Falls (Pt. 11): Passion Fruit

26.

I bleached my hair. I was standing in the bathroom with a towel around my waste and my scalp burned and the wet and now nearly white hair fell to my shoulders and I thought I really looked like I was losing a good amount of hair and I thought that maybe bleaching it was a horrible idea. I imagined it falling out in clumps in the shower.

Fuck it, I thought. It's too late now.

My face seemed to have more color in it than before. The circles under my eyes were dark though now. Or darker. Or maybe I had just noticed them.

I smeared in a wad of blue dye. I had found it upstairs in a small pile of Tom's things and didn't want it to go to waste. It was a small tub and I wasn't sure how to use it and with a few eight ounce glasses of Ezra Brooks under my belt I wasn't interested in reading the small label. I smeared more in and mushed it around. When I thought I had got all of the hair I assumed it needed to sit and I threw a plastic bag over it and went to the bedroom to find my cutoff sweatpants, now sweat shorts.

Sun came in through the window and a breeze that smelled more and more like fall everyday drifted in and I threw the towel on the bed and put my shorts on and a shirt from the band The Unseen that I had cut the collar and sleeves off of and I realized I looked like some kind of fucking drummer. 

I threw back the last of the whiskey in my cup and went to the kitchen. Marie was perched on a chair with her back to the window and an easel in front of her. Incense and pot smoke filled the room and she peered out from around the easel at me. 

"You dyed your hair blue?"

"Yep," I said. 

"Okay." She went back behind the easel.

I poured another glass and sat down at the table. My legs were getting a bit unreliable. "You don't like it?"

"No, it's fine. It's your hair." She moved a paint covered brush around in a glass of water next to her and picked up a different one and resumed painting.

I sat for a minute. "Where'd you get pot?"

"The fucking weed man."

"Are you mad at me?"

"Nope. But where do you think I'd get it?"

"I didn't realize we had a 'weed man'. Sorry."

"Bev does. Met him a couple weeks ago, I guess. Surprised you didn't know."

"Why's that?"

"No reason." 

"Okay." I took a drink and thought that maybe I'd just take a nap. I was drunk enough and I wasn't looking for a fight. "What are you painting?"

"I don't know. Letting the brushes do their thing."

I nodded and after a while, listening to the sounds of the brushes in the glass and on the palette and my own breathe, I went into the living room and turned on the radio and fell asleep on the couch. 

27.

"You're going to have to cut it out," Bev said.

"Fuck." When I woke up the bag was stuck to my head. Blue stains covered the couch where my head had been and there were clumps of hardened dye in my hair. "It'll probably wash out."

"I don't know. I'm pretty sure it won't." 

I was sitting up and Marie and Bev were sitting across from me, on the floor drinking coffee. Marie had been shitty to Bev the past few days and in the morning Bev had apparently decided it had been enough. I woke up as they had been sitting on the floor talking it out. I pretended to be asleep for a while, but I think Marie knew I was awake. Bev convinced Marie that we hadn't fucked and that was probably true, but I didn't know. When I woke up the conversation had slowed and drifted and nothing was quite resolved, but we all felt a little better and Marie had her head on Bev's shoulder and now we were figuring out what to do about the fucking mess I had made. As if nothing had happened and that didn't sit right in me but I would worry about it later. 

"I still don't know why you dyed it," Marie said.

"I don't know. I found the dye. Got bored and drunk. What else am I going to do?" 

My coffee had been on the table in front of me cooling off and I took a drink from it. My head weighed forty six pounds.

"Makes sense," Marie said.

The radio was playing a block of local folk artists. It was nice. Everything felt mostly nice. Except for the headache and the clumps of shit pulling out what little hair the bleach hadn't burned away. And the pissneed.

"I have to write today," I said. "I keep blowing it off."

"So write," Bev said.

"I don't want to. I quit."

"Oh, just like that?" Marie asked.

"Yeah. Fuck it. I wrote a book. Achieved that. Had a good time. I don't want to use my head anymore. I don't want to think. Prop me up in front of an assembly line. Let me zone out forever now. Pack me a sandwich and a juice box and pick me up in eight hours."

"What kind of juice?" Bev asked.

"You couldn't work an assembly line. You'd kill yourself."

"I'm killing myself now," I said. "Passion fruit, Bev."

"Shut the fuck up. You're being melodramatic. You're just trying to hard. Just scribble some shit and polish it later. It's not like you need a new book now. What was it, three books, five years?"

"Yeah."

"Do they make passion fruit juice boxes?" Bev asked. 

"So," Marie said, "Just relax. Take your break. Don't even think about writing for at least a couple more weeks. Breathe a little."

"Come shower with me," I said. 

"Who are you talking to?" Marie asked. 

I shrugged. "Whoever."

I finished my coffee and I kissed only Marie and after the shower I ended up cutting chunks out of my hair. Goodbye, long hair. It didn't mean anything.