"The Modern Blonde"

J.P. Sloan

The first thing you have to realize is that I never would have been a success on Earth. You see, I am not the next Salvador Dali, nor am I another Vincent Van Gogh. I admit that freely. What I paint would largely be ignored on your planet. However, on Mars, my paintings "raise awareness." At least that's what my fans keep saying. What is awareness, anyway? It's the realization that some people don't think or act the way you want them to think or act. And what about my critics? Some call me the Martian Mapplethorpe. Some call me a pornographer. I want you to take a moment and realize that all of my critics live on Mars. This is fundamental to this interview, because your Earthbound readers will not care who I am, nor are they likely to have an opinion, positive or negative, about my paintings. Honestly, I don't see Earth art enthusiasts coughing up thousands of dollars to hang a Richard Lovett original over their mantle. I suspect that I have an appeal for your agnostic majority, because of my reputation as an opponent of religion. This was not my idea. This was not my intention. I don't think it was avoidable... it's an intergral part of my subject matter. But I don't hate religion, and I don't consider myself the enemy of the Martian Assembly of Jesus Christ. On the contrary, I would be nothing without their ignorance. You would not be interviewing me today.

But they don't like hair, and I paint it. So, here we are.

This is not my first interview, I think you know. And if the Earth media isn't yet bored with my same old anecdotes, I am. So I want to do something different today. Instead of sitting here and wading through infinite versions of the same four questions, I'd like to paint a picture. No, not of you. Not with paint. I'd like to paint the landscape of my life, to communicate to you and your readers why it is that I paint what I paint. So indulge me. I'm tired of Mars, frankly. And if I can't visit Earth, then maybe I can "raise awareness."

It's true, you know. There are people on Mars who don't think the way you do. I would say most of them don't. The Continent is a white majority. Believe it. I've read your gazettes and tabloids, and I'd have to say that Earth is utterly misinformed when it comes to Martian politics and Martian religion. There are no political parties here. There is no separation of Church and State. There are two churches on Mars, and everyone, without exclusion, belongs to one or the other. On one hand, there's the Ecclesiastical Saints of Mars. Less than one percent of the Martian population professes to be Ecclesiastical, and they usually have a good reason... like mine. On the other hand, there's the Martian Assembly of Jesus Christ. Ecclesiasticals have no rights, and Assemblists have no freedom. Let me tell you what it was like to grow up as an Assemblist.

My father was an Assemblist preacher, who ran a public broadcast inspirational program from our basement called "Jesus Blesses." My mother was just like every other Assemblist housewife... loyal, maternal, severe. Together, they were Brother Lovett and his wife, Trina. In private, they hated each other. My mother suffered complications during my birth, and when I was two, she had a hysterectomy. Our household would never meet the Assemblist ideal of four children, two boys and two girls. Despite the smoke and mirrors of our best genetic obstetricians, my father would always hold this against my mother. I suppose he felt that he was robbed of public status, and compensated with as much posturing as he could cram into a thirty-minute broadcast. And as long as I was shaven, clean, and off drugs, they left me alone to go and be a good Assemblist boy. And I managed to do just that, until I met Heather.

When I was in high school, we were still accepting immigrants from Earth. Every now and then, we would have a complete stranger enroll in our public schools. They usually carried with them a lethal dose of infectious heterodoxy, and were shunned into submission. This is their first education... conform or rot in hell. I was in fifteenth form when Heather Olmstead first showed her face in our school. Her father had ducked the draft by declaring himself an expatriot. This was before the reforms, so that was still legal, if stupid. You can guess how quickly he made the decision to abandon Earth, once the trials started. Having to deal with a new rotational period, a new gravity, and a new color of sky is hard enough for a fifteen-year-old girl. But can you imagine what it was like for her to be forced to shave her body, head and everything, and surrender her entire self-concept, simply to be allowed to go to school? I'm sure you can't. But it happens every day. It happened to Heather. If she was any degree below the caliber of girl... woman... that she was, then it would have killed her spirit. But Heather Olmstead remains the single finest human being I have ever met, and she was a fast learner.

Her father declared them to be Ecclesiastical, and therefore surrendered his right to vote, their right to social aid, and Heather's only hope of attending Academy. But if there were ever a war, he wouldn't have to fight. And since they shaved their heads, and wore the right clothing, she could go to school. My school.

