The Haircut
I wasn’t trying to change my life when I got the haircut.
I’d seen something — maybe MTV, maybe a magazine — where Lenny Kravitz said he cut his dreads as a kind of spiritual cleansing.
That stuck. Not because I was spiritual. But because it sounded like something a person might do when they’re done pretending they’re okay.
So I cut my hair in the winter of 2001.
Well—Supercuts cut it. Columbus Avenue.
Shoulder-length hair gone. Beard gone.
I walked out with short, spiked hair, freshly shaven, pale as death, looking like Sid Vicious minus the record deal.
Tonya just stared at me from the couch and said,
“You look like a little boy.”
She wasn’t wrong.
I looked young and used up at the same time.
Twenty-one going on postmortem.
She was still around then, sort of.
Girlfriend? Maybe. Co-sufferer was probably closer.
She didn’t use heroin — she drank.
Worked as a dominatrix part-time, and occasionally cooked at a diner in the Gayborhood.
She had her own ways of navigating the wreckage, and for a while, they ran parallel to mine.
She didn’t pay rent, but neither did I.
We were squatting in my own apartment, waiting for the axe to drop.
I’d “borrow” twenties from her drawer and tell myself it was fair — she was living there free, and I was losing pieces of myself one fix at a time. That had to count for something.
But if there was any kind of real routine in those days, it wasn’t Tonya.
It was Doctor Who.
Every Friday night. WHYY.
They’d just started the Peter Davison episodes, and he was my Doctor — the first one I ever watched, back when things still made sense, or at least had structure.
The world could fall apart, but Peter Davison would still show up in that cream-colored coat with a stick of celery pinned to the lapel and try to make things right.
That wasn’t joy. That wasn’t even hope.
It was just… familiar.
Tonya hated it.
She’d groan, disappear into the bedroom, roll her eyes.
But I didn’t care. It was mine.
A single hour where I remembered who I used to be, back before I was sick and broke and stealing cash from drawers.
John and his girlfriend — I think her name was Jenn… no, Jess. But there were always too many Jesses and Jenns in Philly — were usually around.
She was young. Waifish. Sweet in that bruised way.
Her mother had been a porn actress, her stepfather a porn producer — Jess had grown up backstage, behind curtains she was never allowed to close.
Boundaries blurred early. Control was something you either surrendered to or learned to imitate.
She was smart — sharp, even — but by the time I met her, she’d already disappeared into John’s gravity, orbiting him with a kind of practiced submission.
He’d make her dance topless for heroin money.
I never said anything. I didn’t even flinch. That’s how far gone I was.
John was my connection, and in a way, my backup generator.
If I needed dope, he was there.
If I needed a sympathetic ear, a fellow couch traveller for Doctor Who, a distraction from myself — he had that too.
I was never happy, but I wasn’t panicking.
Heroin took away the panic.
Doctor Who took away the silence.
The eviction came eventually, as expected.
Not a plot twist. Just the natural result of inertia.
But at least I’d gotten the haircut.
Because it made me look like someone else — and maybe that someone else could leave.
And I did.