Chapter 1
Chapter
One
SHELBY
May 2012
I giggled with delight at my reflection in the mirror. Any and all attempts at a scowl were made in vain since the Botox had taken full effect.Kendra had convinced me that since I was about to be on television, I should just bite the bullet and try it.
“It’s no big deal,” she’d said. And she was right. Tiny poke, poke, poke and it was done. The RN had instructed me to make my “frowny face” on and off for the next hour so the neurotoxin would get where it needed to go, do what it needed to do. Kendra had come along and got her poke, poke, poke too, and we’d decided to go bargain hunting at TJ Maxx after the appointment. As Kendra stood across from me looking at clothes, I burst out laughing. Dutifully making her frowny face over and over, she appeared to be absolutely repulsed by every single top she was thumbing through on the rack.
Now, two weeks later, I couldn’t stop staring at the smooth space between my eyebrows and testing to see what muscles I could still control.
“ Míra , Shelby! Stop making faces in the mirror so we can finish your makeup!” Lyric scolded. Lyric Vasquez was one of the receptionists and the makeup artist at Aspire, the salon and spa where I’d spent the last ten years working as a massage therapist and esthetician. She flipped her long straight black hair behind her back and stomped her thigh high boot clad foot on the floor.
“Sorry.” I said, still giggling.
I let her finish her work as I playfully dangled my legs on the high makeup chair trying to shake out some nervous energy. Clients would often need a step stool to get into Lyric’s chair. She was over six feet tall and refused to compromise her ergonomics.
Lyric came into Aspire five years before as a newly transitioning girl of eighteen desperate for a job in the beauty industry. Her parents had kicked her out and she seemed to be in search of a new family as well. The owners, no strangers to the power of being given a chance when one is needed the most, hired her on the spot. Not only did we help her learn makeup and the ins and outs of running a salon, but we also helped her move through her transition as best as we could.
I had the privilege of giving Lyric her first ever eyebrow wax. The expression on her face when she saw herself in the mirror for the first time—witnessing a rebirth, someone in that magical moment they are finally able to see themselves as their most authentic self, was an honor and an experience I could never have imagined.
Since then, she has proven to be a genius with makeup, not spending much time behind the front desk anymore with all the client requests and referrals she gets. Every so often someone in her chair or some client walking through the salon will give her that look. I cannot imagine just going through life, simply trying to exist, meanwhile people are trying to figure you out, like you are a puzzle to be solved. I don’t understand how someone’s gender expression has to be anyone else’s business—it would make no difference if they were the barista at your favorite coffee shop or a high-powered attorney. You’d still get your coffee just the way you like it, and they’d still likely be screwing you on billable hours.
“Bert and Ernie are not gay. Simple as that,” said Dimitri playfully from the hair station across from where Lyric was working her magic with my face. He sectioned off a piece of hair on his client and aggressively painted it with lightener on top of a piece of foil. “First of all, their apartment is boring. Second, they wear the same clothes every day. And do not get me started on Bert’s eyebrows!”
Talia laughed from her chair in front of Dimitri. “They most definitely are gay. And Bert is the top.” Talia was Dimitri’s best friend, the Grace to his Will.
“Um, Ernie most definitely tops from the bottom,” offered Lyric.
Dimitri cackled. He’d arranged to do Talia’s hair off the books that morning while the salon was closed for the shooting of a reality TV show episode. As if on cue, Randall, the co-owner of the salon, walked around the corner. Randall was a tall, thin, bald, bearded Black man with delicate, refined features and always impeccably dressed. That day he was wearing slim fit black wool pants and a dark gray cashmere turtleneck sweater.
“Dimitri, you said you’d be done by the time they got here,” Randall said as he looked at his watch, “which is in less than thirty minutes. You haven’t even got half her foils in because you fools are too busy talking about muppet sex.”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal since they’ll be in the spa,” said Dimitri.
“They will start at the front desk. Do you think Darius would let this happen if he wasn’t going to get to be on TV? Maybe they can film that part at the end, and you will be done by then. In any case, you need to start behaving.”
Randall started to walk back up to the front desk, then gracefully turned on his toes to face Dimitri and Talia. This poised, impossibly elegant man, opened his mouth and with a straight face said, “And it’s obvious that Bert is the Dom and Ernie is a little masochistic Sub since he is always trying to piss Bert off with his mischief in order to get punished.” With that he walked away, and we all nearly choked with laughter. Randall’s fiftieth birthday was coming up and I was struck with divine inspiration. I would commission an artist and gift him a beautifully framed portrait of the leather clad duo in a provocative position with Bert using his own nose as the ball gag in Ernie’s mouth. I was thrilled with the prospect of getting to watch Randall Mercer-Watts absolutely lose his shit.
“What’s this TV thing again? asked Talia.