She came into my first class of the day, and turned plenty of heads. Despite the obviously virgin scalp and the occasional clumsy razor nick on her arms, she was an attractive girl. The boys in the class made their obligatory physical assessments, and the girls immediately began to erect subliminal barbed wire around their personal territory. I wasn't a part of the scuttlebutt, being only a marginal member of their society. I was playing the part of the slacker, who would rather doodle in the back of the classroom than study. But I was clued in enough to tell that she was making waves in our glassy little tidal pool. I never spoke a word to her until Colonization Day.

The school held an assembly, as it always does, to celebrate Colonization Day, and I found myself sitting to the back of the bleachers, staring at the swaying orbs of my classmates heads. Heather sat next to me, and I didn't notice her until she spoke to me.

"Is this going to be as corny as the Fourth of July, or am I going to learn something?" she asked me.

I was stunned to hear that kind of talk coming from a girl. "I've never been to a Fourth of July," I told her.

She takes this pause, and says, "Sorry. I thought you were from Earth."

I asked her why. She told me I had the "look" of an immigrant, which was to say, I looked like I resented being there. This was a revelation to me. I had never thought of myself as being counter-culture. I just thought I was a poor player of the game. And so, here's this stunning Earth girl telling me she relates to me. This could have been the first time I ever felt like I really belonged to a subset. It was like an instant bond was forged, and we had a conversation. We talked through the entire ceremony. She told me all about her father, and the events that brought her to Mars. I told her all about the people in our township, and their exhausting intrigues. I remember wishing the ceremony was longer, and thinking of how strange it was to feel this way about another person. It was selfish, but torturous. No one noticed us, and as the weeks went by, we retained the luxury of privacy that only the fringe can afford. I had to find ways to talk with her... be with her... outside of school.

Heather invited me to one of her prayer vigils. I had never attended an Ecclesiastical function, and really knew nothing about them. But by the way Heather had invited me, I figured she was interested in anything but praying. It was more like an excuse to be together. This was something I was going to have to clear with my parents, and it turned out to be harder than I thought it would have been.

My mother, for example, flew right out of the gate. She was like, "Prayer vigil? What's a prayer vigil?"

I didn't really know what a prayer vigil was, so I painted a scene in my head of people in pews chanting a litany with low pipe organ music droning in the background. It was generic, and vaguely Assemblist. She didn't buy it.

"That's Ecclesiastical, isn't it? Who invited you?"

She kept me on my toes. I tried my best to keep my descriptions of Heather non-gender specific, but a mother can always tell when her son is hiding something.

"It's a girl, isn't it? You're going out with an Ecclesiastical girl?" She gave me a look like I had just contracted a virus. "Now, I've heard stories about them, Ricky," she started. "They don't really believe in God, you know. They just talk about being good all the time, and talk about being tolerant and giving... but they deny the power, Ricky. They deny the power! Being good is not good enough." This was an old Assemblist slogan that had been drilled into my head since the cradle. "If she's not a believer, Ricky, then she's going to influence you. Bad company corrupts good character." And on and on... I reminded her that we were discussing a prayer vigil, and it clouded her black-and-white platform.

Ultimately, her answer was, "This is a decision for your father," and left me to the real preacher in the family.

I had to wait on the basement stairs for "Jesus Blesses" to wrap up. My father was standing under four studio lights and about an inch of makeup.

"Now I know a man who can take away that pain. Yes He can. And He's got a plan, brothers and sisters. He's the man with the plan, and He's coming to take the pain away. He's a lion and a lamb, he's a healer and a soldier, he's the Alpha and the Omega... his name, is Martian Jesus." Oh, that was his latest spin. He was in the middle of the Martian Jesus summer, when he made this bogus distinction between the blessings of Jesus on Earth and Jesus on Mars. "Now my friends, hold up your hands to the red sky and say 'I glory in the blessings!' 'I glory in the blessings!' That's right. 'I glory in the blessings!' And he will bless you, because Jesus... blesses!" Freeze frame, roll credits, turn off the lights, and scrape off that foundation.

My father wasn't terribly impressed with my request to attend an Ecclesiastical prayer vigil.

"Did you talk to your mother about this?" I really didn't have to answer that. It was just a way of making me feel like a child. "What's your interest in the Ecclesiasticals?"

Again, I was ill-prepared. So I went for the truth this time, and told him about Heather. I found that this was the smartest choice I could have made, because he got this smirk on his face, and sat me down in the blue canvas director's chair across from him.

"I ever tell you how I met your mother? Her family moved to the Continent from Hoagland. She came to an Assemblist potluck over at the career center. We could only meet at church functions because of her family. You want to talk about old-fashioned? I felt like I was rescuing her. They wanted me to court her... actually court her, with this ritual that would last months! Her father told me he didn't approve of me or my religion, and invited me not to see her again."

