Author Archives: Wistar

When Jennifer brought her two-year-old daughter Harper to the nursing home to visit my grandmother, we pushed the wheelchair into the sunlit center courtyard, wound vacuum in one hand and “Co-Cola” (as they say in Georgia) in the other, and we were all cheered up by watching Harper run from plant to plant and tree to tree, poking her little fingers at bark and bloom. She swung round and round the crape myrtles until the salubrious effects of my grandmother’s Valium started to wane and we went back inside.

After they left, my grandmother pronounced the red-headed Harper “full of beans.” She said Jennifer was delightful too, but after a few beats she wondered “why such a pretty girl would do that to her hair.” Maybe she was just hair-obsessed because her own hadn’t been washed for a couple of weeks, except by a shower cap shampoo at the hospital, which just seemed to make her hair greasier. I offered to bring her some astronaut shampoo, but she really wanted a wash and set.

“Well,” I said, “I think the crimson and purple look great on Jen.” Big Wis looked at me skeptically. “And actually I saw a picture of her head shaved once. She’s one of the few people I know who can carry it off.” In her silence I became self conscious about my split ends and the rat’s nest at the back of my neck. I thought of the time in 10th grade when I tried to pierce my eyebrow with a safety pin, but my skin kept spitting out the ring, rejecting the transplant. And the belly button that got infected in 8th grade because I’d gone too deep with the needle. And the time I ran away. And my senior year of college when I dropped out for a semester, gained major lbs (could no longer fit into those Gap khakis and Talbots button-downs she loves so much), and developed some substance abuse issues. And the nails – always too short – always more obvious than the other mistakes. (Since I was a kid – “If you grow them out, I will buy you a new such and such/take you to Chucky Cheese.”) She nudged me a few times in the hospital room to stop biting.

“At least Jennifer doesn’t have tattoos,” I said. “Or piercings.”

“Yes,” said Big Wis. “That is certainly true. It could be worse.”

We try to prevent our grandparents from knowing exactly how much worse it can get. But I have decided that they like the challenge of loving us through the phases and rebellions (as long as they get to love at a distance). I think they’re proud in some way that they’re still friendly with the cool kids. Even though Big Wis came back from the nursing home salon that afternoon with a smooth grey helmet for a head instead of her natural, wild curls, I felt like she was inspired in some small way by Jennifer’s hair. Just like she was inspired by Harper’s somersaults in the grass. At any rate, I feel like it’s good for older people to see the most flagrant signs of youth. And I don’t think that it’s intolerance that makes some grandparents shake their heads at the mohawks and ripped jeans and gum-chewing on the street corner (yes, I think like a 1950s housewife sometimes – that is my secret), I think they’re just over all that stuff. They just want to meet people so put-together that looks aren’t a distraction. They don’t understand people trying to draw attention to themselves in that way. “Why would such a pretty girl do that to her hair?” was a very real question to my grandmother. She didn’t see that appearance can still be an effective translator of emotion. Especially, I think, for people who are attracted to metaphor, to poetry, and to art in general.

Later that day I explained to Big Wis that Jen had had a really tough year, and my grandmother said that she was sorry, and that she now understood the hair.

This article by Michael Hirschorn from the Atlantic Monthly, entitled Quirked Around, could easily be expanded to be an encyclopedic cultural history of the mid-90s to the present. Quirk. The word makes me shudder. The word has caused me to put down many modern novels after a page and a half. And yet quirk is so well integrated into our contemporary literary, comedic, and cinematic standards, that it’s really impossible to escape. And I’m not totally sure I’d be able to say goodbye. I read the Atlantic article on my laptop while watching Home Movie, a quirky documentary directed by the same guy who made American Movie, the quirky documentary about the sub-par, mid-Western, horror movie director Mark Borchardt. Home Movie is about a handful of eccentric characters across the United States and their bizarre homes. There’s a Louisiana man who lives on a houseboat and sells alligator heads to tourist shops. There’s a flute-playing, drum-circling couple who inhabit an underground missile launch site in Kansas. There’s a former Japanese sitcom star who looks like the Joker and lives in a treehouse in a remote Hawaiian jungle…You get the idea. It’s all very fascinating, to tell you the truth, and there’s a part of me that wishes I had “discovered” these people. I could have stolen them for a book. How could you not fall prey to the quirk, in spite of your best intentions? It reminds me of a conversation I had with my cousin Nick who lives in Brooklyn [most excellent Nick, most excellent Alice, their kickass life together with loaded guns, great captions, & NYU photo school degrees]. We were sitting in a hip neighborhood bar in Red Hook, on a street which was the last street I would expect to find a hip neighborhood bar, on a street where grizzled old men rode bikes with ancient fishing poles strapped to their backs, where the door to the bar looked like it had been built out of weathered sailing ships, and Nick said that there was no such thing as authenticity anymore. It seems like the minute you find a genuine dive bar in Brooklyn, where locals have been drinking beer for decades before the college kids started gentrifying the neighborhood, where the jukebox hasn’t been refurbished to play only Rolling Stones and David Bowie jams, you immediately make the place uncool and inauthentic just by being there. Because you secretly know you don’t belong. You are one of the enemy. The bartender who wears an eye patch because he’s actually missing an eye, and not because he thinks it’s funny to look like a pirate, should refuse you service. You don’t belong because you’re outside looking in. Suddenly you’re peering suspiciously around the bar, judging how “real” everything is, to what extent the regulars lack self-awareness, whether any drink specials involve PBR. You’re judging the other hipsters who walk in two minutes late to the new scene. YOU were there first. You discovered the place.

I’m getting way off track here. Let me try to bring this back around.

I think the problem with quirkiness is the same as the problem with finding a normal bar in Brooklyn. You’re staring too hard. You’re forcing it. You don’t need to watch an eccentric alligator herdsman to feel interested in humanity. Look in the mirror sometime. You’re special too, without having to be obsessed with styrofoam solar system dioramas or owl poop. Your novel doesn’t have to be about the train conductor with a three-legged hamster who sits on his shoulder. Your hipster bar with the hipster tennis shoes dangling from the hipster bar stools is an authentic place too. The people who are just being themselves and having real human emotions and real human lives without any bullshit, contrived quirks, are always going to be better “subjects” than the dime-a-dozen, “I have a thousand cats,” “my back is tattooed with pictures of the Rice Krispies guys,” kind of people. Before you can write great fiction, or be comfortable sitting with your friends at any bar (and I’m a long way from both), you’ve got to accept that you yourself are okay, that you yourself are a real “character,” deserving of the best and the worst beers, without all the witty, quirky accessorizing.