In 1986, at the tender age of 15, while most teens were at the mall or learning how to smoke behind 7-Eleven, I had a job at a hair salon. And by “job,” I mean my mom paid a man named Wayne Michael to let me work there. This was a shocking twist I discovered only after I dared to complain about the labor conditions. Mainly that I was paid in sweaty, scented air and damp towels. “He doesn’t pay you,” my mom snapped. “I pay him to hire you.”
Excuse me? I thought I was part of the workforce. Turns out, I was participating in a weird barter economy where my services were unpaid and my dignity slowly evaporated.
Saturday mornings, I’d trudge into the salon, where the air was thick with Aqua Net and warm perms. “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” would be playing on the radio, which felt wildly inappropriate as Wayne Michael spun a cotton-headed old lady in a chair, wrapping her hair in tiny perm rods. He danced while he worked, gliding around in his loafers with all the flair of a man who had long since stopped caring what teenagers thought of him. I both admired him and suspected he was the reason all the towels smelled like mild chemical warfare.
My job was to sweep up hair, clean the bathroom, and lug home the salon towels to wash in our apartment laundry room, two blocks away. These weren’t just towels. They were waterlogged, ammonia-scented, perm-sauce-soaked beasts. Carrying them felt like dragging a damp St. Bernard that had just escaped from a bottle of Cold Wave.
I was a lazy teen. An Olympic-level procrastinator. I’d sit on the bathroom floor at the shop, staring at the mop bucket like it had personally betrayed me. I wasn’t so much “cleaning the bathroom” as I was “hiding from work and pretending to alphabetize the air freshener.”
But somehow, that job stuck with me. Not because it taught me discipline or how to properly fold a towel. Those things came much later. It stuck because it showed me I could survive awkwardness, sweat, and the crushing betrayal of learning your job is actually a performance art piece called Teen Labor is Free Now.
And maybe, just maybe, that is what character is built on.
Perm fumes. Polyester. And one very confused fifteen-year-old girl with a mop.
Care to help Lisa buy enough Twinkies to drown her sorrow? You can buy a book here.
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