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  “I’m the manager and you’ll do as I say,” I replied, and the owner confirmed this when the guy mistakenly turned to him for support. Later, the same guy quit. He and everyone else knew I was there for the long haul. So they had to put up or get out. But there was still resistance all along the way, and whereas I now try to include diplomacy in my arsenal of countermeasures, back then it just wasn’t on my radar.

  One of the stylists had a raging ego that spiraled way out of control both with his clients and with other members of the staff. He was so high maintenance that it wasn’t worth the effort to deal with him. He thought he could do whatever he wanted because he was so fabulous, and quite frankly he wasn’t that fabulous at all. When he didn’t want to tone it down and refused to be a team player, it was time to let him go. So I fired him.

  “This clearly isn’t working out and you’re obviously not happy,” I told him. “We’re also not happy, so you’ll probably be much better suited at another salon.” When he inquired as to why we weren’t happy, I told him: “Frankly, your work is crap.”

  “All right, fine,” he said, “I’ll pack my stuff,” and off he went. He couldn’t argue with the truth.

  These days, instead of telling him he was crap, I’d probably point to our different belief systems and say that it just didn’t work for the business I was trying to build. This wouldn’t be quite so truthful—he really was crap—but it would achieve the same result in a nicer way. And as you know, tact is now my middle name—don’t laugh—even if I do still vent my frustration when I’m passionate about something and people don’t see the potential that I see. Or, even worse, when what they’re doing is hurting themselves, their business, and everyone around them. At those times, I’m still the bull in the china shop.

  After about seven months of working really hard to turn things around in that job, my efforts began to pay off. People could see I didn’t ask them to do anything that I didn’t do myself—if I asked them to clean, they knew I was also coming in early to clean or that I’d help them. So they respected what I was doing and I honestly think that they noticed and liked the difference at the shop They could see how things were now better organized and that the salon not only looked better but the clients were being properly taken care of, too. For my part, I loved taking charge of something and seeing the fruits of my labor. The business was in better shape, my colleagues had an enhanced working environment, and the clients were having a much more positive experience. This salon owner still runs a very successful business today, having branched out into many cutting-edge areas, and no doubt continuing to surround himself with people he can trust so he can have the freedom to refresh and build the business as he wants to. I must say that I am grateful to him for the opportunity to make some improvements not only in his salon, but in myself as well.

  By the early 1990s, having confronted my own complacency and having found the motivation to transform a salon according to the kind of rules and structure that I’d previously been taught, I was ready to move on—not only from that salon, but also from London. My mum had moved to the States, the British economy had gone to hell in a handbasket, the IRA bomb scares had us all terrified, and people were rioting in the streets over the government’s implementation of a highly unpopular property tax called the “poll tax.”

  As things grew worse, living there became hard, but for me this was a good opportunity to reevaluate what I wanted to do and where I wanted to do it. I wasn’t running away from London, I was running toward my next chapter. It was time for a change—and I quite like change . . .

  How to Fire Someone

  • Let’s face it, I represent every human resource department’s dream when it comes to my work ethic and drive, but I may be their worst nightmare when it comes to my candor. With that disclaimer out of the way, here are my thoughts on the subject anyway:

  • You should check yourself before you take any action. Have you been consistent in your feedback with this person or have you been too complimentary? Mixed signals are the kiss of bloody death, not to mention dishonest!

  • In your prior warnings, always keep your comments focused on how the employee is not meeting your stated goals.

  • If your expectations have been made clear beforehand, then the inevitable won’t come as such a fucking shock.

  • As soon as you know it’s not working out, make a point of letting the employee go quickly and with dignity.

  • Have a witness present and keep your comments brief. Tell them they are not meeting your goals, plain and simple. Whatever the specific reasons are, that is the ultimate truth. Never make it personal, even if they try to.

  • Have the ex-employee leave the premises right away. Fire-ees are bound to get fired up . . . and so, too, will the rest of the staff if they remain there any longer.

  • In the end, they may thank you. Letting people go can teach them to respect rules and boundaries—and even free them to step constructively outside those very same constraints to do work they are better suited for. And you’ll be happier, too.

  Chapter 8

  The Boob Job from Hell

  I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT tits, or at least not my own, until I arrived in America. And then it was tits, tits, tits. They were everywhere—on TV, in the gossip rags, and in my face, or so it seemed. I was the duck out of water, and somehow it all came down to tits. Ass I had no problem with. In fact, my problem was too much ass. It was the tits that were lacking.

  In 1992, I was ready to get out of England. Having never visited the United States, I had always wondered about New York. After all, it was one of the greatest cities on earth and an international hub for fashion and beauty. A little over a year earlier, my mother had remarried, to an American, and relocated to Ridgewood, New Jersey, so I decided to join her there. But I quickly realized that Ridgewood, an upper-class bedroom community, was not New York and it wasn’t London either.

