"Alex? Honey? Are you awake?"
The sound of my mother's voice rang throughout my mind, as if she had been calling down the vast barrel of a shotgun after a wedding. It was a sound I never knew I expected to hear, nor did I expect that I wanted to hear, either, especially with everything that flowed through my veins at the moment. But her voice was thence followed by the soft continuous beep of a heart monitor, and I knew that something had happened. I had done something awful, and something awful enough to land me in a place that wasn't my bedroom at my parents' house.
I was a young boy, lay flat upon his back in the narrow vessel of a hospital bed at the far end of the children's wing, and he had not a single clue as to what had happened up to that point. I was a young boy posted up away from the world at large with nothing more to glean than the pain in his head and the scrape on his palm.
Something had happened. Everything had gone all black.
My eyes had flickered open and I latched onto her own face, her eyes rested behind a pair of half-moon glasses; a firm full feeling had appeared on the right side of my forehead and onto the crown of my head. There should have been a deep pain there, however it had faded out to something that made me think of a rock stuck inside of my skull.
And then I remembered what had happened. It all came back to me in a quick hasty flash and a breath up the side of my head and my shoulders. The weight of the world and everything that made me who I was, all encapsulated within the gash on my head.
She called me again, this time in a much louder voice.
"Mom?" I opened my eyes a bit more, only to find something that obscured my view of my mother's face from the right side. "Mom, what happened?" I gasped and coughed so hard that my whole entire body shuddered and shook from the fall. It wasn't much of a fall from what I could remember but I did take quite the tumble along with the rest of my class down those stones on the hillside.
"It's okay, bubbeleh," she whispered to me, to which she stroked the other cleaner side of my forehead. "You have to rest for a while, though."
"What happened?" My voice broke: the full feeling in my head trickled down the rest of my face, as if she had cracked an egg upon the crown of my head.
"You fell, dear," she cooed at me, to which she kept on stroking my forehead. "Remember? You and your class were at Indian Rock yesterday and you fell."
"I did fall," I muttered. It was right then that I remembered it as if it had just happened, as well: I had climbed up the side of the rock with a couple of my friends and then my foot slipped or something. They tried to help me but I wound up dragging them down with me. Everything after that was impenetrable blackness, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital in my mother's arms and with a helmet of gauze wrapped around my head for a couple of days.
I missed school that Friday and everything.
And I knew the fall was to leave a deep mark on my head, but it was a miracle that I had survived it, even as they released me in the middle of the day on Saturday and I lay down in my own bed that night.
Since the incident, Indian Rock had been fenced off to the public and no one could go there unless they had permission from the city, and I knew that the fall that nearly killed me had a lot to do with it, if not then my friends' parents had said something to the people running the whole entire place. I had no idea about the whole entire story, as to who else wound up in the hospital with me.
And to top everything else all off, by the time I hit thirteen years old, I stood there in my parents' bathroom over the sink basin with my hairbrush nestled in my hand, something on that particular side of my head caught my attention. At first, I thought it was nothing more than the reflection of the bathroom light over me down upon my hair, given it had grown out rather long, down to my shoulders at that point, and it carried a nice full curl near the edge of my shoulders at that point. But as I brushed it on that side, I noticed it again. All I could think was a small piece of my hair shone too brightly, or perhaps I had some blond streaks coming in courtesy of the sunshine. Something I didn't expect to happen, especially since my hair had always been jet-black throughout my childhood.
But I knew something was off when I kept seeing it over and over again, even when I brushed the left side of my head, and even more so when it fell out and landed onto the side of the sink basin. This tiny curl rested upon the swirled porcelain of the basin that I knew was of a completely different color as it so much as lay there.
I glanced down at it and I picked it up.
My hair was a rich jet-black coal color, very much like that of a hard rocker throughout most of the Seventies. When I picked it up and held it between my index finger and my thumb for a better look, I noticed something rather off about it. The black color had faded out to a soft silvery tone.
A single gray hair.
At first, I believed that it wasn't my own, especially when I had shed a few other hairs in the meantime. No way I was about to be fucking reprimanded for something as trivial as leaving hair in the bathroom sink basin, but I had saved this one for last, though. I switched off the light and headed into the living room to show it to her.
"Mom?" I called out.
"Yes, dear?" she returned the favor to me. I doubled back out to the hallway to show it off to her. She peered over her half-moon glasses at me as I made my way into the living room.
"What's that?"
"I found this while I was brushing my hair just now," I told her. "Just lying in the sink basin." I handed it to her and she nudged her half-moons up her nose for a second look.
"Oh. A gray hair. Well, it must be one of your father's."
"Dad's completely bald, though," I pointed out, and she glanced over the rims of her glasses at me, albeit with a thoughtful look upon her face.
"You know, I was getting gray hairs by the time I was eighteen, bubbeleh. It's just a part of life. Just a thing that happens."
"But I'm fourteen, though."
"Tell you what," she started again. "If you see any more of them, don't pluck them because more will grow right in their place. We'll find you some black hair dye in the meantime, too."
Since her promise, more gray hairs did in fact come in, right there at that singular spot at the crown of my head, and right where I hit my head from the fall, too. By that time, I started taking my first guitar lessons with Satriani; and the streak had only grown to of considerable size, a singular plume of gray the size of my pinky finger, right over the right side of my forehead. No one really knew about the true origin of the streak, from a mutation to a scar to a birthmark on my hair, but I had my questions and curiosity about it, much like how I had my curiosity about other things.
When I joined my first band, The Legacy, at sixteen years old, I knew that thing had set up roots on my head and it was there forever. What struck me as peculiar, aside from the fact that it had even showed up in the first place, was the fact that it grew in a singular plume. The rest of my hair was a helmet of solid black waves and tiny tight ringlets.
I thought about wearing a hat more and more since my parents had never gotten black hair dye for my hair, either. But other than my yarmulke, I had no other hats at my disposal.
When the five of us went into the studio to record our first album together, I had taken my spot there by the door of the sound room and with one hand rested upon the right side of my forehead to hide it from any onlookers. I saw myself age by about fifteen years from having gray hair already, and it didn't help matters that I still had to do my homework every night, either. At least until school let out.
No way I was about to drop out during my junior and senior years, though, all to go out on tour with a band that had just formed.
I lived in a time in which every person alive seemed to be catering to me and people my age. On one hand, as a sixteen-year-old boy right smack in the middle of the Eighties. I had to have the large poofy hair sprayed beyond recognition and my nose sozzled full of the ripest form of cocaine if I wasn't already hiding it from my superiors; on the other hand, I had to shed the long lush curls and become a good Christian boy who abstained from any sort of drugs or from listening to Kiss and Van Halen.
