Is "bad perm" redundant?

Once upon a time, I thought it was a good idea to get my hair permed. In my defense, this was in the 1970s and we hadn't grown frontal lobes yet. People were still wearing leisure suits. I guess my fried hair didn't seem so awful in comparison. Still, I find it hard to comprehend that somehow frizzy, fuzzy, foofie hair was completely worth sitting for hours drenched in a solution whose aroma could best be described as ass-ripened ammonia.

This particular perm was for a special occasion: 'twas the night of the Autumn Dance at the junior high school, and masquerading as a standard poodle was to be my key to social acceptance. Or so I deduce; I'm a little hazy on the details this many years later. So many brain cells pickled in the interim...

But I wasn't in it for the chance at romance; at 14, I was already resigned to the fact that love would likely never be mine, and it was best to instead surround myself with alcohol and have at it. That was my master plan the night of the perm, to drink myself into a near stupor and then dodge the dance chaperones for a couple of hours. Yes, sir - nothin' but the most highbrow entertainment for this girl. My companions for the evening were Juanita, Sue, and Phil, which automatically dropped the IQ level even further. We were like monkeys without a barrel, like a ship without a well-oiled cabin boy, like a virgin (hey), touched for the very first time. No, really, we weren't like any of those things. Well, probably the virgin part. But not the monkeys or the ships and such.

We'd managed to convince an adult, who shall go unidentified just in case he or she could still be in big trouble for it, to purchase alcohol for us and stash it in my garage. Mom had repeatedly offered us a ride to the dance, and we'd repeatedly insisted on walking. That had to've made her suspicious, to see four lazy teenagers refuse a ride to their destination. We finally slipped out the door, and I sneaked into the garage to retrieve the cocktail fixin's. I saw the crumpled paper grocery bag, snatched it up, and bolted out the garage door and into the alley behind our house. The four us ran until we were behind the hardware store a couple of blocks over, and then we stopped to breathe and gloat over our acquisition of such fine contraband - until I opened the bag for a better look, and we saw as one that I was a dumb virgin and I had in my arms a bag of my dad's leftover barbecue charcoals from the summer. The slaps on the back quickly turned to smacks across the side of my head for grabbin' the evil twin; they made me go back all by myself to make the swap. Fuckers.

The plan was to walk down to a little park on the east side, about a mile, and consume our alcohol (not charcoal) in the comfort of the swingsets and slides. Unfortunately, that brazen twat, Mother Nature, saw fit to whip us up an impromptu blizzard as we headed toward the park (did I mention that Mother Nature is a bitch?). Instead of admitting defeat and heading back to my house, we showed exactly as much sense as I'd have expected from us and decided the heavy snow would not deter us, and was actually a reason for us to start drinking on the way to the park. Damn, I hope none of them ever reproduced, either.

So, there were the three of them passing around a fifth of Southern Comfort, and there was me with my trusty MD 20/20. I was all sophisticated and shit. Would anybody be surprised to hear that it was all gone, every drop, before we'd managed to fight our way through the near white-out to the park? By the time we were able to barely make out the snow-covered swingset, even the gaggle of drunken imbeciles we were could see it had been a colossal miscalculation to refuse a ride on this most hellishly frozen of evenings. As we huddled in the alcove with the drinking fountain (and, to our credit, no one stuck his or her tongue on that or any other metal), pondering our mile-and-a-half walk to the junior high with much more "aw fuck!" than "peachy keen", we noticed there was a car idling not far from us.

Of course, we all automatically thought it was the parents of one or the other of us, and truthfully, we were so miserable it would almost have been worth it to be busted if we could just sit in a warm, dry car for a while. As we resigned ourselves to our fate, the driver's window came down and some guy who looked to be in his late 20s popped his head out and said, "You kids need a ride someplace?"

Now, wouldn't that be a red flag to you? I guess we felt safe because there were four of us, and we willingly got in the car with what turned out to be just the guy and his wife. I wonder in retrospect how wise it was for them to invite four drunken teenagers of questionable origin into the sanctity of their Buick, but it turned out that nobody had bad intentions, and the couple seemed a little bemused by our predicament. I'm sure this had been them not so long ago. We told them we were headed to the junior high, so they pointed their car in that direction, in the awful snowstorm, and took us. I hope these people went on to win the lottery.

It was only once I was in the car and beginning to thaw that I realized my hair was completely drenched from the snow, and I was pretty sure there was a strict prohibition against wetting the hair for a day or two after the damage, I mean perm, is done. I shrugged it off like responsibility and concentrated on having my hands thawed by the time I got into the dance. As luck would have it, the storm moved on as they drove us, and by the time we got to the school, it was almost completely cleared up. We thanked our chauffeurs and disembarked for our night of adventure and adult avoidance. Oh, man, did we reek. They all emitted a sweet-turned-corrupt odor, and I smelled like someone had vomited grapes on me; in retrospect, I should have sprung for the Boone's Farm.

Juanita lost her sense somewhere between shutting the car door and stepping onto the walkway to the school's front entrance. She always had that uncanny ability, when drinking, to be just fine one second, and then completely insane the next. She demonstrated that on the lawn by suddenly shrieking and slapping my admission money out of my hand, then laughing maniacally while I chased my dollar into the snow. Juanita ran off, to what purpose or to what end, or to the beat of what drummer, I really couldn't tell you, but she ran off, arms waving uncontrollably, just like a...hmmm, just like a dumb fucking teenager who's just consumed a huge amount of Southern Comfort. Inexplicably, we let her go and did not pursue her. Can't imagine why...

Once we were inside, Sue and Phil essentially ditched me. They were both cute, so it stood to reason that both of them had a shot at some romance, or at least makin' out, by entering the hormone-drenched dance floor. I was left to wander, conspicuously drunk and adorned in a dripping, freshly ruined perm. Understandably, it didn't take long for one of the chaperones to get that bloodlust in her eye and start to hunt me down for capture and detention. At that point, I did one of the few sensible things to happen all night and I left the school before I was bagged and tagged.

I was still pretty looped, and since the snow was finished, and none of my drinkin' buddies was anywhere to be found, I walked a few blocks down to the Burger King, where I loaded up with two orders of onion rings and a Coke. My plan was this: eat all the onion rings to cover up the smell of wine on me, that grape vomit scent that was oozing out my pores, so that I could call my dad for a ride and he'd never know I'd been tippin' the bottle. It was brilliant in its sheer audacity! Or...it was ill-advised in its utter lack of planning. I still can't figure out why Dad never said anything on the ride home; there is no way he could not have known I was stinkin' drunk. Wish I'd thought to ask him later on, when the statute of limitations on drunken teenagerness had passed.

That was pretty much the end of that little group of friends. I never had any idea why Juanita had run off like a banshee with hornets on the anus, and I guess I never cared enough to ask. Sue and Phil both drifted off into a better class of prettier people, and Juanita...didn't.

To this day, I still can't eat onion rings that aren't accompanied by a glass of insanely cheap wine.

Addendum: My mom was rarely mad at me for anything, but she was supremely incensed that I went out and ruined my new perm the first night I had it. And by "supremely incensed" I mean my mild-mannered mother was fucking pissed.