Quietly Unfurling The Freak Flag
I have never really cared all that much what my hair looks like. I mean I have cared, enough to drag a comb through it occasionally, so it would not become entirely unkempt; but I have never gone as far as coloring it or attempting to make it straighter or curlier or anything like that.
OK, I did try to “naturally” streak it once. My mop is medium brown in color, and I had heard if you put lemon juice in it and spent some time out in the sun, your hair would acquire blond highlights. I thought that might be pretty cool. In those days I spent every possible moment down at the beach anyway, out in the sun all day; so on the drive down there one Saturday morning, while making my usual stop at the market for a case of Miller Lite and two bags of ice, I also purchased one of those plastic squeeze lemons. The checkout dude probably thought I was going to put the lemon juice in my beer; it was trendy back then to squeeze lime juice in one’s cerveza. But I never went in for that. Because it made my beer taste fucking nasty.
Anyway, when I got down on the beach that day, I slathered on a copious amount of a coconut-oil based Coppertone product called Savage Tan™, an extremely greasy concoction which not only did not block UV rays, but I am pretty sure was formulated to actively attract them. And I also surreptitiously worked some of the lemon juice into my coif. I reloaded with it each time I came in from swimming in the surf, or otherwise whenever it crossed my mind to do it. I noticed the citric acid burned my scalp a little, but I was drinking beer after all, so it did not bother me much. I ended up using the whole squeeze lemon before the day was out, and I had basically forgot about it by the time I drove home that evening. The next morning I noticed in the mirror that, rather than having any streaks or highlights in it, my entire hairdo had gone two or three shades lighter brown, almost to blond. It looked like hell, and took a few days to go away, too. Never again.
I am lucky in the sense my hair grows naturally straight, and is fine (as opposed to coarse.) It looks okay when it is long, and I have always tended to wear it a little longer than whatever the norm was at the time. I think this is at least partly a subconscious reaction to the trauma caused the time my father tricked me into getting a “flat-top.” I was in second grade, and one day he took me to his barber and when I came out of there the hair on top of my head approximated the texture and length of the fuzz on a tennis ball. We stopped at the drug store on the way home and he bought a jar of a hair-styling gel product called Dippity Do®, and a plastic hand brush with short, rigid bristles on it. My dad told me when we got home he would show me how to style my new ‘do.
At that point, my overall reaction to what he had done to me was neutral. I would have preferred to have still had enough hair so it could at least lay down, but one thing I knew about a bad haircut, even then, was that soon or later, the hair would grow back.
It was not until we got home that day and my mom saw me and freaked out and started yelling at my dad that I began to worry. She was especially pissed because school pictures were scheduled for later that week. I did not really care about the pictures, but I realized the enormity of what he had done to me when I went to school the next day and all of my second grade honeys – the ones who would chase me around the playground every day at recess and when they caught me (I didn’t run very hard) would hold me down and kiss me – laughed out loud at me and did not want anything to do with me anymore, at least until my hair grew back. Goddammit, Dad!! What the hell is wrong with you?? This isn't funny, you're messing with my little girlie action now!!
After that, I stayed away from the old man when it came to hirsute matters.
Through elementary and junior high school and up to roughly my sophomore year in high school, my hair was usually a little longer than average, but not much. I played sports, football and baseball and track, and at the time, it seemed like most of the athletic coaches had an aversion to long hair. To them, that was anything long enough to touch the top of one’s ear, or shirt collar. If you had long hair, they thought it meant you were distracted from the goals they had for you, or something. Or that you couldn’t perform as well. A coach was likely to call you a “goddamn hippie.” “Get your hair cut, you goddamn hippie, and you’ll be able to hit the hole faster.” In fact, my junior high school actually had a dress code that restricted hair length, roughly following a typical coach’s guidelines of what was and was not acceptable. I would push the regulations as far as I could, and then be called out on it; to the point I was getting a lot of my haircuts from football coaches. Talk about a screwed up haircut.
Then all of the sudden, all that mostly stopped. The dress code in high school was more lenient; as long as one’s hair was clean and not a “distraction”, whatever that meant, it was fine. Actual length did not seem to matter as much. And so I started to let mine grow out. I still don’t think my coaches liked it very much, but it was the mid-1970s by then, and there was not much they could do about it. Sure, they would threaten to bench you if you did not get a trim, but we all knew that was bullshit. If you were good, you played. And anyway, I started noticing some of the coaches were letting their hair grow out a little, too. Relatively speaking.
