This is what happens when you ignore you gut feelings...

It was a very unusual weekend. “Unusual” is the word I’ll use for lack of a better one. To begin at the beginning…

SATURDAY:
Sonny and I slept kind of late. Noon time we rolled out of the sheets. Listen, I can’t keep my music downloading addiction as repressed as I thought, and Sonny has been working overtime to pick up the slack of losing an employee in his department. What does that add up to? Me, awake at 3am trying desperately to find an mp3 file of “Burning Up” by Madonna that will download without crashing. And Sonny awake until 1am (a phenomenon that rarely occurs) working like a plow mule. This was supposed to be “the restful weekend”. Pssht.

Anyway, we went to the gym after we woke up and got cleaned and prepped. Saturdays at the gym allow you to enjoy your workout without the shrieking and grunting from the muscle-head-crew that EVERY gym acquires. You know… the ones that come in and hog the heaviest hand weights and look at you dirty if you try the chin ups? Fuckers. So anyway, we did a short and sweet circuit. Sonny worked on the weights and I did some cardio. Gawd, I’m behind on my fitness training. It’s January 23rd and I’m watching that resolution slip through my fingers. I’ve got to get a car so I don’t have to depend on Sonny to get me to the gym. The more he works late, the less I get to head to the gym. This sucks MAJOR ass. Oh, BLAST IT ALL TO HELL!!!

From the time that I woke up, I had this bad feeling. Like a sinking feeling in my gut. I ignored it as well as I could, but I knew it had to do with the hair appointment I scheduled for Sunday. Later on in the day, Sonny got his hair cut and I found an adorable take on the prairie skirt. I’m not much of a skirt person, but this is the first skirt I bought without trying it on. I loved it that much. So we had a simple Saturday. Almost…relaxing. I started to take my hair out after dinner. Big mistake. I was up until 5 am picking and pulling and ripping the braids out. Only to have two thirds of my hair still tightly entwined in braids. I gave up after 5 o’clock and went to bed with a puffy, throbbing head.

SUNDAY:
The feeling of doom was more acute and worse than anything I’ve felt before. Seriously. I may sound a little dramatic, but I have no other way to describe what I was feeling. I gave up on getting my hair completely taken out BEFORE I arrived at my appointment and decided that someone there could definitely help me. Tired as I was though, I didn’t get out of bed until 11am. My appointment was for noon. And I knew as well as Sonny did, that the hair place was going to be an hour long journey into Cleveland.

“We can’t use that hair.” The heavyset, Nigerian beautician said when I opened my bag of used hair for her.

“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

Before you cringe and turn up your nose at the idea of “used hair”, realize, that “human braiding hair” can be reused. You simply wash it, condition, comb it out and use it again. Granted, I still had most of the hair on my head (and I arrived an hour late) but she was not an intelligent business woman. I reasoned with myself that I could find a wig shop en route to home and take care of this problem, at least for a week or two.

“We can’t use that hair.” She repeated, shook her head for emphasis. “That’s not enough.”

“But, I’ve still got some on my head. See?” I turned so she could see the middle of my head and all the braids I had yet to remove.

“Uh-uh.” She said. “That’s too much work.”

Poor Sonny has a hearing problem, and on top of it this woman had a thick, barely comprehensible accent. He stood at my right, trying desperately to grasp at pieces of the conversation. Finally, he pressed the lunch bag into my hand and reminded me that he was meeting his friend for lunch. I asked him to wait, and quickly broke down the upshot to him. She claims I don’t have enough hair, and it’s too much work to take the hair from my head... “I might not be staying here, honey.”

The large woman mumbled to her 2 coworkers in their native tongue and jabbed at my bag with her index finger. I had resolved, after a quick look around the desolate salon, that I would probably be better off with a wig. I was prepared to leave. I was almost anxious for it.

“Ok.” The heavy set woman relented. “Get at least one more pack of hair, and we’ll do it for you.”

Finding a hair shop open on a Sunday was quite a job. But we found a place, and bought the hair. Sonny left me there in the care of the hairbraiders. I began opening some braids, and watching the Nigerian religious drama that the women had put into the DVD player. Suddenly, I was being wordlessly urged into the bathroom. For what? I wondered. Soon enough, I found out. They had a sink with water running. What in the name of Morgan Freeman was going ON?

“Come, put your head in the sink.” The large woman was standing beside the basin, tugging at my arm.

It was right about then that I started to hyperventilate. I’ve never been used to that method of hair washing. Ever since I was a kid and my mom drenched my head with a bucket of water, I’ve been absolutely terrified to put my face in the sink for hairwashing. Irrational? Maybe. Infantile? Sure. But, it is what it is. Same as I wouldn’t tango with a tarantula, I had no desire to let this woman wash my head like that.

To be continued...