Hair for Men: A Novel

HAIR

FOR

MEN

*a novel

Michelle Winters

Copyright © 2024 Michelle Winters

Published in Canada in 2024 and the

USA

in 2024 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (

GCA

by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Hair for men : a novel / Michelle Winters.

Names: Winters, Michelle, 1972- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230621961 | Canadiana (ebook) 2023062197X |

ISBN 9781487011918 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487011925 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS8645.I5762 H35 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

At The Hundredth Meridian (Baker, Rob/Downie, Gord/Fay, Johnny/Langlois, Paul/Sinclair, Gord)

Copyright © 1992 Little Smoke Music c/o Southern Music Pub. Co. Canada Ltd.

Copyright © Renewed. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved

Locked In The Trunk Of A Car (Baker, Rob/Downie, Gord/Fay, Johnny/Langlois, Paul/Sinclair, Gord)

Copyright © 1992 Little Smoke Music c/o Southern Music Pub. Co. Canada Ltd.

Copyright © Renewed. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Greg Tabor

Cover image: Barber’s chair by Rakhimov Edgar @ Shutterstock

Book design and typesetting by Lucia Kim

Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe

House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

for Peter Winters

My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.

—Henry Rollins

2016

At the edge of the pier, I crouch and slide the duffle bag from my shoulder into the little yellow boat, careful not to smear any blood on the decking. The bag is heavier than usual, and I force air through my nose to slow my breath. Behind me, the marina is asleep. I look back and count the six lights that stay on all night: the three in the parking lot, the beacon on the clubhouse peak, and the two hard-wired emergency units flanking the sign out front that says Cradle Bay Boat Club. Everything else is dark, most importantly, the Commodore’s office on the ground floor.

I climb down into the Eraserhead, and the boat dips, bringing the gunwales a few inches closer to the surface. Aside from me and the bag, not much else fits in the cockpit of the thirteen-footer. I take another look back at the yard as I unfasten the line from the cleat and push off.

My bow cuts the moonlit ripples and I raise the mainsail, securing it and holding the edge of the boom as it catches the breeze. I raise and trim the jib and sail silently out, tacking around the end of the cove into The Mistake. When you’re leaving the marina for the Bay of Fundy, you instinctively approach the harbour through a channel on your starboard side, but after about two kilometres you start seeing land close in around you and realize it’s not a channel, it’s an inlet. You have to go the whole way back and start again on the other side of the spit. It wastes about an hour and a half under power. Only visiting vessels get stuck in there, and only if we don’t warn them. The enclosure of the inlet, furthermore, kills the wind just enough to make it a haven for horseflies, so there’s no reason for anyone to go in there. Just the place to dump the bodies.

Inside the cove, I release the sails so they billow gently. I unzip the bag.

My hand touches something cold and hairy. It’s a man’s leg, soft and white with dark hair, foot laced into a Nike Air Max Plus. I don’t recognize the shoe, but I never really looked at shoes. Scalps, sure. Necks, ears … If you spend enough time looking at scalps and ears, you can make them disappear. Over time, my eyes learned to skim right past the eczema and acne without ever touching down. It’s a skill I use at the marina’s intake dock when I’m cleaning out a holding tank, and I consider it one of my greater feats of self-restraint. The Nike could belong to Huey; he used to play pickup with his brother. Or Wei? He was on a softball team … They usually arrived in work clothes, since it was daytime. A ton of them played sports—some of them in earnest, some of them to try to develop relationships with other men. I stuff the leg in a garbage bag, then add a rock, and hold the whole package against my chest to force out the air before twisting and knotting the top. I slip the bag into the water, and it sinks with a burp.

Reaching back into the duffle, I pull out a forearm, more tanned than the leg, wrist encircled by an oversized

tag

Heuer watch with a steel band. The arm’s black hairs are caught between the links. The arm is turning green, and death has puffed it up, but you can still see the structure and tone of a middle-aged man. The hand is beautiful, the fingers long and curved with powerful knuckles. I stuff it in a new plastic bag.

A horsefly buzzes past my ear and I swat it dead on the deck, shooting a little echo around the cove. I take out a sport-socked foot and sink it. Then another hand, just past the wrist, and an upper arm with a bulky bicep. No head. I zip up the remaining rocks in the duffle and release it over the side, watching the bubbles rise to the surface and disappear.

I take the bailer (a bleach bottle with the bottom cut out), fill it with water, and swish it around the cockpit. The blood swirls down the drainage hole. I fill bailer after bailer until the cockpit glistens white in the moonlight. When I’m done, I reach into the water to wash my hands. Something clamps onto my wrist. It’s the hand wearing the

tag

Heuer watch. I try to pull free, but the cold hand grips my thumb and tries to pry open my fingers. I get down low in the cockpit and thrash my arm, but then a third hand grabs me and tries to stuff a hundred-dollar bill into my fist. I pull and pull until my arm snaps back against the ceiling above my cast-off sleeping bag. I shoot upright in the forward berth of The Pill and a droplet of morning condensation drips from the hatch onto my forehead. I fall back into the pillows.

This dream has become like part of my waking life. The membrane of consciousness between the world where I dispose of bodies and the world where I don’t is so thin that when I look out toward The Mistake, I can’t be entirely sure it’s not filled with corpses.

From one dream to the next, I can remember the location of every bag I’ve dropped, and I can manoeuvre the Eraserhead in my sleep to a spot uncluttered by previous dreams.

There are only ever men in the bags, which makes sense when I consider how much of my life I’ve devoted to them. Just when I think I’ve jettisoned my last bag, I find myself with another.

