This originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 19, Issue 1/2, Summer 2013.

I Used to Have Hella Long Hair

My god, man, have some self-respect.

WHEN I was a wee lad in Jersey City, my parents took my brother and I to an Italian named Barberlo (not his actual name, though it was equally amazing) to get our hair cut. It was an old-school barbershop and Barberlo was a diminutive man who spoke in a delightfully cartoonish Italian accent and dressed in elaborate suits just to walk to his shop, where he promptly put on a white surgical type outfit for the touching of filthy, lice-ridden heads like ours.

Barberlo had a habit of making groin-hand contact with me when he cut my hair. I was never sure if this was on purpose or not, but it freaked me out. I never told anyone, because it was so subtle as to be in my imagination, and I saw no reason to hurl about accusations when the whole thing didn’t exactly damage me, just made me feel slightly skeeved out. Worse than the occasional groin contact was the fact that Barberlo was an awful barber. Truly awful. I emerged from each session with him looking like someone had attacked me recently, and been unkind.

In High School I developed a hairstyle that I now dub The Moron in a Hurry. It was sort of a Justin Bieber-esque bowl kind of thing, and was truly awful. This wasn’t Barberlo’s fault, really; I was the only giving out orders that he cut the sides and back but leave the top longer. This should have told me that I was not mature enough to manage my own hair (Hell, I don’t believe I’m mature enough now) but I was too young to learn anything. When I went off to college I prepared by resolving to not get my hair cut any more. So I sailed into Freshman year with a shock of a mullet. It was a grand, unruly mullet, just a mess of hair that I often tied back out of my face with a rubber band.

And I just let it grow. There was no effort at shaping, or styling. No cutting. No conditioner, either, so it wasn’t long before my haircut was a frizzy mess of straw on my head. I had these huge plastic glasses and a tendency to wear T-shirts with cartoon characters on them. In other words, it was like someone was paying me to not get laid.

With Age, Wisdom

These days I am sanguine about my hair. I hate getting it cut. Not because of any style issues, but because it’s a gigantic waste of fucking time. Time I am forced to spend sitting awkwardly in a chair making small talk with people as they touch my head. There is nothing – nothing – worse than making that small talk with the people who cut my hair. It’s the same fucking conversation over and over again, always followed by the awkward segue into a discussion about whether I use conditioner, what kind of shampoo I use, did I know that there’s a difference in quality between shampoos. NO I DIDN’T FUCKING KNOW THAT EXCUSE ME WHILE I CHEW MY FOOT OFF TO ESCAPE YOU.

I know these folks get a commission or something when they sell some poor sap like me a bottle of Dr. Einstein’s Hair Dip or whatever, but Jesus Fucked, I do not want to talk to this yobs. I want them to cut my hair in perfect silence. Is that too much to ask?

I suppose so.

Anyways, I treat haircuts like they ought to be treated: Like maintenance. My head is basically an out-of-control source of lice habitat if left untended, and I don’t care for the weight and discomfort of a mass of hair, so I get it cut. If I thought The Duchess would tolerate it, I’d just have my head shaved on a regular basis and be done with it. Maybe when I’m sixty or so she’ll finally see the light, especially as my hair takes on that yellowing old man wispiness.

In Youth, Poor Decisions

So, back to my really, really long hair. I don’t miss it. In photos, I look more or less ungroomed and slightly crazy, and I wonder what my college experience would have been like if I’d shown up that first day with a haircut. Who knows what people thought of me? I only know that when I see pics of myself from that era what I think of me is, what a fucking asshole.

And of course, I was. Aside from awful grooming and fashion decisions, there was an underlying arrogant confidence in those terrible decisions that didn’t make sense then and doesn’t make sense now. I kind of knew I was an asshole, and an uncool asshole at that, but I also thought I was fucking fantastic. I don’t know if this is a testament to how my parents raised me or a testament to the resilient asshole forces within all of us.

Today, I’m different. Slightly buffed down by humiliations and failure, weighted down with booze and decades of steak dinners, I find long hair annoying and I now know how unattractive it is on me. On the other hand, haircuts reveal my thinning spot and shower me with an increasingly gray rain of hair. If I didn’t suspect I would resemble some sort of synthetic humanoid if I shaved my head, you’d better believe I’d go with that. Assuming, again, that The Duchess allowed it. Which she will not, in case you missed that up above.