the fuckitall

by Robin Pickering

IN 1979, MY PARENTS DIVORCED. There were no fights, warnings, explanations. My mom moved to a town in Mid-Coast Maine, two hours from me by car, and my dad was away for weeks at a time on Alert, Air Force code for “we might get nuked at any moment.” I was seven and daily afraid of him disappearing in an underground bunker or getting hit with a cruise missile in an FB-111. At the same time, my brand-new stepmother, Barb, was as confusing as she was obsession-worthy. She was gorgeous! She was mean! She loved stray animals! She said I was a klutz I was smart I was stupid I was creative I was filthy I couldn’t sing!

Barb’s hair was perfect. Cleanly feathered back. Blonde with natural highlights—not “bottle blonde” that made grown-ups roll their eyes in the 80s. Her hair obeyed the blow dryer and round bristle brush and looped away from her face in an enviable flip on each side, while my hair morphed flatly from dirty blonde to ash brown, a.k.a. “mousey.” This description lodged as an image in my mind: a family of homely field rodents picnicking on my head.

Barb said, frequently, “You need to brush that rat’s nest, or I will cut it all off.”

The threat was real, along with tales from my stepsister about the yardstick stored next to the washing machine. “Mum won’t hesitate to break it on your backside. How many have you broken, Mum?”

“I lost count. Mostly on your brother, though.” She laughed a flounce of birdsong and raised her hand as if to smack an invisible butt in front of her.

The menace of scissors endangered the goal of growing my hair down past my waist. I wanted to be able to run a comb—with my name on it—through my long, split-end free hair, and sit on the blunt-cut edge like my classmates with non-divorced parents. Then, I could in one visible way be normal. Instead, my slow-growing mop hung just past my shoulders and became so matted I could only get my fingers through the top layer.

I lived on a farm. There was a lot to do that cut into my “sit and comb your hair in front of an oval mirror” time, like pet horses and feed chickens and do flips in the yard. There was dirt everywhere, and when I cleaned my nails with my teeth, it tasted of iron and earthworms. Even though my real parents were basically gone, I was still on my farm. The barn held me in its afterschool light, swaths of it that shot through the tiny row of transom windows and glittered the dust in the air. There were small pieces of hay in my hair, dirt gathered at my knees and ankles, dog grease on my palms. The idea of combing my hair properly kept escaping me, but at night, I prayed agnostically that I would wake up with a long braid down my back. Then I would be like my classmates. Then Barb would leave me alone.

The threat of scissors turned into actual sharp metal when I was eight. Because I didn’t fully know Barb or the meaning of her commanding birdsong laugh, I hadn’t focused on jamming a comb through my hair. I ended up in the passenger seat of Barb’s Lincoln Town Car, ugly with tears and snot, as she drove on the backroads to Cuts-N-Stuff. I couldn’t speak. Barb calmly smoked a menthol and ashed it out the window.

The stylist was what my real mom would call frumpy. She was wide, and her tight blouse was dotted with pink and orange flowers. Her boobs hung into her shirt like they were resting in hammocks. She gave me a tissue, leaned over me, her flower boobs blocking out my vision. She said, “The top layer is okay. It’s everything underneath. I could try and use some detangler and comb it out.”

“What about a buzzcut?” said Barb.

The stylist stepped back and frowned. “I don’t know about that. So manly.”

“Short. A pixie.”

Barb knew I wanted long hair more than anything. I shrank in the chair. Regardless of whether she was right or wrong, she used her adult power over me as casually as she played with a display of wire and felt animals near the counter. Her callousness had a Firestarter quality, like torching what you think is a pile of chaos because you can. Because it’s easier than kindness. Barb’s thoughtlessness told me I was worth less than the strays she rescued by the side of the road.

The stylist sighed. “You don’t have to cry, honey. We’ll make you pretty.” With each tug of her comb, sharp tendrils of ache spread across my skull. Clumps of ratnest fell to the floor.

