carbonated joy

When I was sixteen, my fashion icons were mostly professional wrestlers.
Jake “the Snake” Roberts had this really wicked curly mullet. I thought it looked so cool.
I had a baby mullet. I was sure that if I got a perm, I would look like Jake “the Snake”.
I was pretty sure that this was my ticket to popularity.
This was my ticket to get an actual girl to actually talk to me, and possibly get engaged or give each other hickeys.
So I got a partial perm.
The curls were supposed to start on the back of my head, about ear level and coolly cascade down my neck.
It was one of those boxed home perms that smelled like a chemical and fried shrimp explosion.
It burned my scalp, made my eyes water and turned parts of my neck red.
Fashion fades, but, sometimes first it hurts.
We took the curlers out and something was immediately apparent…this was NOT good!
Something had backfired and I ended up with, quite possibly, the worst perm in the history of perms.
Around ear level in the back my hair defied gravity and several other laws of nature.
It just kind of exploded into a fuzzy mess.
I looked like a demented circus clown.
I frightened small children and people with heart conditions.
It looked like an angry poodle with split ends was desperately clinging to my head.
On the way home, I went through a McDonald’s drive through and the girl actually snorted when she saw me, she didn’t EVEN try to suppress the snort! Then she pointed at my head and said “OHHHMYGAWD!! What happened to you?”
That’s when it really sank in…
This was no harmless hairstyle.
It was a killer perm, it was bent on killing my social life and any chance I ever had at getting a hickey.
I knew that this killer perm couldn’t be allowed to live.
I drove straight over to my Aunt Judy’s house and begged her to fix it. She cut off all the twisted curls. It took some serious effort on her part to sculpt my scalp into something that I could go into public with.
She killed the killer perm.
I am a survivor.
Perms are never really permanent.
A fashion faux pas will fade.
Troubles will come and go.
You are left with a story and the faint odor of burnt fried chemical shrimp.