You Never Miss It Til It's Gone

I've had a bad hair life.

Oh, sure, there've been a few good days thrown in here and there. Days when I'd wake up, look in the mirror, and say "Damn, my hair looks good!" But on those rare days there was never a camera around to capture it, so it exists only in my memory.

I feel I've been cursed with a repugnant and unruly mane and it has only been in recent years that I've figured out that it probably looks its best when there is very little of it. I am slowly losing my hair so I've taken to shaving it off every couple of months. I still wish I could let it grow, but it doesn't seem to want to anymore. It's tired. So I keep it short.

In the past, however, I would let it grow and be its natural, crazy self. I enjoyed having wild hair. In high school I was told I looked like kramer from seinfeld, but I always wanted my hair to look like sergei eisenstein.

Part of me always wanted to look insane and so I'd let my hair do its own thing. After college, I let my hair grow long again and was told by several people that I looked like a crazy director, like Peter Jackson. I liked that. I didn't mind being compared to people I admired. When a girl I liked tried to insult me by saying, "By the way, Bill Murray called, he wants his hair back." I laughed and thought how having bad hair wasn't so bad after all. Some people could still be cool with bad hair. And I wanted to be one of them.

One day when I was 27 I decided to get my hair cut professionally to impress a girl. I had it cut close to my head and actually used some hair gel in it. A friend of mine was shocked and said he never thought he'd see me with styled hair. "I always took you for a natural hair kinda guy. Ya know, just let it do what it wants. If it's messy, so what..."

And that's how I'd always been. From 9th grade on, that is.

See, I, like so many others, made numerous failed attempts to "fit in" when I was in junior high school. This included my first experimentation with "hair products", after which I swore I'd never touch the stuff again. And I didn't. Until I was 27 and made a second misguided endeavor to try and control my hair.

At 13, I began to let my hair grow out. Before this I had always kept a neat, Clark Kent-style haircut, cowlick and all. This was never a conscious decision on my part. My mother would take me to get my hair cut and I just let the barber, or stylist, or whoever happened to have the scissors held to my head, make the decision for me. I just didn't care. It always looked like shit anyway.

I have NEVER gotten a good hair cut.

EVER.

My hair always looks its worst when I step out of a hair salon or barbershop. No one has ever given me a good haircut. Sometimes it's close to being decent, but it still takes a few days to grow into. And as I walk away I question why I just plopped down hard earned cash for some one to make me look like shit. I can do that myself! (Consequently that is what I have done for the last 4 years. I bought a pair of clippers and just shave it off when it looks bad)

But when I started letting my hair grow out, I still tried to keep it under control. This was 1987 and everyone was all about hair spray and mousse and gel and any possible unguent to hold jurisdiction over your coif.

So I jumped on the bandwagon and bought as many Vidal Sassoon products as I could find at the ACME Supermarket on Thursday nights when my mother went grocery shopping. I would beg and plead with her whenever I saw they had a new mousse or spray.

"You've already got a can of hairspray at the house," she'd say.

"Yes, but this is for EXTRA HOLD!" I 'd argue.

On top of my juvenile NEED to cake my hair in slime, puberty had hit and my body decided I would probably handle it better with curly hair.

Until the age of 13, I'd pretty much had straight hair. As everyone else in my family had straight hair. But when I decided to let it grow, it began to curl back on itself. I suppose it was so used to being closely cropped to my head for all those years that it didn't want to leave the nest and tried its best to stay close to my skull, even if that meant wrapping itself into tight ringlets.

I tried to use the grease I was lathering my head with to straighten those curls out the best I could.

I was a bone-thin white kid with a slime-caked head of randomly-placed cowlicks and curls. I looked like a used Q-tip.

One night in early December, in 7th grade, I was sitting on the ski club bus to go skiing at Doe Mountain in the Poconos. I had joined the ski club not because I enjoyed skiing (I wasn't particularly adept at it. In fact my first ski trip involved me getting caught on the tow rope and being dragged up the mountain as my skis and boots and other personal items were ripped from my body, causing the kids behind me to trip and fall as well) but because that's what all the hot girls at school were doing. My friend Matt and I wanted nothing more than to "accidentally" crash into two beautiful girls and spend the rest of the evening nursing our wounds and falling in love with them at the ski lodge.

This never happened.

As I sat on the bus with Matt that one night, thinking of how I could fake an injury that would lure the ladies to my aide, an older kid who had tormented me most of the school year thus far slapped my head as he walked past.

"EWWW!" he yelled. "What the fuck have you got on your head?!"

The other kids on the bus started listening in. Those who had heard the beginning of this exchange were already laughing.

"It's just mousse," I said.

He laughed.

"Chocolate mousse?"

The other kids laughed at his rapier wit.

"Feels more like snot," he added. This did not receive the laughter he'd expected and he tried to regain his footing by slapping me again.

"EWWW!" he groaned once more and held out his hand for other kids to touch. "Don't light a match near this kid. You might blow up."

That got the crowd going again and he smiled to himself. Others started joining in, making taunts, touching my head, or just doubling over in fits of laughter.

"Hey kid," one of the ninth graders said to me. I turned to look at him.

"Why don't you come over to my house after this so I can back over your head with my truck? It needs an oil change."

A tremendous burst of laughter and I wanted to just go home. Unfortunately I'd be spending the next several hours riding a bus with them to the ski resort, then trying to avoid them on the slopes, then riding the same bus back to hear the insults they'd cooked up while skiing.

Shortly after that I threw out my "products" and decided to let my hair "go wild". I wanted to look "crazy" so no one would fuck with me. If people thought you were scary they wouldn't talk to you. That was what I thought anyway. Unfortunately I never let it go too wild. I was still rather conservative when it came to bucking the system. I still wanted to "fit in".

By ninth grade I had let my hair grow into a KirkCameron/Mike Seaver mullet. Not threatening. Not at all.

I was constantly bombarded with questions about where I got my"perm" done.

Every day I hated my hair. I still hate it. As many different styles as I've tried, one thing remains. It always looks bad. It's always in a state of "kinda-looks-like-something-but-not-quite-there".

However, as much as I dislike it, I am sad to see it go.

My hair has begun its retreat south. There are less and less folicles up front by my forehead every morning I awake. They are slowly pulling back. While they haven't completely conceded defeat yet, they are bailing at an alarming rate. Some of them have taken refuge in my ears or nose. And more and more of their band of brothers join them each day.

I guess that's the irony of it all. My hair sucks. I hate it. But I wish I had more...