I can distinctly recall the worst haircut I ever got, without necessarily recalling the specific year. I know it was in the summer time, I might have been between middle and high school or maybe just middle school terms (it was definitely after my sixth-grade year, because I was now wearing the glasses that I'd gotten that previous birthday pretty regularly. Before, I'd tried to conceal my glasses by only wearing them when I sat at the back of a classroom, unable to see the board otherwise. The little grooves on the sides of my nose gave me away). Anyway, it was definitely at a point before I got into the Beatles and decided that I liked having long hair. Prior to this, if a strand fell onto my lower neck, I panicked and rushed to the nearest barbershop.
My stepdad took me, my sis, and little brother to this place in downtown Clemson, an older-than-dirt barbershop where the guy running the place was an ex-Marine (you could tell by the infinite pictures of him in uniform, standing on some battleship deck with his platoon, ready to fight the infernal Japs or something). My little brother was up first, and he got what my stepdad wanted him to get: a flat-top. I laughed at my brother as his hair came buzzing off. Then it was my turn.
Like I said, I was wearing glasses at this point, I was blind as a bat without them (still am, matter of fact) and I had no idea what was going on. The snickers of my sister and freshly-shorn brother were an indication that, whatever was going on, it wasn't my usual "short back and sides and top and front, sideburns half what they are now". It wasn't until I got to put my glasses back on and missed the usual tug of hair on the side enveloping the ear pieces that I saw what had happened.
A fucking flat-top.
I'd never been a hat person much before, but the entirity of that ride home was spent with me encased in a baseball cap and refusing to take it off for my a-hole siblings, who enjoyed this a little too much. Thankfully it was the summer, which meant I didn't have to be seen in school like this. I did, however, have to be seen in Sunday school like this; having not quite acquired the ability to lay out of church that would later serve me so well (being unable to find a clean shirt, perhaps, or taking my sweet time showering only to find at the last minute that I was running behind and gosh, why don't I just stay here while you guys go?), I went into the little gym behind the main church anxious about being seen. For an adolescent boy, appearance matters as much as it does to the opposite sex; we live and die by what our peers think of us, and it's all about surface appearance. I already had two strikes against me, as puberty had not been kind when it doled out my ration of zits and pimples and I also had the new insult of eyeglasses with heavy lenses and old-school frames. Now I looked like a pimply GI Joe, the one dubbed "Sacrificial Man" who appears at the bottom of the toy rack and usually fulfills the role on a mission of being the one guy that COBRA soldiers can shoot at accurately and kill.
The first Sunday after my haircut, I went into the gym and made a beeline for the bathroom, to see if my hair (or absence of hair) was as bad as I thought. No, it was not...it was worse. Dressed up in a button-up shirt and jeans, I looked awful. I resolved to stay in there until Sunday school was over; I could avoid the taunting and jeers of my peers if I stayed put and played a little trash-can basketball for thirty minutes. A few more Sundays of that, and I got good at trashcan basketball, though judging from the reactions of my fellow Sunday schoolers who saw me hanging out in the men's room the entire time class was in session, I may have acquired a reputation as gay.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, except in the adolescent hierarchy of summer-time church-ordained school activities in which "Bible Jeopardy" trumps the secular, real-life variety (What is a Godless athiest that will burn in hell, Alex?).
Anyway, I bring all this up because when I was younger, I didn't have much control over my body. I had no say in when my zits would go away, or what methods my grandmother would use to hasten their exit from my face (think "medieval Spanish torture chamber" and you're on the right track, at least according to my memory), but I could control my hair. I thought I could, anyway, by showering at night before going to bed and thus avoiding the hassle of showering in the morning (because the water was cold or I was sensitive or something). This lead to years of me looking slightly greasy until (I'm ashamed to say it) college, when it hit me to reverse the time of day during which I washed my hair.
I will muse on this some more at a later date...
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