1988–1994

My career in men’s hairstyling was preordained. My dad sold shampoo for Christof Gallant, and some of my favourite childhood summer days were spent in the car with him, driving from salon to salon around small-town Ontario in our Chevrolet Caprice, while my mother was at home in our tiny Mimico brick bungalow, drinking white wine with Mrs. Murphy from down the street. Dad introduced me to a world where women were in charge, and where his job was to please and impress them. One of the ways he did this was with free samples; the other was his masculinity. He had the cherub’s head of strawberry ringlets he’d passed down to me, and he maintained it at a length that gave him a Percy Shelley virility without ever coming across as feminine. The salon ladies would get right in there and twirl fistfuls of it around their manicured fingers. Their licence to him had no restriction. It was the 1980s, and restriction was no one’s thing, but when my dad gave those women a bag of conditioner samples, they literally swarmed him with kisses. They’d push him down in the shampoo chair and jump in his lap—sometimes a few of them in a stack. Their innuendo-filled exchanges taught me the art of the wink and made me feel included, even though I struggled to understand what was really going on. My dad, it goes without saying, was a champion winker.

Watching women interact with my father was as captivating to my child’s mind as a kaleidoscope or The Jungle Book. The ladies would sit me under the bonnet dryer with a magazine, the hot noise crashing and swirling around my head like an ocean, wrapping me in velvet calm while I watched through slitted eyes to discern what it was about my dad they found so exciting. There was the physical reality of him, every flirty exchange punctuated by a touch of his chest or shoulder. Aside from the physical contact, he was charming, and he gave them the full benefit of his attention: he asked about their kids, he laughed at their jokes, he shattered their doldrums. My dad was a treat.

One time he caught my eye over a suntanned shoulder. Lou, he said afterward, wiping lipstick off his cheek as we crossed the Timbermill Shops and More parking lot, these ladies buy your dinner. Whatever I do with them, it’s all in the interests of selling shampoo. Your mother has a hard time with that sometimes, but it’s part of the job. In fact, it is the job.

I know, I said. They like you. Whatever misgivings he may have had, all I saw was a healthy business model. Those women bought copiously from the Christof Gallant Shine and Balance line, and in return they enjoyed this sexy, enhanced version of my dad that he seemed glad to offer.

They do, he said. Those women like men.

I like men, I said.

He stopped. Louise, that’s… not something you can just say.

An ancient Burt Reynolds movie I wasn’t allowed to watch on TV, The Man Who Loved Women, popped into my head.

If Burt Reynolds can love women, why can’t I love men?

He sighed ruefully. Well … that won’t be as easy as you think. I mean, maybe some of us … Not now. Well, me excepted … but then I’m not a man, I’m your father … He studied me sadly for a moment. Ah, you’ll figure it out. Then he bopped me on the head. Race you to the car! He took off at top speed, knees high, and smacked the hood on arrival. I win again!

✂

My dad was toughening me up, I realized later, for a world orchestrated to my disadvantage. The stirrings were everywhere. I remember the night Tony Wickett from a few doors down came over to announce the birth of his son. Tony was smoking a cigar, handed one to my dad, slapped him on the arm, and said, "My friend, it’s a boy. Jeezus, what a relief! And they laughed. When I came around the doorway to ask why boys were a relief, Tony Wickett crouched down to assure me, with Grinchy finesse, Oh, honey, we’d have been just as happy with a girl."

Minor disagreements my dad would propose we settle by arm wrestling, me at 65 pounds, he at 190. He’d clear a space at the dinner table, sit with an elbow propped on the edge, fingers fanned. We’d face off. As I’d gnash my teeth, straining to leverage his wrist, he’d casually croon, Let me know when you’re ready to start. The shit-talking was as central as his guaranteed victory. Every night when he tucked me in, he’d beat me at cribbage, so that my final awareness before drifting off was just how hard I had to try against someone who didn’t seem to try at all. At the same time, my dad campaigned for my subjugation of Barry Murphy, son of Mrs. Murphy from down the street. When Mrs. Murphy would come over to drink white wine and complain about men with my mom (Gene’s got a Christ complex, that’s his problem), Barry and I would play in the basement, and my dad would debrief me afterward.

So what did you and Barry get up to?

Played G.I. Joes. Climbed the tree.

Kick his ass?

I guess?

Good girl!

From the stove, my mom would lean on a post–Mrs. Murphy hip and say, Oh, good job, Paul. Now you’ve got her full attention, make sure you steer her right.

Mom was my first favourite: warm, smelled good, picked me up … but the more I felt the real-life disfavour of girlhood—and her antipathy toward men—the more distance I put between us, devoting myself entirely to my dad. Mom and I cultivated an inert rivalry based on the sad, unspoken truth that we’d started out as allies.

The quandary for my young brain was how the salon ladies managed to resist falling victim to the feminine condition Barry’s mom came over to rail against. I could only conclude it had to do with their love of men. I knew early on I’d be one of them. I started cutting my own hair at home with my mother’s sewing scissors, having carefully observed all my own haircuts, and knew my technique was solid. But I couldn’t quite picture myself among their coral-coloured ranks—the touching, the flirting. How did one pick that up?

✂

The summer I turned sixteen, femininity reared up and staked its indelible claim. I shot up to six feet, and my breasts ballooned. I’d always flown unremarkably beneath the bullying radar; now I was conspicuous all the time. I lashed myself down with sports bras and tank tops and learned to walk with my back hunched like a turtle, trying to look shorter and flatter. Already losing ground in the world of boys—Barry wouldn’t talk to me at school anymore because we were on different teams now and he said I should find other girls to hang out with—much of my psyche became preoccupied with hiding my body. My clothes felt invisible, my nakedness exhausting.