THE BLACK DIE DEBACLE

by Karl Koweski

The apartment's bathroom was tiny.  The shower was next to the toilet which was next to the sink.  The sink was next to the door with a towel rack at arm's length on the opposing wall.  All of it was tastefully done in a puke pink and sea green motif.

It took me 3 months to reach this point with Debbie.  It was the closest I would ever come to her bedroom.

How I came to be sitting on the commode with Debbie running her hands through my hair is a long and tedious story, which will undoubtedly make me look like a total jackass.  So here's the basics:  I met her at a bar through a mutual friend.  She tolerated my existence so, of course, I assumed it would only be a matter of time before I got down her pants.  Then 3 months passed without so much as a handshake.

I wasn't serious the other day when, while drinking kamikazes and Corona limebackers at Charlie's Tap, I told her I was considering dyeing my hair black.  I left out the part about recently purchasing the new Nine Inch Nails CD.  I was already pretty loaded and on the verge of spontaneous masturbation, but mostly I was just fishing for a compliment in a half-ass, drunken sort of way—something along the lines of:  "You don't need to dye your hair, Vic.  That shaggy, mousy brown look is dead sexy."  Instead, she offered to do the honors.  I didn't stay to finish my Corona.

All the way to her apartment (having stopped off for a Revlon dye kit, a pack of Kools, and a six pack of Tequiza), I anticipated a sensual experience like the pottery wheel scene in Ghost.  Debbie, succumbing to my liquor-enhanced charm, would gently massage the dye through my hair, her oxblood nails softly raking my scalp as she kissed my neck, her heavy breasts pressed against my upper back.

I had an erection harder than my fucking head.

My erotic delusions were vanquished the moment Debbie donned those awkward plastic gloves and began mixing the noxious chemicals.  Her face contorted into a business-like mask of concentrated celibacy.  Sitting on the shitter, hunched over the sink like a criminal laying his head against the chopping block, I grimly figured the odds of snaking the puss to be about 25 to 1.

My hard-on subsided like a golf game in an electrical storm when Debbie slathered the ghastly smelling, ebony tar into my thinning and suddenly precious hair.

The few times her breasts did brush against me, I scarcely took heed.  Debbie hardly spoke, and the first waves of paranoid trepidation washed through the pickled remains of my brain.

"Is somebody else here?"  I asked.

"No."

"No?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, someone's here?"

"No one is here, Vic.  Except us."

"You sure?"

"Yes, Vic, I live here."

"Did I just say something?"

Debbie became increasingly agitated the longer the conversation went on.  I decided not to say anything else although I wasn't a hundred percent certain I said anything in the first place.  There was one thing I was relatively certain about.  At least one of her boyfriends was hiding in this apartment.

Chances of getting laid - 50 to 1.

Once she let the dye set in, I voiced my concern regarding my light brown eyebrows clashing with my newly acquired and decidedly Trent Reznor-like raven wing hair.  With little grace and a whole lot of attitude, Debbie pressed her plastic-sheathed thumbs above my eyes and made two sweeping arcs across my forehead.  I felt instantly compelled to look in the mirror.

The reflection which greeted me looked like a bastardized Eddie Munster imitating Groucho Marx.

"You stupid bitch."

"What did you call me?"

"Ummm, did I just say something?"

"Yeah, asshole, you called me a 'stupid bitch'."

"Oh, I, ummm, meant nothing by it."

75 to 1.

Following several heartfelt apologies, Debbie agreed to remedy the 2 inches of stained skin streaking above each eyebrow.  She assured me fingernail polish remover would do the trick.  At that point, I would have washed my eyebrows in dog vomit if I thought it would help.  As she fished around for the bottle, I glared at the idiot in the mirror—the idiot with the jet-black clump atop his pasty white head.

Debbie applied the fingernail polish remover with a small cosmetic sponge.  I helplessly watched our reflections as a drop trickled off my eyebrow and entered the corner of my eye with the force of a thermo-nuclear explosion.  My head rocked back.  Tears gushed shamelessly.  Total agony.  Worse than the time I caught my nuts hopping a fence while playing manhunt as a kid.  Debbie seemed amused as I staggered around the miniscule bathroom.  I think I may have called her a bitch, again.  She laughed out loud when I slipped on the bathroom rug and crashed into the shower.

That was when I lunged at her.  She easily danced out of my reach and threatened to phone the police.  So I retreated out the back door into the night.  I wasn't sure where I was.  I was half-blind, half-drunk, and totally terrified by the prospect of spending a night in the drunk tank looking like some kind of deranged vampiric comedian.

I jumped two fences and huddled under a piece of shit Camaro up on blocks.  I could hear sirens as far away as Griffith, two towns away.  I laid there, volcanic rock hair offering excellent camouflage this late at night, until the drink caught up with me and I lost consciousness.

I woke up with a terrible hangover and a head full of darkness, but I made it home without police intervention.  Three weeks crawled by as I waited for my hair and eyebrows to grow back in, at which time I eased back into my nightly Charlie Tap excursions, but Debbie had found herself a new place to drink.  And with seven hundred and twenty taverns swarming around Northwestern Indiana, I decided the odds of running into Debbie again were too great to bother figuring.