Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [53]
As preparation for my future as a world-class cosmetologist, I tricked members of the house and certain patients into letting me cut their hair. As it turned out, I had an actual knack for it.
But there was a problem. And the problem was finger waves.
No matter how many times I tried, I could not comb a successful finger wave into straight or even moderately wavy hair.
“Do they really make you learn this? Do they actually test you on this?” I asked Kate.
“They really do, yeah,” she laughed. “I know it’s really old fashioned, I mean nobody does finger waves anymore. But that’s hairdressing school for you. It goes by the book. Unfortunately, the book was written thirty years ago.”
My fingers were too large to make finger waves, I worried. Or I lacked the ability to contort my fingers in the required way.
This one thing, seemingly small, signaled to me the possible destruction of my dream. And I obsessed about it constantly. In the middle of the night when the rest of the house was asleep and couldn’t bother me, I lay in bed with my journal and wrote feverishly about it until my hand cramped and I fell asleep from emotional exhaustion.
One night I was particularly upset. The finger wave issue was becoming larger for me ever since I had asked Fern’s friend Julian Christopher, who owned The Kindest Cut Salon in Amherst, about it. He told me the same thing Kate did, that I’d have to master them. It was an especially sweltering summer night and all the fans in the house were already hogged by other people, so I applied an Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment to my hair, wrapped my head in Saran wrap and lay on my bed to try and write my anxiety away:
3:00 A.M. Can’t sleep. Am worried about this finger wave business. If I can’t get these down, there’s no way IN HELL they’re going to let me graduate. And no graduation means no certification. And no certification means NO HAIR EMPIRE FOR ME. I asked Kate and she said they have an instructor who stands over you and watches. This will make it even worse as far as I’m concerned. Because if I do somehow manage to finally do a good finger wave here on one of these Finches, the chances are just so close to nothing that I’ll be able to do it again in a testing environment with an instructor leaning over my shoulder and judging me. I hate to be judged. I hate school to begin with and tests which I cannot take, so this combination just seems like it’s completely ready to explode. Already I feel doomed. I feel like I am going to end up a busboy at the Hunan Hut in Amherst and then maybe someday graduate to dishwasher. And I don’t know how any of this has happened to me. How come I’m not getting ready for college? I’m fourteen and should be sitting at the kitchen table with my father, saying, “But Dad, Princeton has the better football team. I don’t care that Grandpa went to Harvard. Can’t I just do it my way? Like Sinatra?” Instead, I’m laying on a used twin bed with somebody else’s pee stains. I’m in my mother’s psychiatrist’s house for god sakes, eating candy canes for breakfast. Just this morning, Crazy Dr. F went into the bathroom for his daily 5 A.M. bath. He didn’t know that Poo had put the fish he won at the mall in the tub. So when he walked into the bathroom and saw the tub filled with water, he thought Agnes had suddenly decided to be a good wife and filled the tub for him. So he climbed into the tub of FREEZING cold water filled with like twenty-five fish (which I can’t imagine how he missed) and then the entire house was filled with his HOWL. How did my life take such a dismal turn? What did I do wrong along the way? Oh God, I just heard a noise. I hope it’s not a serial killer. Ever since I saw that movie Halloween