My home river, the La Luna, flows into the Mississippi, so during my homesick moments I just looked at the river and saw the place I came from flowing into where I had just arrived.
The smells are all different, too. There’s this musty smell that saturates everything in the city. It’s a smell soup of damp acorns, oak leaves, and muddy water. Everywhere you go, that river smell trails you and makes your hair smell like the river. In the French Quarter, you get a sour and putrid odor in the warm months, which means almost all year long. I think it’s a combination of mule’s pee from those poor, tired carriage-pulling mules and that beer the bar owners pour on the hot pavement. And there is also—not to be rude—the odor of upchuck from tourists who just eat and drink themselves into oblivion when they come here to visit. One time I heard a lady on the bus say, “New Orleans is where the rest of America comes to urp.” I betcha that is not something the Chamber of Commerce likes to talk about.
Oh, but then there’s the scent of Luzianne coffee roasting in the warehouse district. It’s like burned toast but still delicious. And the smell of those fried and baked Hubig’s Pies coming out of their factory. Sometimes if the wind is right, you can get a whole snack in just one whiff!
And they have coffee places here that stay open the whole night long. People just sit outside at Café du Monde and smoke cigarettes and eat hot beignets covered with confectioner’s sugar at any hour of the day or night. People in New Orleans are like people in La Luna: we adore anything that we can do with our mouths—eating, drinking, smoking, talking, or singing.
When I first got to New Orleans, I stayed in an apartment owned by Mrs. Josie LaBourde, M’Dear’s childhood friend, who would later help me find my own permanent apartment. So it was just a sublet for a while, but it was mine.
After moving in, I got a part-time job at the Camellia Grill, which had the best pecan pies in the state of Louisiana. I’m not kidding you, those pies would just slide down your throat like baby food. The cooks also whipped up pillowy omelets and chili cheese dogs that people stood in lines for, right out the door. Between the money I’d saved in La Luna and the money I made at the grill as a split-shift cashier, I got by fine. I’m not talking Cadillac, but I’m talking just fine.
I like school, and I am good at it. I am working very hard to develop a professional manner. It’s important that you achieve a kind of charm to become a success in the beauty culture profession. I am trying my best to learn how to guide the conversation and not be argumentative. To be a good listener and, above all, not to pry into personal affairs. These are among the many things that they test you on in the Standard Book of Cosmetology.
One of the things we learn early on is that each type of face demands a certain coiffure that is rightly proportioned to that face. There are many types of faces: oval, round, square, pear-shaped. You need to be good at first recognizing these different shapes and characteristics and features, then coming up with a hairdo that will help bring out those features. Because really, all features are beautiful.
Thing is, you got to have a whole lot more than just a flair for hair to get a beauty career up and going. There are lots of other kinds of responsibilities. For example, you need to listen to people and know what they want, even when they don’t know themselves. But thankfully, L’Académie has the very best teachers. They teach you everything from cutting hair and dealing with people to coloring and rescuing even the most damaged head of hair.
After only two weeks one of my teachers, Vicky Varnado, had to be replaced because she was as pregnant as a cow—I’m not kidding. Every time she’d turn around, that big belly of hers would knock something off the manicure cart. And to tell the truth, I didn’t think all that Aqua Net she was breathing in was good for that baby growing in her belly. When Vicky left to have her baby, who do you think took her place? Ricky Chalon. As in La Clinique des Cheveux, which is French for “Hair Care Clinic,” down in the French Quarter. The man was a capital-H Hairdresser. Ricky knew Mister Phil, the owner of L’Académie, who had begged him to come and take Vicky’s place.
Ricky was in the middle of making plans to open a new salon of his own, but he agreed.
Ricky Chalon was a true stylist. He had studied with teachers in Houston and Dallas, and for a while he gave seminars across the South on “Cosmetology: The New Approach.” I was lucky enough to have five classes with him: Cutting, Finger Wave, Setting with Rollers, Color Basics, and Repair.
