GRAY'S ANOMALY

Things are getting hairier. On my head. (Let’s not talk about ears, brows and nose, please.) As a woman said to me at the gym last week, I’m getting shaggier. She meant it as a compliment. I think. 

 

Yes, I’m letting my hair grow out to some proximation of my Big Hair ’80s era. My hair has certainly receded in the passing decades and it’s thinner but the top of the noggin is still well covered and, for that, I am grateful. I think bald men can be very sexy, but I tell myself my head needs hair. Too many moles hide underneath. 

 

They are still hiding, aren’t they? 

 

Hair insecurity makes me reluctant to look too long into the hand mirror that mostly gathers dust in the bathroom vanity. 

 

I’m letting the hair grow out while I still have hair to grow out. It means that the cleaner, closer-cut, left-parted haircut—I call it my “Swedish cut” after seeing so many immaculately, conservatively groomed men during trips to Stockholm—is giving way to big curls. The back of the head, in particular, is curling up. 

 

“Just don’t grow a mullet,” everyone says. 

 

The fact they say that makes me realize it is, in fact, looking a little mullet-y at the moment. Without hand mirror scrutiny, I believe I’m in the awkward phase of growing things out. It’ll get better, I keep telling myself. My hairstylist will have to clean up the neckline during my next visit. 

 

I’m also sprouting facial hair—mustache and beard. When I was twenty and in my first year of teaching—yes, in the ’80s—I grew a mustache to try to look older. I was a high school special education teacher and some of my students were a year older since Texas law permitted students to be enrolled in secondary school until they were twenty-one. I’m rather thankful I don’t have any photos from that period. I don’t think it was a good luck. 

 

This is the first time I’ve attempted a beard. I’ve sometimes been a lazy shaver, letting facial whiskers linger for up to ten days but then I’ve always felt uncomfortably itchy, causing me to lather up the shaving cream and revert to a smoother look. I’m now about six weeks into the beard. It seems as full as it’s likely to get. The itching has subsided. My boyfriend and my best friend are fans of the beard. “You look Scandinavian,” I am told. I will always take that as a compliment. 

 

So far, I’ve gone to the barber twice for beard trims with electric razors. (The thought of a blade trim worries me too much. I imagine myself flinching at the wrong moments and having my chin, cheeks and neck gushing blood.) The process is quite soothing and extremely detail-oriented. I imagine it’s something like having a massage…which I’ve never had. (The thought of my body being needed like bread dough is as appealing as a bloody blade shave.) 

 

Arr, Graybeard!

I’ve come close to getting rid of the beard several times. A few more days, I keep telling myself. I am conflicted by the look. While my hair is blond with some gray growing in, the beard is one hundred percent gray. I feel old. I look like a skinny version of Santa. (Am I even that skinny? Do kids I pass do a double-take. “Santa?!”)

 

Without the beard, I look considerably younger than sixty. With it, I feel sixty-five. I keep asking myself why I would sacrifice looking more youthful? What’s the beard’s appeal?

 

This weekend, my boyfriend, Evan, suggested I dye the beard and mustache. One box of Just For Men blond beard dye and—Bam!—I lost a decade. (Maybe more?) 

 

Somewhat blonder facial scruff...

So now I’m a big, shaggy faker. I have blond highlights in my hair and blond dye for my beard. I am relieved. I’d even say I am happy. I am no longer peeking into the bathroom mirror with dread. The beard will stay a while longer, at least.

 

The concern now is about whether I’ll know when to say my final goodbyes to all blondness. There will come a time when the color will look blatantly painted on, when people will see me for the blond fraud I am, an old guy trying unsuccessfully to look younger. I’ve seen it in other men and women. I just wonder if I’ll see it in me. Will I know when to let the dyes die? Will it take friends and family holding a hair intervention? Will someone slide an anonymous note under my door? “Today’s the day for you to go gray.”

 

For now, I believe I still have enough natural, non-gray hairs on my head to carry off the blond deception. When it’s all gray, may I have the common sense to let things be. Frankly, I think a full head of gray hair can be sexy, too. It can look distinguished. It can convey confidence. It’s possible, I have self-esteem issues around the terms sexy, distinguished and confident. Maybe the real work to be done is inside the head rather than at surface level.

 

  

SNIP IT

I’m hair intolerant. It’s genetic. From my mother’s side of the family. We don’t handle unruly hair.

My hair intolerance came late in life. It’s not that it wasn’t there, but I fought it. I tried to be strong.

