For Money or Mayhem

{3} Not What It Appears To Be

The pounding on my door started at ten a.m. sharp. I wasn’t happy. I’d only been asleep about two hours, having spent most of the night living another man’s life half a world away. What sleep I’d had was restless as the dreams kept flooding my sleeping brain—dreams made so vivid in my mind through his laptop computer.

People don’t realize how much of their lives are on their personal computers. Photos, email, links, music… lovers—it’s all a part of who they are. When I dive into a computer, or ferret out information on the Internet, they become so real that I can talk to them in my head and it feels like they’re answering. Getting that deep into someone else’s head makes it hard to keep track of your own. It takes a while to decompress and I do that best while I’m sleeping.

The knocking continued and I finally dragged myself out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweats, and went to the door.

A little blonde bundle of energy almost poked me in the nose with her fist as she raised it to knock again. About five-three and weighing about a buck ten, she glowed with scarcely contained élan. She smelled of something fruity that I guessed must be her shampoo and I was instantly thankful that it wasn’t floral. I’d be sneezing all over her.

“You’re not up? It’s time to go!”

“Why would I be up at ten on a Saturday morning, Cali? And how did you get into the apartment building? Go where?” I know. I wasn’t giving her an opportunity to answer as I kept asking question after question, but once she started talking, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get another chance to say anything.

“Your makeover! Mom says you should meet us at the Analog by ten-twenty. Your hair appointment is at eleven o’clock.” She wrinkled up her nose as she looked at me. My eyes weren’t quite open yet. “And shower and brush your teeth before you come down. Did you stay up all night again?” My nod was all I got out. “Mom says that kind of schedule will age you prematurely. That’s what she tells me. If I keep staying up late at night, I’ll get wrinkly. She might as well say, ‘Cali, go to bed or you’ll end up looking like Dag.’” She giggled. “Anyway, Mom’s heading down to the Analog and is going to order coffee for everyone, so you need to be there in—let’s see—twelve minutes. ’Bye!” With that she skipped off down the back stairs outside my door and was gone.

Makeover? Oh. Yeah. Bring money. Damn.

I read somewhere that on average women who have been dumped spend $800 on a makeover. When Hope left me and cleaned out my loft, I spent $12.95 on a case of beer and didn’t change clothes for two weeks. That was the last makeover I’d had. When you do most of your work in cyberspace, who cares what color your t-shirt is?

My self-image is a cross between the dark intensity of Sam Spade and the suave sophistication of Nick Charles. Really? I’m a tall, skinny, rumpled Columbo in faded jeans and a t-shirt. I showered quickly, brushed my teeth, pulled on said jeans and t-shirt, and headed out the door to meet the mother and daughter—all the while feeling like the golden sun logo on my shirt was turning into a massive target on my chest.

On the street corner outside the Analog Café, a guy dressed almost like me was tacking posters to a utility pole. The broadsides were stapled from the ground to as high as he could reach and all the way around the pole. About twenty posters, I guessed, each for a different band or venue. He stepped back and took pictures of the pole from all sides on his cell phone, then closed up his kit and walked over toward Denny. I shook my head, knowing that by noon, Jared would come out and tear them all down while muttering about how he’d call the police if they didn’t already have too much to do. He and the owner of the Analog, across the street from our apartment, were vigilantes when it came to keeping the neighborhood clear of flyers and playbills.

Just inside the door of the Analog, a couple in matching, studious black-rimmed glasses, tight black jeans, and army surplus jackets sipped coffee and read. He was reading Tolstoy. For pleasure. Intellectual. She read Still Life with Woodpecker. She typed messages into her phone one-handed without looking. She might have been transcribing the book for all I could tell.

Andi turned away from her conversation with the barista and held out a cup of coffee for me. Hot, strong, and black. Cali was right beside her, sipping something that looked sweet and chocolaty with a big dollop of whipped cream on top.

“Finally,” Cali declared. “Let’s go!”

Andi smiled and greeted me. “She’s kind of excited about the shopping expedition today.”