By the time I was ten, my real mom had a bunch of gay male friends. We hung out with them on my visits, and I couldn’t believe how nice they were. They said things like, “She is so pretty. She looks just like you, Peg,” while my mom grinned and pulled me into her side. I replayed their words in my head, like if I repeated them enough, they would come true, and I could be made of goodness instead of all the things Barb said. My mom’s friends futzed with my hair as if the flat Dorothy Hammill / Mary Lou Retton had some kind of innate beauty everyone else would eventually see.

As if I were worthwhile, my mom’s friend Victor, in his Boston living room with zebra-striped wallpaper, gave me a silver necklace with heart and key charms. The chain was delicate, the miniscule links like satin. I knew they would bust apart or knot up like an argument in my hands. I floated the chain quietly between my fingertips with no-touch. “Can you put it on for me? I’m afraid I’m gonna break it.” Victor moved the tips of my hair to the side of my neck and expertly worked the clasp. The heart and key rested between my collarbones. “There, it’s perfect for you.”

That day in the zebra room, this rich, wild, kind man who barely knew me entrusted me with value and love. His belief in me roused a bravery, a sparkling that pressed out from the center of my chest and told me not to be small, no matter who tried to make me that way.

Every day I found ways to make bigger, louder choices. Though I was stuck with stepsister hand-me-downs, I wore the fun ones—crinkly silvered velours and polos with purpleblueyellow stripes. Though my hair was boy-short and kids who’d known me forever whispered in my ear, “Are you Robin Redbreast or Batman and Robin?” I sassed them back. And when Barb ran off with some guy in 1986, I no longer wanted to grow my hair and sit on it. I wanted it to be really different, because I was different, and fuck anyone who had a problem with that.

The sparkle in my chest to honor innate wildness became the fuckitall. In high school—when I lived with my real mom in rural Maine—that meant a flurry of lopsided blunt cuts, a triangle perm, red-orange henna, and the letdown of bleaching with lemons. It meant clothes from thrift shops and old Bundeswehr tanks from an Army Navy store in Portland. It meant raiding my mom’s closet for her disintegrating flannels and holey T-shirts. My favorite friends were the ones with the fucked-up hair, the shaved-off eyebrows, the hippie stoners, and the goth-metal-new wave dancers at the only cool club in the entire state. Most of us were dreamers of getting tattoos and piercings once we were old enough. We were kind and untamable, zebras-leopards-wolves partying together.

In college in upstate New York, my hair was a grow-out in an accidental grunge look, attempts at rainbow through months of calculated box dying, a black sideways crop. I got access to Alice Underground and Canal Jean Co. in New York City, picking out one or two items I could afford from their basements. Near the end of college, I went to Astor Cuts in NYC, looking for something radical that no one else had, but I didn’t know how to describe it. They were legendary for punk and fashion-forward hair, but the stylist I got was confused by my incoherent directives: shave underneath, angular, jagged, bangs? no bangs? The result was a high fade, bowl-cut dictator-ish look, and didn’t last long.

Once I moved to NYC in 1995, I got my hands on the building blocks for fuckitall domination. The city was a magical place with stores called Ricky’s that had salon-grade bleach for sale and Manic Panic in all the shades: Atomic Turquoise, Pillarbox Red, Green Envy. My roommate Max, whose Midnight Blue hair had recently grown out and was back to its “natural” state of brown with blond stripes, helped me decide that I could start with some blond stripes of my own. If my publishing job hated it, it would be simple to cover back up.

She mixed bleach powder and developer in a hot-and-sour soup container from the Chinese place down the block. “You have let to it set for a minute—it should be a certain thickness, similar to whipped cream.”

My nose stung like in high school when friends and I dumped bleach on our jeans in the tub, dizzy with chemicals. Max’s gloved fingers painted a wide line from my center part down a chunk of hair on each side.

“Why did no one tell me I could just do this?” I asked.

Max carefully separated some strands, her gloved fingers lumpy with globs of bleach. “I don’t know. But I don’t think this’ll be the last time.”

We bleached a little hidden spot in front of my ear and made it turquoise. The Manic Panic smelled like Kool-Aid.

