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It Is Funny
It was two days after I had been let out of the San Jose County Jail on my own recognizance (instead of extradited back to Texas on a felony drug warrant) that I was visiting a girl named Kerry in Santa Cruz. I remember being in a booth at a restaurant having pizza when Kerry commented, while picking some invisible matter off her tongue, that she thought maybe she had some of my hair in her mouth. There was a pause while we both thought about what she had just said, and then we broke out laughing. It felt good to laugh after spending two weeks in jail with a bunch of guys who didn't do much laughing, and although it would have been even more joyous if we had been laughing at the reality of what we were purportedly both laughing at, it was still a good thing going on for me, this laughing. Kerry had hours before cut my hair (hence the possibilities in her mouth), in a fashion so short that a few days later in San Franciso, another friend, Patti, said it made me look gay, which, if I had been in hiding would of been a good thing, according to the B. Kliban philosophy of "always hide where there are a lot of the same things." Still later after driving back cross country to Huntsville, TX. to visit my brother who was studying Criminology at SHSU--and lived pretty close to the penitentiary at which I would be getting butt-fucked if things with my lawyer didn't work out--a neighbor of his quietly asked him did his brother just get out of the penitentiary, on account of that haircut and all. But things with the lawyer did work out because there is right now a picture of me in a desk drawer in my boyhood bedroom in Dallas TX. taken in Tomkins Square Park in NYC some months, maybe a year, after the arrest and haircut, and the hair grew out nicely, so that sometimes while I'm visiting my mom there in Dallas who lives alone with the curvature of her 82-year-old spine, and I look at that picture in the drawer, I think--that was the best haircut I ever got. It did for awhile bother me that Kerry had confided to a mutual friend that she felt guilty about all the laughing she had done with me because it reminded her of laughing with her father in an effort to please him, and she was, you know, trying to be a woman in this world independent of the need to please men. But it doesn't bother me anymore, that, because I'm just looking for a laugh wherever I can find it--back then, up ahead, wherever.