When I asked him what he did, he said he went right against the grain and proposed to her. She latched onto the Assemblists like a tick, because her family disowned her. So, my father gave me a twenty, made a comment about men understanding men, and sent me with his blessing.

I'm glad I wasn't home when my mother found out.

The Ecclesiasticals met in a movie theater. So much for pews! There were only about two hundred people there, but there was no music. There were no suits. No incense, no litany. There were just people sitting in their work clothes, holding themselves, rocking back and forth. I guess they were praying, but they weren't saying anything. In an Assemblist church, the pastor chooses the prayer, and the laity makes the respondents at the right times. These guys were just making it up as they went along.

I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned to find Heather, her face lit up with the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. She was just glad to see me. I wanted to ask her some questions about the prayer thing, but she wasn't interested in it. She led me out into the lobby of the theater, where we spent the whole evening sitting and talking.

Her head was looking more natural now that it had been in the sun a little bit. She was getting more and more attractive, but no one at school had been noticing. She wasn't playing the game, and I was the only one who was talking to her. Well, that was fine by me.

Anyway, before the evening was up, she kissed me. It was quick, but it sent my mind into short circuits. It was my first kiss. Yes, my first. But that's not as important to you as the fact that this was the precise moment she owned my heart. And this is important, because when I gave away my heart to this magnificent woman, at that moment, it wrote out the events that would determine the rest of my life... and bring me here.

Secret relationships are almost impossible on Mars. Ours was difficult, but it worked. No one noticed us... not even my parents, whose lives were just a little too full to fit mine in. We went everywhere separately. We would talk on the phone for hours, my feet kicked up on the wall as I sketched her face on my sketch pad. By the time I was sixteen, I was thinking about sex a lot. And we talked about sex. We didn't discuss having it, we just discussed it as an intellectual topic. But she was the star in all of my fantasies. Everyone has a fantasy life... even you, I suppose. And when the only person you can fantasize about is the one person who is always just right there in your grasp... well, it's torture. And it's wonderful.

So, then comes Easter Sunday. Yes, Assemblists celebrate Easter, just like the Earth religions. Only, it's like a national holiday on Mars. All the cities shut down and put on these half-reverent, half-raucous festivals to the resurrection. Everyone attends, no matter what your beliefs. It's just something you do. Even the fringe would come, if just to watch the fireworks. My family had acquired a serious press box at the civic center celebrations, due to my father's increasing popularity with the elders. Heather had told me that she was going to attend, but I realized that I wouldn't be able to pick her out from the crowd.

I got kind of restless, and made up an excuse to retire to the crowd below. I wandered the sea of heads for a half-hour before a hand reached out from behind a stage stanchion and pulled me behind the thick velvet curtain. Before my eyes could adjust to the low light, I could feel Heather's lips pressing against mine, her tongue making invitations to mine. There was a kind of frantic lust pouring out of her. When I caught my breath, she suggested we ditch the party and go back to my house. Which was to say, go back up to my room. The jog back to my house was a blur. My brain was throbbing, my heart was pounding. I kept thinking, "This is it! This is it!" I mean, this was the one thing no one on the whole planet could prepare me for, and it was the one act around which my pubescent mind had constructed the purpose of my being. Sex! And not only sex, it was going to be sex, free of interruption, with the girl of my dreams.

When we got to my room, she noticed my sketches of her tacked onto the walls. It took her by surprise. I think it sunk in just how in love with her I was. This was the precise moment she gave me her heart.

I had heard the stories of other people's first time... of how it was clumsy, quick, painful, disappointing. Mine wasn't like that. When we took our clothes off, all of my expectations kind of numbed. The immense beauty of her body almost brought me to tears. I felt my body moving towards hers automatically. We fell into bed, and I can only describe our love making as a dance. It was slow, coordinated, like each move was predestined. I don't think I even came the first time. Her motions were hypnotizing me.

Didn't think I was a romantic, did you? None of the great pornographers are, right? Well, look. I'm not sharing this with you to get my rocks off. I learned something that night which would shatter my whole world... and I mean, the way I understood reality itself. It left me broken, numb, afraid, and just a little intrigued.

When Heather rolled off of me, she lay there looking at me. She got this serious look on her face, and she asked me, "Do you trust me?"

I told her I did.

She said, "I trust you, Ricky. I trust you more than anyone else on this planet. And I want you to know me. I want you to see everything there is to see."

I didn't think that, after sex, there was much left to see. Was I wrong!

