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hair and started painting this creamy white stuff in it. She was wearing rubber gloves to keep
this chemical relaxer off her own skin, which should have been my first clue that maybe this
wasn’t such a great idea. Once my hair was full of the relaxer, she told me, “You have to try to
keep it in for as long as possible. It’s going to start burning. When it starts burning, tell me
and we’ll rinse it out. But the longer you can handle it, the straighter your hair will become.”
I wanted to do it right, so I sat in the chair and waited and waited for as long as I could.
I waited too long.
She’d told me to tell her when it started burning. She should have told me to tell her
when it started tingling, because by the time it was actually burning it had already taken off
several layers of my scalp. I was well past tingling when I started to freak out. “It’s burning!
It’s burning!” She rushed me over to the sink and started to rinse the relaxer out. What I
didn’t know is that the chemical doesn’t really start to burn until it’s being rinsed out. I felt
like someone was pouring liquid fire onto my head. When she was done I had patches of acid
burns all over my scalp.
I was the only man in the salon; it was all women. It was a window into what women
experience to look good on a regular basis. Why would they ever do this?, I thought. This is
horrible. But it worked. My hair was completely straight. The woman combed it back, and I
looked like a pimp, a pimp named Slickback.
Bongani then dragged me back to the first salon, and the woman agreed to cornrow my
hair. She worked slowly. It took six hours. Finally she said, “Okay, you can look in the
mirror.” She turned me around in the chair and I looked in the mirror and…I had never seen
myself like that before. It was like the makeover scenes in my American movies, where they
take the dorky guy or girl, fix the hair and change the clothes, and the ugly duckling becomes
the swan. I’d been so convinced I’d never get a date that I never tried to look nice for a girl, so
I didn’t know that I could. The hair was good. My skin wasn’t perfect, but it was getting
better; the pustules had receded into regular pimples. I looked…not bad.
I went home, and my mom squealed when I walked in the door.
“Ooooooh! They turned my baby boy into a pretty little girl! I’ve got a little girl! You’re so
pretty!”
“Mom! C’mon. Stop it.”
“Is this the way you’re telling me that you’re gay?”
“What? No. Why would you say that?”
“You know it’s okay if you are.”
“No, Mom. I’m not gay.”
Everyone in my family loved it. They all thought it looked great. My mom did tease the
shit out of me, though.
“It’s very well done,” she said, “but it is way too pretty. You do look like a girl.”
—
The big night finally came. Tom came over to help me get ready. The hair, the clothes,
everything came together perfectly. Once I was set, we went to Abel to get the keys to the
BMW, and that was the moment the whole night started to go wrong.