( 3:54 PM )
PENELOPE CRUZ SHOWER CAM
Today, I bought a hairbrush. Normally, I know, this would be one of like three things that aren’t interesting enough even for a weblog, but I'm all about, you know, breaking down barriers and shit. I have never purchased a hair brush. Nor have I purchased a comb, a pick or any other hair-manipulation device. In truth, I’ve never even owned any. Until now, I never needed any.
For 15 years my hair was so short as to defy even the most densely packed brush bristles. You couldn’t move the damn stuff. Which was how I liked it: easy. I’d tussle it with a towel and sort of flatten it with a palm and, bada-boom, my look would be complete. In the last year, though, I’ve been growing it longer. In that time I have received only three haircuts.
That’s as many haircuts as I used to get in three months, if you must know. For years I’d go once a month to the barbershop, where the guy would wrap my neck in tissue, clip on the No. 3 blade, buzz-cut the sides and back, taper toward the top with a bigger attachment–a No. 3 ½ maybe–and scissor the top to finger length. No sideburns. And a month later, just when it would get long enough to start lying over–-long enough to need a comb–-I’d go back under the clippers.
Before that, in high school, my friend Tab and I would cut each other’s hair. None of this tapering bullshit or finger-length scissoring. Just uniform buzzcuts, short and straightforward as any Marine.
We weren’t Marines, of course, or militarists or skinheads; just guys with curly hair in a time when it wouldn’t do for a white kid to wear an afro. We cut one another’s hair, in his mom’s garage usually, because we were too manly for salons and too cool for barbershops, where all they ever talked about was weather and government incompetence.
Sometime in college I started letting it grow out a little on top, but never more than an inch and a half or whatever an alchoholic barber’s finger could swell to. It was clean, cool, conservative, copacetic.
And so it went, through the years. Time passed, wine bottles emptied, love came and went, but my hair stayed the same. Until early last year, when for no reason, without planning it or deciding to do it, I went six weeks without a haircut. Then I went three months. Then I went six months, my hair growing longer than it had been since my very first haircut, when I was two years old.
That’s how it looks now (four months past a haircut), and just like in those baby pictures, it’s curly, unruly stuff. If I leave it alone it gets pretty crazy, curling around the top of my head like the thoughts that swirl on a first kiss. So I use hair gel–-a glop of clear, unsmelling goo with little plastic-looking bubbles in it. This odd stuff makes my hair look wet for an hour and keeps it matted down for about three hours. After that the mop starts to assert itself again and begins the poofing process that leaves me looking fairly Greg Brady by nightfall.
I like to stay in control of my hair–-a compulsion left over from my short-hair formative years, I suppose–-and it occured to me that a brush might help; I thought it might get the gel down in there, really work it down to the follicles, or whatever. This morning, I was in Walgreens, and there they were.
So now I own a hairbrush. It looks like a nice one, a black Conair about six inches long with a ribbed rubber grip and a nest of maybe 120 pins (they’re hard to count; try it–it’s a bitch) with round black-coated tips. I used it and it seemed to work okay. When I got home late this afternoon nothing had gone too haywire up there.
I can’t tell you why I decided to grow my hair longer. Like I said, there was never any moment of decision. There was some egging on from Stephane and some whispered endorsements from some friendly ladies, but I don’t think those things influenced me too much.
It’s not any kind of political statement or attempt at noncomformity–-I’ve never believed your individuality had anything to do with your hair or your clothes or the bumper stickers on your car.
I hope it’s not some premature midlife-crisis bullshit. The last thing I want is to become a Richard Ford character, a thumb-sucking baby boomer trying to reclaim his soul.
But I think it’s not surprising that this hair thing happened in 2002, a year in which I changed apartments twice, almost moved to a new city and quit my job of four years. All year I felt restless, unsettled. Craving change. Maybe what started with skipping a few haircuts led to quitting a perfectly good job.
In a few years I’ll be ready again. I’ll be bored and restless and maybe I’ll go back to clean-cut. For now, though, it’s working. My girlfriend likes the hair: she buries her hands in it and she laughs in the morning when it looks like it could be home to a family of condors. And that's what it's about: make a change--you never know what joys it'll bring.
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