I should write a piece of  YA flash fiction about what I could have done with all the time I spent worrying about and fussing with my hair between the time my mother gave up on it when I was seven, and when I decided to stop trying to battle my curls sometime in my mid twenties. Slavery to conventional wisdom on hair styles. Submission to parental belief in tidy hair signifying good grooming. Sleeping on hair rolled around orange juice cans. Sitting under a bubble dryer for an hour with hair tortured around huge rollers.  Denying myself social activity around a pool or lake or being outside on a rainy day to avoid dreaded frizz. Blow drying sections of hair stretched taut with a brush until my arms ached. Constraining the untamable with rubber bands, head bands, barrettes, bandanas.  I did it all.  Until I didn’t care whether curly hair was in fashion or not.  Until a run in the rain trumped a sleek hairdo. Until I spent summers sailing and swimming far away from mirrors. Until someone reminded me that my life was a mass of twists and turns that originated in me and grew outward: why would my hair be any different?

I’ve always been vain about my hair.

When I was born, I was pretty much bald, but as a very young boy, I had bright, curly locks of almost white blonde hair.  My parents had also had bright blond hair as children, though by my birth, they had both had become brunette as they aged.

As with most children, I had a complete meltdown the first time I had my hair cut.  It probably wasn’t from losing my pretty hair, but from fear of being held down in a big chair by some big guy with sharp scissors and buzzing clippers.

Growing up, I would often not leave the house if I hadn’t showered and combed (and for a while, blow dried) my hair.  It was the 1970s and 1980s, and hair was a big deal—often literally a “big” deal.

At some point during college, my step-mother announced, “You’re losing your hair, you know.  You’d probably better enjoy it while it lasts.”  It was typical of her type of personal interaction.

I managed to deal with the growing “parking spaces” for years, but generally kept my hair long enough to comb.  It was growing finer, as well as thinner, so needed a bit more strategy to keep it looking right.  I switched the part to the right side, because it made my hair look fuller, and I kept it a bit longer so hair on one side would cover the parking space on the other.  It was decidedly NOT a comb-over. No, never that.  At work, there was a fairly senior-level employee whose comb-over went from his left ear all the way to his right. Not subtle, not fooling anyone, and the subject of some sad head shaking among the staff.  I swore that would never be me.

Then, one haircut, the stylist really messed up, and cut some of my hair much too short. He had to drop down to about a #6 on the clippers on my whole head to fix the problem, and I had my first “buzzcut” style ever.  It felt extreme and a bit awkward, but the response from people was huge.  It was such a departure from my usual look, that people seemed to be seeing my face as if they’d never noticed it before.  From then on, I kept going back to the buzz cut, gradually getting shorter and shorter until I was at about a #3 on the clippers and felt that any shorter might as well be shaved.

Unfortunately for my vanity, the “parking spaces” eventually turned into a “roundabout” — the pattern of thinning hair had progressed to leave a clump of hair in the center above my forehead with a mostly clear, bald zone around it.  Worse, one side of that clump of hair was thicker than the other.  Meaning, even with my hair buzzed, it looked like I had a one-inch lump of off-balance hair on my forehead.

I decreased the clippers to a #2, and eventually to the lowest setting before using just bare clippers. If I thought I looked bald before, this was new territory.

Vanity sucks.  But Vanity also gave me an option.

In the movie “Speed”, one of the characters talks about how to solve a hostage crisis by “shooting the hostage”—to get the innocent person out of the way so there is nothing in the way of taking out the kidnapper. I decided to metaphorically shoot the hostage of my own vanity.

I shaved my head.

Now, rather than being that “guy with the receding hairline,” I could now be “the guy with the shaved head.”  Much more manly.  Much more decisive.  Look at all the “tough guy” actors and athletes with shaved heads out there.  That would be my new look.  Vanity without a full head of hair.  Without hair at all, in fact.

I can only say this about the journey and my eventual, relatively permanent choice of solution: You will NEVER know how vain you truly are until you shave your head.  You’ll also never truly realize how much maintenance time and money we all spend — even men — on having a head of hair.  While I don’t always shave with a razor (which usually needs shaving at least every other day), I still keep my hair clipped as short as I can and buzz it about once a week, if I don’t shave it off completely.  Very low maintenance, and I can wake up from a nap and not look like I’ve been rolled in the subway.

It was a very liberating thing to do, and I realized after that—all along—it had been me who was the hostage.

Even as a youngster I wasn’t a big fan of formica. But, like so many kitchen tables in the 1960s, our family meals were served on a gray formica table. The formica looked to me like it was trying to be a modern art painting, even though I didn’t really know what modern art looked like back then. I just knew it looked fake somehow.  The tomato soup colored plastic chairs, however, were pretty. They weren’t trying to be anything but chairs. It was at this kitchen set that Mom served the first meals I remember.

