Night Hawks The Weave Three thieves battered through a wall, crawled close to the floor to dodge motion detectors and stole six duffel bags filled with human hair extensions from a Chicago beauty supply store. The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday that the hair extensions were worth $230,000. --Associated Press news item, July 12, 2012 So what feeds this hair machine? --Chris Rock, Good Hair Ieesha is nervous and trying not to sneeze when she steps at four in the morning to the front door of Sassy Hair Salon and Beauty Supplies in the Central District. After all, it was a sneeze that got her fired from this salon two days ago. She has a sore throat and red eyes, but that''s all you can see because a ski mask covers the rest of her face. As she twists the key in the lock, her eyes are darting in every direction, up and down the empty street, because we''ve never done anything like this before. When she worked here, the owner, Frances, gave her a key so she could open and straighten up the shop before the other hairdressers arrived. I told her to make a copy of the key in case one day she might need it.

That was two days ago, on September first, the start of hay fever season and the second anniversary of the day we started dating. Once inside the door, she has exactly forty seconds to remember and punch in the four-digit code before the alarm''s security system goes off. Then, to stay clear of the motion detectors, she gets down on the floor of the waiting room in her cut-knee jeans, and crawls on all fours past the leather reception chairs and modules stacked with copies of Spin, Upscale, and Jet magazines for the salon''s customers to read and just perhaps find on their glossy, Photoshopped pages the coiffure that is perfect for their mood at the moment. Within a few seconds, Ieesha is beyond the reception area and into a space, long and wide, that is a site for unexpected mystery and wonder that will test the limits of what we think we know. Moving deeper into this room, where the elusive experience called beauty is manufactured every day from hot combs and crème relaxers, she passes workstations, four on each side of her, all of them equipped with swiveling styling chairs and carts covered with appliance holders, spray bottles, and Sulfur8 shampoo. Holding a tiny flashlight attached to her key ring, she works her way around manicure tables, dryer chairs, and a display case where sexy, silky, eiderdown-soft wigs, some as thick as a show pony''s tail, hang in rows like scalps taken as trophies after a war. Every day the customers at Sassy Hair Salon and the wigs lovingly check each other out, and then after long and careful deliberation, the wigs always buy the women. Unstated, but permeating every particle in that exchange of desire, is a profound, historical pain, a hurt based on the lie that the hair one was unlucky enough to be born with can never in this culture be good enough, never beautiful as it is, and must be scorched by scalp-scalding chemicals into temporary straightness, because if that torment is not endured often from the tender age of even four months old, how can one ever satisfy the unquenchable thirst to be desired or worthy of love? The storage room containing the unusual treasure she seeks is now just a few feet away, but Ieesha stops at the station where she worked just two days ago, her red eyes glazing over with tears caused not by ragweed pollen but by a memory suspended in the darkness.

She sees it all again. There she is, wearing her vinyl salon vest, its pockets filled with the tools of her trade. In her chair is an older customer, a heavy, high-strung Seattle city councilwoman. The salon was packed that afternoon, steamed by peopled humidity. A ceiling fan shirred air perfumed with the odor of burnt hair. The councilwoman wanted her hair straightened, not a perm, for a political fund-raiser she was hosting that week. But she couldn''t--or wouldn''t--sit quietly. She kept gossiping nonstop about everybody in city government as well as the do Gabby Douglas wore during the Olympics, blethering away in the kind of voice that carried right through you, that went inside like your ears didn''t have any choice at all and had to soak up the words the way a sponge did water.

All of a sudden, Ieesha sneezed. Her fingers slipped. She burned the old lady''s left earlobe. The councilwoman flew from her seat, so enraged they had to peel her off the ceiling, shouting about how Ieesha didn''t know the first thing about doing hair. She demanded that Frances fire her. And even took things a step farther, saying in a stroke of scorn that anyone working in a beauty salon should be looking damned good herself, and that Ieesha didn''t. Frances was not a bad person to work for, far from it, and she knew my girlfriend was a first-rate cosmetologist. Even so, the owner of Sassy Hair Salon didn''t want to lose a city councilwoman who was a twice-a-month, high-spending customer able to buy and sell her business twice over.

