If I Ever Get Out of Here

“Cut it off,” I yelled.
“Shut up, or my dad will hear you,” Carson Mastick said. “He’s not that
drunk yet, and I’m gonna have a hard enough time explaining how you
come down looking like a different kid than the one that went upstairs.” For
ten minutes, he’d been farting around, waving the scissors like a magic
wand. Now he yanked the long tail of hair from my neck and touched the
scissors an inch above my collar. “Is this about it? There’s no turning back
once I start chopping.”
“Yup, that’s it,” I said.
“You think cutting off your braid is going to make those white kids
suddenly talk to you?” Carson’s cousin Tami said. “If you believe that, you
need brain surgery, not a haircut. What do you care what they think
anyway? You’ve had this braid since, what, kindergarten?”
“Second grade,” I said. “If you’ll remember, someone stuck a massive
wad of gum in my hair that year and I had to cut it all off and start over.”
“Was an accident,” Carson said, the same thing he said whenever he did
something terrible that he secretly thought was funny.
“Give it to me,” Tami said. “I got better things to do.” She grabbed the
scissors.
“Wait,” Carson said, “I didn’t —”
Suddenly, it was gone, the hair I’d grown for five years. Tami held it out
in her hand and I turned around.
“You didn’t fix it first,” I said. Everyone on the reservation knew that
when you snipped off a braid, if you wanted to save it, you had to tie off
both ends before you cut. And since almost no one cut off a braid casually,
you always saved it to remember the reason you had cut it. What Tami held
looked like a small black hay bale. “What am I gonna do with that?” I
yelled, and Carson made the shush expression with his face. “You can’t
braid it loose. It’s not boondoggle.”
“You could always do what I do,” Tami said. “I have my stylist sweep it
up for me, and then when I get home, I let it go in one of the back fields, so
the birds can nest with it.”
“Your stylist,” Carson laughed. “I’m the one that cuts her hair.”
In the mirror, my hair fell in strange lengths from Tami’s cut. “Let me
even this out,” Carson said, but with each slice he made, my hair looked
worse, like I was in one of those paintings at school where the person’s lips
are on their cheek and one eye sits on top of their ear.
I noticed something else in the mirror I hadn’t registered before. “When
did you get a guitar?”
“Last week,” Carson said, picking it up and strumming it, then tossing it
back in the corner. “I told my old man I wanted one, and he knew I was
talking electric, but he brought this piece of crap home. Showed me a few
chords, said if I’m still playing it in December, we’ll think about the
electric.”
“Where’d it come from?” I walked over to pick it up, but he grabbed it
away.
“Sorry,” he said with a fake sad face. “The old man said no one else
could touch it. We just got it on hock. Bug Jemison was hard up for some of
his Rhine wine, so the old man bought him a few jugs ’til the end of the
month, and we’re holding the guitar hostage. If he don’t pay up when his
disability check comes in, the guitar’s mine. But until then…”
“Can you play any Beatles?” I asked, hopeful.
“Beatles! They broke up and ain’t never getting back together. Get over
it.”
I left a few minutes later, starting my long walk home across half the
reservation, still gripping the hank of hair. I opened my fingers a little every
few yards to let the August breeze take some for the birds. As I turned the
corner at Dog Street, where I lived, I could see my old elementary school.
The teachers would be in their classrooms now, decorating bulletin boards
with WELCOME TO THE 1975–76 SCHOOL YEAR! in big construction-paper letters. They
were going to be puzzled by the fact that the United States Bicentennial
Celebration wasn’t exactly a reservation priority, since we’d been here for a
lot longer than two hundred years.
The sight of the school reminded me how I got in this situation in the
first place. It probably started back in third grade, when I had become a
novelty. When I told my ma I was going to be featured on Indian Culture
Night as the only kid from my grade who could speak Tuscarora fluently, I
thought she would be happy, since she was always talking good grades this
and good grades that. But she laughed like she did when the case worker
asked about my dad’s child-support payments during our monthly visits to
her cubicle.