“Have you heard of that show Dare Me to Do it ? The one where the guy goes around and does weird jobs with people?” Dimitri asked her.
“I’ve heard of it, never watched it though.”
“Shelby made a video audition thing to have him come and do waxing with her. I guess the show has kind of become a little more serious though. He likes to talk about equity and sustainability and stuff like that now. Right, Shelby?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “And really getting into people and their stories more than just the job itself. They decided that since my job isn’t usually done by men, they could do a show like that. I had to kind of come up with answers to the question of why more men aren’t estheticians.”
“Because I don’t want a man waxing my hoo-hah,” said Talia.
“Exactly. But why not?” I challenged.
“Uh, I don’t know. Just… no.”
I laughed. “Well, I had to come up with a better explanation than that.”
“Show her the video!” Lyric told Dimitri.
Six months before it began as a joke. Which turned into a dare (fitting for a show called “ Dare Me to Do It .”) Darius and I were talking about the show, and he suggested I make a pitch. I laughed it off at first, but the idea kept poking at me. I was comfortable in front of the camera by then, since the year before Darius had encouraged me to work my signature pinup style and make YouTube video tutorials for hair and makeup. I’d done them under the alias Cherrie Bombshell, not really wanting to get attention from people I knew. It can get weird with male clients, not to mention some family members, but my salon family had seen them all. Including this one.
“Holy shit!” Talia shouted as she watched my audition video on Dimitri’s phone. “No wonder they are coming here! This is hot as hell.”
“Right?!” said Dimitri. “And Shelby has a huge thing for the host, so it was like she was doing it just for him.” He would stop working and look at Talia in the mirror every time he talked to her. No wonder they were taking so long.
“Eww. He’s so…old.” Lyric scrunched up her face.
“He’s forty-seven. That’s not old to me.” I countered. I’d just turned forty in January. Dimitri was right—I did have a crush on the host.
In fact, I’d had a crush on him since I was thirteen years old.
Back in the eighties, Jake Ford was on a soap opera called Sault Ste. Marie . To this day I’m surprised it stayed on the air for ten years when people had such a hard time pronouncing the name— soo saint marie. Jake played Foster McBride, the son of wealthy shipping magnates in the northern Michigan town who wanted to bartend and own a bar instead of getting into the family business. He’d spend his days rebelling against his birthright in tight T-shirts andbedding practically every woman in town.
I bought all the teen magazines that featured his pictures and papered my bedroom walls with his face. He had a hint of an ethnic ambiguity, which in hindsight I thought maybe they’d been actively trying to minimize to increase his “marketability.” They did that a lot back then, and I’d even wondered if Jake Ford was his real name. These days on his show he often slipped into easy and fluent Spanish while warmly interacting with employees he’d encounter on the job. In any case, to me, he was so much more mysterious and alluring than the blond or sandy haired, freckle-faced, milquetoast boys that filled the other pages of the magazines. Dark hair, deep, dark chocolate eyes, strong angular features, and a bottom lip so full it had a crease in the middle.
My crush had waned over the years since he’d stepped away from the spotlight, only occasionally making a guest appearance on a drama or crime show. When my son Brody stumbled onto his show on the Encounter channel a few years ago, however, I couldn’t deny that Jake Ford could still get my attention. I liked him with miles on his face, and his eyes held the promise of so many stories. He’d matured, especially since the show had shifted in the last couple of years to be less silly and more substantial. He liked to feature the people far more than the job and get to the heart of why people do what they do. Way sexier to me now than a softly filtered bartender on daytime TV.
“What lip color?” Lyric asked me. “I know you’re picky.”
“Vixen.” It was a fun, bold, bright red that looked surprisingly good with my dark red hair done up in victory rolls and wrapped in a black bandana.
Randall came around the corner again, this time with an urgency in his long strides. Laser focused on Lyric and me, he said, “I need you two to come up front right now and help me talk Darius down from the shelves again.”
Darius was also a beautiful, bald and bearded Black man who, when he smiled his big, bright, cherubic smile, you could see exactly how he had looked when he was a little boy. He was much shorter and stockier than Randall, and some of the stylists had recently taken to calling them “Key and Peele” as the resemblance was comically accurate.
Darius was a self-proclaimed hyper-focused perfectionist when it came to his clients which made him an incomparable and brilliant stylist. He’d made his way through the LA celebrity hair scene for years until he met Randall. Randall loved Darius, but he could not abide by his volatile and chaotic lifestyle and soon became intolerant of the clubs and the drugs. He gave Darius an ultimatum—move to Milwaukee, Randall’s hometown, and settle down, or lose him. In 1992 they opened Aspire just outside of Milwaukee in the adorable suburb of Tosa Falls. In 2002, they started a cosmetology and barbering school in Milwaukee’s inner city which provides grants and tuition assistance for underprivileged young people who want to get into the trade.