In the 1970s, hair length was still a fairly accurate indicator of one’s life philosophy, I guess you would call it. At least generally speaking, having long hair suggested you were vaguely rebellious; while you may or may not have given a rat’s ass about ideology or sectarian politics, at the least your long hair indicated a general acceptance of and possibly even enthusiasm for the time-honored hippie tenets of free love, music, and mind-altering substances. Hell, yeah. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, baby. I was roughly 15 years old at the time, and all for that stuff. That is when I really began to let my hair grow. By the time I graduated high school, it was close to shoulder-length.
It stayed long through college. Once I started working for a living, I began cutting my hair shorter and in a more conventional style. I do not think I ever gave it much thought. I certainly subjugated any desire I may have still had for longer hair to career concerns. It wasn't an issue to me. It was what one did. And now, looking back from nearly thirty years on, I have no regrets.
Four or five years ago, it occurred to me I had reached a time and a point in my career where it did not matter very much how long my hair was anymore. For one thing, I had pretty much become my own boss by then, so who was going to tell me different? Also, by then long hair had lost its novelty, and the length one wore one's hair had ceased to have much meaning sociologically, at least in terms of defining a demographic group with any kind of consistent system of political beliefs, lifestyle choices, and/or general philosopy. Anyone from your CPA to your stock broker to the most backwards redneck conservative wing nut you knew might be sporting hair halfway down to his ass. Long hair was just another hairstyle, nothing more.
So, long story short, I quit cutting my hair, other than to trim it up here and there. And by now I believe it is longer than it ever has been. I should say that I have been blessed genetically not only with straight hair, but also with hair which apparently is not going to turn gray and/or fall out of my head anytime soon. No Just For Men or Rogaine for me, thanks. Not yet, anyway. I guess I am sort of like Ronald Reagan in a way. Hopefully, the only way I am like Reagan who, you’ll remember, claimed his hair, which stayed jet black well into his seventies, had never been colored or dyed. Of course, this was from a guy who had been a movie actor in Hollywood for many years, and who as President was not particularly known for his grasp of the facts, not to mention the truth (“I did not sell arms to Iran to finance the contra rebels in Nicaragua.”) What I am saying is, I am not sporting one of those “old man” long hairstyles, balding on top and all gray and curly and thin. My hair now looks basically like it did when I was in high school, except possibly longer.
My wife did not like my idea very much at first. But she has come around. I think she likes the long hair now. Anyway, she still cannot keep her hands off me, which is all I care about. My kids think it is ironic – and I think they actually have an idea what “ironic” means – that I, the dad, get on them for their hair being too short. Actually, I think that is pretty ironic, too. My oldest son keeps his ‘do barely past flat-top length. It is the style with his peers, and it gets him women, so he goes with it. I can understand that. My youngest is pretty much the same, but he may end up being my long-haired child, yet. He is a natural musician (a trait which he did not inherit from me), a guitarist who, in my biased opinion, is very, very good. The other night he called me into his room and played Jimi Hendrix’ “Pali Gap”, almost note for note; for anyone not familiar with it, it is a pretty difficult song to learn, I imagine, especially at age twelve. He has a band with some of his sixth grade friends, and he is pretty serious about it all. So I am thinking he is my last, best hope to quit screwing around with this short hair stuff and let it grow out, dammit.
I guess the long hair thing is my version of going middle age crazy. I did not go out and buy a Harley like all the doctors and lawyers and accountants around here, or ditch my wife and kids for a woman half my age, or quit my job and move to the Cayman Islands to open a daiquiri hut on the beach (although I may still do that.) So, given the alternatives, growing my hair long at this point seems to be a fairly benign way for me to deal with the fading of my youth. It does not bother anyone too much, and it allows me to fantasize that I still have some of the rebel in me, that I have not been completely co-opted, and corrupted, by the. . . you know, by the establishment.
*****
I probably do need to cut my hair. It is past my shoulders now. I have noticed it gets in my way sometimes, and it is kind of difficult to keep it from getting tangled. It would be a lot easier to manage if it was shorter, and I guess my mother and my mother-in-law would get off my ass about it if I went ahead and had myself sheared.