“You’re just the dog and pony show,” Ma said. She spoke a couple of
sentences in Tuscarora. “Know what I said?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Didn’t think so. They’re looking for cash to keep the program going.
Everyone wants to believe we can rebuild what the boarding schools took
away from us. You’re Lewis the Horse, the proof that it can be done, that
kids could learn the traditional language. But I don’t know who you’re
going to speak it to,” she said. “No one your age speaks it, and no one out
in the white world would understand you. Concentrate on subjects that are
going to actually help you out.”
She refused to attend Indian Culture Night. I walked to school myself
and did my bit to amaze the teachers. Then I went home the same way I’d
gone, on foot. I was known as a carless kid, but for that night, I was the
smart kid, and I liked the change. I kept up my grades, moving into
advanced reading with the fourth graders, a year older than me, and I kept
up with the work, welcoming a change of identity.
So when Groffini, the reservation school guidance counselor, sent our
names over to the county junior high at the end of fifth grade, they tracked
me into what my brother, Zach, called the smarties section, the brainiacs.
Trouble was, they apparently didn’t think any of the other rez kids would
make it in that section, so they tossed me in with twenty-two white
strangers.
Maybe the fact that I’d been good at learning Tuscarora made them
believe I’d be able to pick up the white kids’ language easily. But with all
my supposed brains, I didn’t grasp that the way we talk to one another on
the reservation was definitely not the way kids talked in this largely white
junior high. On the rez, you start getting teased a little bit right after you
learn to talk, and either you learn to tease back or you get eaten alive. One
girl in my class, Marie, got stuck with the name “Stinkpot,” courtesy of
Carson, when we were in first grade. You can see how I was okay with
“Brainiac” by comparison. You might also be able to see that if I thought
calling someone “Stinkpot” was a good way of making friends, I was in for
a fairly rough ride.
So the first week of sixth grade, I thought I’d come up with nicknames
for two kids I wanted to hang out with, to show them I was Prime Friend
Material. I tried an easy one first, calling Stacey Lodinsky “Spacey”
instead, like she was an airhead. And Artie Critcher seemed like a friendly
enough guy, so when I noticed that his hair curled out from the front and
back like a dirigible, I made the obvious leap and started calling him Blimp
Head.
Stacey maybe just didn’t hear me, since she didn’t say anything about
the name. But when I said to Artie, “Hey, Blimp Head, you wanna sit next
to each other in lunch?” he said, “My hair might have a funny shape, but at
least I wash it every day. I don’t want your dandruff in my soup, so no
thanks.” They both stopped talking to me shortly after that. Clearly, the only
plan I had for forming friendships had been a spectacular failure. Maybe I
needed a new nickname myself, something like “the Invisible Boy.”
And then it got worse. For most of sixth grade, it was like I had a force
field around me, like one of those Martian war machines in War of the
Worlds, with a death ray waiting to blast the other kids if they made any
sudden move in my direction. They just pretended I wasn’t there as much as
they possibly could. During lunch, we were required to sit with our class at
two long tables. In every other section, the Indians gravitated to one another
like atoms in some science experiment, but I sank to the bottom of my
particular beaker, alone. Still, I had to eat, so I’d go to one end of our
assigned tables, decide who was least likely to resist when I set my tray
down, and inch myself onto the bench next to my reluctant seatmate, who
usually gave up one butt cheek of room, sometimes even both. The force
field kept me inside and everyone else out. I’d given up trying to make
friends by Christmas break.
This year, I was going to make another shot at it. Thanks to my zero
social distractions, I’d kept my grades up, so I remained among the
brainiacs for seventh grade. I was hoping someone from a lower track had
done well enough in sixth that they’d be bumped up to my class and might
offer a new door to a friend. I wasn’t crazy enough to think it would be
someone from the reservation, so I thought the more I looked like everyone
else in the class, the better chance I might have with someone who didn’t
know about my force field. I’d find out in a couple days.
