Salon.com > Amy Traverso

This time the germs are real

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Matthew was doing OK before anthrax. That's not to say he was doing well; his disease kept him from working or going to school, and he didn't like to interact with people that much. But he could spend his days reading, visiting his grandmother, maybe going out to eat. He talked with a couple of friends by e-mail or phone, and checked in on an Internet support group for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He had good days.

Then came the spores. Matthew says it was the letter to Tom Daschle that set him off, leaving him afraid to touch things, to concentrate on a book, to leave the house. "God forbid I should open any mail," he says. "I don't do that, of course. I started wearing gloves. I started to not show my face outside."

Matthew is 21 years old, and his OCD has been largely untreated. He was diagnosed at 19, when fears of germs, rabid dogs and disease took over much of his thinking, but talking to a therapist about it proved embarrassing, and he stopped going. Then, in October, things got so bad he feared he might hurt himself. "I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep," he says. He checked himself into a hospital, and began taking medication. Now back home with his family, he's going to give therapy another shot. But it's hard, he says, with the whole country afraid of anthrax.

Hair whore

Mon, 02 Apr 2001 20:06:00 +0000

I never thought I'd become a hair whore. I was raised Catholic, in the suburbs. I had too much guilt, and too little fashion sense.

But then I moved to the city and cheated on the first good stylist I had ever had -- the only one who had ever given me truly great hair. And then I cheated on everyone I had cheated on her with. For two years, I never visited the same salon twice. Each new stylist became the next fix, the steppingstone to a better life, with more lift in the roots.

I wandered in the wilderness. Then I went crawling back. This is my story.

Donna was my upstairs neighbor in a building where everyone but me and my roommate is a hair professional. To me -- a 27-year-old recent transplant to Boston from Albuquerque, N.M. -- her salon was an oasis of chic. The elevator opened up right into the middle of the salon, and everyone wore black. On Saturday mornings, the blonds came in to get their roots done -- a line of perfect tinfoil heads bent over W magazine. I used to dress up just to go there.

Donna took me under her wing, and freed me of my bob 'n' bangs. She asked me to be her hair model and gave me a 30 percent discount. Under her watch, my hair spoke for me. It said "stylish" and "smart." It did not say "I used to wear denim jumpers from Eddie Bauer." Which I did, with Birkenstocks.