Bad Haircut
He checks himself in the rearview, his son passenger-side, antsy but sullen, pierced and tatted up, earphones in the last hundred miles, father and son on a drive, to rehab, $20,000 a month, twenty-fucking-thousand, the road swirling like dead rope or dollar signs, father noticing the choppy cut around his own ear tops, uneven bangs, remembering the palsied way Jerry had used the trimmer, hand tremors almost as bad as his junkie son’s, the kid who has everything except for, apparently, a mogul of cocaine, which is enough to make a man disavow his own blood, yet he drives on dutifully, ripping a tuft of hair free, roots and all, a wet trickle sludging down his neck as he recognizes the boy’s stammered breathing, the parched thirst, so much like his own, unquenchable, unkillable, one more nuisance fingering his chest, his lungs, his right cheek where his wallet twitches, like an off-kilter heart.
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