For a while, I dated a gal named Emily Vank, whom I’d met at the local public radio station’s community arts festival. Held each summer at the local site-specific arts gallery, the festival gears itself toward the hoi polloi (lots of fried foods, face-painting, and yellow-ribbon-shaped magnets) but does attract a higher class of women, usually slumming bohemian wannabes with generous trust funds. From the moment I first saw her at the black-velvet paintings booth, I somehow knew she belonged to that higher class, that in fact she was class valedictorian, so to speak. We sparked a connection by archly praising the artworks before us—such a fine depiction of that pissed-off-looking American eagle in the desert-camouflage army helmet. A fine painting that future generations will treasure.
We had our first date the next evening at that Ethiopian restaurant popular with every incense-huffing, arts-foundation airhead in the gallery and fashion district two blocks from the abandoned cork factory that’s turned into the drug lair known as the Cracktory. As we sat at our table and sipped what the menu called limited-edition handcrafted beers, she went into detail about her upbringing. She mentioned the source of her family’s wealth, an investment company her paternal ancestors had founded “a billion years ago, it seems, give or take a few hours.” She described the summers her family would spend in the Riviera—“Yes, that Riviera, in France, not in Iowa or anything.” And she related the story of how, at age sixteen, she had made her high-society debut at a debutante ball, wearing a bulky gown that made her look like—she paused here for dramatic effect—it made her “look like a used Kleenex, minus the snotty stuff, though maybe some snotty stuff would have improved it,” a line that did make me genuinely laugh for the first time that evening.
Things turned a little more serious, however, over the main course, a vegetarian sampler heavy on chickpeas (my new least favorite vegetables—they tasted like sooty phlegm). After dipping her fingers into the finger bowl and wiping them off with her napkin (she had chosen to eat sans utensils, Ethiopian-style), she said, apropos of nothing, that she suffered from—she pronounced this slowly and carefully—trichotillomania, or the compulsive pulling-out of one’s own hair.
“Oh really?” I said with unfeigned-looking empathy, placing down my fork.
Uh-huh. She told me she’d started pulling out her hair in 1992 at age 12. She said in an authoritative voice that “trich” (pronounced “trick”) tends to begin around puberty. As a child, she’d pluck out a strand at a time, rubbing each strand across her cheeks, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger, collecting the hair between the pages of her favorite book then and now, Bonnie the Bicyclist, a 1930s novel set in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1890s, about a ten-year-old named Bonnie Wheeler, a modern girl (she wears bloomers!) who rides her bike all over town, having all sorts of adventures. A couple sequels followed, which Emily read, but she didn’t like them as much. Stick with the original, she advised me. Yeah, sure, I’ll do that. I’ll read the original cover to cover, right after I gouge my eyes out with a rusty grapefruit spoon.
Anyway, she would pull out her hair during times of stress: her menstrual period, final exams, prolonged seething between her parents, and especially worries that someone would notice her patchy scalp.
But no one did at first. When the hair loss grew too large to hide with creative combovers, Emily started wearing ballcaps everywhere. She didn’t even have to attend gym, the only class to require bare heads; she had that golden ticket known as a medical exemption. (A heart murmur, in her case.) She got away with her surreptitious hair removal for six months, until her parents finally caught her sans ballcap and false eyelashes. (She’d also started pulling out her real eyelashes by this time.) Her parents ceased their seething long enough to send her to a psychologist I’d never heard of named Dr. Portia Hickman-Miott, a legend in treating tweenage mental disorders. The doc, maybe in her mid- to late-forties, really appealed to the young folk, because she wore acid-washed jeans and pink fingernail polish, and because she played the top-forty station during sessions. Well, she appealed to Emily at least.
Emily saw the doc off and on until graduation. The doc taught her Habit Reversal Training, in which you learn how to recognize your naughty hair-pulling urges and to think about something else when you get them. Emily told me the hour-long sessions had cost a hundred bucks each (worth every penny, of course) but wouldn’t tell me what she’d think about to conquer her urges. We’d just met, after all; she didn’t feel comfortable sharing something so personal so soon, after sharing a million other personal facts about herself. At first I thought Okay, whatever, until I remembered I had my own secrets, namely that I’d rather conceal financial matters from the opposite sex, no matter how long we’ve known each other. What if your sweetheart turns into a greedy liar who wants to screw you over? Why use your big mouth to make her job easier?
Anyway, years of therapy (and a few tons of Prozac, one of the magic pills used to treat trich) decreased Emily’s hair-pulling but didn’t eliminate it. She still pulled out hair from time to time, keeping each strand in that novel she still owns. She did have what she called “a conversation starter” made a few years earlier at a previous public radio arts festival: a T-shirt with the words YOU CAN’T TRICH ME on it. According to her, almost every time she wore that garment, a complete stranger or two would come up to her, read its message, and say “Trich?”, rhyming that word with “Rich.” No, trick, Emily would explain before going into detail about her hairy situation. She’d actually use that phrase “hairy situation” when, as she put it, “educating the world.”
Ordinarily I’d have nothing to do with a nutcase like Emily, but I couldn’t pass up her magnificent body, top-heavy with that porcelain skin that makes me turgid even before foreplay commences. (I could see the blue veins in her cleavage.) Also she had that academic spinster look I love—tiny round glasses, creased face, pinched lips, dingy red hair pulled tight into a bun the size of Lake Champlain. She was 25 but looked 50, making me even more turgid, not that I’d have to wait long (say, for the second date) to access her orifices. (I can’t attribute my taste in women to anything Oedipal; my mother’s scrawny and swarthy and has had so much work done on her face her plastic surgeon sends her two chocolate Advent calendars each December, though I do appreciate my mother’s help in paying for my legal bills during that last, shall we say, inappropriate physical contact imbroglio.) Plus Emily had a bad ticker, so I felt a little sorry for her. I’ve always wanted to use that term, “bad ticker.”
posted October 15, 2005 (revised November 17, 2005) (and July 3-4, 2023) (and July 7-8, 2023)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 