OK, I did try to “naturally” streak it once. My mop is medium brown in color, and I had heard if you put lemon juice in it and spent some time out in the sun, your hair would acquire blond highlights. I thought that might be pretty cool. In those days I spent every possible moment down at the beach anyway, out in the sun all day; so on the drive down there one Saturday morning, while making my usual stop at the market for a case of Miller Lite and two bags of ice, I also purchased one of those plastic squeeze lemons. The checkout dude probably thought I was going to put the lemon juice in my beer; it was trendy back then to squeeze lime juice in one’s cerveza. But I never went in for that. Because it made my beer taste fucking nasty.
Anyway, when I got down on the beach that day, I slathered on a copious amount of a coconut-oil based Coppertone product called Savage Tan™, an extremely greasy concoction which not only did not block UV rays, but I am pretty sure was formulated to actively attract them. And I also surreptitiously worked some of the lemon juice into my coif. I reloaded with it each time I came in from swimming in the surf, or otherwise whenever it crossed my mind to do it. I noticed the citric acid burned my scalp a little, but I was drinking beer after all, so it did not bother me much. I ended up using the whole squeeze lemon before the day was out, and I had basically forgot about it by the time I drove home that evening. The next morning I noticed in the mirror that, rather than having any streaks or highlights in it, my entire hairdo had gone two or three shades lighter brown, almost to blond. It looked like hell, and took a few days to go away, too. Never again.
I am lucky in the sense my hair grows naturally straight, and is fine (as opposed to coarse.) It looks okay when it is long, and I have always tended to wear it a little longer than whatever the norm was at the time. I think this is at least partly a subconscious reaction to the trauma caused the time my father tricked me into getting a “flat-top.” I was in second grade, and one day he took me to his barber and when I came out of there the hair on top of my head approximated the texture and length of the fuzz on a tennis ball. We stopped at the drug store on the way home and he bought a jar of a hair-styling gel product called Dippity Do®, and a plastic hand brush with short, rigid bristles on it. My dad told me when we got home he would show me how to style my new ‘do.
At that point, my overall reaction to what he had done to me was neutral. I would have preferred to have still had enough hair so it could at least lay down, but one thing I knew about a bad haircut, even then, was that soon or later, the hair would grow back.
It was not until we got home that day and my mom saw me and freaked out and started yelling at my dad that I began to worry. She was especially pissed because school pictures were scheduled for later that week. I did not really care about the pictures, but I realized the enormity of what he had done to me when I went to school the next day and all of my second grade honeys – the ones who would chase me around the playground every day at recess and when they caught me (I didn’t run very hard) would hold me down and kiss me – laughed out loud at me and did not want anything to do with me anymore, at least until my hair grew back. Goddammit, Dad!! What the hell is wrong with you?? This isn't funny, you're messing with my little girlie action now!!
After that, I stayed away from the old man when it came to hirsute matters.
Through elementary and junior high school and up to roughly my sophomore year in high school, my hair was usually a little longer than average, but not much. I played sports, football and baseball and track, and at the time, it seemed like most of the athletic coaches had an aversion to long hair. To them, that was anything long enough to touch the top of one’s ear, or shirt collar. If you had long hair, they thought it meant you were distracted from the goals they had for you, or something. Or that you couldn’t perform as well. A coach was likely to call you a “goddamn hippie.” “Get your hair cut, you goddamn hippie, and you’ll be able to hit the hole faster.” In fact, my junior high school actually had a dress code that restricted hair length, roughly following a typical coach’s guidelines of what was and was not acceptable. I would push the regulations as far as I could, and then be called out on it; to the point I was getting a lot of my haircuts from football coaches. Talk about a screwed up haircut.
Then all of the sudden, all that mostly stopped. The dress code in high school was more lenient; as long as one’s hair was clean and not a “distraction”, whatever that meant, it was fine. Actual length did not seem to matter as much. And so I started to let mine grow out. I still don’t think my coaches liked it very much, but it was the mid-1970s by then, and there was not much they could do about it. Sure, they would threaten to bench you if you did not get a trim, but we all knew that was bullshit. If you were good, you played. And anyway, I started noticing some of the coaches were letting their hair grow out a little, too. Relatively speaking.
