Everything seemed to stop for a moment as Denis’s laughter ricocheted off the walls of the little house. Then Teresa’s son Alex arrived with his boyfriend. Teresa hugged her boy, pushing the clump of fuchsia bangs off his face as they separated. Alex had recently become the latest addition to the Tippy Toes family, and I was beginning to adore him. Being a gay man in Mexico was a tough row to hoe, and Alex had faced his own share of the difficulties that come with the territory. I remember first seeing him when Sergio was working on my house, a sweet boy with hair hanging down over his eyes, who was way too slight to be lifting the four-hundred-pound chimney I was having hauled to my roof. I realize now that what Sergio had been trying to do was man him up. Later I heard more about his situation through Noah. Sergio, unable to reconcile his stepson’s sexual preference with his own machismo mind-set, was becoming increasingly tough on the kid. Teresa loved her son, but she just didn’t want him to be gay. Her concern was his future. Being an “obvio”—an outwardly obvious gay person—would put a lot of jobs out of his reach. A gay police officer in Mazatlán? Probably wouldn’t fly. A construction worker? Not so much. Maybe it might work in Guadalajara or Mexico City, but not around here. Sergio and Teresa agreed on two things: Alex’s “gayness” was a phase that needed to end, and they were the ones who had to make that happen.
They began withholding privileges, and even material goods. One Christmas he was the only one in the family to receive no gifts. He had refused to cut his hair. No haircut? No Christmas. He sat silently as everyone else at the party opened their gifts, then retreated to his room, cranked up the music, and tried to dance the pain away. There was a soft knock at his door. When he opened it, there stood his grandmother holding out a cardboard box. “It was the ugliest shirt in the world,” he later told Noah. “But it was the most beautiful gift I’ve ever received.”
But Alex still resisted his parents’ pressure. “This is our house, these are our rules,” they insisted. He rebelled by dropping out of school, and began to hang out on the streets. And the battle continued.
In a society where gender roles are so highly defined—men are expected to appear dominant and independent, and women are supposed to seem submissive and dependent—any man who doesn’t obviously “act like a man” is considered to have committed a great offense. Of course, this whole notion cracked me up, as I was well aware that most of it was for show. I knew that even up here, on The Hill, it was the women who were the ones in control. But Mexican women know how to be strong, “like a man,” without making their men feel weak. It’s truly an art, and I was beginning to think that maybe I should try tearing a page from their book.
But for a man in a machismo culture who dares to let his feminine side show, like Alex, there’s very little tolerance. Alex had been taunted, and worse. Some gay men are physically attacked by members of their own family, some are committed to psychiatric clinics, and some are downright rejected. People will do anything and everything to “get the gay out” of you.
A lot of people down here seem to have a complicated relationship with the notion of being gay. They love their drag queens, but if it’s someone in your family, you just don’t talk about it. You figure they’ll simply grow out of it. In fact, there is a weird code word that’s used—“forty-one.” At first I thought it meant you had until turning forty-one years old to be considered actually gay. But I later found out that it, in fact, goes back to a society scandal that took place in 1901, when the police raided a male-only dance where, out of the forty-one people in attendance, nineteen were dressed as women. But nobody seems to be aware of the origin of the “forty-one phobia,” so some believe that men are at their greatest risk of becoming sexually attracted to men when they reach that age. It’s a big joke among men and boys around here, and it’s apparently a number to be feared and avoided at all costs. Kids will yell out, “Not it!” if the number forty-one falls upon them in a schoolyard count. There is no forty-first division of the Mexican Army.
Once, when I had complained to Analisa that it hadn’t rained in a long time, she replied, “Too many gays.”
I shot her a look. “What?” she asked defensively. “That’s what they say down here.”
Not quite believing her, I tried it out on the car-wash guy. “Why hasn’t it rained in so long?” I asked in an innocent voice.
“Too many gays,” he answered without a blink. As did the cop who patrolled the area around Tippy Toes, as did the guy repainting my house, as did the man repairing my shoes on the sidewalk at the Plazuela República. Go figure.
At twenty years old, Alex was a survivor. He had sought refuge in his grandmother’s house, and Noah had been helping him out, paying Alex to watch Italya for a few hours a day while he and Martha were at the salon. I saw firsthand how sweet he was with the baby, so kind and gentle. And I could relate all too well to his pain. Yes, it was Sergio and Teresa’s house, and it was Sergio and Teresa’s rules, but what Sergio and Teresa just didn’t get was how their relentless demands about Alex’s hair, about his clothing, the touch of mascara he sometimes wore, were tearing his soul apart. They may have wanted what they thought was best for him, but to him it felt like a complete rejection of his very identity, a refusal to love him for who he was. My own mom didn’t like me fat. She thought being skinny would be best for me. But that just wasn’t who I was. And Lord, did that hurt.
There was another reason compelling me to open the door of Tippy Toes to Alex. During my hairdressing days in Michigan, I became acquainted with a sweet nineteen-year-old boy who used to frequently come into the salon for makeup tips and eyebrow waxings. I suspected that his appointments were often just an excuse to talk. In conservative Holland, I was a rare friendly shoulder to lean on. One day, he was my last appointment on the books, and he was late. After half an hour of waiting, I left to go home. Apparently he showed up shortly after, but refused to let anyone else do the job. He only wanted me. That night, he committed suicide.