Many people don’t know it, but a beauty shop is sometimes an emergency room. Suppose a woman goes and bleaches the living daylights out of her hair, then she decides she doesn’t like it. So she puts on another color on top of it—say, Pretty Penny. Well, that combination is going to turn her hair green. Yes, I mean green. And most likely, the spot where she did her patch test strip is going to be green and orange. That’s just what happens when an amateur fools around with hair chemicals. It’s the same thing as when people take drugs that aren’t prescribed and they end up in the emergency room. In my Hair Repair class, we learned to handle a beauty casualty just like a doctor takes care of a drug overdose.
And Ricky Chalon was the King of Beauty Casualties. One day just after I started classes at L’Académie, a student beauty operator put color on a woman without giving her a patch test. For a patch test, all you do is put a little of the color on a Q-tip and dab it behind an ear—that’s to tell whether the person will have a reaction to the chemical. Ricky happened to be in the shop, and he could just smell that something was wrong. He took a look at that woman’s roots, and sure enough, she was having a hypersensitive reaction to the dye! He managed to get that dye out of the woman’s hair in the nick of time without her even panicking. That is how cool an operator Ricky Chalon was.
Now, I want you to know that that woman’s head would have swole up and she would’ve died if Ricky hadn’t had the sixth sense that something was wrong. I’m not kidding, people die from dye reactions. Ricky saved that woman’s life! It was a beauty miracle.
Ricky said in class one day that the mark of a true beautician is that you don’t even have to like the head that’s in your hands to take care of it. You see, a beautician’s hands have to feel things that other people’s can’t. It’s like taking a pulse. And Ricky said that to be a true practitioner of beauty, you need to learn to feel several pulses, deeper than just the first pulse, just like the Chinese doctors practicing Eastern medicine.
He also talked about how healthy thoughts can be cultivated, and they can create beauty that can stimulate the functions of the body. Strong negative emotions, he told us, like worry and fear, have a harmful effect on the heart and the arteries and the glands. So you should do everything you can to improve the quality of your thoughts. These were things M’Dear had taught me, too; sometimes I felt like Ricky and M’Dear had met somehow.
One of the first things I noticed about Ricky was the shape of his hands. His wrists were narrow and elegant, and his long fingers were so refined. When he was working—say, wrapping perm rods—those hands moved around so fast that you could swear he was a sleight-of-hand artist. But when he slowed down to demonstrate something to us, you could see that each one of his fingers was doing its individual job, just as graceful as could be. The only other men who have Ricky Chalon’s kind of hands are piano players and brain surgeons.
Yes, Ricky Chalon’s hands were magic.
I always thought I wanted my own shop. I’m like my M’Dear was, I don’t like taking orders from other people. But it isn’t easy to open up and maintain your own beauty salon, and this was the kind of academy that would train me to do that. Yes, I was still miserable from missing Tuck, but I was already beginning to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t start thinking about a different kind of man—a man who shared my dreams. A man like Ricky Chalon.
So, one morning in Repair class, Ricky asked for a volunteer so he could show how to administer an emergency Nutra-Kit. I said, “Do me! Do me!” Ricky invented Nutra-Kitting, and I was just dying to
be his Nutra Kit–ee.
First of all, he washed my hair. But this was not a regular wash. When my hair was wet and sudsy, he began to massage my head. He took those beautiful hands of his with the long piano-player fingers, and he rubbed my head straight into heaven. I was so relaxed that I worried I might be drooling out the side of my mouth. I actually started to pray, “Dear Jesus, please don’t let this end. I’ll give up everything else, just don’t let him stop touching my head.”
Then Ricky rinsed my hair and rubbed in a combination of warm olive oil and some kind of placenta stuff. After the placenta worked its way down to the very base of my hair shafts, Ricky rinsed off the Nutra-Kit. The touch of his hands made my whole body tingle. As that Nutra-Kit swirled down the drain, every one of my worries rinsed away, too. And, well, let’s just say that every tissue in my body felt pretty darn good.
Then I knew that Ricky had healing hands, too.
