Sunny: The Hippie Chick

By Dawn Natelle

Reviewed and Edited by Eric

Chapter 12 – Ah look at all the lonely people

Once Ben finished cleaning the tools in the shed, he began working on a new project. He found a scrap metal post about 12 feet high and put it into a small hole filled with concrete. At the top end was a sheet of plywood, and a round metal hoop. He erected his basketball net in the vacant lot, against the fence. Next he got an old basketball. It leaked, but he had an air pump in the toolshed and if he filled it with air it would be good for an hour or two. He was able to crawl under the fence in one spot and shoot baskets when he was bored.

Sunny spent all her spare time in the garden. She had bought a flat of tomato seedlings at the market and planted all 12 in the garden. She also planted lettuce, peas and onions from seeds purchased in the hardware store. She tended her garden almost every day, treating the small shoots as if they were her own children. Of course, when she wasn’t in the garden, she was at the cancer ward.

Sunny later recounted the following to me. One day Ben came out of the shed after filling his ball with air, and Sunny said: “You have company, I think?” She gestured at three young boys with a ball of their own, shooting at the basket. There was no gate in the fence, and Sunny said the boys had crawled under in the same spot Ben used. Ben walked over to that crawl spot and started under. The boys, two black and one Hispanic, froze and then ran away, only to find no exit through the fence.

Ben stood up, and looked at the terrified Hispanic lad and said: “Wanna play?” The boy relaxed when he saw that he wasn’t in trouble. “Can we?” he asked. “We didn’t know it was your basket.”

“Sure, as long as you don’t damage it. You can play here anytime, as long as I get to join in when I want to.” With that the other two lads came back and they took turns shooting, with Ben giving them tips on technique.

When Sunny finally stood up from her garden she saw that there were now nine boys in the yard and Ben was refereeing a game. More boys passing by saw the game and came around to join in. That was the start of Ben’s free summer camp for kids. Eventually there were about 100 kids, with different times for different age groups. The youngest played from 10 to 12, then from 12 to 2 the next larger group played, with two more groups playing until 6 p.m. Ben was both coach and referee for the games which largely replaced ball on the back streets as recreation for kids who didn’t have a lot of money for organized sport.

About a month later Ben was in the yard when a Volkswagen bus pulled up in front of the apartment and died a noisy death in a vacant parking spot. The driver, and a few hippies got out and started looking at the uncooperative engine. Ben went over and joined them and quickly decided that it was one of about four common problems with VWs, especially if this one had been driven hard from the East “I can probably fix that, for $100,” he suggested.

“Naw,” said a long haired, bearded hippie. “It got us here. That’s all we wanted out of it. Only paid $200 for it. Plus, where are we going to park it? All the places we’ve seen want too much money. We should just leave it here and let them tow it. I mean they can’t use the Michigan plates to send fines after us.”

“Do you want to sell it?” Ben suggested. “I’ll give you $20 for it.”

“$30,” the hippie countered.

“Sorry,” Ben replied. “I’ve only got $24 till next payday.” He opened his wallet to show the man.

“$24 then,” the man said. “That’ll buy us some more weed.”

Ben got the ownership signed over and gave the man his cash and watched the hippies from Detroit dance off down the street. The bus spent the night on the curb and in the morning Ben borrowed a buck from me to feed the meter. Ben started working on the chain link fence, unthreading the connector wire. By afternoon he had opened the fence and when his teen ball players appeared, they all pushed the derelict vehicle into the vacant lot and back to near where the garage was on Mrs. Horley’s land. Sunny steered the bus while all the boys provided the push to move it.

After the fence was restored into its old position, Ben went back and checked out his new vehicle. He soon had a good idea what was wrong (there was more than one thing). Getting parts looked to be a problem, until one of the 10-year-olds said he knew where there was another bus almost identical, abandoned five blocks over.

On Monday, with another $10 from his day at the Market, Ben and the young boy went to the other bus and Ben nosed around. It also looked derelict, but when he started poking in the engine, a man came out of the house shouting that the wreck was his personal property. Ben backed off immediately and mentioned that he was fixing up a similar vehicle, and would the man be willing to sell some parts?

Ben managed to use the $10 he had to buy the right to strip the old van for a month. After that, if there was anything more he needed, he would pay another $10. The man looked at it as free money, since he had no plans for his van and agreed.