  In suburban New Jersey everyone looked the same . . . except me. I was the weird girl with the shaved head and crazy clothes. With my anglicized Aussie accent, I also didn’t sound like everyone else. And I certainly didn’t act like everyone else. People definitely noticed. One of the first incidents I remember was ordering a tomato-and-onion sandwich in a local bagel store. The server made fun of the way I pronounced “tom-ahto” because he didn’t understand what I was saying. After I kept pointing at the fruit in question, he finally exclaimed, “Ohhh, you mean a tomato!” What else could he have thought I was referring to? A fucking nuclear missile? “Yes, yes, a tomaydo-and-onion sandwich,” I corrected myself, which prompted more hilarity because he thought it was such a bizarre food combination. How fucking provincial, I thought. The town was less than thirty miles outside of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world to which most of the residents commuted every day for work. Obviously, in the humdrum daily grind, it was easy to forget all the different cultures and people around them.

  Another time, I was eating in a diner with my mother and laughing about the outcry that Sinéad O’Connor had recently caused by tearing up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live. “So what?” I remarked. “It’s not like she stabbed him.” Well, the people sitting behind me were obviously listening to our conversation and they decided to get involved by telling me how horribly wrong I was. They were the ones butting into our conversation, but I was the one being chastised. I felt like a frustrated fish out of water.

  Shortly after I moved to Ridgewood, a woman in a grocery store asked me how my treatment was going. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Well, you don’t have any hair,” she replied, “so I assume you’re going through chemo.” At first, I thought the stupid cow was being sarcastic, but then I realized that to her way of thinking, there couldn’t be any other possible reason for shaving my head.

  I love hair—obviously—and I enjoy working with it, but for me it’s never been the be-all and end-all of what makes a person attractive. Yes, I think it’s beautiful, and the right cut and co
lor can definitely make a woman or a man more eye-catching. But you don’t need long hair to be sexy or stunning. In London during the late eighties and early nineties, people were more open to expressing themselves with their hair, whether it was brightly colored, styled unconventionally, cropped short, or cut altogether—it was viewed as an accessory. In New Jersey, however, people were really uncomfortable that I didn’t have any hair. “For fuck’s sake,” I felt like saying. “Stop worrying so much about me and worry more about yourself!”

  My first job in Ridgewood was in a large salon, and because I was new I’d only get clients when they asked for me or when all of the other stylists were busy. That’s normal in this business. However, some of the clients would say, “I don’t want that girl with no hair to cut my hair.” They were quite literally scared at the sight of me. Just as the children in school had run away from the fat kid, fearing my weight might be contagious, these women were concerned I’d inflict my baldness on them.

  At one point, the salon owners actually put me in the basement, and although no one ever admitted it, I knew this was because they wanted to hide me. It reminded me of an incident when I was working for Stephen Pratt back in Australia. During a staff meeting one day, he told another stylist, “If you want to hide, go and stand behind Tabatha, because then I’ll never be able to see you.” I was mortified.

  Confronted with such small-minded bullshit, I realized that the only thing I could do to be accepted was to show them what a brilliant hairdresser I was—then let people try to find fault with me! So I started to walk the boutique-lined streets, handing out business cards, and although some of the ladies fled, others were enticed by the free haircuts that I offered. Once I styled their hair, they kept coming back, and they paid full price and even recommended me to their friends.

  When other clients saw the intensity I put into a haircut, they asked for me to style them, too, and the result was that I built my clientele from the basement up. What’s more, within a year, I was not only on the main floor with a full book, I was also the bloody education director, training all of the other hairdressers in the place! Ironically, I now had to fix all the client complaints. All of which proves my point that it doesn’t matter what I look like; what matters is how I make you look and feel. I always knew I was a damned good hairdresser, and when all of those more conservative suburban women realized that, too, it didn’t matter whether I was bald, fat, or a flaming drag queen.

  But as brilliant as work was going, I was still struggling to find a social scene. In London, I had lots of friends and went out every night, but Ridgewood wasn’t exactly a hotbed of alternative activities. It was a more conservative place with more conservative values. So in an attempt to fit in with my coworkers and clients, I started to date the NFL football player I mentioned before. There I was, never having watched the American version of the sport, and suddenly I was going out for fancy dinners with a defensive lineman from the New York Giants! It certainly got tongues wagging at the salon and around town.

  We dated for a little over a year, but I can’t say I was ever in love. I went out with the guy for the street cred and to prove to the people around me—who so disapproved of my bald head and everything else about me—that I could date the pro footballer that they salivated over. So there! Of course, I eventually got bored and wanted something—and someone—more satisfying than a guy who dated several women at once and clearly wasn’t invested in me for me. I supposed we used each other, which is fine until it’s not fine. The whole affair ended poorly, with me fucking up his Porsche, and that was that.