I tried to imagine it: Ricky and I would get to know each other a little better, get married, and then open up our own shop together. Budgeting and licensing and shop permits—Ricky could help me do all that! We’d call the place La Ric and La Lily’s or U.S. Hair Force or the Curl Couple. We’d wake up and eat our breakfast, then go to our shop, where our customers would love us and the wonderful hairstyles we would create.
My thoughts got interrupted when Ricky towel-dried my hair after the Nutra-Kit. When he did, I felt the touch of his hands again, this time all the way down to my—well, my special spot. I couldn’t believe it. No one but Tuck had ever made me feel that way.
I wanted his hands in my life.
From then on, I just couldn’t get Ricky out of my mind. Sitting at the Dollar Day matinee on my day off from the Camellia Grill, all I could see on the screen was Ricky. Swimming my laps at the YMCA every evening, all I could picture was Ricky. Walking through Audubon Park and looking at those live oaks, so old and deep, Ricky was still on my mind. Every time I took a breath and looked at the sky, I thought, “Ricky, Ricky, Ricky.” I fantasized about introducing him to Tuck, triumphantly, after we were married—with me just looking at Tuck like he’d never mattered in my life at all.
I was lying in bed one Saturday morning when it hit me: Ricky probably loved me too! A man wouldn’t Nutra-Kit a woman the way he did unless he had very special feelings! I bet Ricky is just too shy to admit it. Well, I learned the hard way that a girl cannot afford to sit around and wait when she likes a guy. I am going to have to tell him, that’s all there is to it.
The perfect moment seemed to come when I was in the laundry room at L’Académie, helping Ricky fold the clean towels just out of the dryer. We were talking and joking around, and just on a whim, Ricky took one of the white, fluffy towels with “L’Académie de Beauté de Crescent” stamped on them and wrapped me up in it. I could feel the softness of the towel, still warm from the dryer, and Ricky’s hands on my shoulder. When he unwrapped me, I decided to spill the beans.
“Ricky,” I said. “I think I’m in love with you.”
He started to say something, but I told him, “No, please. Just let me talk and you listen.”
I took a deep breath and the words started pouring out of my heart. “I felt the way you touched me when you did the Nutra-Kit, Ricky. And I think you feel something for me, too. So, I was thinking that after I graduate and pass the state certification test, I could be your teaching assistant. Just till I’m—well—good enough to teach. And then, you know—and then we could, well, we could sort of see what happens next between us, as a man and a woman.”
Ricky folded up a few more towels before he spoke. “Calla, honey, I think you need to know that I think of women as—well, as friends.”
“Well, I know that! What I mean is that we could become more than friends.”
“No, darling,” he said, “what I’m trying to tell you is that I prefer men.”
My mouth dropped open so wide that a jillion fat june bugs could have flown right in. But just as quickly I thought, Ricky believes this because he has not met the right girl. I figured that there were hundreds of men thinking they liked other men—especially in New Orleans—because the right girl had not yet stepped into their lives.
So I might be in a whole new situation with Ricky, but a gal has gotta go for what she wants! In this case, a sweet, handsome, funny man who knows everything there is to know about hair, and who has hands that can heal. And who can teach me everything he knows about beauty. He is the one for me in so, so many ways.
A man with strong, tender hands who could banish my loss and sadness and share a life filled with beauty! I realized that he had been sent to me for a reason. He may not know it yet, but I do. Those eyes, those lips. Those hands that can do just about anything to people’s heads and many other parts of their body, I am quite sure.
So I told myself, Go, Calla. Bat those eyelashes!
I looked at Ricky across the stack of warm towels and said, “I think I’m going to love being friends with you, Ricky.”
I started making plans. First things first: the right perfume. A gal’s first subtle move. I heard that Ricky loved gardenias, so I bought a big bottle of Jungle Gardenia, and every day on the streetcar to L’Académie, I sprayed on a little extra.