That night, as I was fixing our dinner of Top Ramen, Ieesha quietly came through the door of our apartment, still wearing her salon vest, her eyes burning with tears. She wears her hair in the neat, tight black halo she was born with, unadorned, simple, honest, uncontrived, as genuinely individual as her lips and nose. To some people she might seem as plain as characters in those old-timey plays, Clara in Paddy Chayefsky''s Marty, or Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. But Ieesha has the warm, dark, and rich complexion of Michelle Obama or Angela Bassett, which is, so help me, as gorgeous as gorgeous gets. Nevertheless, sometimes in the morning, as she was getting ready for work, I''d catch her struggling to pull a pick through the burls and kinks of her hair with tears in her eyes as she looked in the mirror, tugging hardest at the nape of her neck, that spot called the kitchen. I tell her she''s beautiful as she is, but when she peers at television, movies, or popular magazines, where generic blue-eyed Barbie dolls with orthodontically perfect teeth, Botox, and breast implants prance, pose, and promenade through the media, she says with a sense of fatality and resignation, "I can''t look like that." She knows that whenever she steps out our door, it''s guaranteed that a wound awaits her, that someone or something will let her know that her hair and dark skin are not good enough, or tell Ieesha her presence is not wanted. All she has to do is walk into a store and be watched with suspicion, or have a cashier slap her change on the counter rather than place it on the palm of her outstretched hand.

Or maybe read about the rodeo clown named Mike Hayhurst at the Creston Classic Rodeo in California, who joked that "Playboy is offering Ann Romney $250,000 to pose in that magazine and the White House is upset about it because National Geographic only offered Michelle Obama $50 to pose for them." Between bouts of blowing her nose loudly into a Kleenex in our tiny studio apartment, she cried that whole day she got fired, saying with a hopeless, plaintive hitch in her voice, "What''s wrong with me?" Rightly or wrongly, she was convinced that she would never find another job during the Great Recession. That put everything we wanted to do on hold. Both of us were broke, with bills piling up on the kitchen counter after I got laid off from my part-time job as a substitute English teacher at Garfield High School. We were on food stamps and got our clothes from Goodwill. I tried to console her, first with kisses, then caresses, and before the night was over we made roof-raising whoopee. Afterwards, and for the thousandth time, I came close to proposing that we get married. But I had a failure of nerve, afraid she''d temporize or say no, or that because we were so poor we needed to wait.

To be honest, I was never sure if she saw me as Mr. Right or just as Mr. Right Now. So what I said to her that night, as we lay awake in each other''s arms, our fingers intertwined, was getting fired might just be the change in luck we were looking for. Frances was so busy with customers, she didn''t have time to change the locks. Or the code for the ADT alarm system. Naturally, Ieesha, who''d never stolen anything in her life, was reluctant, but I kept after her until she agreed. Finally, after a few minutes, she enters the density of the storeroom''s sooty darkness, her arms outstretched and feeling her way cat-footed.

Among cardboard boxes of skin crèmes, conditioners, balms, and oils, she locates the holy grail of hair in three pea-green duffel bags stacked against the wall, like rugs rolled up for storage. She drags a chair beneath the storeroom window, then starts tossing the bags into the alley. As planned, I''m waiting outside, her old Toyota Corolla dappled with rust idling behind me. I catch each bag as it comes through the window, and throw them onto the backseat. The bags, I discover, weigh next to nothing. Yet for some reason, these sacks of something as common and plentiful as old hair are worth a lot of bank, why I don''t know. Or why women struggling to pay their rent, poor women forced to choose between food and their winter fuel bill, go into debt shelling out between $1,000 and $3,000, and sometimes as much as $5,000, for a weave with real human hair. It baffled me until I read how some people must feel used things possess special properties.

For example, someone on eBay bought Britney Spears''s used gum for $14,000; someone else paid $115,000 for a han.