Vanity

When I was kid, my mom had a kitchen stool, a handy tool for reaching things on shelves, a perch for friends to set and talk, or for kids to stir cookies and sneak bites of raw egg-laden dough. She loved that stool, and when it wore out, she replaced it with a sturdy, assemble-it-yourself, high-back version, in maple. She painted it a jaunty shade of orange, just the accent to avocado Formica and green shag rug. When the first stool came apart, literally falling to pieces under my weight, it was like stepping across a threshold when the new stool entered our house. The old stool had been my nemesis, an execution tool, like an electric chair. If I could see it out of the corner of my eye, my breath would catch, my voice would fall softer, respectful. It's not that I feared the chair, but what it represented: haircuts.

Somewhere, sometime, my dad received an illustrated How-To book on cutting hair. He already possessed a set of clippers, possibly cast-offs from a veterinary clinic, and after a little light reading decided that he could make me a presentable young man, and save some money at the same time. Cutting hair, even a simple pig shave, has a learning curve. To this day, I have a thick scar, from a gouging scissors wound, behind the top of my right ear which causes eyeglasses to cant to the left if I don't tweak the temple piece just so.

Hair is composed of lifeless keratin, a proteinaceous material also comprising finger and toe nails. Completely lacking nerves, hair is dead, a solid scientific fact that I disputed for years. The combination of dad's rusty tools and aggressive style molded me into a quaking, hand-shy dog-boy when the subject of haircuts came up. Like a setter fearful of baths, I would disappear, kicking and crying when discovered and subsequently hoisted into position on the stool. Although I never had a problem with dentists, I completely understand the aversion some people develop, even after modern painless dentistry. I'm here to tell you that cutting hair hurts.

My family had moved to Bellingham, Washington from Billings, Montana, where boys were expected to look like boys, which, in the eyes of my parents, most of the male students and professors in Bellingham failed to achieve. Long hair was a hallmark of the Hippies, and for years my Montana relatives were fascinated by stories about men that looked like women. The other crucial element of my Big Sky origin was the Scando-Teutonic genotype that I inherited. Pale skin and blond hair, shorn to quarter-inch fuzz, guaranteed certain sunburn on my scalp, and I learned to sport a ball cap on my tender head. My unprotected ears, however, fried like eggs in the northern sun, and in the summer months the burnt skin flaked off like stale potato chips.

We moved when I was in fourth grade, and I was quickly greeted by Matt, a friendly, fearless boy, a year older, his hair shaped into what he called a "mop". Like the Monkees, he was cool, and my mom must have taken pity on me when I mentioned my envy for his long hair. Dad grudgingly attempted to learn a scissor cut, which still, inexplicably, hurt like hellfire. I no longer looked like a junior Marine, and I saw my social standing improve at my new school, Happy Valley Elementary, where no one wore a crew cut.

In fifth grade I rode a train by myself, back to Montana for the summer, to "work" on my grandparents' farm, with the fantastic goal of earning money for a ten-speed bike. They belonged to a small tight-knit "church", meeting in family member's homes twice a week, and I was soon led to understand that my shaggy hair was pure homemade sin. Grandpa sat me down, opened the bible, searching until he found the justification he needed to mandate the haircut:

Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her? For her hair is given to her for a
covering. 1 Corinthians 11:14-15

After reading me the verse, he paraphrased: "Boys with long hair are a disgrace."

My uncle Ervin held me down, like a bawling lamb, and duplicated my dad's ineptitude with scissors. Lacking proper clippers, I received a compromise haircut, well above my ears, but longer than a crew cut. In the mirror, through tearful eyes, I saw the boy I would recognize years later, playing banjo in Deliverance. Somewhere, I found a floppy, leather hat, a souvenir from Mexico, and wore it constantly to protect my dignity and albinism, at 3500 feet of elevation, under the blazing Big Sky.

I experimented briefly with growing my hair out in my late twenties. I was managing a Birkenstock store in Seattle, and I was tired of the bowl cut, the Caesar style, as kinder persons called it. This gave me a reason to wear a bandana, a different one each day, to restrain the bangs that would otherwise obscure my vision. Slowly, painfully so, my hair grew out to the point where I could finally tuck the strands behind my ears in imitation of my über-cool friend, Jorn. At last, I could pull it all into a stunted ponytail which looks ridiculous in the sole surviving photograph. I settled for a part down the middle, and my thick, straight hair fell like two greasy curtains on each side of my head.

There was a character on the TV series, Northern Exposure, named Ed Chigliak, played by Darren E. Burrows. He defined undefinable cool on the show, and we had the same haircut, even the same middle initials. I longed for people to compare us, but, in reality, I looked more like the villainous teacher of the Dark Arts, Severus Snape, from Harry Potter. Eventually, I succumbed to the tiny voice hissing inside my head, "You look like a complete ass." I went to Supercuts and had the whole tangled wreck shaved off my head, back to square one. When I picked up my son, Alec, at his daycare later, he burst into tears because I looked like someone else.

Ten years later, I experimented with actually shaving my head, switching to an electric shaver when I lopped off, like a carrot top, a mole behind my left ear. My head is uncommonly round, and I worried that it might be mistaken for a bowling ball, my narrow eyes imperceptible on the broad expanse of pink flesh. I grew a goatee with a thin wispy moustache drooping around the sides of my mouth. The goatee suggested where my face was located, but with the shaved head, and my bulk, I looked like a stereotypical B-grade biker movie bad-ass. I scraped off the facial hair and joined a more respectable society when I began volunteering for the local fire department.

Eventually, I grew tired of shaving my head every few days (and the frightened look in children's eyes), and went back to the original buzz cut, which morphed into the more stylized, and military, high and tight. Also known as a jarhead, a crew cut on the top, the sides and back trimmed as short as tools and talent allow. Some say the name comes from how the ears stick out like a jar, but the true origin is lost in USMC lore. I like the low maintenance of the style, and it offers a professional appearance at 0300.

My hair is the perfect shrub to the stylist's topiary. It quickly (about an inch a month) grows straight out, like the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber guy, and lays down only after attaining a length of several inches. Until that time, it forms a halo around my head that looks like a bizarre dandelion gone to seed. Interestingly, the shortest hairs grow faster, and two week after a cut, it's all the same length.

The tenacity of my fuzz tends to highlight any lapse of attention by the barber, and I remained loyal to the rare but transient souls that could meet my high standards. After some time, he or she would quit or get fired, and I would renew my search for competent barber. Too many times, I examined my pelt, after a new stylist's trim, only to find a myriad of stray hairs poking up like so many snags in the carpet. Clipping these bristles myself was as frustrating an exercise as writing my name backwards in the mirror, upside-down, and invariably resulted in snipping at precisely the wrong place and copious profanity.

But no more. I have found my follicular angel, in the guise of Joie, at Rudy's Barbershop. She cut my hair flawlessly for my Chief's interview, and continues to do so three years later. She knows my preference for guards (a razor finish on the sides and back, a 3.0 on top), and has the process down to a quick and easy art form. Rather than take the cafeteria offering of the first-available barber, I'll call ahead to get my name on her list. My schedule allows me to exploit the slower times of day and I seldom wait long.

It's my one vanity, perhaps a little OCD, perhaps the result of childhood trauma, but it's all mine.