BLOOD IN MY HAIRSPRAY

Now, the last thing you want to hear is how this book ends, right? Good, because I haven’t finished it yet. Oh, don’t start. It was a busy month. I’m real close to finishing it, though, and I gotta tell you, it’s pretty fucking good. Crap. I shouldn’t have used “fucking”. Guess you won’t be seeing this in any press kits.
The book: Blood in my Hairspray. Doesn’t really read like a book. More like a journal. Straight-up storytelling. Only not so straight. The narrator is Damian Shtup, a gay, Jewish hairdresser who’s New York life becomes riddled with Tom and Jerry-style hijinks when one of his customers keels over on his salon floor. A customer who also happens to be a Mafia wife. “Oh, snap!” is right.
So what happens next? What doesn’t? Damian finds himself in the strangest of situations. Among them: spraying an aerosol can of blood on his head; finding a fetal horse’s head stuck to his comb; suffering through a visit from his Punxsutawney, PA parents; clinging for dear life to the hood of a car as it races through town, and into a hot wax car wash; in jail, with his transvestite prostitute therapist. It’s the greatest film noir whodunit John Waters never directed. I’d cast a sassy, Die Hard-era Bruce Willis in the lead role.
Despite my bald, heterosexual, Gentile ass having nothing in common with the book’s main character, I got a kick out of reading it. Steven Schreibman wields a pen contented with writing novels as comfortably as you and I write letters to friends. No awkward SAT words. No drab, dry pretentiousness. Just puns, jokes, and lots of pop culture references.
Wait,...
Okay. Finished. Happy? You should be. I am. And that’s saying something, considering this is the last thing I’ll have read when 2002 comes to a close. Not a bad way to end my literary year.
LOOK FOR IT IN YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE.