Jet Black Hair

 It was not my fault that I was blond. I never wanted to be blond. I was born blond. My brother felt the same way about his red hair. What we wanted was to have black hair. Jet black hair. Like our friend Steve. Like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Like James Bond. And so on. How could one possibly look cool with blond or red hair? It was a bane, a curse, only partially hidden by a cap or an army helmet, but there seemed nothing really that one could do about it. 

Until, that is, my brother, hanging out one day with my mother at the Safeway store, noticed a miracle on one of the shelves. 

Black hair spray! 

You just spray it on, like the paint one would use on a model airplane, and presto, you had black hair. 

So at the next opportunity, having combined our allowances, we walked up to Safeway and purchased two cans of black hair coloring spray. We did not realize at the time that this was meant for older people who merely wanted to hide isolated gray streaks. As it was, we purchased our spray, conveyed the magic potion back home, and straightaway shut ourselves and our cannisters in the second story bathroom where my brother, the more talented artistically, emptied both cannisters on our heads. It did not take long to notice that the spray colored not only the hair, but anything else it touched, such as our foreheads, the mirror, the soap dish, the toilet bowl. The overlaps to the skin were carefully addressed with multiple squares of toilet paper. Those on the mirror merely smudged, further reducing the reflection, and so these, we decided, could wait till later. We were eager to rush outside and test out our brave new appearance on the world. The spray had made our hair stiff as taffy, and the taffy came out like motor grease in the teeth of our combs, requiring some reapplication, but at last we were ready to emerge. 

It turned out unfortunate for us that our mother was in the kitchen, which we needed to traverse on the way to the back door. Nonetheless, we paraded through, smiling proudly, feeling taller than usual, quick, suave, cat-like. 

I had never seen my mother, otherwise a sweet, nearly angelic woman, so angry as on that day. She was stunned at first, struck speechless by the sight of us, as if two large crows had just flown straight into her forehead. It began to become apparent to us that she was not pleased. 

To be brief, this marked the end of our career with black hair, and instituted a series of scrubbings that seemed to leave open the question of whether there would be any hair left after the scrubbings had ended. Goodbye Napoleon Solo, goodbye James Bond. Hello again to wimpy, unmanly blond and red.

Why was my mother so angry? Why was she behaving as if we had committed some unspeakable transgression? I certainly did not know at the time. I think now that we had simply compromised something very special to her. She loved our blond and red hair. We were her children, and this was the way she and our father had made us. We were beautiful, and now we had disfigured ourselves. That's all that I can figure. 

To be clear, I still don't like my hair. What's left of it, anyway. I'd still rather have black hair. But even to this day, I'm not about to try to color it again, because poor Mom would turn in her grave to see it, and she deserves, if anyone in the world does, to rest in peace.