by Tom Boyle
This story was first published in The Colossal Gilasolo Illustrated, with illustrations from one of my favorite artists, Blair Wilson. Click the image to see Wilson’s work.
The swish of Gloria’s gown as she swiftly sashayed into the studio was a sweet sound to Bicksnell. “Well? Let’s get going!” Gloria commanded impatiently as if the others had been twenty minutes late. Bicksnell knew her too well; knew better than to remind her of her tardiness. They had a shooting to do, Gloria was here. So was his migraine. Bicksnell began to regret attempting a double shooting.
Marco, the photographer who spoke English only in clichés, was asleep on the divan. Phil, the cameraman Bicksnell called in to film Gloria for a television advertisement, was killing time through experimentation. He angled the camera as close to ninety degrees as possible and zoomed in on a rivet in the studio rafters.
This was the first time Bicksnell had tried a double shooting. He figured he could cut costs and time by filming the magazine shooting for a flashy television ad. He would combine the magazine and television accounts with Lastaderm Face Cream and have two creative projects to show for it. Never again. Bicksnell and AdvertWorld, the agency for which he worked, had worked with Lastaderm and their cover-girl Gloria on and off for twenty years. In fact, Lastaderm was Bicksnell’s first account ever.
Bicksnell marveled at Gloria’s youthful countenance. Not one line, he thought, no wrinkles. Twenty years I’ve worked with her and she looks younger today. Bicksnell, on the other hand, had a small balloon of a paunch and a tonsure patch of skin surrounded by a brier patch of tangled, grey-singed hair. The hair began to wriggle and dance, like seaweed, in a strong current of air.
Marco was awake and aiming the high-powered fan, used for wind-blown-looks, at Gloria with the intention of blowing her dress up. Phil lowered the camera’s boom and was trying to zoom up the other side of Gloria’s dress.
Gloria’s face contorted. She looked half as if she was occupied by a thought, and half as if she was in excruciating pain. No one knew what was happening.
Bald. Ron Labone loathed the word. Ron’s hair began their exodus from his scalp like lemmings to the fjords three days after his eighteenth birthday. Ron became traumatized shortly thereafter. The bald spot, as it grew steadily, had broken Ron’s will. He abandoned his plans to become a national baseball hero and studied accounting instead.
Ron felt ostracized, alien. He spent his twenty-third birthday with Fuji, his pug dog, in front of his television. He pulled the Glamour magazine he had purchased from its bag. He held the bag up to his nose and inhaled deeply. He loved the scent that emanated from all of the perfume samples. He inhaled again and stared at the cover-girl.
By eleven o’clock, Ron was sleeping in front of the TV and Fuji was having a late night snack of Ron’s slippers. Ron woke to the sound of music. Blurrily, he watched the closing credits of F-Troop. Then, like a messiah laying hands on the hairless pariah Ron, Aaron E. S. Stiles spoke from the screen. Grow fabulous hair in months using my patented product. Call now! Before Ron was fully awake and capable of coherency, he was frantically pressing the buttons of his phone. In a minute’s time, Ron had charged forty-eight canisters of the miracle hair-growth product, with shipping and handling, to his Master Card.
$1,200 and four to six weeks later, Ron began his rigid regimen of daily hair-growth applications. At first there was no obvious change. Then one day Ron shook Fuji awake to tell her the exciting news: two intrepid strands of hair peeked through the skin of Ron’s forehead. In the following weeks, the re-growth of hair trickled across and speckled Ron’s head. Aglow with this moderate success, Ron increased the dosage. He splattered it on his scalp, swished it about, and squeezed out more until each of the forty-eight canisters was empty. He dripped with the miracle product. His shoulders began to grow hair, his hands, his toes.
As promised, Ron had a full head of hair in mere months. His confidence returned, bringing with it his dream of being a baseball player. He signed up at the YMCA, began working out, jogging, swimming.
Ron called the lovely red-locked woman from sales — the one who invaded his dreams and woke him in a cold sweat, short of breath — and asked her out on a date.