She sat up, and reached for the back of her ear. She started tugging at the skin of her scalp. It was pulling away sickly from her skull, and I started to really freak out. Her skin gave way, and she peeled it back across her head. It was a skin cap. A very convincing one, too. Because never in a thousand years would I have guessed that Heather Olmstead was walking around in public with beautiful blond hair tucked underneath that skin cap.

I say beautiful now. That's obvious. But just then, my stomach was turning. You have to understand, I was raised my entire life without ever seeing hair on a person's head. I had never touched hair that wasn't stubble to be shaved off. I was taught that it was dirty, perverted, and wrong. Simply wrong. There were never any explanations given. It was just a tenet of my faith.

So, here I have Heather, fresh from making love to me in my bed, leaning over me with short blond hair shining in the neon lights strung across my headboard. She saw the alarm in my face, I know. But she stood her own. She didn't wilt. She knew where I was coming from, and she was prepared. I did my best not to shrink away from her, but I was getting nauseous.

With an expression of open confidence, she asked me, "Is it that bad?"

I shook my head, but I didn't have words.

She leaned over to kiss me, and I instinctively closed my eyes. I felt her lips on my cheek, and her thighs wrap themselves around me again. One of her hands worked its way down my abdomen to my groin, while her other hand found one of mine. She pulled my hand up to her face, and traced her nose and brow with my fingers. I was too busy being aroused to notice that she was leading my hand up to her hair.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my fingers running through that hair. It felt totally different than I had imagined. It was soft... so very soft. So smooth. I pulled my other hand to her head, and started stroking her hair, letting it slide between my fingers.

Well, fetish jokes aside, I discovered a whole new side to myself. Please understand that this was all very illegal and perverted. Hair is something people on Earth see every day, and it can not rise to the level of sexual taboo when it is so accessible. But there is a certain power to a woman's hair, which I need not explain. Have you ever been caught smelling a woman's hair? Have you ever found yourself aroused watching a woman brush her hair? Have you ever seen the difference a new style, or a new color, can make on a woman's sexuality? It's real. It's something that had been cut off of my Martian society, and when it surfaced in my bedroom, it was like a nuclear explosion.

I never viewed my church the same way again. In the weeks to follow, I started nosing around the library, reading the Book of Jesus on Mars. I tried to find the passage where Jesus said that no one was supposed to have hair. I couldn't find it. I discretely inquired with the school chaplain, under pretense of doing a research project. He gave me an interesting lesson on the original Mars Colony, and their fight against communicable diseases... but he offered no satisfying spiritual justification for the shaving of heads. It remained a mystery to me.

Heather took me to the place she got her skin cap. It was a seedy boutique in the red light district called The Modern Blonde. They had feelers out in the Spaceport for new immigrants to Mars, their primary customer base. Whenever they found an Earth immigrant, fresh from the realization that they would have to shave their entire body for the rest of their life, they would meet, greet, and offer an alternative. The Modern Blonde was a very smelly, dirty place. When she pulled me through the front shop, we dove through a black curtain and into a large, smoke-filled space. It was kind of like a club, but everyone in there had hair. A couple of the women, and one of the men, had very long hair. I guess they stayed underground. There were red leather futons along the walls, and a rotating cocktail table in the middle, leaving just enough space to squeeze by. Heather pulled off her cap, and transformed into this other person. Looking around at these short, hairy people, I realized that I was a Martian in a room full of Earthlings being, well, Earthling.

Here's where I compliment you and insult you at the same time. You Earthlings have this talent for making a person feel truly free, but at the same time, you have a way of making a person feel truly dirty. It took time for me to get used to their company, but I became a regular there. I started bringing my sketch pad, and you can now see the segue coming. I spent most of my free time there, drawing. The first painting I sold, the "Raven on Velvet", was based on a sketch in the back room of the Modern Blonde. She was this twenty-five year old Earthling named Raven. She had shiny black hair, the whitest porcelain skin, and a deadly look in her eyes. I sketched each of them, and they hung them up on the walls. I took some home with me, and hid them with my sketches of Heather. This was the beginning.

But an artist doesn't make waves without some kind of outing. And outed I was. It had to happen with my mother. She noticed the subtle changes in my attitudes and behaviors, the way every mother in the universe can. Only she thought it was drugs. She had Heather figured for a junkie, and started leaving little tracts about drug use in my laundry. Subtle.

