When I was a little kid, I came home one day with a crewcut. Well, all four of us boys did. My father took it upon himself to have our heads shaved and according to family legend, my mother gave my father one helluva tongue lashing, especially because he had also brought home horse meat, in lieu of cash, in payment for a TV he repaired.
My mother has always allowed her children to wear their hair any way they liked. At one moment in time, it almost caused my oldest brother to have to live in foster care because he wore… get ready… sideburns to high school.
While this seems like nonsense now, it was a big deal when I was young. My parents had to fight the school district to keep him, all because of some hair that ran down the sides of his face.
I never liked going to the barber. I still don’t. I just find the whole waiting thing a total waste of time, not just at the barber’s, but at the doctor’s, the mechanic’s; anywhere there is a wait. This is time I am never going to get back and the powers that be that I must see don’t seem to really respect that.
Still, visits to the barber were required, as our own style decisions eventually got too long and a correction would have to be made. For years, we went to the barbershop in the Highlands owned by the Gibson family. It was in the same strip mall as the Wigwam and A&H.
Larry Gibson was my barber for years, well into high school. At one point, as a little boy, I noticed that Larry would keep pushing on my head to let me know where I should turn. Up, down, to the left to the right. I decided that I was going to really impress him and remember every single command in sequence so he never had to tell me what to do next with his hand.
It was folly, of course. He never cut my hair the same way. All my gyrations in the chair only mystified him, as if I was having a series of petit mal seizures while in the barber’s chair. Little did he know that I was only trying to amaze him, not display signs of a neurological disorder.
Throughout my school years, my hair was always longish. Part of the reason was that that was just the style back then. The other part was because as I said, I didn’t like haircuts.
As I got older, I worked in corporate. When my hair got unruly, I would march off to the barber. I had already scoped out their hours. I always arrived five minutes before they opened because I wanted to be the first one in. In a world of unisex hair shops, I never wanted to get stuck behind a blue hair or worse, multiple blue hairs, who are finicky about their damned hair and remain in a chair for hours on end, gossiping and obsessing.
Inevitably, the stylist would ask me what kind of cut I wanted. They would just look mystified because I had no preference whatsoever. I would try in vain to speak stylist, saying odd things like “over the ears,” “blocked in the back,” etc., not really knowing what they meant.
And then one day I heard the magical phrase – the code word – uttered by a stylist. She said, “Oh, you want a gentleman’s cut.” From then on, “gentleman’s cut” it was. Whenever I was asked how I would like my hair cut, I would reply, “Gentleman’s cut for me, thanks!” with tremendous confidence.
As I’ve turn mid old, I am mostly thankful that I still have hair. In my family, baldness runs rampant and my brothers have had receding hairlines since they were teenagers. Me, I still have a mop of hair. I’m sure it went has retreated a bit over the years. At one time I had planned to have my head tattooed so that I could 1) gauge if the hairline was indeed receding, and 2) I thought the lines would help the stylist quickly and efficiently cut my hair. I could just say, “Just cut up to the lines.” How easy is that?
Several years ago, and this is the whole reason I am writing about my hair, I started to let it grow out. It is now to the upper middle of my back and in a pony tail. I grew it to portray Sir Henry Morgan in my pirate world, back when I did re-enfakement.
I always felt blessed that my hair had decided to turn gray instead of turn loose, as I say. It used to be more salt and pepper, but I seemed to have run out pepper in my freaked out, stressed out last marriage. So it is just increasingly salt, but not the super bleached stuff that you put on french fries. More like rock salt.
So it has entered my brain that it’s time to get rid of all the locks, which will happen today. This came up in large part because I occasionally think I should return to the 8 to 5 working world and look more the part. But mostly, it came up because in my visit to Seattle, my pony tail would come between me and the headrest of the Nissan Sentra I had rented and whenever I wanted to turn my head, I couldn’t, at least not without ripping out a lot of cascading hair.
As such, I am about to bid my hair a fond adieu. Back to the gentleman’s cut I go. But unlike Samson, don’t think for a moment that my pirating ways will be compromised as I go with a low hair solution. I have never had my self-image caught up in such nonsense as my dashing good looks…
Wait, is that a pimple on my face? Damn! Where is the ProActiv? I can’t go out like this!
Out on the Treasure Coast, mane flowing in an eastern breeze, at least for a few hours more,
– Robb