Mom was a good cook and would later become a really good cook after traveling the world.  My dad probably barbecued every summer day of his life until he passed away at 82.  As a young couple my parents shared cooking chores for our family: Besides grilling, Dad cooked weekend breakfasts — usually pancakes and often bacon and eggs. In his fun made-up language for my sister and me, he called bacon “basin” and eggs were “egglets”.   The most frequent dinner was barbequed beef patties, corn on the cob, good old Campbell’s pork and beans and a relish dish – usually pickles and green onions.  Sitting in a booster seat on those plastic red chairs at dinner, I watched Mom dip her green onions in a bit of salt next to the beef patty on her plate. Of course, I tried it and liked it. It was the beginning of a lot of salty snacks down the road.

But the very best “meals” were the birthday cakes. Likely a neighbor or McCall’s magazine was the source of a recipe for using dolls in birthday cakes. Mom positioned a doll maybe 6″ tall or so in the center of a bundt cake and frosted the cake to look like a big hoop skirt. We loved it!  The hats on these dolls were works of art, and the tiered skirts were a little girl’s dream.  Again, the beginning of a lot of mouthwatering desserts…and somehow mixed with fashion! And beyond the cake, Mom decorated the house. Boy, did she decorate.

Looking back, those were wonderful years. The memories of breakfasts, dinners and parties around that kitchen table with my family are among my favorite. Even if it was a formica table, which is blessedly covered by a tablecloth in the attached photo of my sister’s 6th birthday party.

Hair has power.  My father knew that, which is why he shaved us skull-tight once a week, leaving him with the controlling interest.  Yet he was bald, which didn’t make sense.

Regardless, by third grade, the year I started hitting on women, he let us grow our hair out.  The power it gave me was … I have no idea.

What I do remember was that I was required to keep up with my end of the bargain–keeping it combed and neat and combed at all times–unless I wanted it shaved off again; and I couldn’t go back to that, not after making my grand entrance into the third grade classroom, hair combable and slicked back and looking groovy.

But I’ll tell you what, it was a lot of work.  And because I was a lazy boy (no other way to say it), I would comb it to perfection at night just before bed, then pull one of my mother’s old stocking hose over my head so when I woke the next morning I wouldn’t have to comb it.  Incidentally, after my parents would go to bed, I would also get dressed, shoes and all, so I wouldn’t have to dress in the morning, either.  All night, with an itchy head, I worried about my stocking cap falling off, and I was extremely uncomfortable with my Levis and shoes and long sleeve shirt on.  It took twenty minutes to turn over in bed; and when I did turn over, I had to get up immediately afterwards, worried that my stocking cap shifted a little, checking its position in the bathroom mirror.  Then, when I’d lay back down, I’d wonder again if my stocking cap had moved.  Long nights.  It reminded me when I used to wet the bed.

So I’d get up the next morning, my stocking cap would have undoubtedly shifted, and my hair would look like someone pressed an iron against my head in several places.  I’d have to wet it and re-comb it, and by the time I was done, it was more work than if I would have just gone to bed like a normal kid.  On top of that, my mother would make me take off all of my clothes because they would be all wrinkled.

“@$#% Blane!  What the hell is wrong with you?  Now I have to re-iron them and you’ll be late for school.  What the hell is wrong with you?”  I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, I’d say to myself.

It was about that time that I discovered it, the most important discovery in the 60’s–Dippity-Do setting gel, for women.  I saw the commercial, I listened to the  song, and two days later I spotted it in our bathroom medicine cabinet.  I was elated.  That morning, I unscrewed the cap, dug my whole hand into it, pulled out a gob double the size of silly putty, and worked it all through my hair.  I ran a comb through my hair, effortlessly, making a perfect part, every strand matching the one next to it.  I looked close to perfect.  The only uncomfortable part was the all the excess goop running down the back of my neck and down my back, but it dried up by the time I got to school.

The best part was yet to come.  Within an hour, my hair got hard as concrete, turning into a hair shell, a helmet.  If anyone tried messing it up, they’d probably get cut or bruised.  It got even better.  By lunch I would comb it out, leaving my hair soft, dry, and in perfect shape.  I would start out in the morning with a wet look, looking almost perfect, and my afternoon I would look even better.

When the season changed and the days started getting warmer, I discovered one of Dippity-Do’s defects.  When I started sweating, my hair would harden up again.  So when I came in for recess, half my hair started hardening (the part that got wet) while the other part stayed dry.  Since the wet spots were darker, my head looked kind of spotted.  Becky told everyone I had malaria.  Larry said it was because my head was growing.  I was a walking freak-of-nature.

Fortunately, I quickly learned that once it completely hardened again, I could just comb it out, bringing back that 100% dry look, bringing back me.

 

Eighth graders took PE, but we didn’t shower.

