The Migration of Hair

By Dan Burke

The Migration of Hair is Dan Burke's second novel, and a follow up to his hit 2003 novel, Driving Into The Sun. In this reprise, we find main character Tommy Aloysius questioning his life deep in the deserts of Arizona. Climb aboard this freight train to hell as Tommy blasts off to Eastern Europe as an ex-pornographer in exile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Burke
• Release date: Apr 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452490472

Dan Burke

My name is Dan and I am an author of a few book.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Change This

I didn’t get my man-smell until I was twenty-five. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was by a hotel pool in rural Louisiana, there on a contract for Coca-Cola. I was pushing sugar and caffeine on school kids across the state, driving a truck, rubbing elbows with schoolteachers, principals, bottlers, and yard boys named Hi-Pockets and Clementine.

The humidity squeezed me from all sides in that July moment. I raised my arms and was stretching to the clouded sky when I smelled a foreign odor. I found out that foreign odor was me, but oddly enough, only from my right armpit. The left one hadn’t matured enough yet, but the right one got it right for the both of them.

A powerful and manly man-smell emanated from me and tears of joy—well, sweat actually—streamed down my cheeks when the moment finally came. I had my man-smell. A man-smell was mine.

I think about that proud moment, sitting here with my belly flopping over my waist. Things are always changing. No matter how much life goes by me, one thing seems to stay the same: change. Take my man-smell, for example. It was months before my left pit was able to produce a pungent odor as manly as my right, but when it finally did, it came with a reckoning. Now I spend half my days on man-smell patrol. I have special systems and lotions to quell this dysfunction for important moments. I can suffocate gangs of small children if I’m not careful, and I don’t want the blood of innocent toddlers on my hands. No way.

I won’t even get started on my hairline. It’s a good thing I was able to grow it long in my twenties. Thinning came quickly, and like my pits, came on with a vengeance. I complain now, but just think what I have to look forward to. Soon, my hairline will split down the middle of my head, creating two islands of comb-over heyday. Then, like a Play-Doh toy machine, hair will begin to sprout out of my ears, appear on my back, cover my chest and knuckles while my head loses the rest of its wooly protection and glows with a shine. That’s nature. I couldn’t stop it if I tried. It’s change in its cruelest hour, changing me from a man to a monkey as I grow wise.

And life is really no different than this: the migration of hair. Things happen to us, for better or worse; we try to form opinions, we try to effect change in our favor, but change doesn’t care. Change will change whether we like it or not. Man-smell—Wham! Thinning hairline—Wham! Your woman leaves you—Wham! You get fired for being a pornographer—Wham! You get the point.

If I’ve learned anything from these chapters of my life, it’s that I have very little control over the course my life takes. Some call that ignorance. Some call that wisdom. Me, I just call it experience. Change will change when change feels like changing, and I’m not going to change its mind. I have very little to say in the matter. In fact, when it comes to change, when was the last time you had the last word?

