A Collagen Lift


As is my custom once a month I went to get my hair cut from an old friend of mine. He's on veteran's disability but is allowed to make a few bucks cutting hair. Even though to the outside world my hair may not even exist, and my haircut might be just the fuzz after the buzz, the trained eye will not be fooled. This is a forty dollar haircut and it takes an hour. Much of that time is spent with his needing his hands to gesture while telling stories, making them unavailable for cutting hair, or his talking to a sick friend on the speaker phone, which would be hard to hear with those damned clippers running.

So I sit there, being careful to stay silent when he's off on a tear about something, so that he doesn't get the mistaken impression that we are having a conversation. Still, he's been a friend for many years, and we all get some weird ways about us when we realize we are beginning to rot.

But we don't all go down without a fight. "Do you use any facial treatments?" he asked.

"What kind of asshole question is that?"

"I'm serious. These little lines under your eyes? And these lines down your cheeks? Just the slightest lift will make you look ten years younger. Watch." He placed his index and middle fingers near the top of my ears and lifted just slightly. "Do you see that?"

"Hold it there and I'll get a stapler."

He ignored me. "You need a collagen lift. Let me show you." He went out and came back with the smallest jar anybody ever dared to sell. It was squat and blue. "This costs about forty dollars at Farmacia, across the street, so you just use a tiny bit. But that's all you need." I watched in the mirror. It's not a mirror you'd have because you'd probably want a frame or some way to secure it to the wall. This one is propped on a cluttered black desk, against the wall. The shade on the lamp is not made for the lamp, but used to work before Tom changed the bulb to one of the energy savers shaped like a corkscrew. Now the shade keeps falling off onto the floor and the barber carefully rebalances it, losing every hand to the house.

And you might not want black walls with stars and pieces of art done by a group of artists to celebrate the barber's descent into the midnight of his soul. I'm sure he has some brain damage from excesses during that darkness, which turned out to be nothing more than his turning out the lights and stumbling around helpless for the required amount of time.

The room wasn't always black nor even in use. It was the private space, once, and the big room surrounded by windows ... where an old black pit sleeps on the bed ... was where we'd hang out. The big room was full of birds, then: three big parrots, some smaller ones, they would be talking all the time. We were a lot more active then. Growing old is more like baking a cake than rising to the peak and then just keeping on going, making the leap into heaven with your hand on the throttle and your eye on the rail.

Joseph Henderson pointed out to me that this kind of thinking is self-centered, and typical of the hero phase of male development. "And who do you imagine he's trying to impress with all those heroics?"

"Yes, of course, his mother."

"Yes. To mature, you have to give up the hero. It's a youthful stage."

There was a picture on the black wall of a thin little oriental woman. In the photograph she and my friend are frozen in time, holding each other. They look happy. Around the perimeter of the room were surfaces crowded with commerce, like a port marketplace, Tibetan objects, jewelry from the time when he was buying stones in the Far East and was proclaiming the virtues of wearing your wealth on your person. He really liked to push the macho. If a dog bit him he'd tell you in confidence that he had destroyed the dog's spirit with a spell. That was one side of him.

The other side was the healer. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. He was closing the sale. I needed collagen. "It's a proven fact that looking good helps you live longer," he said. "You look in the mirror and see this ..." ... he lifted just slightly again to show me a younger face "...you have more will to live."

"Depending on what you live for." I didn't elaborate. People who want to stay young probably live for youth. It's where all the possibilities are still open, and the ego hasn't yet noticed lights from the neighbors just through the woods. Maybe the darkness has to come before those lights are visible. The sacrifice doesn't always go smoothly.

Leaning against the walls were various drums and Didgeridoos. Each object could be identified in terms of some use if it was focused on and separated from the point of collapse into an undifferentiated center. But it seemed too much trouble, and so the bland television screen over beside the entrance to the cave -- black curtains covering a crawl space opening -- seduced with the promise of normalcy. "Here, just take one of these and saturate your colors."

Tom lives behind the wall. If you go through the curtains into the crawl space and around the corner there is a small chamber. It is a place to sleep. I hear Tom in the kitchen with Patricia. I guess they're fixing food, typically vegetarian fare.

I relax my neck muscles as the healer turns my head and feels of the skeletal alignment. A quick move and I pop into place. Add practicing medicine without a license to his possible sources of trouble. He rubs hemp oil into my bald head, now having made a long journey from the picture of me in company 335, one of a sea of shaved heads. We were being trained, which began with surrendering our beautiful locks. Now I have my hair cut like that voluntarily, and pay forty bucks, because it's actually shaping a very short cut to the contours of the head which requires a lot of skill. Most barbers don't have a clue. They just buzz it off.

This is what he tells me anyway. I am impressed that he is actually making me believe this. He has been cutting my hair for over twenty years ... maybe twenty-five ... and as I have lost my hair and begun to prefer the cleanness of a buzz cut, he has me convinced that it's more work for him. He doesn't set a price. It's whatever I think is fair. But Linda gets him to cut her hair sometimes and she assures me that he is as good as he says he is.

He sends me away with a blast on a conch shell. For a few moments I stand on the stairs and watch him stretching toward heaven. His breathing, trained on the didge, can move in a circle and just keep blasting away, so I decide to hurry on down the stairs so he can stop, because I've realized he's going to give me this salute from his spirit all the way out the security gate, which opened into bright sunshine on Cole Street.

This is the section of the Haight where the mannequins don't gather in fishnet stockings and high heels, and the rock band shirts and head shops don't reign. It's where there's a hardware store and a market, a place to buy pet food and a few very good cafes, as well as a fitness center. Farmacia is not a place I'd ever gone into before, but I knew what I wanted to buy.

The woman who greeted me had on a name tag which identified her as a herbalist. I told her that my barber had suggested I get an eye cream to tighten up the skin a little. "The name was Zia."

"Was it Zia for men?"

"I assume so. It was a really squat little jar, dark blue."

"Let's look at the other Zia products." Having already established that I was here on the advice of my barber, and not just dropping in to browse women's cosmetics, I pointed to the little blue pot: "That's the one."

She put a dab on the back on her hand and smeared it around. Then she put a dab on the back of my hand and I imitated her. It's like when you use a cleaning product you want to test it on a neutral surface before you try it on the expensive tile. Thinking I was continuing to imitate her I dipped a forefinger into the cream and rubbed it under my eye.

"That's too hard," she said. "You don't really rub it. You dab it, like this. And try using your ring finger. The index and middle are too aggressive."

This was a woman who prizes a differentiated touch. She explained to me that the area just under the eye is very thin and easily stretched, so one should not rub it. I tried it again, this time with my ring finger, and dapped the cream under my eyes. Because I'm a bodyworker I know that information, but wasn't really connecting it, being too preoccupied with my storyteller side, which was seeing the entire episode from the dreaming mind.

"There are other areas like that," I said. I was thinking of the muscle tissue above a woman's breasts, which is rather analogous to what she was describing as beneath the eye.

Of course what was in my mind was not part of the communication, and therefore not associated with any meaning for her. The only meaning was the response, which was that she led me over to a sample drawer and gave me a bunch of free stuff. I paid her cash so as to leave no paper trail attesting to my buying this product.

Then I walked over the hill, in the early afternoon sunshine, with my bag of youth restoration magic. Sometimes having a moment is enough, if you stay awake inside of it.

Posted: Wed - June 11, 2008 at 11:52 AM