After two cravats of Chateau Blanc ’73, dinner was finally served. Ron had ordered the filet mignon for his date and self. Susan, Ron’s date, was unimpressed. She was a staunch vegetarian and feminist and would have liked to have placed her own order. She had no intention of eating the meat and hoped a salad would be served. Susan wasn’t in the mood to argue by the time the orders were taken. She was still in pain from the beginning of the date.
Ron showed up at Susan’s house at 7:30. During Ron’s absence from the dating scene, men had stopped opening doors for women. A lot had changed, but no one had informed Ron. To Susan’s chagrin.
It was when Susan resisted having Ron open the car door for her that she was hurt. Ron insisted. Susan finally figured it would be easier to humor Ron, and pray for the date’s end, than to try to undo the conditioning etched so deeply in Ron. She lowered herself into the car, reached to pull the cascade of her dress into the car before Ron closed the door on it. Before Susan could slip her dress into the car, Ron reached for her head.
It was as if the hair were a bunch of oranges that Ron was trying to catch before they fell from the bushel. His grab surprised Susan. She jerked back suddenly. Ron’s fingers caught in the red loops, but he was unaware. He slammed the car door. Susan’s scream dazed him. Ron stood stunned with locks of red hair flowing through his fingers, disconnected from Susan.
Susan’s head was still throbbing in the place her hair used to be when the salad arrived. “Take mine back.” Ron said, gesturing the waiter and his salad away. “I don’t like vegetables.”
Susan fumed. Susan’s stomach growled and she echoed it. Her salad was small, intended as an appetizer. She lunged toward the rejected salad, fork in hand, and stabbed a round of cucumber and some lettuce before the waiter retreated swiftly to the kitchen. Ron began to regret the date.
Susan smugly nibbled on her recent kill, paying no heed to Ron’s puzzled look. At her patience end, Susan was about to burst into a violent verbal assault on Ron when she noticed a long blonde hair in her salad. What would have been an eloquent attack on Ron’s very nature, became an awkward gasp of horror. She gaped at the hair as one end wrapped around a tomato. The rest stretched and snaked through the entire arrangement.
It was when Ron reached to pull the hair out of Susan’s salad that she noticed several red hairs, her hair, waving and wriggling, almost taunting from Ron’s neck.
“Lastaderm® makes my skin so soft and so…” Gloria paused, beaming with a trained, artificial warmth, “smooth…” Again, she paused, but Bicksnell knew this wasn’t in the script. He peeled his calluses, as he always did when Gloria added embellishments.
Gloria’s face contorted. She looked half as if she was occupied by a thought, and half as if she was in excruciating pain. No one knew what was happening.
An imperceptible, hair-thin line formed below Gloria’s ear and traced her face, racing like the fuse of a dynamite stick. A thin crack fissured the circumference of the model’s visage. Bicksnell noted how like a tragic theatre mask Gloria’s face looked.
When the crack reconnected with its origin, there was a sound like a balloon being stretched to its fullest capacity. Bicksnell could have sworn Gloria’s face was growing. It was twice its original size. Then there was a loud pop.
Gloria’s grimacing face became severed from her belittled head and body. Like the walls of Mount St. Helen, the face slid to the floor, bounced once, gained momentum and ricocheted from two walls. The body fell flailing to the floor.
“That’s the way the ball bounces, yes? The cookie is crumbling, no?” Marco commented as Phil filmed the entire event.
With each bound, Gloria’s face rebounded faster and struck harder. One wall retained the imprint of Gloria’s enlarged lips, nose and forehead. Then the face hit its former body as it writhed about faceless on the floor. It landed once, bounced, struck the ceiling, dislodging debris that cascaded through the rafters and onto Gloria’s body. The face plummeted again onto the body, pummeling it to pulp.
What happened next surprised Bicksnell more than having a renegade face bounding about the studio — the face laughed. The laughter grew like a Greek chorus of a thousand souls as the face crashed through lights, backdrops and recording devices. Each landing brought more destruction. The face, snarling with maniacal satisfaction, struck the camera that Phil had been zig-zagging and zooming to follow Gloria’s former face’s path of destruction. The large camera pinned Phil down. Marco rushed to his aid. “You are stuck as snug as bug under rug, yes!”
