGHT NOW BEFORE THE KRONOS HIGH COUNCIL LEARNS WHAT'S HAPPENED (... clean interior ...) 

 

“LOL,” emails Jill.

 

If you're laughing, you can't call. Why aren't you calling? Search me. I thought I lived in New York so I wouldn’t have to go through this. I wish I had new brakes.

Bedtime

 

Alex will be 15 next month and he goes to bed at 9:30. I wish he could go to bed later, but with Alex there’s this window. If he’s up until 10:15, he’s up until 11. And he’s up at five.

 

I can live with that. Marines get up at five. I had an aunt who got up at five: She worked the day shift at what we in Bangor, Maine, in the mid-1970s called “The Hospital” and had to be there at seven. She went to bed at nine.

 

“Alex,” I say to him, “head down now.”

 

Alex’s brother Ned is 12 and already we’re hearing stories about how when he’s at an overnight at a friend’s or at summer camp he stays up until the wee hours. Once we (i.e., Uncle Rob) drove Ned back to camp in the middle of the night; Ned later reported that he arrived at the camp in the middle of the night and at about seven the next morning headed to a water park in New Jersey. So that’s Ned at his age.

 

I try to settle Alex as Jill, out in the dining room, tries to grab a few minutes online before she goes to bed. “Alex, head down.”

 

I get on Ned’s bed. Ned doesn’t use his bed anymore; he sleeps in our bedroom these days. We’re not happy about that.

 

The whirr of the air conditioner is loud, because I think Alex broke it by running it in February. I would try to stop him, but when I’d come in the morning there it would be on “A/C.” He only knows that the click of the knob and the whirr seems to help him sleep. “Alex,” I told him in February, “don’t do this or you’ll break it!”

 

“Fan,” he says, “fan fan!” He holds his arm up toward the window. “Fan!”

Ned’s bed has new sheets on it (haven’t changed them in four weeks) and they’re cool and crisp, but I turn the A/C to Fan on these nights that are still cool get my ass in there. “Are you happy now, Alex? Go to sleep?”

 

No. “Giraffe!” Alex says. He means a plastic animal that we bought him once. “Giraffe!”

 

“All right, Alex, lay down and put your head down !”

 

He doesn’t: I see his black form wriggle from his bed and throw open the bright light of the door. He’s black in the light of the hallway as he heads out into where Jill is trying to grab a couple of minutes online.

 

I have to get up. “Alex. Come back.” Sometimes he does. Sometimes he gets back into bed on his own, and I in the dark I stab buttons on the outdated stereo in what used to be their room and hope that whatever I press makes him go to sleep. 

iProblem

The Nationals

First it was brownies. Then corn-on-the-cob. Then blueberries. Watermelon – and when I knifed it up and presented it to Alex in pieces in the bowl, he tried to slide it back together into a whole watermelon. That was cute and useless at the same time.

 

For a while there was chicken, deep-fried from places like Popeyes or McD’s. Once he tore into the Popeyes Tenders and found that they’d just come out of the fryer. “Careful, honey,” the lady behind the counter said. Sometimes at home we baked frozen in-the-box nuggets. Still Alex would maul them, other times leaving nothing but tan crumbs in the bottom the shallow dark-blue plastic bowl that seems to have become his in the moments of feeding. “How does he do it?” an old friend asked me once, watching Alex, “on no food?”

 

Fuck if I know. Jill got him to eat brownies in a Queens diner when he was a toddler. Later we smashed a blueberry or two across his front teeth. Strawberries too, I think. I forget. I’ve begun to forget. A lifetime later, Jill got him to nibble corn-on-the-cob at a Manhattan Street fair.

 

I saw her doing this with him and moved to help when she said, “Leave us alone. We’re doing fine. Get’im when he’s hungry.”

 

Month by month, Alex’s dinner evolved into three Hebrew Nationals fried for a few minutes in a crappy little tin pan we’re ruining with Hebrew Nationals. I dumped the slices into the blue plastic bowl. I slice the hot dogs into pieces about three-quarters of an inch wide. Any more or less and you’re just fooling yourself. “Alex, hot dogs.” Months on months he took the plastic bowl of sliced Hebrew Nationals in his fine fingers. Then one night he didn’t.

 

Then another night he didn’t. “Alex, don’t you want hot dogs?” Even tonight:

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Noooooo!”

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Nooo! That’s o-KAY!”

 

I’d feed him something better: I’ll give $500 cash to the person who gets him to eat a steak, baked potato and salad. But it was hot dogs. Hot dogs. I sent Hebrew Nationals (and God they are good – have you tasted them?) to him night after night.

 

“Nooooooooo.”

 

Nooooooooo. And he’s supposed to live on .. what? Alex’s reb-hab nurse notices this; every Thursday and Friday evening the blue plastic bowl comes back to her.

 

One Thursday, she tries chicken from the Chinese joint around the corner. “Try it,” the nurse says to him, “Good boy! Chew! Very good!”

 

“Chew, chew,” Jill says. “You’re eating it!”.

 

Later I ask Jill the secret. “I would say the trick with Alex is getting him when he’s hungry.” Jill looks at him. “Alex, all right? All right.”