The $5 Treatment

When it comes to hair, I have never acquired the confidence that seems to come so naturally to most other fashion-conscious L.A. women. In beauty salons, I feel pale, ill at ease, deficient--never quite sure what I want. Even if I knew, I have never learned the esoteric language that would enable me to communicate it.

“Something easy to take care of” is about as precise as I can get.

“Do you want it layered?” stylists ask. “That sounds good,” I say, thinking wildly, What are layers?

“How short do you want it on top?” they ask.

“I don’t know,” I squirm. “What do you think?”

They tell you to bring in a picture, but the pictures, of course, are always of models or movie stars. I finally figured out it wasn’t Meg Ryan’s hair I wanted, it was her face, which would look good even topped by a yarn wig.

No matter how many hours I spent in salons, no matter how much I paid, my hair looked the same--and never how I wanted it to. I segued from $100 perms to $35 haircuts to Supercuts to an eight-buck “corte de pelo” in a Latino barrio: Why pay $100 when you can look like hell for $10? I mused.

Then one morning I went completely over the edge. I decided to get a $5 haircut at the Marinello School of Beauty.

Arriving at the Fairfax-area salon, I gingerly opened the door and entered a room the size of a high school cafeteria: a jumble of sinks, dryers, beat-up tables strewn with boxes of pink curlers and mannequin heads--with luridly made-up faces and hacked-off hair--impaled on spikes, like trophies from a marauding army.

After taking my name, a short, surly woman jerked her head toward a clot of chattering teenagers, and a girl who appeared to be about 14 stepped up. “Hi, I’m Doria,” she smiled. Many of the students seemed to have settled that season on a botanical theme--hair arranged in formal tiers, like a terraced garden set in shellac; crests and swirls evocative of a topiary dinosaur--but Doria was a Josephine Baker look-alike, with curlicue eyelashes, hair glued to her skull like a bathing cap and long, graceful limbs.

At the none-too-clean sink, Doria shook out a plastic cape with a satisfying snap, draped it efficiently across my lap and fastened the Velcroed ends around my neck as tightly as a tourniquet.

“Do you think you could loosen this a little?” I croaked.

“Dang!” she apologized, rushing to help. “It’s been a whole week and I still can’t get the hang of that bib.”

The problem was soon solved, and Doria went on to give a first-rate wash, training delicious jets of warm water and a creamy shampoo onto my head. She wrapped my hair in a towel, led me gently to a ripped Naugahyde chair and asked the dreaded question: “How do you want it?”

What I wanted was something arty but uncontrived, cutting-edge but timeless, a style that would telegraph to the world that I am deeply sensitive, daringly iconoclastic and, though far too spiritually evolved to actually care about my personal appearance, attractive in an intriguing, off-kilter sort of way.

“Something easy to take care of,” I mumbled. “You know, a little off the top.”

Doria was exactingly thorough. She took a swatch of hair between her fingers until a sixty-fourth of an inch was showing and then snipped it off so that it was absolutely even. She did this doggedly, conscientiously and unbelievably slowly. I’d figured the cheaper it was, the less time it would take, but after 10 minutes I realized I’d be lucky to make it home in time for dinner.

Unfortunately, this left my mind free to wander the same unrewarding paths it has traveled countless times before: whether I have my ‘tis-a-gift-to-be-simple Yankee mother to thank for my ambivalent attitude toward beauty; if so, why, at the age of 49, I haven’t managed to move beyond it; whether my approach to hair is a brave refusal to conform, or simply masochistic.

After realizing, as always, that I’m not nearly emotionally advanced enough to sort all this out, I started peppering Doria with questions, trying to dig up some dirt on the world of beauty schools. It was a two-year program, she informed me; those ratty doll heads cost 27 bucks apiece.

“Have you ever screwed up someone’s hair really bad?” I asked.

“Nooo,” she hooted, “not here--but I was working on my auntie’s hair once, trying to bring the color up. And I still don’t know what happened, but that hair done turned green. I said, ‘Auntie, you don’t want to be lookin’ in no mirror right now.’ Good thing she wasn’t working till the next day, I had to cut it most all off.”

I mulled over this satisfyingly nightmarish scenario for a few minutes, then turned my attention to the other clients, many of whom were alarmingly illustrative of the long-term effects of bleach, fixatives and dye. Still, they were having a grand old time, yukking it up with a joyful ease I could only envy. I soon grasped that the Marinello was not so much a beauty school as a combination locker room, card parlor and social club.

One girl mentioned a holiday potluck. “Don’t tell me about no potlucks!” Doria sighed. “We in potlucks up to our ears. Someone we ain’t hardly even knew just had a baby shower potluck. You know how much a case of Pampers cost? Twenty-fi’ dollars! Maybe someday, but right now I got tuition and bills and a car!”

After an hour, Doria had barely worked her way to the back of my head. Ordinarily, this would have made me crazily impatient, but I loved the way she smelled, a cross between “Evening in Paris” and a Lilt permanent, and her girlish chatter made me feel at home in a way I never did in one of those hoity-toity artiste salons up on Melrose Avenue.

Beyond the mirror, palm trees swayed in the parking lot and the mountains were suspended in a lavender haze. I drowsily closed my eyes. When I awakened, I seemed to have two different hairdos--the top arranged in a languorous pompadour, the sides all but shaved. Doria, her elegant hands finally still, was beaming with pride. “Do you like it?” she asked shyly.

It was hideous, of course--I looked like a cross between Roy Orbison and Imogene Coca. But suddenly on Doria’s lovely face I saw superimposed the faces of all the hairdressers who, over the years, had tried their best to make me feel comfortable, to guess what I could not articulate, to give me the kind of hair that would make me happy. For one crazy second, my middle-aged face, my gigantic nose, my head full of cowlicks looked almost . . .

“Doria,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”