I knew Alex well enough to know he, in all probability, wasn’t a candidate for suicide, but the memory of the boy from Michigan was one that had haunted me for fifteen years. And the two of them did remind me a bit of each other, with their love of makeup and their flamboyant clothes. And I did worry that Alex might be taken advantage of by the wrong people. So into Tippy Toes he came. He was family, and that’s where he belonged.
I left Denis at the food table, where he was deliberating over some puffy round things with hot sauce on them, and picked my way through the dancing kids and through the open door into Martha’s mom’s room, where Luz was sitting on the bed, tuning out the ruckus under a large set of earphones.
“Whatcha drawing?” I asked, gesturing to the pad on her lap. Luz smiled shyly, turned the page around, and held it up for me to see. A swarm of those wide-eyed, mop-headed Japanese comic-book characters stared back at me. “That’s really cool! Muy bueno!” Luz’s smile grew a little bit broader. “You really could be an artist.”
At Tippy Toes, Luz was finally starting to shine. At first things were iffy, she seemed so afraid, refusing to look the customers in the eyes. I’d ask those I knew to talk to her, engage her, in English or Spanish or whatever, anything to help her connect. But it wasn’t working. Luz just couldn’t seem to get the feel for the job. My head was telling me I had to let her go—my business was too new to jeopardize relationships with the customers. But my heart kept telling me to give her a chance. So I called in the cavalry, and they went into overdrive. Martha would park herself next to Luz, counseling her step by step as she did a pedicure, while Noah would distract the customer with a little chitchat. As Luz tended to get a little heavy-handed with the polish, Teresa would sweep in the minute it was time to open the bottle, and take over the job. Then Selena would push Teresa out of the chair, and paint on a design. They were like runners in a relay, passing the baton. Soon customers were requesting Luz, who by now would grab their feet with the confidenc
e of an old pro. And when I, more than once, caught sight of Luz smiling at something overheard in English, it became clear to me just how quickly, and thoroughly, she was catching on.
I loved the way everyone circled the wagons to take care of Luz. That seemed to be the way they did things on The Hill, I thought, as I observed women coming in and out of the open front door, tag-teaming each other as watchdogs for those kids who had run outside to play. A toddler falls down? The closest pair of arms picks him up and kisses his boo-boo. Someone’s thirsty? Whoever hears the plea grabs the bottle. Everyone does what they can, what they know how to do, to help. It just seems to be who they are. They may not have the resources to keep kids in school, or the wherewithal to push them down a different path, or the courage to tell them to dare to be different, but if someone in the family needs a little help? There’s a whole army of folks out there who will have their backs before they can even send out an SOS. They did what they could.
“Denis,” I shouted above the din of the party, “I want to talk to you about something!”
“Uh-oh.”
“Oh, just be quiet, and hear me out!” I yelled. “I have an idea!”
“Double uh-oh.” He held up his pack of cigarettes and pointed to the door. I followed close behind.
“Okay,” I continued, “tell me. What is it that I do best?”
Denis held his lighter in midair. “Is this a trick question?”
“Seriously, what am I really, really good at?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Doing hair?”
“Exactly! And what is it that upsets me the most?”
“Um, when I watch TV and don’t listen to what you say?”
“Besides that.”
“When I go to Josi’s store in my pajamas?”
“Those aren’t pajamas. They’re underwear! No, I mean what is it that I see around here that makes me crazy, that makes me want to do something but I never know what?”
“I don’t know, the sewage in the street? Too much spandex?”
“It’s the girls! You know, like the flower girls, and the others on the streets. And not just them, it’s a lot of these girls, too.” I pointed back inside the house. “These girls need to know that they can be somebody, anybody, if they try hard enough. And then there are the others—the girls who have no family, or families that don’t care—the kids in orphanages and homes. You know how many of those there are around here. There are fund-raisers just about every night of the week.”
“So you’re going to do everybody’s hair?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course not.”
“You’re going to give everyone a job at Tippy Toes?”
“I’m practically doing that already.” In fact, Martha’s mother’s living room did look a little like a Tippy Toes company picnic that afternoon. It made me feel good that the salon was providing work for so many of my extended family. In my own way, I sort of had their backs. It’s what I could bring to the table. But I knew that I had the capability to do more, and with that came a responsibility to do more. And I had to do it in the way that I knew best.
“You’re not going to start a beauty school, are you?” Poor Denis had been habitually subjected to my tales of woe over the anguish of having to leave behind all I had built in Kabul, and had been a witness to my vows to never do anything like it again.
“Lord no,” I assured him. “But you’re close!” I took a deep breath. “I am going to figure out a way to send some of the girls down here to beauty school.” Denis raised his bushy white eyebrows. “No, really. It makes so much sense. If these girls knew a trade, they’d always have a way to support themselves, and their children when they have them. And everybody, everywhere, needs a hairdresser, right?” Denis nodded. “And even if they don’t stick with hairdressing, at least they’ll gain the confidence that comes with actually accomplishing something; at least they’ll know they have the capability to do more than sell flowers, or worse.”
