THE EYE, THE TOOTH

The New Haggery

It all started at my hair salon.  I walked in, full of dreadlocks and snarls, and this angel of a punkrock chick in camouflage leggings took one look at me and said, “You need more rockstar layers?”

 I felt seen and understood. 

But I had sunscreen in my eye most of the appointment.  Ever get sunscreen in your eye?  It’s like getting oven cleaner in it, only it’s greasy, and it clings to your eyeball burning holes in it for about 20 minutes.  I looked like a pirate, with one side of my face caved around my leaky red eye.

Many shades of blonde later, I felt pretty chuffed.  I had found this groovy hair salon mere blocks from my new apartment,  a mere 20 minute walk through the Hasidic neighborhood.  The Hasidim don’t look at you at all.  They only look at their own, and avert their eyes from anyone outside of their sect. There are many posters around the neighborhood, proclaiming “The Messiah Is Here!” proclaiming that an old Rabbi man is the Messiah.  

There are many religious schoolbuses around my house, with Hebrew lettering.  There are young mothers in kerchiefs, with multiple infants.   There seems to have been a dropoff in the number of wigs they use, or the wigs got much better. Perhaps Hasidic women owe a debt to drag queens for democratizing better wigs. 

 If you’re going to live a completely separatist religious identity, I say, at least do it in the time of a living Messiah.  I must say it is fun looking at the Hasidic women, and how they cheat around their own draconian fashion laws.  I saw one girl in her modest dress wearing black Chuck Taylors and I was so proud of her. 

I recently celebrated my 57th birthday, which is very interesting when most of the people you are hanging out with are around the age of 28, and have no memory of any of your references, or really anything before the year 2000. 

When I left New York eight years ago I was quite mentally ill, and  kicking off a forced retirement — then menopause set in.  Vanity, I concluded, was an expense I could no longer afford. 

I went on a vision quest years ago with the help of some Tibetan drums, and saw myself carrying a baby goat to throw it into the mouth of the Yama, the God of Death.   I didn’t want to feed the goat to Death; I thought it might hurt the goat.  Then I realized that the goat was my own vanity.  Vanity that needed to be sacrificed.

Buddhists don’t really truck with vanity, so I’ve been tamping mine down.   I had enough in my youth to last a lifetime. 

Now I am a Brooklyn bartender working with and serving beautiful people young enough to be my children.  I’ve done a lot of work on sacrificing vanity, but still —  it is kind of important, now that I work with the public, that I have all my teeth. 

I am convinced that as punishment for being so pleased with my excellent hair, extra-terrestrial beings stole my retainer with my fake tooth in it.  An eyetooth.  One in front.  (I’m in the middle of the process of getting a dental implant.  My crown kept falling out, because my last dentist was described on Yelp as being “somewhat third world.”) 

Two nights ago, I took my retainer out to eat an apple, set it on the counter in the kitchen..and the motherfucker completely VAPORIZED.  

I spent four hours scouring every single corner of everyplace I had been — a space of about six square feet.   I cleaned every surface.  I searched under the bed and in the bedclothes.  I went through the trash, even the wet shit at the bottom of the trash.  I left NO STONE UNTURNED and the thing is just fucking GONE which means that my retainer was stolen by elves, or that one of my Orishas (the seven African spirits) was pranking me.  

“Think your hair looks nice?” The universe seemed to be saying, in a  mocking tone.  “Try going to work looking like a meth-head.  Hah ha.” 

Now, usually, my Ellegua (Esu) finds everything that is lost in my house, but he hadn’t been unpacked properly.   He was languishing in a wooden box, in bubble wrap.  I unpacked him hurriedly and started begging him to find my tooth. 

I could just feel he was snickering at me. 

Since I had been eyeless at the hair salon, I was reminded of the Graeae, the three hag sisters of fate who share one eye and tooth among them and are always grabbing at each other screeching,

“The EYE!  The TOOTH! Give me the EYE!”  

I suppose this all means that extra-terrestrial entities are exhorting me to embrace my inner pirate.   I’m going to work today with all the beautiful young people with a hole in my face. So I am trying to embrace my outer haggishness. 

This isn’t the problem, so much.  The problem is, I just know my retainer is going to appear again, probably after I don’t need it anymore, and it’s going to appear somewhere so fucking weird that I will know there were poltergeists or other entities roaming around my apartment, fucking with me.  Given my strange metaphysical history,  I fully expect to find my retainer atop a pyramid of soup cans that appears eerily on my table, or inside a fish at a Chinese restaurant, or some other impossible configuration that tells me that entities from the 4th dimension are toying with me. 

That’s a bigger conundrum than, say, the mice that occasionally crawl into my kitchen.  Those can be murdered. 

Vanity doesn’t die so easily — so supernatural entities that steal your retainer (and therefore your vanity) are actually probably on your side, on some level. 

The hole in my smile can’t be seen if I am talking normally, but I know myself.  I’m going to talk about it to everyone, probably, and give them all a nice pirate “Arrgh.”  

Vanity at some point needs to give way to comedy, or you’re just hooped.