That was the day that he declared his love. He was forced to do it. Otherwise, he would have put it off indefinitely.
They were leaving the campus of San Francisco State , and on their way to her rickety Corvair. He didn’t own a car. He followed her through a door and placed his hand on her back. She vehemently swiped it off with an elbow. The rest of the way to the car neither mentioned her reaction to his touch, but it lurked under the conversation. After they got into the car, which was parked on a roaring six lane thoroughfare, she put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. Each waited for the other to speak first.
“We have to talk,” he finally said, stating the obvious to stall the inevitable.
She looked at him. She was hunched, tensed, and cornered.
“You must know how I feel about you by now,” he began. “It would be hard to miss. But I don’t know how you feel about me.”
She relaxed and turned away from him to stare over the steering wheel.
He followed her line of sight out the windshield and then said: “I mean, we’re together almost everyday, so you must like my companionship. But you also seem. . . I dunno. . . ” He turned to watch her response. “. . . Repulsed by me.”
She turned toward him with a tiny smirk of admiration for the aptness of his word.
“What’s wrong?” he pleaded. “You act sometimes like I have leprosy or something. Am I . . . physically . . . unattractive . . . to you? What is it?”
“Your hair,” she said quietly. “It’s your hair.”
He ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair. It had grown somewhat since they met, but it was still a straight’s haircut.
“What do you mean?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Your hair, it disgusts me,” she said firmly. “Short hair is sexually repulsive to me. It just looks ugly.”
The car filled with the engine whine of cars passing a few feet beyond the window. He was stunned and reeling.
She was gaining momentum. “And your clothes… What are you? Your personality is hip, but your appearance is straight. No, not even straight. Straights don’t even dress like that.” She waved dismissively at his saggy corduroy coat and baggy khaki pants. “You’re a. . . you’re a. . . non-entity.”
He sprang upright and said, “That’s right! That’s exactly what I am. When I got out of the mental hospital, I cut my hair and threw away my bell bottoms and Beatle boots, because I was through belonging to a camp. I wanted to erase myself. To be invisible. I like it that way.”
“Well I don’t. It’s ugly.”
She had been a groupie in high school, often staking out the airport with girlfriends on the off-chance of catching a passing rock band. He knew her type well. Teenie boppers, nymphet refugees from suburbia, were always hanging out on Haight Street , hoping to be picked up by an incarnation of their rock star fantasies. He also knew cats who played-up a resemblance to a rock star to pick up these chicks. One night in a dark corner of the mezzanine at the Fillmore Auditorium, while she was still a virgin, she sucked the cock of such a guy. Because of his “regal demeanor.”
She had managed to transfer an obsession with the Beatles and other English rock groups into an obsession with English literature and now she was a straight-A student with a groupie lodged deep in her libido.
Sitting beside her in the car, he realized the absurdity of his predicament. He had had many sex partners but never a girlfriend. He had never so much as touched a girl he was in love with. He didn’t go steady in high school because no girl would have him. He was too weird. And here he was again, in love, and again, thwarted from living out the rock songs, those ad jingles for romantic love. And this time, he was thwarted by a frivolous, adolescent fetish!!! He had held strategy sessions with a couple chicks from his outpatient therapy group and hair didn’t come up once.
“This is some kind of sick joke!” he suddenly roared with outrage. “I don’t believe it. I. . . it’s. . . this is incredible!”
Thrown onto the defensive, she snuck an embarrassed glance at him, then bent her head and stared at her fidgeting hands.
“You mean to tell me, you’re going to let HAIR keep us from getting together?! I mean. . . we have so much. We’ve always got something to talk about. We’re always laughing. We have the same values. It’s a perfect match.”
“I know. I know. I don’t know what to do.” He realized this had been a gnawing problem for her.“It’s the way I feel. I can’t help it. I love long hair.”
He saw that she was a victim of this no less than he was. All the same, when he thought about being thwarted again, a shiver of rage ran through him, and he slammed his fist on the dashboard and shoved his face to within inches of hers and yelled, “But I love you goddamnit, can’t you see that?!”
He noticed a fleck of his saliva on her cheek and sat upright.
“Yes,” she replied in a near-whisper. Then she crumpled into sobs and said, “What can I do? What can I do?”
He wanted to comfort her but was afraid to touch her. Instead he leaned his head against the cold, wet window. The windows were translucent with condensation (as if they had been making out) and glowed gray with the afternoon overcast.
He felt another surge of outrage and this time decided he would never see her again. But that wasn’t feasible. Due to an accident of scheduling, they shared one class Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and another Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was too late in the semester to transfer out of the classes and dropping them would endanger his draft deferment.
Then he admitted to himself that he wouldn’t have left the classes anyway. He still had a nub of hope left for changing her mind.
