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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
September 18, 2005
Published as Political Comment
in a WIP dated November 7, 2000.
© 2000 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Zachary’s Haircut, 2005
© 2005 by Bud Grossmann
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A SHORT HISTORY OF MY HAIR STYLES
In 1949, I was born with crooked feet and crew-cut hair. To this day, I have continuously worn my hair in that same style, except for a few months when I was seven, and during three decades of my early adulthood when I only wished I had a buzz job but lacked the courage to cut my losses.
My memories of childhood haircuts are faded and few. In the mid-1950’s, when our family lived on a U.S. Army post in Japan, the price of a child’s haircut was 25¢, American. For a time, Mom and Dad allowed us boys—me and my brothers Bruce and Larry—to say “Please take just a little off the top.” But a two-bit haircut had hidden costs: Vitalis, combs, and the drive to the barber shop. Dad bought a clippers kit and began to cut our hair in any style we chose, so long as we asked for a butch.
Family photos suggest that Dad did a fair enough job of barbering and we boys did a fair enough job of sitting still. I recall, however, one time when I was in high school, and my friend Rick snapped a finger against my skull. “I see you got a little rat bite there!” With my own fingertip I found the nicked skin, and I took my complaint to my father. He was sympathetic. “Sorry about that,” he said. “But give it a month, son, and nobody’ll know.”
During my first years of high school, in Wisconsin in 1963 to ’65, I didn’t put a lot of thought into the hair on my head. Some of my pals cared about hair, it’s true; they maintained a perfect flat-top or a carefully greased D.A. But in that small-town high school, a fellow could be plenty popular even if he was one of the few guys around who still wore a homemade buzz job.
But then we moved to Baltimore. In that place and at that time, hair mattered. The white guys at my new school, almost all of them, wore a style called “Joe.” Why it was called Joe, I do not know. It could have been called JohnPaulGeorge&Ringo: longish, with a side part, no forehead or ears to be seen. I’m a white guy, but I am not a white sheep; I declined to go along. Maybe I’d have had more than one date all year if I had grown some hair. Too late now to know.
In my senior year my family lived in Hawaii, on an Army post again. My hair stayed short, but girls were willing to speak to me once more.
Then came college in California. Farewell to father, and bye-bye to barber shops, for a good long while. Hair, no hair, hair again. ’Burns, beard, no beard. Marriage, jobs, kids. Whiskers that went to gray. A succession of stylists at fifteen or twenty bucks a cut. For thirty-two years I used a comb.
One warm morning in September of 1999, when I’d gone three months without a trim, the hair on my neck was driving me to distraction. I’d made several attempts to see Eddie, my barber, but one thing or another had kept me from his shop. That morning, I picked up the phone to call for an appointment. But Eddie wasn’t in. That did it. I rummaged in a drawer and found an electric clipper like the one my dad used to use. I oiled up the blades, snapped a No. 4 comb in place, ran an electric cord to my shower stall, set up a mirror on the soap dish on the wall, stripped off my clothing and my eyeglasses, and sheared off my hair. One-half inch all over, is what I made it, with no tapering on the nape. Then I put a razor to my whiskers and left only the ’stache and goat.
I showered, dried off, put my glasses on, and took a look. I leaped back in surprise! A “tough guy” is what I saw. He’d take some getting used to, but my head felt cool and light, and my hair was soft as the belly of a puppy dog.
A few nights later, my son and I went to a movie at the little shopping center up the street. The show got out at nearly midnight, and Dave and I headed home, past darkened shops and emptied restaurants. We met almost no one until we were beside Supercuts, the barber shop at the end of a row of storefronts. Two of its windowed walls formed a corner, and I caught a glimpse, through the pair of panes, of an elderly fellow and a boy coming our way. Dave was beside me, in his wheelchair; I held out my hand and told him, “Wait!” I feared my appearance at that late hour could startle an old man into cardiac arrest.
So we stopped to give the people a chance to come round the corner, but they didn’t show. We inched forward to find them, but amazingly, David and I were all alone. I stepped back and peered again into the shadows of the barber shop, and found what you have surely guessed: the far “window” was a mirror, reflecting my own foolish fear.
That was, as I say, a year ago September. Since that time I’ve sustained self-inflicted crewcuts at the rate of one a week. No one yet, I’m disappointed to report, has fainted at the sight of my shrunken head.
Today, Tuesday, November 7, in the year 2000, our nation is electing a president and making other decisions, too. Candidates and commentators caterwaul about the catastrophe to come if we carelessly cast our votes. They could be right. Time will tell. But I suspect we have little to fear except the fear of our own selves. ♦
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