\u201cCan I fix your hair?\u201d said a woman\nbehind me. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seconds earlier she had sat five stools\naway at Pitch’s East, drinking beer and a Crown and coke. She was\ndark haired, dark skinned, sun burned in the face, verging on OTA or\nperhaps already there, and giggling up a storm. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a sunny afternoon in May and I\nwas drinking a beer after a grueling day on my new construction job\nand scrawling lyrics for a country song that would be be the first\ncountry song in music history that rhymed Smirnoff<\/em> with\ngettin’ off<\/em> and farts<\/em> with Karl Marx<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My hair was long, brown, gray, dusty,\nsweaty, messy. I had a month-long beard going. I smelled of paint and\nplywood. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before I could answer, the woman ran\nher hands through my hair and started massaging my scalp and shaping\na style. She was at my right side now, and I turned toward her. She\nhad a huge smile, dark eyes, and a couple nicks and scars. Her\nbreasts grazed my shoulder. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n She belonged in the kink modern Western\nI had recently started writing. I suspected she was already living\nit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSure,\u201d I said. \u201cYou think it\nneeds fixing?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She kept massaging and styling. Her\ntouch felt incredible. I was getting turned on!<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis will make you look less crazy,\u201d\nshe slurred. \u201cYou’re handsome.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I watched her work my hair in the\nmirror of the back bar. That turned me on as well. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere,\u201d she said, as she\nextricated her hands from my hair, but not before twirling several\nstrands of gray hair into a thicker one, a braid, and letting it hang\nloose to the right of my nose. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n She came around to my left side and we\nstruck up a conversation. She had a first name without a vowel,\nworked the graveyard shift as a caregiver in a local nursing home (\u201cI\nfinally found my purpose.\u201d), lived in a condemned house not far\naway, with a hundred-pound pig as a a pet and roommate, wrote poetry\nand affirmations on the walls of the house, and planned on buying a\nRV and taking the pig on the road and working as an itinerant\ncaregiver. The pig didn’t care much for men and sometimes attacked\nthem. \u201cShe’s going to keep me single the rest of my life,\u201d she\nsaid while laughing. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thanked her for the styling and\ncommended her commitment to a job that paid $11 an hour for an\nethically bankrupt nation. I thought about buying her a drink, but\nsensed she’d had enough. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was time for me to go home and whip\nup supper from some cans. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I stood up from the bar, she said,\n\u201cYou want to see my pig?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was tempted. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I had, the Western would have\nwritten itself. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cCan I fix your hair?\u201d said a woman behind me. Seconds earlier she had sat five stools away at Pitch’s East, drinking beer and a Crown and coke. She was dark haired, dark skinned, sun burned in the face, verging on OTA or perhaps already there, and giggling up a storm. It was a sunny […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-tavern-age","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5211,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions\/5211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}