Anyway, she must have gone rummaging through my room for paraphernalia, or something, because she found my sketches. I came home from school one day, and both my mother and my father were waiting for me at the kitchen table. When you see that, you know it can't be good. I must have worn guilt like a mask. They invited me to sit down, and asked me about Sunday's service. This, I felt, was particularly cruel. They were laying the foundation work for a regular crucifixion. They grilled me about some spiritual points, some church history, and some matters about sex. I thought I had given them the strict party line, and that I was showing them no weakness. That may have been the case, but it wouldn't have mattered. Without further word, my mother shoved one of my drawings across the table. It was a particularly revealing sketch of Madeline, a red-head at the Modern Blond. She wasn't wearing anything at all. She was bending backwards slightly, her curly red hair playing off her shoulder. It was one of my best, actually. Too bad.

"I think we need an explanation, Ricky." She was looking for a good excuse to pass along when the lid blew off the top of this thing. My father was just boring holes through me.

All of my strength was gone. I had no desire to fight them, or try to dodge the consequences. So I said, "It's Madeline. She has a husband named Emil. He has hair, too."

And that was it. From that point on, I was no longer an Assemblist. From that point on, I was a controversy. I walked out in the middle of the ensuing havoc, and headed straight for the Olmsteads'. Heather would be next, and I wanted to warn her.

I was too late. Someone had been there. Their house was covered in black spray paint hate graffiti. The word had gotten out before I was even confronted with it. Heather and her father weren't home, and I decided to leave before I was seen and blamed either for the graffiti or for associating with the Olmsteads.

Ever feel real panic? It hurts, doesn't it? It kind of slows down time. Time was crawling by miserably slow as I rushed downtown. I figured The Modern Blonde would have been Heather's first choice for refuge. They seem to have harbored hair criminals for a long time without incident. Well, fate was hanging on me like toxic waste. By the time I got to The Modern Blonde, I could see its glowing remains in the shadows of the evening, belching smoke into the browning sky. They had burned it to the ground! Several of my sketches were scattered along the street. I looked down, and found that I was standing on a sketch of Heather. I became a hollow person, realizing that my neighbors, my parents, were capable of this violence. I had no recourse, no plan, and no one to blame but myself. All I had was the desire just to know that she was all right.

My mother wasn't home when I got back. My father was sipping a juice on the sofa, just staring at a television that wasn't even turned on. I felt detached from this family. I looked at the back of my father's head, and saw him as an outsider. An equal. I paused behind his back and asked, "What happened to her?"

He took a long drag of juice, and with an overly dramatic pause, replied, "She ought to be at the Spaceport by now."

"They ran them off of the planet?"

"They don't belong," he said without guile.

I sniffled at him, and launched into a sermon of my own. I can't remember anything I said, but I do know it was enough to get me kicked out of the house. Of course, no one in the community knew at first that I was involved with the hair scandal. My father saw to that. His ratings were far too important to be jeopardized by his pervert son's desire for an Earth girl. So I moved away to Tycho.

It's the painting that kept me sane. The people in Tycho are far more relaxed than on the Continent. There are several starving artists trying to break new ground out here. Do me a favor and mention that, if you ever write this interview. They could really use an audience. I found my audience soon enough. All I did was hire model after model from the Spaceport. I purchased some downloaded images from some of my friends in the black market. And most importantly, I found Monsieur Gilbert Ballard. He gave me the other half of my education... form, definition, lighting, structure, negative space. May God rest his soul.

I never stop thinking about Heather Olmstead. Yes, I did find her. After my first showing... you know, the one that was boycotted... I got a communiqué from Earth, passed on by one of my connections at the Spaceport. She found herself in England, and she and her father are doing better there than they would have here on Mars. She's attending a small business school, and plans to engineer a start-up company next year. Again, I'd appreciate it if a harmless endorsement just happened to fall into your article.

I know, I'm shameless.

I don't think I'll ever see her again in person. My body could never take Earth's gravity, and our borders are now closed. Maybe one day, it will be possible to meet, on a platform, when we have peace again. But my life has not taught me to be optimistic.

And if you're wondering what Heather looks like, or if you want an image for the article, don't bother hunting down her school files. Just look to the piece that was displayed at the Hudson Gallery last month. "War Child." I poured more of my soul into that painting than any other, because I had to get her out of me. I wasn't entirely successful, but at least I can go to church again.

So, no one on Earth is going to bat an eye about a struggling artist who made a name for himself by painting pornographic images of women with hair. But one or two of your readers might think about the way they live, and wonder why it is that their wife could simply be a woman on Earth, but a whore on Mars. How have we become so different? Why do we hide behind our gods when we want to speak out for our beliefs? I haven't figured it out yet.

I'm not worried.

My memories are enough.

And if someone ever says they have an answer, I'm willing to listen.