I can still hear the shout…”MAKE IT SHORT”…coming from the kitchen from my mother to the barber who was about to give me a haircut upstairs in my bedroom. I was 10 years old, home sick in bed, and I couldn’t go to the barbershop. But that didn’t stop my mother from arranging for the barber to come to the house. Afterall, my parents were having a dinner party that night, and in their opinion, I couldn’t be seen with a week-old haircut. Yes…my mother had me scheduled for weekly trips to the barbershop for a crew-cut…until I was about 11 years old, a painful ritual that clearly left its mark on me.
The barber took her command to heart, and proceeded to shave off practically all of my hair, leaving me near-bald. Needless to say, she screamed (from shock) when she came upstairs to see me, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked in the mirror.
Wearing a baseball cap was the only solution. So, I greeted the guests in my pajamas with my cap, and I went to school and wore my cap. I practically showered with that cap on. It took weeks to grow back, and a lifetime to try to forget the story…which I haven’t been able to shake.
The irony..now I like it “short, very short”. In fact, every Monday morning I shave my head with a professional barber’s razor. Maybe if Bruce Willis had been alive in the ’50’s and worn his hear the way he does, I might have liked that “cut”. It took 55 years to come around to seeing that maybe, just maybe, my mother was right, and stylish ahead of her time!
Hair. Always been a big deal to me. I accomplished hormonal lift-off at 11 and immediately shifted into hyper hair-awareness mode. I simultaneously stumbled upon my first rebel role model — James Dean. I became fascinated with him, not for his work in film — Who knew what a method actor was? — but for his bohemian, New York-based lifestyle as represented in the only fan magazine I ever owned.
Through the fan mag’s photos and a detailed bio, James Dean introduced me to my cultural mecca — Greenwich Village — and saved me from a devastating hairstyle dilemma.
Most of my comrades had begun to sport DAs, pomade-laden artifiacts that swept backwards into a stunning representation of a duck’s ass. The front of a DA featured oily ringlets of hair that dangled down the forehead, Sal Mineo-style. This baroque rendering required copious amounts of Brylcreem and frequent visits to the boys’ room to keep the entire mechanism in perfect form.
DAs worked best if you were dark-haired and Italian. I was neither. Nevertheless, I set out to cultivate my own DA.
A terrible obstacle discouraged my DA grooming attempts. I had a cowlick that wreaked havoc with the left side of my scalp, a tornado swath of untamable hair that ran from front to back. No amount of Vaseline, Brylcreem, or motor oil would tame my hair into the DA’s required contortions. But then I met my fan mag hero, James Dean. Jeez!! His hair was a mess but he still looked totally cool! And he wore glasses, just like me!
Not many of my classmates knew about James Dean. He was my secret. And if anybody cracked wise about my hair, I’d just show them this picture, tell ’em he was a movie star and walk away, secure in the authenticity of my own weirdness.