Ben and the boy left with full hands carrying bits they could liberate from the rusty heap, and the next day they were back with proper tools to get the parts Ben really wanted for his van. Over the next week they pretty much stripped the man’s van, getting parts they needed, and other spares of parts that were in good condition should Ben get another conversion going.

A day or two later Sunny came in from the garden, all sweaty and alive, and headed for the shower. I went to the bedroom to be ready to comb out her beautiful long hair. I had just started when she spoke: “Mitch, would you still love me if I cut my hair?”

“Sunny, it is you I love, not your hair. I would still love you if you were bald.”

Good answer,” she said. “Because that it is going to happen.”

“What? You are going to cut your hair?”

“No. I’m going to shave my head.”

“What?” I said at a slightly higher frequency. “Why are you going to do that?”

“For the kids. Most of them are on chemo and lose all their hair. I want to be able to empathize better with them. But mostly it is one girl. Karen is nine and will be going back to school this fall after a year fighting leukemia. She lost a year at school, so will be with younger kids she doesn’t know. But what is bothering her is that she is bald now and will still have nearly no hair in September. One of the nurses said there are a group of women who make wigs for kids when they can get human hair. I’ve got lots of hair, so I said I will donate. There is going to be a hairdresser at the clinic tomorrow and she’s going to cut it all off.”

“Oh,” I said slowly. I had already said I wouldn’t mind. “Will you keep it shaved?”

“For a week, maybe,” she replied. “Then I will start growing it out. In a few months it will look like a short pixie cut, and in a year it will be eight inches long, based on how fast it grew before.”

“Okay, but I want to see them cut it.”

“I can probably get you a seat. All the kids will be watching, and a pile of the nurses.”

I finished brushing out her damp hair, for the last time, apparently. Ben came in from working on his van and went straight to the washroom to clean up. He tried to leave the room clean, but Sunny always went in after him to get it ‘girl-clean’.

The next morning hightailed it over to the cancer ward an hour after Sunny left. I got there just as they were about to start. Some of the little girls were crying: Sunny later told me that they loved her long locks and seeing her shave it off created flashbacks to their losing their own hair.

I heard a lady, apparently from the charity, tell Sunny and the nurses that the women in her group were planning to go all out on Karen’s wig. Normally it takes a woman over a month to finish a wig, but in this case two women were going to work on the opposite sides at once, with a third volunteer preparing the hair strands. And they were going to work two shifts, one morning and one afternoon to finish up in a week, when Karen was expected to be released.

Then the hairdresser took over, pulling Sunny’s hair into a tight ponytail, and then slicing it all off with a massive pair of scissors. The knot holding the ponytail came off with the long plait, and Sunny suddenly had short hair. Cute hair, I decided. But she wouldn’t stop there, and the stylist took an electric shear and started cutting those last few inches off. Shearing sheep came to my mind, and the woman finished up with a straight razor, cutting all the stubble off. As a blonde the stubble hadn’t shown much, but Sunny wanted it to feel smooth to the touch. Once she was done she went to all the children and let them rub her hair “for luck” and some even kissed the top of her head.

The woman from the charity took the long plait and measured it. “Forty-four inches,” she announced. “We need ten inches for a wig, so we will be able to do three more after we finish Karen’s.”

That comment stunned me a bit. Apparently Sunny could have just had 10 inches or so cut from the end of her hair, which would have made it just short of waist height. But she had taken it all off. But as I watched her playing with the children, I had to admit she still looked feminine, and pretty. It was not her hair, but her manner and her Sunniness that made her what she was. And I loved her as much as ever.

I had to rush to get to my next class, and Sunny had stories to read and songs to sing for the little kids looking at her with pure hero worship in their gaunt little faces. I could see how much she lived for that feedback, and I felt lucky to know her and love her.

That night I got my chance to kiss the bald dome. Sunny had a thin neck and a fairly small head, and still looked pretty, especially with a bit of makeup. I rubbed her head for luck, and then Sunny slid down between my legs and I got lucky.

When she came up for air, and to wipe her mouth on a towel I noticed that her breasts were noticeably bigger than I had realized. Small A cups, but real female breasts with prominent nipples. When she got back into bed, I started playing with them, and before long Sunny got lucky. Then we cuddled through the night.