Elder versions of fuckitall thrived in educational publishing. My favorite—a supervising editor—wore bold striped shirts and giant jewel-encrusted pins of beetles, her hair a half-feathered, wavy holdover from the 80s. The imprint of curling iron usage had infiltrated the DNA of her bangs, and they arched in a solid loop to meet the top edges of her penciled brows. Opinionated sparkly earrings hung to her shoulder pads. I was as equally empowered by her fashion sense as I was by her confusion of how to cut and paste on a Mac.

My direct supervisor, Christina, was warm, funny, tastefully outfitted in white blouses and loose navy suits, low heels on her stockinged feet. Her fuckitall glinted in her eyes.

“I like your hair,” she said, when I first appeared striped at work.

I silently Yessssss-ed and then asked her if it was against any company dress codes.

“You can bleach your hair all you want.”

I ran with that permission, and as I moved up the so-called corporate ladder, my hair got more insane.

Rainbow? Check.

Striped bomb pop? Check.

Shoulder-length swirls of PurpleBlueOrangePillarboxRed? Check.

The heart and key from Victor still nestled in the hollow of my throat, now strung on ball chain from the hardware store. Those underage conversations of having tattoos and piercings started whispering a “what’s next,” like putting up zebra wallpaper because you can. Because you have been seen with care, and that helps you see yourself. And if I could do this and get away with it, I should do it even harder for those who wanted to but thought they weren’t allowed.

But the need to pay rent meant asking permission from corporate America. In Christina’s office, I said, “I’ve been wanting to get a piercing, but not if it will jeopardize my job.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Like what?”

“Like, eyebrow?”

“Oh god, don’t do that. Those are the worst. I mean, do what you want, but…What about a nose piercing?”

At New York Adorned, the artist screwed in a stud where there had just been a needle and lots of rubbing alcohol. The stud looked lonely.

“Can you do a second one?”

“Sure. The other nostril?”

“No, below. A hoop.”

From a tray of captive bead rings, we found a dense hoop that fit catty-corner from the stud. Another hot sting of the needle and the stud had a partner.

No one noticed. Not my roommate, my bandmates, other yoga teacher trainees in the program I was in. If I asked, they said, “Oh! Haven’t you had those forever?” As if my pierced self traveled back in time to match who I had always been.

Christina did notice. “Good choice,” she said in the hall between gray cubbies.

Before tattooing became legal in the city (in 1997), Max was finishing up a giant piece she had traded with an underground tattoo artist for rent at her previous apartment. Her original piece was a tiny Celtic knot on her shoulder from her first trip outside the US. People asked, “Is that a real tattoo?” as if she spent each morning reapplying it in blue-black fuzzy marker. Now her fuckitall was a Celtic wolf in the shape of a capital T from an illuminated manuscript, inked around the original knot and expanded to protect her entire back. Her last session took place in the East Village where the artist was crashing on the couch of the High Times magazine publisher’s son.

Brand-new blackline work is often dark and defined. For the tattoo-inclined, seeing fresh ink can trigger the need for a piece of sharp-stamped meaning making. As Max’s wolf got its last defined touches, my trigger was set. I flipped through a copy of High Times, and we chatted about local sex worker friends bargaining for health care while an excited corner of my brain decided INK TIME.

You can’t take out a tattoo and put it on the bedside table. You can’t shave it off or douse it in dye. Cover-ups weren’t often done, and you had to find someone talented, or you would end up with a double-exposure ink job. To be certain, I came up with a design and sat on it for a year before my appointment at East Side Ink. It had been undercover operated by Andrea Elston since 1992, and though tattooing was newly legal, the shop was still underground, down a flight of steps.

Just like at Astor Cuts, I managed to challenge the cool hype of NYC with my incoherent instructions. Please use this symbol I drew! And also this symbol for the planet Jupiter on either side. Flip it? Upside-down it! Make the blackline like stained glass. Blend the colors like sunset! My own grasp at meaning-making was a nod to my favorite number that looked like the Jupiter symbol, and a star/sun/crescent/ankh design I had drawn, influenced by a love of Death from the Sandman comics.