I made it through the big, poufy, mega-permed ‘80s and early ‘90s with barely a tic. When I saw Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack in “Working Girl”, it registered that their coiffures needed taming, but I didn’t respond like it was a horror movie, clenching the armrests and casting my eyes downward to see if popcorn-fed rats lurked at my feet. I watched and told myself movies are make believe and New Jersey is on the other coast. (Admittedly, I may have had my own case of poufy hair, a circumstance that was entirely perm-free.)

I only registered mild annoyance after moving to L.A. twenty-five years ago and seeing middle-aged men deal with receding hairlines by growing it where they could—extending the neckline, clumping it together in a ponytail. Not braided like Willie Nelson. Too much work. This was California casual. On occasion, I wanted to shake these guys and shout, “Your hair’s still receding. We still see that.” But I took my deep breaths, I let that Bobby McFerrin ditty dance in my head and I did some mental “Vogue”-ing. I worked through it.

I thought I made it.

I am not my mother’s son!

Then came the mullet. It proved a greater challenge. I could hear my grandfather in my head. Needs a haircut. Very succinct. He was a keen observer, always wanting to keep the younger generations in check. His tone conveyed more: Thugs and no-goods. A barber would fix ‘em. I believe that was my grandfather’s answer to all the evils of the world. Forget prisons; we need more barbers.

My mother learned well from my grandfather who, incidentally, went bald at the age of twenty. But she was always more verbose. I shudder to think what her commentary would be if she watched an old Michael Bolton video with me. “Where are my scissors? Honestly, what was he thinking? ‘Love Is a Wonderful Thing’? I’ll tell you what’s a wonderful thing. A haircut. Once a month. Five weeks at most. Just look at that mop. It’s like a lion’s mane. I’ll tame it. Clean, crisp snips. And there’d be three new wigs for cancer patients. Although Genie Mulgrove has a stylish collection of bandanas to make the most of things. Satin. Some of them are even from Neiman Marcus. But when you’ve got cancer, you need your splurges.”  

It was a struggle, but I made it through mullets, too. “Hockey hair”, they called it. That helped. I accepted it in the name of national pride. Hockey. Canada. Suck it up.

But I’ve come undone due to the latest hair misstep. I hear my grandfather’s voice saying, Needs a haircut. I hear my mother rambling about her scissors. And even more succinctly than my grandfather, I pose the question: “Why?”

“Why, oh, why, oh, why why why?!” Okay, not so succinctly. I see the redundancy in my thinking but I can’t help myself. I can’t lop off even a single “why”. I. Am. Hair. Intolerant.

There are men walking around with a tiny lock of hair clumped together in a rubber band so that it sticks out of the top of their head. Like a shaggy antenna. Or, more accurately, a ponytail stump. (If you Google "man bun", you'll get lots of scary versions; the men I've seen attempt the look don't have a thick enough clump to form a bun in the first place.)

Why?!

I suspect someone like David Beckham started this. Some sort of soccer requirement. Clump up that loose tuft of hair at the top of the head in case some gust of wind kicks up in the stadium and he gets a red card for giving an opposing player an unwanted hair whipping. But, men, we need to get real. David Beckham can carry off almost anything. He’d be hot in a squirrel costume. We are not David Beckham. We cannot carry off the ponytail stump.

We should know this. As boys, we were told not to play with rubber bands. Clearly, some boys weren’t so compliant. Or perhaps they were and now they are demonstrating a latent need to experiment with elastics.

I’d gladly buy them a geoboard. Anything to keep the rubber bands out of their hair.

Please.

This will not hold up well in one’s personal history. Like crocs and pants that sag down to the knees. I am certain of this. And there will be oodles of incriminating evidence in the form of Instagram and Facebook selfies.

I can hear the children of these men, years from now, looking at pictures of their dads when they actually had hair. But that relatively full head of hear won’t be something the young‘uns marvel at because there will be that overriding distraction. “Uh, dad, why is your hair sticking up at the back in every picture?”

“I meant to do that. It was the fashion.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“It was.” And, god willing, I’ll be there to chime in and say, in a cathartic release, “It wasn’t! It really wasn’t!”

So please, gentlemen, put the rubber bands down. Tame your hair with gobs of goop if you must. It is time to clip the ponytail stump.

If you don’t do it, I may just have to pull out my mother’s scissors. I’m not afraid to use them. My ancestors will cheer me on.