A week later we were at the cancer ward again. My hair brushing chores had been replaced by shaving Sunny every morning. She said this would stop tomorrow, as she then planned to start growing her hair out again. But the kids had loved kissing that bald head, and rubbing it for luck, often just before going in for a painful treatment session.

Today Karen’s parents were there, and the little girl with them was now dressed conventionally. She looked much better, having gained some weight during the past week, although her hair was largely gone, with only wispy remnants remaining. The lady from the charity appeared late, announcing that they had just finished the wig, and took it out of a wig box. She then knelt and placed it on Karen’s head, adjusting it a bit.

Normally there are not mirrors in the oncology ward, because patients have no interest in seeing what they look like when they are ill, but a full length mirror had been wheeled in from somewhere, and Karen rushed up to it, looking from one side to another, with the biggest smile on her face. She turned and looked to her mother and said: “I’m beautiful,” giving her a big hug. Then she tore across the room to where Sunny was standing and leapt into her arms, repeating “I’m beautiful. Thank you for giving me your hair.”

“You always were beautiful to me,” Sunny said. “And I hope that my hair makes you happy and popular at school.”

After Karen had said goodbye to all her friends from the clinic, with all of them admiring her wig, her parents took her home. Sunny stayed and sang songs and told stories for several more hours, but I had to hurry off to college, thanking God as I walked there that I was so lucky to have such a kind and giving girlfriend.

The next morning Sunny said I wasn’t to shave her head. She wanted to grow it back to show the kids in the ward that their hair would return. That morning she had a short stubble, like what Ben gets four hours after shaving, and less than what I need to shave off each morning. By the end of the week it was long enough that you could see the blonde color, and at the end of a month it was a half inch long, looking like an extremely short pixie cut.

She admitted that the shorter hair was handy in the garden, where she still weeded for an hour every day, and mentioned that some of her crops were nearing the point of being harvested. Ben also spent most of his morning out there, working on his van until the neighborhood kids came by to shoot baskets and have a pickup game or two in the vacant lot.

One day when I went out, I noticed that he had moved the chain link fence about 10 feet in, leaving a laneway along the side of the house. At supper that night he said that was to give access to the street for his van, which was nearly ready to test drive. There was metered parking on the street and parking out there would be expensive in tickets or parking coins. The only problem was that he needed to remove one meter along the street.

Sunny saved the day here. She had made friends with the meter maid on that street: she made friends with everyone. She spoke to the woman who suggested that if one of the meters disappeared, she probably wouldn’t notice. So Ben took out a meter at the end of his new lane and painted some markings that showed no parking in that slot. He stored the meter and its post in his shed, so he could replace it in the future.

There was never anything said by the owner of the vacant lot either. The owner was just holding the property until he could acquire a few more adjacent lots, which would allow him to build a bigger commercial building. The narrower space didn’t bother him since it would be less space to maintain. Not that it mattered, since Ben cut the grass in the lot with the old push mower.

Sunny had an appointment with both her doctors the next week. Dr. McBrien pronounced her hormone usage successful, although she would have to keep taking the drugs. She was up to a C cup now, clearly spilling over her B cup bras. The next day it was a trip across the city to Dr. Killensworth, who announced that she could schedule an operation for September. Sunny was adamant she wanted big boobs, and still wanted the largest size of implants. I felt sort of possessive over her natural breasts, as they game me hours of pleasure in bed, but I finally agreed with Sunny for the large implants.

Dr. Killensworth said he was doing about 30 operations a week on women: both younger women wanting to appear larger, and older women getting a breast reconstruction. He noted that the operation took less time than counseling the women prior to the surgery. That was when he floored me when he suggested that I would be a good person to take over most of the counseling. After all, it was all my research that had led him into his burgeoning sideline. He figured I would need 16 hours a week, all day on Saturday and two evenings of four hours each. I guess I hesitated, my week was pretty full with Sunny, studying and working at the free clinic. But then he said he would pay me $10 an hour. Even with deductions that would mean $120 a week, more than most people earned full time.

It was near the end of term, so I agreed to take the job on when exams were over. Our money problems were over. I would even be able to pay Mary for some of the legal work she was doing for Ben. The two of them were together at least three times a week.