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She walked into Walden House and was struck by the sight of a confident, skinny woman strutting down a hallway, blond hair spiked up high. The woman was wearing one red and one green leg warmer, and people treated her as if she were the head of the senior class. "What a positive attitude," thought Penny. "That is what a place like this needs."
Soon thereafter, Penny injured her back and was laid up in bed. She rang up Walden House, looking for some temporary help. It came in the form of the skinny girl with the spiked hair. Carmel worked all day for her, and came back the next day, and the next, driven as much by curiosity as a sense of caretaking. Who was this older woman with the swanky pad? How did she get to be so independent?
Carmel would prepare meals, clean the house, run errands. Her energy seemed boundless. One day, Carmel told Penny about her experiences in the drug scene. The code words, the behaviors, the tweakers, the junkies, and the whores. Penny listened. Carmel told her about her sister's drug problems, and how her brother had been hired as a "mule" to fly a planeload of drugs to Fiji, but had been caught and thrown in jail. Penny nodded. In turn, she told Carmel about her life as a single mother, about mortgages and refinancing, and the nature of independent business loans. Carmel nodded. And then they talked about jewelry, and they laughed.
Carmel met someone else during her stay at Wal-den House. Robert Sanger was several years older than she. Quiet, stoic, he had also been through the drug scene. He was tall and big-chested, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a worm wearing a top hat and smoking a joint. But Carmel noticed he seemed to have the financial part of life figured out. He owned a two-story Victorian at the top of Castro Street. He drove some cherry motorcycles and cars. He was raising children on his own. He was actually very pleasant.
They were married in 1985 at the Henry Ohloff House rehab mansion on the corner of Fell and Steiner in the Western Addition. Carmel wore an extravagant black and red wedding gown, hair done up wild with a tule extension interspersed with feathers. Carmel's circle of friends was widening; in addition to the drag queens, now there were 12-steppers and bikers. In from Sydney, Mom sat shyly by herself at the wedding, beautifully dressed and groomed, a good Catholic mother. Her little Carmel was turning out all right, after all.
Life after marriage took on a different rhythm. The wild nights at Slut Central would continue without Carmel, as the group began work on the gender-swapping sci-fi musical film Vegas in Space. The queens were amazed at Carmel's newfound focus. She still had half her head shaved, and wore loud-colored bell-bottoms and carried weird purses, but she was changing, growing more materialistic. She started driving a motorcycle, roaring off on expeditions to flea markets, where she rummaged through big-eyed Keane paintings, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth-inspired figurines, and metal children's toys. She avoided the drug crowd entirely. And she looked at the city's hair salons with a fresh eye. Lessons learned from independent businesspeople like Robert and Penny were starting to sink in.
In 1986, a storefront space became available on Post Street, a few blocks from Union Square. The place needed a name. Carmel sat on her bed, thinking. It had to be something psychedelic, something associated with hair. Tarantulas are hairy. And the color pink, it's fluffy and fun. Pink Tarantula -- they'd either love it or hate it. And if they were intimidated by it, fuck 'em, they could go to Supercuts. It was now May. She wanted to open in two months. Robert helped her finance the salon by selling his '57 Corvette.
In the months leading up to the opening of the Pink Tarantula, Carmel was working at the Pacific Heights Haircutting Salon, located on Fillmore at California. The salon was known less for its fabulous cuts than its ersatz, Old West, rough-hewn wood paneling, which led people in the hair biz to call it "The Barn." And there was even better gossip.
Right in the middle of white-bread Pacific Heights, in this seemingly conservative, button-down salon, there was heroin, big time. Deals went out the door constantly; the owners were walking in, drooling on themselves. Everybody knew. It would have been laughable, were it not so pathetic.
In the midst of this smack scene stood the clean-and-sober Carmel, furiously working shifts, saving her money. She thought she had left this crap behind, and here she was, trapped among the users, counting the days when she could get the hell out. One afternoon she was introduced to a free-lance hairdresser named Patrick Miller.
Patrick looked at the tattooed woman's shoulder-length hair, bleached a dark turquoise-green. Carmel looked at Patrick's blue-black, 12-inch-tall flattop, which looked like the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. She curtsied and said, "Great do."
They chatted about her new shop. Patrick said he was driving around the city on his motorcycle, cutting hair, and could use a gig. Carmel told him to check back. One day he asked her for a formal tryout. Carmel asked to see Patrick's left profile. He turned his aircraft-carrier head.
"Right profile," she said. He turned the other direction.
"Honey ... you'll do."
"That was the interview," remembers Patrick. "We clicked."
After firing the final shot through the Tarantula's window, the man with shaved eyebrows hopped in the passenger side of a late-'80s dark blue Buick Skylark. The driver was a woman with shoulder-length bleached blond hair. The car screeched off. Two blocks away on Minna Street, a gun was whipped out the window.