Yes, Darius was a hyper-focused perfectionist when it came to hair, but even more so with the aesthetic of the salon.
The front desk had a coffee bar with an apothecary vibe. On the back counter was a beautiful espresso machine that looked like an Italian sports car. The shelves above held cups, saucers, beautiful lidded glass and ceramic containers housing a large variety of teas, mortars and pestles just for fun, and little plants nestled in among everything. Often, you’d see Darius standing there, hands on his hips carefully considering the shelves, and, usually, within minutes, he’d be taking everything down to rearrange it. Making little micro-adjustments for hours.
He was standing in front of the shelves that way when we walked up to the front.
“Darius. Honey, we don’t have time. They’ll be here in less than ten minutes.” I gently told him.
“I know, but I just know that when I watch the show, I’ll find the one thing that seems out of place, and I’ll wish I’d fixed it.”
I rubbed his back. “Lyric will make you a latte. While she does that, you can move a few things—on one condition.” I held up a finger to his face. “You can’t pick anything up. Only slide things side to side or forward and back.”
He nodded and stepped forward to begin his ritual. Randall smiled at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”
I was suddenly becoming increasingly nervous and somewhat nauseated at the realization that my teen crush would be there any minute. I’d appreciated having been distracted by Dimitri and Talia and had been somehow soothed by the fact that Lyric hadn’t seemed that impressed, or even bothered at all, that a TV crew was coming to our salon.
Darius had adjusted a few things on the shelves and was halfway through his latte. He was feeling better. I, however, was becoming more unhinged by the second and began to pace in front of the door.
“Hey… I wanted to tell you something,” Darius said to me.
“Don’t do it,” Randall cautioned, shaking his head.
“I’ve got to tell her. I feel like I need to tell her,” Darius pleaded, his hands making an exaggerated in and out gesture against his chest.
“Tell me what?” I asked. They were making me nervous.
“I met him. Jake. Back in the day,” he explained. “I styled him for a couple of magazine photo shoots.”
“Oh my God! Maybe I had your work on my wall. How cool is that?”
“Yes. Maybe. But Jake was… well, he was kind of a dick.”
I laughed at his drama. That didn’t surprise me one bit. I would think a twenty-something soap star slash teen idol would rarely have been a kind or overly polite person. “And? I mean, was he like a homophobe? Was he mean to you?”
“No, nothing like that. He was just arrogant and opinionated. Thought his shit didn’t stink.”
“Hmm,” said Randall. “Sounds just like someone else I knew back then…except I told him all the time how much his shit stinks.” He winked at me. “How did the two of them not get along?”
I laughed. None of it bothered me in the slightest. In fact, if he were still a dick, it would help alleviate my crush and I could more easily navigate the shoot. Be less flustered. Less fangirl. I sincerely doubted, however, that he was the same person Darius knew. Obviously, he could pretend to be whoever he wanted to be on the show—he was an actor after all—but in my gut I felt like the show shifted because of his genuine interest in people and their stories.
I stood at the window of the salon, both wishing they would hurry up and get there and hoping they would be late. Maybe even hoping they wouldn’t show up at all. I was getting my “nervous tummy” which wasn’t anywhere near as cute as it sounds. Instead of little butterflies I just felt like I had to take a very large poop.
“Shelby, get away from that window before you put your little nose print on it,” scolded Darius.
I was just about to back up when two large, black SUVs drove past. My stomach dropped as they made Y turns and pulled up in front of the salon. “Holy shit, they’re here.” My palms were sweating. My palms never sweat.
I walked quickly to stand behind Darius and Randall. I did not want to be the first person they saw or talked to when they walked in.
From out of the first SUV came three men, two of whom I recognized from the show. They would often cut to the crew if they tripped over something or there was a particularly bad smell someone was reacting to. Dan, the assistant director who’s often used as a guinea pig for comic relief on the show, popped out of the second SUV followed by a woman. I assumed it was Rita, the producer and the only person I’d had contact with.
The passenger door opened, and I finally saw him.
Jake Ford.
He was taking a painstakingly long beat in the SUV. He had sunglasses on, and it looked like he was on his phone.
When he finally did get out, he made a few three-sixty turns and looked up the height of the building and down onto the street. He was getting a lay of the land. I’d imagined it was part of his process and it would all be included as part of the “story.”
He began walking toward the salon doors. Toward me. With what seemed to be a series of expertly choreographed movements, he ended his call, put his phone in his back pocket and swiped the sunglasses off his face.
As he reached out his arm to pull the glass door open, I couldn’t help but think how surreal this moment was. I had been watching Jake Ford through glass screens for twenty-seven years, and now he was about to breach the last one that stood between us.