$480 Haircut

I leapt up and caught the Frisbee and then landed in sheer agony. My foot collided on the side of a curb and I twisted my ankle. At first I thought it was nothing, and continued to play Frisbee with Leo in the gravelly parking lot behind our apartment.

Ten minutes later, I hobbled into the apartment to see my girlfriend, Caz, watching TV. I convinced her to drive me to the Roxborough Hospital, which was just a couple blocks away.

I gave the woman at the triage window my healthcare card and drivers license. She made some copies and I was soon in a room of curtain walls, waiting for a doctor. Caz pulled out a platinum and black onyx ring that she happened to have in her purse, and asked if I wanted it.

I had never worn a ring before. It fit only on my pinky fingers. I put it on my left pinky finger, as Caz explained that only mafia bosses wear it like that, and how cool it looked.

The doctor gave me an Rx for some Percosett, wrapped my swollen ankle in a bandage, and told me to use crutches for a couple weeks. He sized me up and adjusted the crutches, and I was on my way to CVS to pick up the pain relievers. Caz picked up a blond hair dye kit, wanting to transform me to a spiky blond dude.

Back at the house, I sat and watched Leo play video games and let the dull calm of Percosett tick the hours away. I had work the following day, and was dreading shuffling the crutches while driving to work.

Caz insisted on dying my hair, ridding my head of brown hair, and give me a new choppy look with spiky parts, all held together with pommade. So, I let her do it. She was already tweezing my eyebrows and had waxed my chest, so this was normal protocol and I was her fashion guinea pig.

We brought a chair into the bathroom and I sat with my head leaning in the sink, looking up at a smiling Caz having her way with my head, snipping off hair with a pair of scissors that I used solely around Christmas to wrap gifts. Then came the stinky hair dye.

The next day at work, my co-worker Kevin saw me and said, “What the fuck happened to you? Did you trip and fall into a tub of bleach and break your leg?!” The jokes were relentless all day long, but it was all good fun. I was enjoying the perks of being on crutches, coffee delivered to my desk, lunch orders taken, and a less stressed workload.

One programmer guy, Big Mike as they called him, stopped by my cube, put his hands on his hips, and said, “That’s pretty gay, man.”

Big Mike had about a dozen different cowboy boots that he rotated and wore to work, and he had a tough sneer that hardly broke out a chuckle. He was known to get pissed while coding and slam a fist on the desk with an almighty “FUCK!”

I thought it was odd that Big Mike was talking trash on my hair though because he had a mullet where the “party in the back” was extravagantly long. Who was he to deem what was fashionable?

Two more times that Monday morning, Big Mike pinpointed quite loudly that my new doo was homosexual. “That’s gay, man. You’re not changing teams now, are ya?”

A few days later, one of the office girls came up to me and whispered briefly, “Mike got the same haircut as you. Walk by his desk!”

I laughed out loud. It was just too ridiculous a thought. Big Mike was about 20 years older than me, and that alone would make it odd. But after all that trash talk? There was just no way in hell he could ride his motorcycle without that mullet blowing in the breeze.

Soon, a couple more co-workers walked by clasping their mouths with their hands, trying not to lose it in laughter.

I got on my crutches and clanked on down towards Big Mike’s cube and saw quite a solid replica of my hairdo. He had dyed his brown hair blond and spiked it with pommade just like I had done. And the mullet? Completely gone! He didn’t look over at me and I never asked him why. It was as if we were just wearing the same Phillies cap or something.

Weeks later, I got a bill for $480 from the Roxborough Hospital. It was one of the few Philly hospitals that wasn’t “in my network” of healthcare providers.