Though the rest of my work is objectively better (and not drawn by me), I have a fondness for this first piece. It’s as if I sensed the trouble to come with undiagnosed scoliosis and sacral joint instability. I walked (and walk) around with my thumbs notched into my sacroiliac joints to ease the pain, fingerpads up against the Jupiters, the stylized burst of sunstar across my sacrum a container for the pain where the bones clash together.

More tattoos planned, my tongue pierced, I began to stretch my ears to fit a set of plugs I was saving up for. I left the corporate world to teach yoga full time, met an awesome girlfriend, played in a band. Though my life should have sung at perfect pitch, inside I was a mess. Whenever I wasn’t teaching, I was unfocused, angry, overwhelmed, mean-spirited, unable to consistently practice meditation or awareness skills to settle my system. Life accelerated with a run-around hustle to teach and pay the bills, take care of repetitive stress injuries, soothe my banged-up body that hefted hard-edged amps and tripped often onto pavement. During this no-sleep-in-Brooklyn, I continually remade myself—my visual appearance as loud and frantic as my life was.

In late summer of 2001, the sky was achingly clean like a sapphire Pantone of the year. My black-with-blond-jaguar-spots-and-royal-blue-accents hair was starting to fade. I didn’t know what to do next. The not-knowing opened up in me like a sinkhole, and the fuckitall went from sparkle to panic mode.

I taught yoga classes to some folx running a fashion start-up in Williamsburg. One of them had dreads to her ass. She was white and told me she’d had them since she was twelve. “You could do it, too,” she said.

I couldn’t stop thinking about them. She could sit on them! The fuckitall went full-on grade school. THIS, pick THIS. A lead singer from a local band had them. Other queers in the scene did. Shiva from the Indian triumvirate, whose image sat on my meditation altar, had them. He was the deity I felt most connected to, despite that I was a groundless white Irish/German/English/French Canadian mutt who, unlike Max, did not feel connected to Celtic culture. I was/am settled by Advaita Vedanta (non-dualistic teachings) and the related practices. I was/am settled by my teacher from India, and by Shiva, my favorite.

THIS, pick THIS. This will help you focus. This will help you remember what’s real. This will help you slow down. This will ground you.

The internet was still a child but held a website dedicated to white-person dreads. “It’s just another hairstyle,” it said in comic sans, cyan and magenta. “Start by braiding your hair and letting the braids get messy!”

A friend from the Dominican Republic recommended her friend Mecca, and I sat in her salon for hours while we shot the shit and she turned me into Bo Derek. She tugged at my scalp, and I stared out at Avenue B and the stream of bodies in flip-flops and baby tees meandering by, suddenly conscious of how the heat swelling from the gap under the door met the frigid AC blasting behind us. In that small storm of temperatures, I wondered if my fuckitall might have miscalculated. Was this right or helpful?

True to my doubts, the sinkhole, instead of being sated with all the braids I threw in it, gapped wider. I was doing everything at once: moving in with my girlfriend, packing my old apartment, playing shows, teaching classes all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, traveling to Maine to see family. I ignored my feelings and kept moving.

In our new apartment, a subletted railroad tight with the original renter’s belongings, my girlfriend and I tried to make the space cozy. My braids were not turning to dreads as the website said they would. They hung, shiny and waxed, like nylon. At the end of each long day, we sat on the floor, and I unbraided and combed while my girlfriend ratted and twisted my hair. She could reach better, and she wanted to make the dreads as much as I needed her to help me.

The days got more achingly blue. Smoke billowed up from Manhattan when I was on my bike headed to a yoga client, and I didn’t know about the planes, the telescoped towers, until an hour later. My girlfriend crossed the bridge back into Brooklyn with streams of dusty and shocked people. My pilot dad was diverted mid-flight to Gander, Canada, and my grandmother got very sick.

With Brooklyn shut down, we gathered at each other’s apartments, shared vegetable stew. Friends teased the remaining braids into puffy columns. I twisted them constantly, my childhood fear of being nuked replaced with a grown-up, spiraling anxiety of dirty bombs, wayward airplanes, and boxcutters, as if I had been collapsed back into my Cold War childhood. The air smelled like burning skin—the wind full of grains of buildings and bodies.