It is hard to follow one great vision in the world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost. —Black Elk

~~~~~

HEAT STONED

CALIFORNIA OF MY YOUTH

California. Could any other place be so perfect? It’s easy to dream about California during the final stretch of a Tucson summer. A time when the air is as thick as it’s burning with exhaustion and days long with endurance now gone. Some days it seems like the heat will never leave, like you awoke one morning dead and found yourself suffering in eternal hellfire. And hell may very well be a dreamier version of Arizona, with bandits and unkempt outlaws hiding from the pressures of life, waiting to die, all of us just waiting to die in the arms of the Earth once and for all.

So there it waits for me, distant horizons of my youth—California, with its beaches and rolling golden hillsides, with its sprawling oaks etched into an endless, powdery-blue sky. There only seems to be two types of weather in California: perfect and perfect with rain.

The wet sounds so inviting sitting here on the east side of town. They say it won’t be long before the heat is gone. I know it’s true, but never believe it. It just seems impossible to remember, hard to imagine that there’s ever a time when the air thins out and cools. We call Tucson a dry heat. Someone asked me what that meant once, and I told him to turn his oven up to four hundred and stick his face inside. That, my friend, is what we call a dry heat. And it really feels no different, passing from the razor chill of a strip mall, or shopping mall, or movie theater out into summer. No different at all, just bigger and more overwhelming.

I remember sweet California like a fresh peach I can only taste through a sun-dried mouth. I dream of the ocean in faraway memories of swimming in the waves, lying on the beach as I ignore the sting of my chapped lips. I dream of touching the green fields that feed the nation, that feed the world, as I run my fingers across my dry and scaly skin. And, O delicious San Francisco, with its bay-wet night air. I miss seeing couples walking hand-in-hand in North Beach. I miss the drunken, pushed-up women being felt up in night hallways by end-of-bar hopefuls. I miss the blinking red lights of Broadway, and the seedy strip clubs open until the garbage trucks of morning swarm the streets. In San Francisco, you can eat the finest cuisine, soak in a rich history, and walk until your feet fall off without one second of boredom. Your eyes are wild on a playground of visceral delights, scanning the buildings, the landmarks, the people, the sights.

I say far out to San Francisco, far out to my distant cousin of dot-com dreams. Peace to all those protesting Vietnam vets, too impatient with their give-peace-a-chance T-shirts, high on grass and the comfort of their Birkenstock sandals. Only in San Francisco, where the food will spoil your palette in one day, the educated will leave you spinning in their own way, the nights of Fall will leave your heart in satiated decay.

Booze is an opiate in that town, unlike the way it affects you in the desert. The high isn’t cheap or desperate. The weight not so morbid or soulless. Each drink gives you life in the City, new inspiration. Objects become closer than they appear, and colors grow vibrant as an ageless energy fills your spine, tingles your cheeks in rosy winter.

California. I lie on my bed-top of solitude as I long for you. I know I’ll be with you again some day. That brings me comfort as I listen to the tumble of my swamp cooler squirrel-cage rumbling. Just about now, the dump-pump should be spewing waste into thirsty gutters.

Yep. There it goes. The water will rejoin the air before it hits the ground.

SMALL STEPS

I got a hand-job one night at the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco. It was up in the back of a mini-movie hall where pornos were playing to an empty house. We sat up in an alcove with a see-through curtain so I could save twenty bucks. The woman who handled me was a sweet-hearted professional. She was older and freaky. She had fake tits, tattooed nipples, and a big C-section scar across her belly. When we sat down and drew the curtain she started to talk to me, asking me dirty question to turn me on. It was starting to work when she stood up unexpectedly, calling to dancers in neighboring rooms. She wanted to see if they had any lube.

I sat there in my mid-thirties likeness of me, watching, self-conscious with my shirt off, wondering why I was there, doing this again. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that alcohol helps you make bad decisions. So there I was, making a bad decision again. A few minutes later, she pierced the curtain with eight-inch heels and a handful of small packets. She complained that she couldn’t find any lotion, that we might have had to use spit if she didn’t, but all things were fine now as she put on a plastic glove.

As she worked, she pulled the curtain open and told me to watch the movie playing. It was of two girls getting together. She said, Look at that nice pussy. Isn’t that a nice pussy? I agreed, not noticing, looking at her face, wondering why she felt so comfortable doing what she did for money. I was glad she did, though. It made the moment feel less seedy, almost awkwardly natural.

As we spent time together I continued to watch her, and then she watched me as I closed my eyes. I held onto her like I was riding a childhood roller coaster, dreaming of nights when I should have been getting hand-jobs above the carnival, hiding from parents with my high-school sweetheart. That didn’t happen for me, so the dream made the story in my head less real, and more perfect, because sex, or anything, is less perfect when it involves two, and somehow less satisfying when there’s only one.

Does the best sex happen in our daydreams? We conquer all those strangers and neighbors one by one, or sometimes all together with the power of a silent thought. Is that perfection? I asked myself.

No. That’s just loneliness making excuses again, trying to cover up the dirt with smoke, trying to cure the boils with putty and clay. Truth is, we’re all a little sick, a little lonely, and a little bit reluctant to leave our dream worlds because life is scary.

Somewhere along the way we must have forgotten to breathe life out. And by that I mean we’ve lost our perspective; we’ve lost our ability to recognize life for what it truly is—a learning experience, a process of learning and growing from one level of consciousness to the next as we succeed and fail miserably along the way. I keep running into people who are trying to suck life up, taking the hits while just trying to keep their hands on the wheel, because letting go is too scary. Letting go doesn’t make sense because they have fallen for the illusion, the falsified belief that we’re independent from the world and each other. They are looking out for number one, and the rest of the world has fucked them out of a perfect life, and damn it for the burden. I’m a good person, why do these things keep happening to me? they ask, stuffing their anger deep inside, letting it all pile up in dark corners that never get swept, that never get looked at because all of their focus is narrow and straight out in front. They’re just trying to get by with the least amount of disruption before they die.

They are missing the point. Life must also be exhaled. Holding your breath all your days, watching the emotional river rise within yourself is missing the point, and will only drown your spirit one inch at a time. It’s only when life is exhaled that we ever learn anything valuable about ourselves and our connection to the world. Processing those pain points, enjoying those elated moments of pleasure are truly one of the greatest gifts we have, our feelings. But feelings are a pricey commodity these days, and seem only for the faith-rich.

Maybe that’s what’s missing today—faith. Maybe if we had more faith in ourselves, in each other, we’d be brave enough to breath life out again, to feel free enough to express and communicate our experiences to each other in hopes that we could all learn from the lessons we set forth for ourselves to learn. Or, as my good friend Devin Vail once said, Before we decided to come into this world, forgot about it, then did it anyway.

I think about what that image must have looked like, looking over the cliff of eternity, standing there with a few angels, wondering if that was really what I wanted to do. I can see me taking a few deep breaths, a smile from the angels cheering me on, feeling warm and strong in their presence, having faith as I dropped in on another human experience in search of lessons learned, on a quest of milestones I had set for myself in order to grow and evolve, waking up ignorant of all my planning and dreams, throwing the craps of faith that I will somehow