Hair has power.  My father knew that, which is why he shaved us skull-tight once a week, leaving him with the controlling interest.  Yet he was bald, which didn’t make sense.

Regardless, by third grade, the year I started hitting on women, he let us grow our hair out.  The power it gave me was … I have no idea.

What I do remember was that I was required to keep up with my end of the bargain–keeping it combed and neat and combed at all times–unless I wanted it shaved off again; and I couldn’t go back to that, not after making my grand entrance into the third grade classroom, hair combable and slicked back and looking groovy.

But I’ll tell you what, it was a lot of work.  And because I was a lazy boy (no other way to say it), I would comb it to perfection at night just before bed, then pull one of my mother’s old stocking hose over my head so when I woke the next morning I wouldn’t have to comb it.  Incidentally, after my parents would go to bed, I would also get dressed, shoes and all, so I wouldn’t have to dress in the morning, either.  All night, with an itchy head, I worried about my stocking cap falling off, and I was extremely uncomfortable with my Levis and shoes and long sleeve shirt on.  It took twenty minutes to turn over in bed; and when I did turn over, I had to get up immediately afterwards, worried that my stocking cap shifted a little, checking its position in the bathroom mirror.  Then, when I’d lay back down, I’d wonder again if my stocking cap had moved.  Long nights.  It reminded me when I used to wet the bed.

So I’d get up the next morning, my stocking cap would have undoubtedly shifted, and my hair would look like someone pressed an iron against my head in several places.  I’d have to wet it and re-comb it, and by the time I was done, it was more work than if I would have just gone to bed like a normal kid.  On top of that, my mother would make me take off all of my clothes because they would be all wrinkled.

“@$#% Blane!  What the hell is wrong with you?  Now I have to re-iron them and you’ll be late for school.  What the hell is wrong with you?”  I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, I’d say to myself.

It was about that time that I discovered it, the most important discovery in the 60’s–Dippity-Do setting gel, for women.  I saw the commercial, I listened to the  song, and two days later I spotted it in our bathroom medicine cabinet.  I was elated.  That morning, I unscrewed the cap, dug my whole hand into it, pulled out a gob double the size of silly putty, and worked it all through my hair.  I ran a comb through my hair, effortlessly, making a perfect part, every strand matching the one next to it.  I looked close to perfect.  The only uncomfortable part was the all the excess goop running down the back of my neck and down my back, but it dried up by the time I got to school.

The best part was yet to come.  Within an hour, my hair got hard as concrete, turning into a hair shell, a helmet.  If anyone tried messing it up, they’d probably get cut or bruised.  It got even better.  By lunch I would comb it out, leaving my hair soft, dry, and in perfect shape.  I would start out in the morning with a wet look, looking almost perfect, and my afternoon I would look even better.

When the season changed and the days started getting warmer, I discovered one of Dippity-Do’s defects.  When I started sweating, my hair would harden up again.  So when I came in for recess, half my hair started hardening (the part that got wet) while the other part stayed dry.  Since the wet spots were darker, my head looked kind of spotted.  Becky told everyone I had malaria.  Larry said it was because my head was growing.  I was a walking freak-of-nature.

Fortunately, I quickly learned that once it completely hardened again, I could just comb it out, bringing back that 100% dry look, bringing back me.

Eighth graders took PE, but we didn’t shower.

Freshmen in high school showered. Fifty years later, that seems no big deal.

But. The summer before my freshman year, I still didn’t have hair on my balls. Determination was my long suit, my key to success. I willed hair to grow on my balls. It didn’t grow. I’d seen the locker room and the shower room at the high school. It was a long walk with no cover.

That summer, if anyone had asked me what worried me–and if I’d been able to articulate–it was the fear of ridicule.

And with no more than three weeks of summer to go, I sprang ’em, I qualified for the walk.

Even now, as I write this, I sigh with a sense of relief. Because my fears were grounded. Two boys with little pink dicks and scrotums, but no hair, were laughed at and ridiculed (maybe not daily, but once would have been too much).

