My mother\u2019s habit of showing strangers my penis probably ought to have raised more eyebrows than it did. In her purse, she kept a photo of me as a toddler in one of those knee-high plastic swimming pools you could find in the backyard of every other suburban ranch house back in the seventies. I was naked in that picture.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust look at his hair!\u201d she\u2019d exclaim, whipping out the photo.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s what people looked at first. She was still telling this story when I was in college. Sometime during my freshman year, after she started showing the picture to my friends, I stole it and threw it away. She sulked for a week. I let her go on thinking she\u2019d lost it.<\/p>\n
My adventures in involuntary exhibitionism actually started much earlier. Beaming like a model from the days of radium toothpaste, Mom would say, \u201cWhen you were a baby, strangers would come up to me in the grocery store and say \u2018What a beautiful little girl!\u2019 It was your hair. All those blond curls. They\u2019d say you were too pretty to be a boy. So you know what I\u2019d do? I\u2019d pull down your diaper and show them your little dingaling!\u201d If you looked closely enough, you could almost see the spirals in her eyes.<\/p>\n
Old ladies would exclaim, \u201cI just love his Shirley Temple curls!\u201d in supermarkets and other public places before grabbing a handful of my irresistible golden corkscrews as my mother looked on, ecstatic. It\u2019s hard to pull away from squealing crones when you\u2019re like four and they\u2019ve got you by the hair. I might have been slapped a few times for trying. Don\u2019t be rude, I was told. It\u2019s a compliment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere did you get that hair?\u201d the ladies would ask, still clutching.<\/p>\n
Someone taught me to reply, \u201cFrom Granny\u2019s wig.\u201d Shrieking with laughter, my assailants would sometimes let go of me and sometimes not. They usually didn\u2019t pull too much hair out.<\/p>\n
At the barber shop, my father would say, \u201cTake a little off the sides\u201d after seating himself in the chair. The barber would then snip and trim and my father would get up afterward looking tidier above the ears but more or less the same. When it was my turn, I\u2019d say, \u201cTake a little off the sides\u201d too, to the amusement of all. I didn\u2019t know how to say, \u201cI don\u2019t like having big hair\u201d and \u201cKids at school make racist afro jokes\u201d and \u201cCan\u2019t you straighten it?\u201d but I wanted to.<\/p>\n
My classmates would ask where I got my hair permed. So would their parents, and strangers. The thing is, white people in eastern North Carolina in the seventies all looked more or less alike. I stood out. People assumed I must have wanted a big mop of hair like that\u2014it couldn\u2019t be natural. I must have begged my parents to take me to a salon. I must love the attention. At that age I wasn\u2019t even sure what permanents were, other than something ladies did at the beauty shop. They\u2019d sit in chairs with those buzzing metal beehive contraptions over their heads and read magazines, and voila, curls. No, whatever a permanent was, I wanted the opposite.<\/p>\n
My parents\u2019 undiscussed battle royale over my hair went on for years because my mother craved attention. She felt stymied in other areas of her life, and my exotic gender-bending prettiness gave her something people could envy. To that end, my nimbus of curls sometimes reached stratocumulus volume and height. There seemed to be an embargo on cutting it, too, which compounded a problem: my father wanted me to look male. So did I, not that anyone asked.<\/p>\n
Having a mad tangle of blond girlycurls when you\u2019re a boy and those first telltale gay characteristics are starting to show makes things difficult fast. The bullying was fierce and relentless. When I got older, there were actual attempts on my life, but it was the South and this was not unexpected. In the early eighties when everyone had big feathered hair, it took me a year or two to realize I couldn\u2019t look like everyone else, no matter how much I wanted to fit in. To compensate, I focused on what I could fix. I practiced walking and not swinging my ass. I became my own speech therapist and talked into a tape recorder to suppress as much lilting gay Southernness as I could. I had the barber cut my hair short enough to make it look straight. The curls were still there, though, always lurking.<\/p>\n
My teenage rebellion took the form of eighties New Wave synthpop hair, buzzed almost to the scalp on the sides and around back, and topped with a generous dollop of peroxided ringlets. I wore dangly earrings. Purple paisley shirts and green socks. Newly embrazened by MTV\u2019s color violence, I craved agency over my extremes. The members of most English bands I liked\u2014Depeche Mode, the Thompson Twins, A Flock of Seagulls, and so on\u2014rocked whorled immensities of hair in pictures and videos. If Martin Gore could get away with it, then I was determined to, regardless of who I pissed off. Seeing me like that, older men in my life\u2014my father, my mother\u2019s boss, a couple of my teachers\u2014would sometimes hide their contempt and sometimes not. Rebelling feels great until you get bored with the consequences.<\/p>\n
Tired equally of enduring adult male disdain and maintaining the public playground attached to my scalp, I started having it cut short again. When the husband of a colleague at my college job opened a barbershop, she suggested I visit. A light bulb came on. Of course a Black barber would know what to do with tightly curled hair, would know which guard to use on the clippers, and wouldn\u2019t squeal and fawn and suggest I think twice about cutting all that gorgeousness off. Being a white Southerner, I had a certain inbred cultural propensity to overlook the obvious if race was involved. I went to that barbershop once a month until graduation.<\/p>\n
Unlike many new graduates that year, I found a job right away. Instead of looking for a new barbershop in my new city, I bought a cheap hair clipper. It cost the same as four buzz cuts. On the kind of salary that covers three weeks of modest eating and a fourth of anxiety, canned tuna, and instant noodles, I had to economize. I didn\u2019t mind the expense, though\u2014not where my hair was concerned. The 2-guard buzz got me mistaken for military now and then instead of run off empty country roads if I was on my bike and the local rednecks needed entertainment. A little bit sometimes does go a long way.<\/p>\n