Freshmen in high school showered. Fifty years later, that seems no big deal.

But. The summer before my freshman year, I still didn’t have hair on my balls. Determination was my long suit, my key to success. I willed hair to grow on my balls. It didn’t grow. I’d seen the locker room and the shower room at the high school. It was a long walk with no cover.

That summer, if anyone had asked me what worried me–and if I’d been able to articulate–it was the fear of ridicule.

And with no more than three weeks of summer to go, I sprang ’em, I qualified for the walk.

Even now, as I write this, I sigh with a sense of relief. Because my fears were grounded. Two boys with little pink dicks and scrotums, but no hair, were laughed at and ridiculed (maybe not daily, but once would have been too much).

That year, I still resided near the bottom of the pecking order in a tough school. But nobody laughed at my dick. I remain grateful to my family tree. I don’t think will power had anything to do with it.

I didn’t eat for several years.

My mother prepared dishes that were unable to go down my throat, dishes consisting of soggy and over-cooked frozen vegetables, dishes with cream corn from a can–not even worthy of bluegill bait–and shriveled peas, dishes with roast beef so over-cooked that it would not only suck out all the saliva in your mouth like a stale chicharon, but if left in too long, would start to collapse the entire bone structure of your cranium.

My father’s over-used response was the same every time:  “Son, you don’t have to like it, you just have to eat it.”  And if you didn’t eat it, you sat there until bed time, all the while hearing your friends outside screaming and laughing and playing.  (I once responded with, “Would you eat dirt if you didn’t like it?”  That was not a good outcome.  I think he thought I was talking about his wife’s cooking, but I was really just using dirt as an example of something that doesn’t taste good to most humans.  So shoot me for trying to reason.)

My first attempt was cliché, stuffing as much into my mouth as possible, asking to be excused to use the bathroom, and then spitting it out in the toilet.  That attempt failed–not the spitting out part, but the keeping-from-being-detected part.  I got a whippin’ with a leather strap, and that was without proof.  I learned my lesson:  be smarter than the warden, and don’t get caught.

I tried everything: packing the chewed and compacted food way back into my mouth in places I didn’t know even existed; secretly keeping extra napkins with me to discard the food, bundling them up and shoving them down my underwear until she noticed inappropriate stains, hiding them in my pockets until my pants started smelling like oil & vinegar, packing them in my socks until she noticed that the stains weren’t from dirt.

Every night, before I was excused, I was required to go to the kitchen so my mother could interrogate me, followed by a full-body search, ending with her digging her finger throughout my mouth as if I were smuggling in drugs.  I even tried the dog–which actually worked for a short while–until I got lazy and forgot to wipe his mustache.  Dried tamale pie on a wired-hair mutt can be a dead giveaway to a discerning mother whose sole purpose in life was to detect any wrongdoings.

Once in a lifetime, every human is blessed with nothing less than a miracle, an end-of-the-rainbow find, if you will.  Struggling through my  refining process, almost at my wits end, I discovered a board (or shelf) under the table, running the full length.  In carpenter’s terms, a 1″ X 6″.  In my terms, a “magical” shelf, sent from heaven, letting me know that God is good, God is merciful, and the world is just.

From that point forward, it was a slam dunk.  I’d wait for everyone to leave the table, as usual, then I’d grab handfuls of whatever was on my plate, cupped it, turned it upside down and smacked it down on top of the magical board like a wad of clay.  At night, when everyone was asleep, I’d scoop the substance off the shelf and into napkins, walked out into the back alley, and slung them into the neighbor’s yard.  Even though it was always dark, I could still see my frozen vegetable and tamale pie grenade, unfolding in mid air like a parachute, the particles dropping first, then the white napkin following, as if in relief to get rid of its package.  I launched them into a different backyard every night to avoid suspicion.

My mother thought that I was eating better and/or her cooking was getting better.  The Warden thought I was maturing, owning up to my eighteen-year sentence.  But the truth was, I beat the system.

As time went by, I got lazy, and sometimes I neglected to get up in the middle of the night to throw food grenades.  Until finally I just stopped altogether.  What the hell, the shelf was as long as the table, endless.

Years later I did start eating everything on my plate and forgot about the magical shelf and how it saved my life.  Until one day.  My parents decided it was time to refinish the table.  When they took it apart they could not, for the life of them, figure out how these concrete mounds got formed under the table.  A fuzz like mold covered them, further concealing their true identity.  They brainstormed for awhile before arriving at their Aha! moment.

Until your eighteen-year sentence is up, you are never too old for an old fashion whipping.

When he was done, I had a shiny new helmet of perfectly symmetrical, meticulously groomed, "Dry Look" hair.
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On the weekends, at a dance, away from school, --in the real world, we would pull that length of hair out from behind and drape it over our ears. Wild!
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