The dreads always needed work. I tended to them while looping my mantra while shellshocked on a plane to Kentucky to see my mom’s mom in the hospital while sitting in the vinyl chairs of hospice meetings. The dreads wouldn’t tighten. Though my hair was a bramble of tangles as a child, now it was greasy with beeswax and bits of stuck fluff. The roots grew in smooth, unraveling and releasing stray hairs no matter how much I twisted. I was not more focused. I was not slowing down or grounding. And a particular hairstyle was not going to get me there. Especially not this hairstyle. In a city of full-on 24/7 game face, it garnered sidelong glances and snickers. On the subway, some Black kids grabbed and pulled my hair, laughing, before jumping off the train. By then, I knew the truth—I had picked the wrong expression of fuckitall, and before I could deal with it, life sped forward. My grandmother on my mom’s side died.

I flew back to Louisville, numb, fingers crossed against terrorists. One of my mom’s gay friends, Michael James, drove down in his bright red Corvette to help my mom. He had been a hairdresser in the 80s in Manhattan and immediately gestured at my head. “What’s going on with this?”

“I tried something.”

“Well, I have my razor. We can take care of that.”

We set up in my grandmother’s bathroom, where I used to shower chlorine off as a child, where she had sliced into one of my eyebrows while trimming my pool-wet bangs. I was quiet when she cut me, and she was surprised to see blood.

Next to Michael James, I pretended I didn’t know who mirror-me was. Just a stranger with a bare register of the old scar looping out from under an eyebrow, the heart and key that glinted in the fluorescent light. A couple firefighter yoga students were dead. Students from the financial district had disappeared. My grandmother, dead. Dad, after a lifetime of flying, was quitting. In this moment of standing still, the fuckitall dispelled into grief. Time stretched as my insides slowed down—my heart, my brain, the looping of my mantra’s syllables. My nerves gently pulled back from the undersurface of my skin, like I could be a creature aligned with quiet.

Michael James cut the dreads off at the roots, joking a patter while he worked. Once he had gotten them all, my hair was still neatly sectioned in boxes, and he ran the razor until the hard lines disappeared.

He said, “You know, your mom told me that when you were little, you looked like Farrah Fawcett, from Charlie’s Angels, with all your wavy hair blowing around. She and your dad would call you Farrah Fawcett Minor.”

“I don’t remember that.” My childhood memories of both real parents together are less than one hand’s worth. But I did remember my mom smoothing my hair while she drove the car with one knee, working knots out of it while I slept exhausted over the emergency brake, my cheek on her leg. Time with her was precious, a weekend swap once or twice a month in the Maine Mall parking lot, trading Barb’s velvety Lincoln Town Car for mom’s plastic-lined Datsun. My real mom didn’t smoke or own a yardstick and her laugh was wacky and evolved into wolf howls when we got into pun contests on the highway. My mom was her own sort of zebra stripes.

All the air in the room was touching my scalp. Michael James rubbed oil between his palms before gently massaging it onto my head. He held up a matted, blue-tinged jaguar bunch. “Do you want to keep one?”

I shook my head, bald, but from kindness. The slowdown lent breath to a new sparkle in my system: You are okay, you are safe, you are not alone, you can just be.

About the author:

Robin Pickering is a yoga practitioner, guitarist, and chronically ill human who is perfectly happy to be a misfit. She lit-magged her way through her schooling years in rural Maine and not-so-rural Poughkeepsie. After college, she jumped into educational publishing in NYC. Robin detoured for 20 years as a yoga teacher, writing and playing music on the side in the queercore Brooklyn band Triple Creme. Since the pandemic, she has focused on writing and was a 2023 Season 18 AWP Writer to Writer mentee and a finalist for the 2024 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers in CNF for Atomic: A Gen X Memoir of Fractured Family and Altered States. Her work has appeared in Bend, Don't Shatter, an anthology by Soft Skull Press, and in Esta Tierra. A meditator and only child, she’s just as comfortable at a loud punk show as she is alone in silence.