Hearing my idea spoken out loud was a little scary, but my mind was already swimming with things I had to do to get the ball rolling. Poor Denis, I thought. He probably thought he was getting some chilled-out retiree to kick back with for his golden years, and here I was running a crazy business and starting a whole new project on top of it. But to his credit, and to my delight, his only response was to take my hand in his and say, “Go for it.”
“Pi-ña-ta! Pi-ña-ta! Pi-ña-ta!” The house behind us was suddenly filled with squeals of excitement, with kids leaping over each other for the chance to be first in line to whack the red and blue Spider-Man piñata (which looked about as much like Spider-Man as I did) strung up in effigy from a rope across the ceiling. Of course, the birthday boy went first, and after a few determined swings, the cardboard burst open, sending everyone scrambling on their bellies in a free-for-all. I’d seen full-grown adults, my Tippy Toes girls, in fact, practically kill each other over piñata spillage during a fiesta. They dived into the frenzy in their stilettos, pushed each other out of the way, and actually sat on their claimed treasure to keep anyone else from getting it. All this over a few cheap sweets.
“Those must be really good candies,” I said to Martha as she beamed at her son with pride.
“It is for good luck, Debbie.” She tucked one into my pocket and peered out the door. I followed her gaze to the darkening sky. “You should go now. It will be night soon.”
When Renee first showed up at Tippy Toes, she looked like a little drowned pup. Her baby-fine blond hair seemed to have melted in the heat and humidity, and it was sticking to her scalp like skinny wet linguine. Of course, she was a walk-in who had asked only for a mani-pedi, so what could I say? Well, let’s just say that whatever I said, by the time she left I had her booked for a full eight-hour session of hair extensions, and armed with explicit instructions on where and how to buy the hair herself, online, as the tax we’d have to pay on imported hair down here would double her cost, and she was heading back to the States for a while. I gave her a warning: beware of the scams. There are so many hair cowboys ripping people off out there these days it’s ridiculous. Human hair has become so valuable that salons are being robbed for their hair, with the cash left behind in the register. Ukraine, I told Renee. Make sure the hair is Ukrainian. I provided her with my connection in Kiev and wished her luck.
When she returned a couple of months later, she proudly plopped her bag of hair down in front of me like a cat presenting a dead mouse at his master’s feet. I nearly gasped. Renee had obviously asked for the lightest blond hair in all of Ukraine. She got it. Hooker bleached-blond hair, so overprocessed that it was going to be a hairdresser’s nightmare. Daniela shot me a look, and I shot one back. Then we politely excused ourselves and headed to the back room to perform a miracle.
I grabbed one ponytail and Daniela grabbed the other, and we frantically began to mix. We needed to darken half the hair so the colors would blend. “Keep trying,” I whispered to Daniela as I headed back to talk to Renee about style and length.
“Debbie!” came a panicky voice from the back room. “Debbie! Come!”
Behind the door, Daniela held up two olive green ponytails. “Verde, Debbie,” she said with a frown. “Green.”
Renee waited patiently, unaware of the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that were being done to turn her very expensive hair not-green. After all, we still had eight long hours of togetherness ahead, and there was no way I was about to get started on the wrong foot. It took every bit of color in my cupboards and every bit of hairdresser knowledge in my head to save that hair that day.
Once Daniela and I actually got started on Renee, it was like three old friends swapping tales at a high school reunion. When you spend eight hours together, committed to a tedious job that can’t be left half done, you’d better pray you’ll find plenty to talk about—never a problem for me. Luckily my two partners in crime were up to the ta
sk.
Renee told us she was married to a successful Texas car dealer. But her privileged life came with a large dose of pain—she had lost her son under tragic circumstances six years earlier. A tear came to Daniela’s eye as she picked up the gist of Renee’s story. In an attempt to change the channel from sad to happy, I shared some video I had on my phone of Daniela’s little girl dancing with Derek at his birthday party, and told Renee a little about life on The Hill. Later I shared my story of Kabul, and all I had left behind. Eventually the conversation came around to my idea about sending girls to beauty school. Renee seemed fascinated.
“Why, Deb,” she said in her sweet Texas drawl, “how on earth did you ever come up with that idea?”
I pointed to the copy of my Kabul Beauty School book that stood on display by the register. “Not such a wild idea. It just took me a while to find that part of me again.”
“Well, I think it’s awesome.”
“You know,” I said, “I just believe in my profession. And in a country like this, where an education is so tough to get, where birth control is so not the norm, at least from what I’m seeing, and where prostitution is legal, knowing how to do nails or hair can be a skill that gives girls a future they’d never have. It’s really pretty simple.”
“It sounds really exciting, Deb.”
“And you know what I decided to call the whole thing? Project Mariposa. As in butterfly.”
“Nice,” said Renee with a little nod.
After another hour of exchanging chitchat about everything and anything, out of the clear blue sky Renee asked me a question.
“How much does it cost?”
“What, your extensions? Didn’t I give you the price before—”
“No, how much does it cost to send a girl to beauty school?”