Pretty Girl by Angelo Perez First Place Non-Fiction Award My family moved to Buffalo, New York at the end of summer in 2006. We lived in the lower section of an old Victorian duplex that was located in South Buffalo—the Irish Catholic part of the city. Above us lived my aunt Vickie who owned two cats I couldn’t care anymore for than I would a crack on the sidewalk, but would occasionally feign ardent interest in if I needed to use the computer upstairs. Vickie had a mullet so needless to say she was from my stepdad’s side of the family. No one from my mother’s side would ever sport such a horrendous hair cut unless that one was looking to get snubbed off the will. When my hair grew too course and thick, en route to making me feel like my head would survive a Russian winter, Vickie offered to take me to get it cut, which was kind of a given because she was the only one inside the house with a car. I neglected to do my research of salons in Buffalo, but I figured Vickie would take me to a reputable place that was filled with pretty girls and their pretty clients, the air thick with Tresemme and top 40 hits. I don’t know why I had this notion. I assumed Vickie was aware that I was gay, and that when it came to aesthetic matters, I would not settle for anything that didn’t scream, “Fabulous!” or “Fresh!” One can only imagine the horror I felt when we pulled up next to a pole with a helix of red, white, and blue. “We’re here, kiddo. Let’s get your hair cut!” We walked into the shop, and my aunt greeted Lou, an elderly barber with a gray handlebar mustache, thick spectacles and a pot belly that looked to be suffocating underneath his white apron. This was not the place I imagined. Where were the pretty girls with the cute bobs and floral tattoos? In their place were old men who could’ve been the standins for the cast ofCocoon . Where were their pretty clients with their high end ensembles and Blackberrys? Instead the shop was teeming with run-of-the-mill, football enthusiast fathers with their sons. I bet if I looked into one of the drawers, I’d find a copy of a hunting magazine instead of thinning shears. And what was that awful smell that lingered in the air? After shave? Or something that was collected from a sweaty underarm mixed into a container with Listerine and passed off to customers as bacteria killing liquid for nicks and cuts? The only familiar element was the ample amount of large mirrors, which I thought was placed in the shop for the client’s discretion in the off chance that your barber might slice your throat open. Lou, the barber my aunt acknowledged, was too busy refining his client’s sideburns with a blade to notice another victim had walked in. In films and television, this procedure did not look menacing at all, but as I witnessed its manifestation in front of me, it became very unsettling especially when my hair-cutting experience has been comfortably limited to getting a refreshing spritz of water on top of my head and gossiping about 10 theMeadow
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