The nose twitched, the eyes rolled like a chameleon’s, the lips puckered and stuck with suction to the floor. Gloria, insofar as the face was Gloria, protruded her tongue. Calmly, using her tongue-foot, she headed for the door.
The headline read “NINE DEAD AS FLYING FACE TERRORIZES TOWN.”
Ron Labone looked carefully at the photo on the front page of the morning paper, as he sat in a dark cafe, holding his hair away from his eyes. Ron recognized the face from the television and from the cover of the magazines. He could almost smell the potpourri of perfumes. The headline read “NINE DEAD AS FLYING FACE TERRORIZES TOWN.”
Ron looked up, saw Bicksnell, let his hair hide his eyes. “Is it true? Is this for real?”
Bicksnell sized up the man across the dark booth from him. Is this for real? echoed in his mind as he squinted in the dim light, trying to distinguish eyes, a mouth, even limbs on the person with whom he spoke. Is it real to speak to a hairball twice my size? Bicksnell wondered.
“Yes.” Bicksnell answered. “It’s as real as anything.”
“Then I’ll help.” A hair slipped from Bicksnell’s black coffee, slid out of sight and into the black hole of hair.
The two stepped onto the night street. Bicksnell reflected that Ron had gotten much worse since he had to discontinue the Aaron E. S. Stiles account due to bad publicity. In the light, Bicksnell could see strands of red, blonde, black, even green hair in his companion; all the stray hairs that had migrated to Ron since his battle with baldness began. Susan’s red locks sprouted near the top of the sphere of hair. Some blonde streaks from the young man with the ponytail, who had loaned Ron his brush draped, to one side like a tassel from a mortarboard. All the waterlogged locks lost in the showers at the YMCA were there. Some grey from the old woman Ron had startled into shock one night when his hairy transformation had grown to a frightening degree.
Ron tumbleweeded across the deserted street. Bicksnell noticed hairs, at the base of the ball that was Ron, as they inched forward to join the snarled congregation. Some marched erect, in files of two, to the mass of hair.
Bicksnell and Ron stood at the opening of an alley. Gloria’s face had been panting at the far end for nearly a half an hour. It was resting after a rampage that tore the facades off of several buildings in the vicinity.
Resolved with the duty at hand, Ron paused briefly, then began to roll swiftly down the alley way, headlong toward the face. The mouth opened wide and Ron bounded uncontrolled into it. The mouth closed. Then, like a cat, the face twitched and hacked Ron back out.
Reacting quickly, the face started to bounce, slightly at first, gaining momentum until it could pounce on to Ron. In the attempt, however, the face became entangled in the hair. Gloria wriggled, but only became further entrapped.
Her breath smelled as sweet as the pages of the magazines that brought the face to Ron’s home monthly. He hugged her in the tendrils of hair that ensnared Gloria’s face.
Gloria stopped resisting; she smiled. Her expression softened, the coldness of her glare melted. Her eyes melted. Her nose squished into a gelatinous, shrinking mound between her pooling blue eyes.
Ron let the liquefying face gently slip, almost seep, onto the alley floor. He watched as her skin, eyes, ears, brows and nose swirled and spiraled fluidly around the lips, then slid into the drainage gutters. Ron kissed the lips as they sank into the cement. They were still smiling.
A furry, atrophied arm pulled the magazine from its plastic shroud and placed it between two candles on a makeshift shrine. Ron sniffed the sweet scent that remained in the bag. He inhaled deeply and pulled the bag over his hair-infested head. He wrapped the opening tight around his neck. He inhaled.
Copyright © Tom Boyle
Cuddles the Urban Pirate is a mini-comic I’ve created (even ran the copier, and folded and stapled them by hand). It is the chronicles of a band of misfit animals with eye patches (from cosmetic testing), wooden legs (from steel traps), and the parrot is into s&m. They travel America meeting other animals with similar tales of damage and damaged tails and help their new friends exact revenge on the humans that have wronged them.
Cuddles
Bunny Kung Foo Foo
Scrappy
Polly
Nigel
Their Van
tombWriter 