Letting Her Hair Down

This is from a character sketch I wrote for my journalism class:

“Aw hell, we'll give you reality,” promises Laura Fortune-Wanamaker, “Artistic Hair Designer and Cosmetologist” according to her business card. Laura is a walking paradox: a raucous wild child who goes on motorcycle runs down the coast and drunkenly dances with paraplegics, and a single mother who spent five grueling years in Milwaukee training to become a stylist.
Laura’s room is at the back of Strandz Salon, next door to G & L salon, in a shoddy plaza with cracked adobe walls, turquoise awnings and a dinky fountain. She shares her room with Nicole, a small girl riddled with tattoos and sporting a rockabilly ’do. The black mats, mirror frames, chairs, tiles and fan are brightened by a pink blow dryer, family photos and a leopard print broom against the wall. Light filters in through a dirty, cracked skylight and a long window looking out on the street.
It’s ten A.M. and Laura’s waiting for her first client. She sits in the chair, sips a cheap coffee, fiddles with her cell phone and peeks out the window. In her mid-thirties, Laura is youthful but not hip. She’s slightly pudgy, dressed in all black with an unfashionable haircut. Her contagious energy though, apparent in her boisterous voice and colorful stories, is what people remember about her. When she spies Jasmine, a twenty-something blond, she rushes out to the reception desk.
“Hey girl!” Laura cries. “How you doin?” Jasmine is seated and offered coffee, water, a magazine, even tequila (with a wink), all declined.
“You’re the one with the Virgo birthday, right?” Laura asks, feeling Jasmine’s hair.
“No, Sagittarius,” Jasmine answers.
“Are you dating now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re all, ‘Stop asking me questions!’” Laura says grinning.
Comfortable silence ensues as Laura comes in and out of the room, concocting Jasmine’s new chocolate hue. She snaps on black gloves and starts applying the color. As the opening notes of “Step by Step” by New Kids on the Block waft through the room, Laura starts dancing and Jasmine brightens.
“O my god, this takes me back!”
“The eighties were a rough time for me,” Laura says. “O wait, this was the nineties, huh.”
The conversation wanders from boy bands to Hugh Hefner to the inexplicable motherlessness of Disney heroines. Laura weaves yarns about her phone’s tragic demise by minivan despite her heroic efforts, a stranger she greeted in Vegas who threatened to slit her throat and the time she once befriended a homeless surfer and tried to fix him up with her mother. Finally they discuss men. Laura’s giddy about her new fiancé, Harley, a biker she met six months ago.
“I don’t like pretty guys, I like manly men,” she says. “If he’s looking at himself more than me, if he’s using my damn hair flattener, there’s gonna be a problem.” When asked about her ideal guy, she pauses a minute and admits her attraction to Handy Manny, a character from one of her two-year-old son’s favorite shows.
“What does that say about me?” she muses.
“At least he’s nice. I mean he talks to his tools, but hey,” teases Jasmine.
Laura deftly paints in highlights, makes sure the color is even and goes to rinse out the dye. She selects a lavender mint shampoo and her strong hands go to work massaging Jasmine’s scalp. Laura wants to include hand and scalp massages as one of her services. “That’s what people appreciate, the above and beyond,” she says. “Time is money, but I’d rather give each client their time.”
Next is the haircut. “We’re going from a graduated bob, right? But you want to grow it out to here?” Laura frowns in concentration, mouth slightly open as she measures, calculates, snips and arranges. She periodically stops to clarify Jasmine’s wishes and explain what she’s doing.
Laura’s expertise was borne from five lonely winters in Wisconsin. She endured forty hour work weeks on top of technical training, begging people on the street to be her models and suffering under a crazy teacher who would throw combs across the room and scream “this isn’t rocket science dammit!” But she accepts it as part of the process. “You have to hustle in this business” she maintains, “or you end up working at Fantastic Sams.”
Jasmine’s hair is done at one o’clock. The total is one hundred and twenty dollars, but she doesn’t have cash or a check. Laura lets her drive to the ATM down the street to retrieve the money.
“I have a pretty kickback job,” she admits. “Have you heard the riddle about the good hairstylist?”
She lays down the premise: there are two hairdressers. One has spectacular hair, but the other looks atrocious. Who do you choose to do your own hair?
“The one with the bad hair, of course,” Laura says, “because she did the other one’s hair! Or something like that.” She laughs.
“I’m a bad story teller,” Laura claims, settling back into her chair, “but I have fun. And I do damn good hair.”