In the 1970s, hair length was still a fairly accurate indicator of one’s life philosophy, I guess you would call it. At least generally speaking, having long hair suggested you were vaguely rebellious; while you may or may not have given a rat’s ass about ideology or sectarian politics, at the least your long hair indicated a general acceptance of and possibly even enthusiasm for the time-honored hippie tenets of free love, music, and mind-altering substances. Hell, yeah. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, baby. I was roughly 15 years old at the time, and all for that stuff. That is when I really began to let my hair grow. By the time I graduated high school, it was close to shoulder-length.
It stayed long through college. Once I started working for a living, I began cutting my hair shorter and in a more conventional style. I do not think I ever gave it much thought. I certainly subjugated any desire I may have still had for longer hair to career concerns. It wasn't an issue to me. It was what one did. And now, looking back from nearly thirty years on, I have no regrets.
Four or five years ago, it occurred to me I had reached a time and a point in my career where it did not matter very much how long my hair was anymore. For one thing, I had pretty much become my own boss by then, so who was going to tell me different? Also, by then long hair had lost its novelty, and the length one wore one's hair had ceased to have much meaning sociologically, at least in terms of defining a demographic group with any kind of consistent system of political beliefs, lifestyle choices, and/or general philosopy. Anyone from your CPA to your stock broker to the most backwards redneck conservative wing nut you knew might be sporting hair halfway down to his ass. Long hair was just another hairstyle, nothing more.
So, long story short, I quit cutting my hair, other than to trim it up here and there. And by now I believe it is longer than it ever has been. I should say that I have been blessed genetically not only with straight hair, but also with hair which apparently is not going to turn gray and/or fall out of my head anytime soon. No Just For Men or Rogaine for me, thanks. Not yet, anyway. I guess I am sort of like Ronald Reagan in a way. Hopefully, the only way I am like Reagan who, you’ll remember, claimed his hair, which stayed jet black well into his seventies, had never been colored or dyed. Of course, this was from a guy who had been a movie actor in Hollywood for many years, and who as President was not particularly known for his grasp of the facts, not to mention the truth (“I did not sell arms to Iran to finance the contra rebels in Nicaragua.”) What I am saying is, I am not sporting one of those “old man” long hairstyles, balding on top and all gray and curly and thin. My hair now looks basically like it did when I was in high school, except possibly longer.
My wife did not like my idea very much at first. But she has come around. I think she likes the long hair now. Anyway, she still cannot keep her hands off me, which is all I care about. My kids think it is ironic – and I think they actually have an idea what “ironic” means – that I, the dad, get on them for their hair being too short. Actually, I think that is pretty ironic, too. My oldest son keeps his ‘do barely past flat-top length. It is the style with his peers, and it gets him women, so he goes with it. I can understand that. My youngest is pretty much the same, but he may end up being my long-haired child, yet. He is a natural musician (a trait which he did not inherit from me), a guitarist who, in my biased opinion, is very, very good. The other night he called me into his room and played Jimi Hendrix’ “Pali Gap”, almost note for note; for anyone not familiar with it, it is a pretty difficult song to learn, I imagine, especially at age twelve. He has a band with some of his sixth grade friends, and he is pretty serious about it all. So I am thinking he is my last, best hope to quit screwing around with this short hair stuff and let it grow out, dammit.
I guess the long hair thing is my version of going middle age crazy. I did not go out and buy a Harley like all the doctors and lawyers and accountants around here, or ditch my wife and kids for a woman half my age, or quit my job and move to the Cayman Islands to open a daiquiri hut on the beach (although I may still do that.) So, given the alternatives, growing my hair long at this point seems to be a fairly benign way for me to deal with the fading of my youth. It does not bother anyone too much, and it allows me to fantasize that I still have some of the rebel in me, that I have not been completely co-opted, and corrupted, by the. . . you know, by the establishment.
*****
I probably do need to cut my hair. It is past my shoulders now. I have noticed it gets in my way sometimes, and it is kind of difficult to keep it from getting tangled. It would be a lot easier to manage if it was shorter, and I guess my mother and my mother-in-law would get off my ass about it if I went ahead and had myself sheared.
But I don’t think I am going to do it, not yet. Having it long still means something to me, beyond just a hair style; even if no one else cares about any of that stuff anymore.
*****
*****
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