Even though I’d turned on to Dog Street, I still had a long walk to my
house, so I started eyeing whatever cars were going my way. One awesome
thing about being from a tiny place where everyone knows everyone, and
where everyone knows your family doesn’t own transportation, is that you
can usually snag a ride by just sticking your thumb out to hitchhike. Two
vehicles later, I was climbing in a car’s open trunk, already stuffed full of
kids heading for a late-summer swim in the dike.
“What happened to your hair?” all of them asked me, shouting over one
another.
“I bet it was lice,” Floyd Page said, and they all backed away,
exaggerating, pretending they were going to climb out of the trunk.
“Impossible,” I said. “I wasn’t using your comb.”
Floyd rubbed my bristles as we laughed. In this way, we communicated
in the language we knew best — hassling one another.

“You’re in luck,” my uncle Albert said when I got home. “She’s not back
yet, so you’re not officially late.”
He didn’t seem to notice that my head looked like post-tornado TV
footage. At that moment, my brother Zach’s car pulled in the driveway to
drop off my ma. The engine shut off, which meant he was coming in,
probably helping with groceries.
“What the hell happened to your hair?” was the first thing Zach said.
“You look like David Bowie on a bad night.”
“I’nit tho,” Albert said, laughing, registering my hair for the first time.
“Who’s David Bowie?” I asked.
“That’s a little later in your musical education,” Albert said.
“So spill it. What happened?” Zach was not going to let me off.
“I cut it.”
“It looks like you cut it,” he said, sticking his fingers in my hair. “With a
blindfold on.”
Just then, my ma walked in, carrying a couple bags of groceries.
“What is this?” she said, staring at my hair.
“I cut my hair,” I said. “I’m tired of not fitting in with my class. That
two-foot braid just shouted, ‘Reservation Kid Here,’ so I got rid of it.”
“Go get the buzzer,” she said.
“What?”
“Either you’re going to get it or I’m going to get it, but before we eat,
we’re cleaning that hair up,” she said, grabbing a towel to pin around my
neck. “You look like a Welfare Indian.”
“I am a Welfare Indian,” I said.
“You don’t need to look the part,” she said.
The buzzer was a garage sale purchase — a hair clipper that made more
noise than it should have, grabbed your hair like it was mad at you, and
sometimes gave off a burning odor while it did its job. She came at me.
Five minutes later, the longest hairs on my head were in my eyebrows, and
they survived only because they were behind my glasses.
“The next time you think about caving in to how you believe white
people want to see you,” she said, sheathing the buzzer in its holster, “you
remember this.”
She took the towel off me and I dunked my head in the washing pan.
The water was cold, but I didn’t want all those tiny hairs drifting down my
shirt like a million little bugs.
“Nice look, G.I. Joe,” Zach said from across the room, finishing the last
of the spaghetti in the serving bowl before I had the chance to get any. “Too
bad you don’t have that patented Kung Fu Grip or you wouldn’t need to
worry about fitting in. You could just do a Bruce Lee on your enemies.”
I peeked in the mirror. I looked exactly like what he said. My hair was
buzzed to maybe a quarter of an inch, and it stood up straight, like
dandelion fuzz that had been spray painted black.
When I went to bed that night, I grabbed the latest copy of The Amazing
Spider-Man. Albert periodically supplied me with comics when he picked
up his magazines, and I always hoped for Spider-Man. I was glad
somebody’s world was more complicated and lonely than mine, even if he
was a comic book character in a blue-and-red bodysuit.
I reached behind me to pull my braid forward, as I had every night for
years, but my fingers touched nothing but stubbly hair and skin. I shared a
room with Albert, who lay a few feet away in his bed, thumbing through a
magazine. He noticed my automatic gesture.
“Feels funny, isn’t it? Like maybe a piece of you is missing?” he said.
“You get used to it after a while.” He closed his magazine. “Besides, if you
don’t like it, it grows back. They buzzed mine when I got drafted and
shipped off to Vietnam. Now look at it.” He flipped his long hair like he
was in a shampoo commercial. “But you’re gonna have to live with it for a
while anyway. Hope it was worth it,” he said, shutting off his light.