“Why would she be excited about getting me a new pair of pants?”

“Oh, she just figures that if we are shopping there is a high likelihood that she’ll be able to divert the purpose to her own benefit. I know she has her eye on a sweater she saw at Candy’s. And Candy’s just happens to be next door to the Men’s Wearhouse.” Andi pulled her keys out of her purse as we left the café. “I’ll drive. Nothing we want is within walking distance of here.”

I tried to think of what was around. Well, there were more costume shops per capita on Capitol Hill than anyplace except Reno, but aside from a few vintage clothing stores there isn’t much in the way of actual clothing—at least not if you’re over twenty. Granted, if you wanted to dress like a vampire or a zombie, this was the place to come, but neither of those would go over well at a finance company.

Fifteen minutes later we walked into an upscale hair salon in a fancy hotel. I was pushed into a chair in the waiting room while Andi and Cali walked back to where I could see half a dozen stylists clipping at their customers. I was trying to remember when I’d last had a haircut. I usually kept it pulled back in a ponytail and just whacked enough off the ends to keep it above my shoulder blades. I hadn’t really been into short hair since my Navy days, though I’d gone through various lengths when I was a rising star. I just quit caring about it a few years ago.

My beard was thin. Blondes have lousy beards. My Swedish heritage showed up in my skin and hair tones. Granted, the beard wasn’t really long. I had a pair of hair clippers my mother gave me years ago and once a month I put the longest attachment on them and buzzed my face. I picked up one of the magazines and flipped through it. The pictures were of men that all looked fifteen years younger than me and several millions richer. They’d all either walked off the pages of GQ or had just come from performing with the Chippendales. My boney ass wasn’t going to measure up to these guys no matter how they cut my hair.

Andi and Cali came out to sit with me and said it would be a few minutes before Sinclair was ready to see me. Somehow I pictured a big green dinosaur lumbering around grazing off what was once on my head. Andi and Cali got busy with the magazines, pointing and then shaking a head and turning the page. Before long a middle aged woman just over five feet tall and just under that wide came into the waiting room from the studio. She was not, however, green. When she said my name it sounded like a frog had dragged itself out of a particularly filthy swamp and taken up residence in her throat.

“Dag Hamar?” I stood. She looked at me and then threw a questioning look at Andi. “Turn around.” I rotated. She pushed on my arms to make me turn further. Then she motioned me to follow her as she lumbered back into the salon and pointed to a chair in front of a sink. “I should have scheduled a longer appointment,” she muttered.

It was an hour and forty minutes later that I was finally allowed to look in a mirror after having been scrubbed, scraped, clipped, dyed, massaged, and blown dry.

I almost didn’t recognize the face that looked back at me. It was shaved completely smooth except for a pencil thin mustache. Even that had been darkened slightly. Sinclair called it chestnut, but that made me feel like a horse. My hair was short and I’d forgotten that at that length it curled slightly. It didn’t have a part, but was just swept back. My nose twitched a bit and I realized my chin was cold. And a little lopsided. Cali reached up and felt my cheek.

“Ooo. Baby smooth,” she giggled.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “It looks great, thank you.”

“Be back here in two weeks and I’ll keep it looking that way,” Sinclair rasped. “You’ve got a good head. If it weren’t for that…” She shook her head sadly. “…disaster.” Two weeks? Fortunately, Sinclair took a credit card because in spite of what Andi said about bringing money, I was nowhere near prepared to pay $160 for a haircut. Plus tip. But I had to admit, I was beginning to feel a bit more like Nick Charles. If only I liked martinis…

We stopped for lunch before serious shopping. I’d been to Andi and Cali’s house with friends when Cali was watching a makeover show on television, and I could tell by the way she kept eying me over lunch that she was calculating what she was going to do to me. Andi and I were having a reasonably adult conversation during the meal—she asking me test interview questions. I bit into my BLT and saw Cali with her cell phone sending text messages.

“No phones at the table,” Andi reminded her daughter.

