Joe Meno - Hairstyles of the damned

You rock it: Koren #1 favorite wife of all time, Dan Sinker, Mark Zambo, Meghan Lee, Jimmy Vickery, Jake Silker, Chad Rasner, Meg Stielstra, Lott Hill, Todd Dills, Jim Munroe, Jon Resh, Mike Coleman, Joe Tower, Joe Denk, Meredith Stone, Jenny Norton, Sarah K., Nick Novosel, the cast and crew of Haunted Trails, Brian Peterson at the Fireside Bowl, Quimbys Bookstore, The Alley Chicago, Charles Everitt, Jenny Bent, Johnny Temple, my family, folks I met through the Phantom Three, Our Missles Are:, Sleepwalk magazine, Go Cougars, Bail magazine, Punk Planet magazine, the all-powerful Columbia College Fiction Writing Department, the Chicago Tribune, and the always supportive New City.

You suck it: Judith Regan. Badly. And all you other bad publishing corporations. Be ready, the end is nigh.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Akashic Books/Punk Planet Books
2004 Joe Meno

Punk Planet Books is a division of Independents Day Media.

Photographs by Laurent Yen

Model: Meghan Galbraith

Book design by Pirate Signal International

ePub ISBN 13: 978-1-936-07029-9

ISBN: 1-888451-70-X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106233

All rights reserved

Akashic Books Punk Planet Books

PO Box 1456 4229 N. Honore

New York, NY 10009 Chicago, IL 60613

Akashic7@aol.com books@punkplanet.com

www.akashicbooks.com www.punkplanetbooks.com

Praise for Joe Menos previous novels

How the Hula Girl Sings (2001)

Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman whose language is simple and direct and never loses sight of its origins.Hubert Selby, Jr.

Meno has a poets feel for small-town details Hes a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.Publishers Weekly

Menos poetic and visceral style perfectly captures the seedy locale, and he finds the sadness behind the violence and the anger behind revenge.Booklist

How the Hula Girl Sings is a powerful tale, a breezy little yarn of small-town intrigue overshadowed by a host of deeper meanings woven into the roof of the narrative.Chicago Tribune

Tender As Hellfire (1999)

Tender As Hellfire features some of the liveliest characters that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel Menos passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch.Publishers Weekly

Menos voicerough, repetitive, and intense as a dogs growlis evidence that he is a writer with promise.Booklist

Dark and exuberant with a stunning lyrical quality Tender As Hellfire is reckless storytelling, both in the audacity of its plot twists and in the nearly sentimental quality of the emotions that it plumbs.

Chicago Tribune

Were hooked.New City

october 1990

Whoa, oh, oh oh, sweet child of mine

Sweet Child o Mine

Axl Rose, Guns n Roses

Your penis is king

Graffiti in a high school boys bathroom

The sun shines out of our behinds

Hand in Glove

Morrissey, The Smiths

The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat. We were in her crappy car and singing, and at the end of the song White Riot, the one by the Clash, I realized by the way I was watching her mouth pucker and smile and her eyes blink and wink, we were way more than friends, at least to me. I looked over at Gretchen driving and she was starting to sing the next song, Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? by the Clash again, and I said, I love driving around with you, Gretchen, but because the radio was so loud all she could do was see my mouth move.

It was a Tuesday around four in the afternoon, the first semester of our junior year in high school, and neither one of us had anything to do, because Gretchen had just recently been fired from the Cinnabon at the mall for flipping off a female customer when she asked for more icing, and I wasnt allowed to work because my mother was very overprotective of me and insisted that I only focus on studying. I yelled something to Gretchen again and she nodded at me and then turned her head back to drive and kept on singing and I guess I looked over at her, at her short blondish-pink hairsome of it hanging in her face, some tucked behind her ear, some dyed brighter pink than the restand I watched the way her mouth moved again and I noticed she didnt ever wear lipstick and it was one of the reasons I think I liked her; and also I smiled at how she was holding her small white hands on the steering wheel very seriously, like she was a new driver, which she was not, because she was seventeen and had been driving way before she had gotten her license last year. I also looked at her breasts; I looked at them and they were big, very big, more than I knew what to do with, and I guess the truth of the matter was they were big because she was fat, and it didnt matter to me then, not the way it would if I was like hanging out with Bobby B. or some other guy at the mall, and hed be like, Check out that porker, and Id be like, Yeah, and then Id laugh. Gretchen was fat, I mean not like obese, but she was definitely big, not her face so much, but her middle and behind.

Worse than that, she was known for kicking other girls asses on a regular basis. It was not very cool. There was the awful hair-pulling incident with Polly Winchensky. There was the enormous black eye she gave Lisa Hensel. There was the time Gretchen broke Amy Schaffers arm at a Halloween partyyou know, when Amy Schaffer had rolled her eyes at Gretchens costume, when she came as JFK post-assassination, with the black suit and blood and bullet holes, and Amy Schaffer said, You really do look like a man, and Gretchen just turned and grabbed Amy Schaffers arm and twisted it so hard behind her back that Amy Schaffers school drama days were ended right there, just like that, so that poor Amy Schaffer had to go around for the next two years milking sympathy, like a fucking martyr wearing her aircast everywhere, long after it could have possibly been needed for anything recuperative.

Also, well, also Gretchen wasnt the most feminine girl in the world, sincerely. She swore a lot and only listened to punk, like the Misfits and the Ramones and the Descendents, especially when we were in the car, because, although it had a decent stereo for a Ford Escort, there was a tape that had been stuck in the cassette player for about a year now and most of the time that was all it would play, and you had to jab the tape with a pen or nail file to get it to start, and the tape was the same handpicked mix Gretchen had thought was cool a year ago, which according to the label on the tape was what she had called White Protest Rock, version II.

Gretchens mix-tapes, her music choices, were like these songs that seemed to be all about our lives, but in small random ways that made sense on almost any occasion. Like Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Maybe it meant I should tell Gretchen how I was feeling. Or maybe it meant I should just go home. To me, the tapes were what made me like her, then love her so much: the fact that in between the Misfits and the Specials, she would have a song from the Mamas and the Papas, Dream a Little Dream of Me or something like that. Those mix-tapes were the secret soundtrack to how I was feeling or what I thought about almost everything.

Alsoand I dont know if I should mention this or notGretchen always called other people, even our friends, douche-bags or douche-holes or cunts or cunt-holes or cunt-teasers or cuntwads or cunt-heads or even cunt-asses, which doesnt even make sense when you think about it, things like that. The way she swore amazed me and again, it probably made me like her a lot more than any other girl I had ever met because she didnt ever seem to mind hanging out with me.