That year, I still resided near the bottom of the pecking order in a tough school. But nobody laughed at my dick. I remain grateful to my family tree. I don’t think will power had anything to do with it.

I didn’t eat for several years.

My mother prepared dishes that were unable to go down my throat, dishes consisting of soggy and over-cooked frozen vegetables, dishes with cream corn from a can–not even worthy of bluegill bait–and shriveled peas, dishes with roast beef so over-cooked that it would not only suck out all the saliva in your mouth like a stale chicharon, but if left in too long, would start to collapse the entire bone structure of your cranium.

My father’s over-used response was the same every time:  “Son, you don’t have to like it, you just have to eat it.”  And if you didn’t eat it, you sat there until bed time, all the while hearing your friends outside screaming and laughing and playing.  (I once responded with, “Would you eat dirt if you didn’t like it?”  That was not a good outcome.  I think he thought I was talking about his wife’s cooking, but I was really just using dirt as an example of something that doesn’t taste good to most humans.  So shoot me for trying to reason.)

My first attempt was cliché, stuffing as much into my mouth as possible, asking to be excused to use the bathroom, and then spitting it out in the toilet.  That attempt failed–not the spitting out part, but the keeping-from-being-detected part.  I got a whippin’ with a leather strap, and that was without proof.  I learned my lesson:  be smarter than the warden, and don’t get caught.

I tried everything: packing the chewed and compacted food way back into my mouth in places I didn’t know even existed; secretly keeping extra napkins with me to discard the food, bundling them up and shoving them down my underwear until she noticed inappropriate stains, hiding them in my pockets until my pants started smelling like oil & vinegar, packing them in my socks until she noticed that the stains weren’t from dirt.

Every night, before I was excused, I was required to go to the kitchen so my mother could interrogate me, followed by a full-body search, ending with her digging her finger throughout my mouth as if I were smuggling in drugs.  I even tried the dog–which actually worked for a short while–until I got lazy and forgot to wipe his mustache.  Dried tamale pie on a wired-hair mutt can be a dead giveaway to a discerning mother whose sole purpose in life was to detect any wrongdoings.

Once in a lifetime, every human is blessed with nothing less than a miracle, an end-of-the-rainbow find, if you will.  Struggling through my  refining process, almost at my wits end, I discovered a board (or shelf) under the table, running the full length.  In carpenter’s terms, a 1″ X 6″.  In my terms, a “magical” shelf, sent from heaven, letting me know that God is good, God is merciful, and the world is just.

From that point forward, it was a slam dunk.  I’d wait for everyone to leave the table, as usual, then I’d grab handfuls of whatever was on my plate, cupped it, turned it upside down and smacked it down on top of the magical board like a wad of clay.  At night, when everyone was asleep, I’d scoop the substance off the shelf and into napkins, walked out into the back alley, and slung them into the neighbor’s yard.  Even though it was always dark, I could still see my frozen vegetable and tamale pie grenade, unfolding in mid air like a parachute, the particles dropping first, then the white napkin following, as if in relief to get rid of its package.  I launched them into a different backyard every night to avoid suspicion.

My mother thought that I was eating better and/or her cooking was getting better.  The Warden thought I was maturing, owning up to my eighteen-year sentence.  But the truth was, I beat the system.

As time went by, I got lazy, and sometimes I neglected to get up in the middle of the night to throw food grenades.  Until finally I just stopped altogether.  What the hell, the shelf was as long as the table, endless.

Years later I did start eating everything on my plate and forgot about the magical shelf and how it saved my life.  Until one day.  My parents decided it was time to refinish the table.  When they took it apart they could not, for the life of them, figure out how these concrete mounds got formed under the table.  A fuzz like mold covered them, further concealing their true identity.  They brainstormed for awhile before arriving at their Aha! moment.

Until your eighteen-year sentence is up, you are never too old for an old fashion whipping.

When he was done, I had a shiny new helmet of perfectly symmetrical, meticulously groomed, "Dry Look" hair.
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