  It was an accident, really. He had given me his Porsche for the weekend to get it detailed for him while he was out of town. In many ways, I was more like his girl Friday than his girlfriend. After the car was detailed, I was driving it back to his house. I thought to myself, “Fuck it, I’m driving a Porsche 911,” so I put the top down and opened her up on Route 208 to have a little fun. Suddenly the bonnet, which the detailer had apparently not closed properly, flew up, dog-eared, and slammed right into the windshield. I managed to pull over but I couldn’t get the mangled metal back down, so I had to drive the rest of the way pretty much hanging out the window to see down the road. When I got to the football player’s house, I parked the car in his garage and I went out with friends in New York. He wasn’t supposed to be home for another couple of days, so I thought I had some time to figure out what to do. As it turned out, he had lied to me and was away with a girl. When they decided to come back early, he saw his poor baby all messed up. I got an angry phone call demanding to know what had happened and I told him the detailer hadn’t secured the bonnet properly. I could have been killed driving on the highway like that, for God’s sake. He demanded $10,000 to fix the car and I told him that was what insurance was for. It was what you might call an irreconcilable difference in our relationship. And it was the last I heard from him. Although his poor southern parents still contact me every once in a while, since I am the girlfriend who moved them from their trailer into a house for him. In the end, it had been a fun ride.

  Even after the footballer, I continued to try to define American beauty to help me fit in more. From what I could see, most popular American girls had nice teeth, long hair, and big boobs—they were Barbie dolls! So I tried growing my hair, losing weight, and—drumroll, please—getting a boob job. Small on top and big in the behind, I had always felt that if I had a little more up top it would somehow balance my arse. It was stereotypical female logic. God knows, most of the other girls my pro football boyfriend dated had big boobs—or at least bigger boobs than me. Ironically, while I took time to craft individual looks that helped my clients express how they felt inside, I let their opinions push me in the opposite direction. Even after having suffered the torments of the kids who bullied me at school because I was fat, I did what I’ve been telling you to never do—I let the masses tell me what shape peg I should be. They made me believe I needed to be a round peg.

  Through my Aussie eyes, America was all about the picture that’s painted on the outside. I call it the shiny obsession, because so many people here seem to be infatuated with the surface, the gloss. They aspire to be those unrealistically thin creatures who appear on magazine covers but who none of us can really look like because they’ve been airbrushed to hell. Neither Australians nor Europeans are like that. The whole time I lived in London, I spent every summer in Greece, where it didn’t matter if you weighed ninety pounds or three hundred pounds. On the beach, everyone had their bras off, and regardless of whether their boobs were pointing up to the sun or hanging down to their ankles, no one gave a shit. Thin, fat, young, or old, the women were on vacation, getting a tan. And no one batted an eyelid.

  In the United States, perfect or not, everyone, even the most beautiful movie stars, seem preoccupied with improving their appearance. It starts at a young age with parents paying for everything from plastic surgery to dental braces. Not so in Australia and the UK, where, if people’s teeth weren’t really, really bad, the attitude is “Fuck it, leave ’em alone.” In America, it’s hard to resist the pervasiveness of the shiny obsession. I started to notice the differences between that shiny obsession and myself more and more, and I stacked up less and less.

  For the first time in my life, I made a serious effort to lose weight by working out at a gym and dieting, as I mentioned before. In Australia and London, I’d never really thought about what I ate. If I wanted a chip butty (a french fry sandwich), I’d have a chip butty; and if I wanted a Snickers bar for breakfast, I’d have a Snickers bar for breakfast. Forget healthy. But in America, that same food was considered an evil commodity that prompted outcries from my coworkers of “Oh my God, you’re going to eat that?” I felt like I was gobbling shit off the sidewalk and soon the embarrassment made me cave in to the pressure and focus on the shiny obsession, too.

  That’s when I got a boob job. I wanted bigger tits, but not to attract men like my football player. I just wanted to fit in by loo
king more like the women around me and wearing the same clothes they wore. It was all about the aesthetics. So I did my homework and found someone who, reputedly, was the boob doctor. During the consultation, I told him I was a B cup and wanted to be a C cup, and I showed him photos of women’s breasts that I liked—not overly large or fake-looking, just in proportion with the rest of my body. After the surgery, however, I was a full D cup. I was huge and I was shocked.

  When I left the hospital, I was all boob. Everyone started talking to them! Men, women—it didn’t matter. They stopped making eye contact and stared at my new, fucking obnoxious knockers. I went from showing them off—partly because I’d paid for them and partly because I couldn’t hide them—to standing around with crossed arms. I was uncomfortable with myself for totally the opposite reason.

  Not only did I find the giant tits annoying—after all, I wasn’t getting any bloody attention, they were—I was also annoyed with myself for thinking that a couple of water bags stuffed in my chest could make me feel beautiful. Having hoped bigger boobs would get me into some secret bloody society of Barbie girls and serve as the magic wand that would make me happy, I learned pretty quickly that the whole fitting-in thing wasn’t that simple and wasn’t for me. And things only got worse.

  Four days later, while Mum and I were in a shopping mall, I suddenly felt as if someone had kicked me in the chest on my left side. The pain was intense. Aware something was really wrong, I asked Mum to take me to the bathroom, where I discovered that my left boob had moved up under my arm. It kept swelling bigger and bigger, so when we left the mall, I lay down on the backseat of our car. I had no idea what the fuck was going on.