Being a lifelong fan of not dying, I gave North Carolina a couple more years before departing for the safer urban north. Although DC is more conservative than other major cities, it is diverse enough to offer different models of masculinity and maleness. I had at times wondered if I might be trans. These thoughts went on for years, persisting not because I felt like a woman but\u00a0 I felt I\u2019d failed at being male. I lacked a certain swagger and ease; I had emotions and hated sports; I felt uncomfortable taking up space. There was the hair. But even if I\u2019d spent my formative years having my dick shown to strangers as proof I was male, I\u2019d never once looked down in the shower and thought, that\u2019s not who I am.<\/p>\n
It therefore made no sense at all to decide to grow my hair long, or to even consider it.<\/p>\n
It therefore became essential to try.<\/p>\n
After you accept that no one can uphold competing, contradictory gender mandates, you can do whatever you goddamn want. I was in my mid-twenties now and could shave my head again if I got tired of the attention. I\u2019d always wondered what it would be like to have long hair. Did I want to be on my deathbed someday with one extra regret? I did not.<\/p>\n
I spent the first year of this experiment shellacking an increasingly unruly fucktangle of curls as close to my skull as I could get them to go. Brave soldiers all, they wouldn\u2019t stay down. By the end of the day, my gel-coated corkscrew bangs, freed of their moorings, would be poking me in the eyes; similarly disordered tufts would flop clownlike over my ears and tickle my neck. For those last several months until my hair became long enough to tie back, I looked like I needed a trip to a dog groomer, not a barber. I almost gave up several times. I wanted to cut the whole mess off. Atavistically certain the result might be worth it, I endured.<\/p>\n
Long, my hair felt like an asset, something I had a say in. The Venezuelan I was dating liked the corkscrews and inexplicably the rest of me, and took me to Caracas por conocer la familia. My first time on the metro, a woman raced up to me and asked me to translate a letter she\u2019d gotten from a US university. Her son was enrolled there. She was worried something had happened to him. When she thrust the letter into my hands, my friend intervened. I was haltingly conversational in Spanish, not fluent enough to tell her what the letter said while every other passenger in the carriage stared. After that incident, we drove more. It wasn\u2019t the hair and yet somehow it was. I stood out. The morning we left for the airport, my friend\u2019s abuelita gave me a hug, gently grasped a lock of my hair, and said, \u201cMe amo a tu pelo.\u201d I had a supermarket flashback. She was kind, though. She didn\u2019t yank out a keepsake.<\/p>\n
My ringlet era ended with hair cascading halfway down my back in the shower. As it dried, the curls would tighten. Dry, it was shoulder-length. I\u2019d switched from a brush to a pick because I was pulling too much of it out. My mother had always insisted I wouldn\u2019t go bald. The men in her family had full heads of hair in old age. So would I. But like the economy toward the end of the late-nineties dotcom boom, my hairline was showing signs of recession. The gilded excesses could not be sustained. A few weeks before I moved to California, I cut it all off.<\/p>\n
What prompted it? A sneer from an enlisted guy at one of the bases where I\u2019d been sent for a work assignment? I could handle that. Being taken for a very tall woman at Home Depot one afternoon? That was funny, not catastrophic. No, the reason was rather mundane: I\u2019m terrible at mornings, utterly useless. If I could shave five or ten minutes off my getting-ready routine, I\u2019d still be late for everything but maybe not as much.<\/p>\n
I sat on the floor to do it. Kitchen shears first, then the new clipper I\u2019d bought for the occasion. I cut a big wodge out of my bangs so there\u2019d be no turning back. The feel of the blades biting through the hair made me thrum with a subtle electric glee. It took half an hour to chop enough off for the clipper to work. I could have done it faster but didn\u2019t want to slip and gouge out an eye.<\/p>\n
The ladies at work were appalled the next day. There were gasps and a couple of \u201cHow could you?\u201ds. A clucking of tongues, a shaking of heads. One took greater umbrage and demanded to know why I hadn\u2019t donated the hair to a cancer charity.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can do that?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey make wigs with it for chemo patients,\u201d she said, livid. \u201cHair like that\u2026 you don\u2019t still have it, do you?\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019d thrown it away and taken the trash out, good riddance. However worthwhile the cause, I wasn\u2019t going to go dumpster-diving to retrieve it. I felt as if I\u2019d been accused of stealing pain meds from a dying person\u2019s bedside table. My colleague glared at me for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n
I finally stopped buzzing my hair a decade later. My then-partner and I spent Christmas in Seoul that year. I forgot to put the clipper in my suitcase. Our second morning there, I had a \u201cfuck it\u201d moment in the shower, shaved my head, and decided I liked the dome look. As a kid I was promised I\u2019d never go bald, but my hair has receded enough to look like a convertible top stuck halfway up. If I don\u2019t shave it, that is. As an adult I now know I\u2019m autistic. Grabby, invasive attention breaks every glass figurine in my head. I refuse to grow the corkscrews out again. People don\u2019t need to see them. It\u2019s not a loss. Baldness suits me. I\u2019m the anti-Medusa. Best of all, no one pulls my pants down in the grocery store these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After you accept that no one can uphold competing, contradictory gender mandates, you can do whatever you goddamn want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":20180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","writer-marshall-moore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20181,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions\/20181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}