A Snowy Owl and a Desert Rat
I walked into a tense situation at the Joshua Tree Post Office the other day.
The main counter is in a small enclosed room at one end of the building. It has two glass doors: one in, one out. The line to enter this room forms across the big lobby. These socially-distanced days, people stand on evenly-spaced blue stickers the size of Frisbees—sixish feet apart—waiting their turn to go in. On the other side of the glass doors—the customer side of the counter—only four adults fit comfortably amid the greeting card racks, shipping boxes for sale, and the inexplicable red velvet theater rope on chrome stanchions which divides this small room.
On this day, there were only three adults inside the glassed-in room, but they were not at all comfortable.
Living on a rural dirt road, I don’t get mail delivery at my house. There’s a clump of flimsy apartment-style mailboxes at a busy intersection a mile away—one for my address—but I don’t trust it. When the meth roller coaster goes up, so do the mailbox break-ins. Instead, I opted for a small PO Box at the actual post office. This means I only get mail a couple times a week: it’s a bit of a drive, and you have to make it there by 5 PM, which seldom happens. The lobby, where the boxes are located, used to be open 24/7. I loved picking up my mail at 11 PM on a hot summer night. Now it’s locked at 5:30 because—you know—crime. In addition to someone smashing a window to break into the office, last Christmas someone stole the big blue mailbox from out front. The robbers tore it right out of its concrete footings and drove off with it. Being a Sunday night—and the first COVID i.e. non-travel—Christmas, it was apparently full of gift cards, dropped in over a busy weekend. ‘Twas a bonanza for the thieves, an awful Grinch moment for everyone else.
I didn’t need the services at the counter, I was turning in a “blue slip” I’d found in the parking lot. These slips—like big bookmarks, 3 inches wide and 11 inches long—mean you’ve got a package! when one shows up in your tiny box. Using the old-fashioned interoffice envelope method, box numbers are written on and crossed off one after the next, retired only when the entire slip is filled in on both sides. This dogeared old slip, overlooked in someone’s pile of mail and accidentally dropped on the ground, might have been for a package from FedEx or UPS, likely from Amazon. Many people use the post office’s physical address for deliveries because—you know...
As I entered the glassed-in room to return the blue slip, the conversation between a man in work clothes waiting at the counter and a fashionable young woman in line stopped abruptly. Tension hung in the air. The woman—and the tech bro-looking young man in line behind her—looked at me with caution—like the guy at the counter had a live grenade or something. He didn’t, of course, but their faces warned me to tread lightly. The post office workers were all in the back room, so it was just these three customers, and me.
The guy at the counter turned his attention away from the woman and toward me. “Nice hair,” he said loudly, a bit too sarcastically. “You trying to start some sort of new trend out here with that?”
My current hairdo is maybe best described as a sloppy pixie cut—short but not too short, notched over the ears, messy bangs—and bright white. Not remarkable enough to warrant a comment from a stranger, so this told me all I needed to know about this guy: old school desert rat, hates the newcomers who’ve flocked here recently, looking for a fight. Was probably picking a fight with the woman in line before I came in.
His vibe reminded me of my old neighbor, a guy I used to call Cuckoo Bananas—a term borrowed from my friend Layla—because he was violent and unpredictable. Also, I didn’t know his real name for a long time. Full-volume obscenity streams were a constant from his junkyard compound across the road, while his wife screamed for him to “staaaaaaaaahp” whatever he was doing. (I’d often see her pulled off on the side of the road, around the corner, looking at her phone and taking sips from a bottle, getting up the nerve to go home after work. She wore the old kind of mascara that runs, so she always looked like a sleep-deprived panda. I asked her once if she was OK. She was so embarrassed and mortified that I felt horrible for invading her moment of Me Time.)
When the neighbor who used to scrape our dirt road after a storm (with his own personal earth mover) sold his house and moved across town, Cuckoo Bananas started doing it by dragging an old queen sized bed spring behind his truck. It worked surprisingly well, though it left bits of metal behind. One day, as I was heading in the opposite direction, I stopped next to his slow-moving truck and lowered my window.
”What?!” he yelled at me, his wife looking on nervously from the passenger’s seat.
“I just wanted to thank you for doing this,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
This was the first time we’d ever talked. He was stunned.
“I… we… you… You’re welcome.”
It was as if no one had ever thanked him for anything in his life.
After that, when we passed on the road, Dale—his name, as it turns out—gave me a neighborly “toot toot” and a four finger steering wheel wave.
With Dale in mind, I smiled at this guy in the post office, revealing the hole where my right canine tooth had been until recently.
“Thanks!” I said cheerfully. “I’ve been doing it myself to save money. Austerity budget, don’t you know.”
Maybe it was the mention of a budget, maybe it was missing tooth, I don’t know, but Duder backed the fuck off.
After a long beat he said, “Well, it looks good.”
Years ago, when I lived in Hollywood, I had an actress neighbor in her 60s. She gamely went out on several auditions a month, despite never getting hired for anything but background work. Louise had long bleached blond hair, her look since the 1960s. It suited her, so she saw no reason to change it. But this youthful “California girl” hairstyle required some heroic upkeep. Louise hit the salon every other week to get her roots touched up. While this is standard practice for women (and men) who color their hair, she went to get fake dark roots over her white. This was advanced-class “bottle blond” deception, the implication being, no, you’re right, wink wink, I’m not a real blond, I’m a brunette. From my second floor window perspective, however, I knew what was really growing out of her scalp between touch-ups.
I swore I’d never play that game when the time came. But my first encounter with ageism at work sent me straight to the salon to “banish the grays.”
By 2010, I’d had enough. I told my stylist I wanted to transition to my natural color.
“No.” She said flatly. “I hate gray hair.”
I stopped going to her for color—only for cuts—and started doing my own color. I’d watched many a foil get wrapped around my hair over the years, so I quickly got good at it doing my own lowlights. In time, I won my stylist over.
“You were stuck in a little brown corner,” she admitted one day. Then she confessed that she’d actually started transitioning her other clients, using the method I’d developed for myself.
Now proudly white haired, (like a snowy owl minus the yellow eyes), this desert rat was right: I am trying to start a trend, or at least continue one I started a decade ago. I want the whole world to throw off the chains of hair dye and be freeeeee. (Unless it’s purple and you’re 16.)
When the post office clerk came out of the back room, I handed the blue slip across the counter. “Someone dropped this outside,” I said.
She recognized the box number. “Of course he did,” she said with a laugh. “Thanks.”
I smiled at the guy on my way out.
“Thanks again for the hair compliment.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Keep up the good work!”
As I pushed open the door, the tension in the room followed me out… and vanished.