I liked to get to L’Académie early in the morning, before anyone else. Ricky was always in the back, fixing a pot of coffee and reading the new issue of Modern Hair. I’d walk up behind him and waft the perfume his way, but he didn’t seem to notice.
So I got me one of those lace body stockings that looked like you could see through it. Twice over by the hair dryers I accidentally bumped into Ricky and lingered there for a minute before saying, “Oh, pardon me!”
See, I planned to try one new thing every day. Calla, I told myself, if you want something, you’ve got to be willing to work for it.
But nothing was working. I mean, zilch. Ricky just kept looking at me like I was a little neuter. Something just had to be done.
Chapter 19
1972
I was at Godchaux’s semiannual shoe sale when I learned about Madame Marie, Modern Voodoo Queen. I was trying on a pair of pink peau de soie pumps with clear Lucite heels when my eye caught a flyer on the chair next to me. It had a picture of a woman on it, wearing a headdress. She was staring with what looked like lightning bolts shooting out of her eyes. Underneath the picture was a slogan: “Can Bewitch Even the Most Stubborn Beloved.”
Now, I would not normally ever need or try something like this. But tough times call for tough measures. So I decided to call up Madame Marie and make an appointment for the following Tuesday.
On that Tuesday, I rode over to Tremé, the neighborhood where Madame Marie lived, right outside the French Quarter. She had what they call a “Creole cottage,” with four rooms set two in back, two in front. There was no bell, no knocker, no nothing on her front door. Just French doors opening from the front rooms straight to the banquette, which was what they call sidewalks in the Crescent City.
Through the French doors, I saw a figure sitting up in an armchair. I cleared my throat and said, “’Scuse me, Madame Marie, I’m Calla, the one that called about the Love Enchantment appointment.”
Her house smelled like the fires Papa built in the fall to burn off brush. It was the middle of the day, but the curtains were pulled, and the only light came from a TV set and an old fish aquarium set up against the wall. I never imagined that voodoo queens watched Days of Our Lives. Well, I guess they have got to fill up their slack time, too. The room was tight and close, with low ceilings. Ladies with tall beehives would have to stoop to stay in the room, I imagined.
Madame Marie had wrinkles so deep you could stick a dime in them, but with those green eyes and that hair hanging down her back, you knew she’d driven men crazy in her day. Her hands were all gnarled and big-knuckled and full of rings, with skin the color of café au lait. And she had on a tignon, a big scarf wrapped around her head. Her earrings were so big and heavy that I couldn’t see how hu
man ears could support them. Her mouth was large and set off by deep ruby lipstick.
“What you want, girly?”
“I got love problems, Madame Marie. I got this man, he’s my teacher over at L’Académie de Beauté. And I want him to love me. I want us to get married and open up a beauty shop together. Because, you see, he has magic hands. Only, he thinks of women as friends.”
Madame Marie let out a laugh. “He like the sweet boys, yeah?”
“Yes, ma’am, that is correct. He says he prefers men. So he won’t give me the time of day!”
“Does he do you mean?”
“Oh, no, no! He’s not mean at all. He’s the best beauty teacher a girl could have. Only he doesn’t see that I could help him with his problem.”
“Uh-huh!” Madame Marie said. “Girly, I got your answer. You take dried newt and burdock root, grind to a fine powder, and sprinkle it in this man’s food. You make sure he gets at least two ounces. Less than two ounces, no good.”
“Where can I get newt and burdock root?”
Madame Marie got up and went through a beaded curtain. I waited and watched while Hope on Days of Our Lives came back from having amnesia, only to find that her husband had married another woman, who was a cripple. Her heart was broken, but Hope was kind and hated to steal her husband away from a woman in a wheelchair. And there was something about malaria and a brain tumor that got just too involved for me to follow.
Madame Marie finally came back. She handed me a little paper sack full of powder. “This is potent, girly. You’ll get him good.”
“This stuff sure does smell strong. Nasty too.”
“Listen to Madame Marie. If the food sprinkle don’t work, you take another two ounces, mix with talc, and sprinkle it all over his clothes and person, you hear?”