“I was just sending myself a note,” Cali replied. “I didn’t want to forget the colors I see him in.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, coming to full attention. I could see where this was going if I didn’t set some boundaries. “You are not turning me into a fashion plate. Neither I nor anyone I might work for would be impressed or comfortable with that. I don’t want to stand out. I want to blend in.”

“Even conservative business wear has some things you can do to make it a little edgy,” Cali said. “You’d be so cool in…”

“No.”

“What?”

“No edgy. No colors. Simple blacks or grays and white shirts. Blend in, don’t stand out.”

“Can we at least have colored ties?” she pled.

“Only if it doesn’t make any difference what I wear it with,” I said adamantly. “I don’t want to have to think about what I’m pulling out of the closet to wear. I reach in, pull out pants, shirt, tie, and I’m dressed. It should make no difference which of each I put on.” I didn’t want to mention the fact that I’m colorblind. If the girl put different colored clothes in my closet, there was no question that I’d end up wearing the wrong ones. People would notice.

“Boring!”

“Cali,” Andi jumped in, “it is his life and his image. We’re only making over his appearance, not who he is.”

“I like who he is, but all that black clothing he wears is just so blah.”

“Hey!” I said. “He is right here. And he thought all you kids were into wearing black all the time.”

“Men!” Cali humphed. “You just don’t get it.”

“Cali, we’re supposed to be helping Dag. Be nice,” her mother soothed. “I’m sure he won’t object to you getting something colorful that makes up for his… uh… monochromicity.” I was pretty sure Andi was going to say something like drabness or plainness, but she took a diplomatic view.

Andi and I have an easy relationship. I don’t have many friends. Jordan and I are pretty close, but between his police shifts and my night-work, we don’t get together that much unless it’s to bring down a criminal or to study. The guys I called friends at Henderson, suddenly became scarce after I blew the whistle on our boss. They seemed to think that they wouldn’t all be out of work if I had just let the CEO keep robbing the company. He ripped them off, but in their eyes, I was to blame for the company’s collapse.

And Cali… Well, she was just Cali. I’d known her since she was ten and now at seventeen she was turning into a young woman, but still had the brightness and energy of the ten-year-old I’d first met. And she wasn’t much bigger. I could indulge some of her whims about making me a dress-up doll. It’s just that I really couldn’t do colors.

I ended up with two gray suits that I could tell apart by the texture, two pairs of black slacks, and three white shirts. Cali had assured me that the five ties I bought—“You can’t wear the same one every day!”—would go with any combination of the suits or slacks and that I could wear either jacket with the black slacks. She’d let her mother pick out one of the ties and I instantly found that it was my favorite. I’d picked up a nice gray cashmere sweater that I could wear when I dressed down that reminded me of petting Eric’s cats.

And neither Cali nor Andi objected when I paid Cali for her fashion-consulting services by buying the sweater at Candy’s that she’d had her eye on.

I still couldn’t get used to my naked chin, though.

I was raised in a traditional family. My father went to work every day of his working life at the same company and had risen from a wiper on a fishing vessel to dock foreman. He’d retired with a pension and was rewarded for his many years of service. And when he died the next year, he left my mother with a modest but comfortable nest egg that ensured her security for the rest of her life. It was the American ideal.

Well, the dying part sucked.

I was among those who held that same dream when I came out of college. I joined a firm, and worked my butt off to ascend to my level of incompetence. My years of loyalty were rewarded with a bankrupt company from which the bastards at the top had stripped out every cent of our retirement plans, most of which was held in company stock.

I swore I’d never work for a corporation again, unless I owned it. The only thing that made this situation palatable at all was that I would only be pretending to work for them.

I spent the better part of Sunday with Lars, getting briefed on the job and the background of the company I was going into. He was suitably impressed with my new look, though I cringed when he suggested I looked just like “one of them” in my black slacks and gray cashmere pullover. Lars reminded me, however, that I needed to keep up with the shaving. I realized I didn’t currently have any shaving equipment, just my clippers. That was going to take some getting used to.

Not to mention that I hadn’t been on a job interview in fifteen years.

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