Back in the day, though, my proud, thick head of rich brown hair, with its gentle waves and interesting cowlicks, billowed in the wind like the banner of a triumphant army. Actually, "back in the day" is a perfectly accurate description. A day. A solitary day it did that. Most other days that banner was under assault by my father and his dark legion of tonsorial berserkers. I fought a constant, retreating, defensive action against this barrage of barbers, all of whom had the word "stylist" printed on their shop windows, which was about as textbook a definition of "irony" as I have ever seen.
My first haircut, I am told, occurred when I turned six months old. I was born bald, or nearly so, and my father waited impatiently through the months for the mousey down on my head to develop into a patch just thick enough to take the clippers to. My mother had entertained notions of letting my hair grow shoulder length, the way people used to do in generations past. I have seen pictures of my older male cousins at age 2, with long wavy hair and wearing some sort of communion dress-like thing. These were two guys who grew up to play football and enter body-building contests.
But, this was 1959, and my dad was determined his first born son would have a manly appearance (never mind that like every other 6 month old, I already looked like a retired Trappist monk), so my little baby hair was buzzed off. He got to take his son to the corner barbershop, and watch while his little nipper was propped up in the chair, swaddled with a barber's smock, and terrorized by a large, buzzing electrical shear.
That set the pace for the next 6 or 7 years. Every six months, I was taken to the barbershop, kicking and screaming, and whatever amount of hair I'd managed to accrue was forcibly taken from me. It was a regularly scheduled tonsorial mugging.
One day in my second grade year, I saw a kid with a hairstyle I'd never seen before. He had a nearly bald head, except for two inch bangs. I followed him around during recess, committing to memory every detail of his scalp, till he threatened to go to the safety patrol. When barber time came round again, I suggested this style to my father as a fair compromise--he got 95% shaved head, I got 3% hair. I left 2% for margin of error. To my utter surprise, dad agreed to it. The barber said this style was called The Princeton, but looking back on my Appalachian childhood, it's clear this style was about as Ivy League as a turkey call. Anyway, I had won an important battle. The war was still far from over, but I had established a beachhead (or rather, forehead) of hair.
But there the march of my column stalled. Over the next few years I was bogged down in the mud of either The Princeton, or the Buzz. My hair grew very fast, and unevenly for some reason, so in between haircuts my head usually looked like it had been grazed by goats. It seemed to me dad kept a team of barbers on retainer, in case a patch of hair got loose and threatened to touch my ears. Once I actually asked for a Crew Cut, also know as the Flattop, and that request was cheerfully granted. When you have been a prisoner for a long time, captivity begins to be important to you.
The Flattop was actually a move in solidarity with John Greene, my best friend during my sixth-grade year, my blood-brother in fact (we'd actually cut our thumbs and mixed blood--the Indian way, according to our Cub Scout literature--this was long before such actions would produce hysteria in both the Medical and Overprotective Mom professions). His father had forced a flattop on him, and to make him feel better I decided to get one too. Now it was sort of a greasy, bristly badge of courage, to have a stupid looking head. We were blood-brothers in arms and Brycream, instead of being two hapless boys defined by the unreasonable control exerted by their fathers-- sample from conversation with my father an hour before every hair appointment for over ten years--
Me: "But it's MY hair!"
Dad: No, it's MY hair. It's mine until you are 18. After that you wear it down to your ass for all I care, but till you turn 18--if I let you live that long-- it's MINE!"
For a short while during that same year, my father decided he could save money by cutting our hair himself--by this time my younger brothers were in the same fix as I. There was nothing I could to save them. He must have figured that he could make his sons look like retards as well as any professional, so why not save all that money? He invested in some cruel-looking barbering tools that he ordered from a catalogue that featured the Marqus de Sade on the cover.
On barbering night, he set up a stool in the basement, laid out his instruments on a tray like a surgeon, and went to work. I was the oldest of my brothers--the Abbe Ferrara of this dungeon--and was already broken. I sat passively on the stool while dad clipped and buzzed away. I took myself away, to a happy place where the sun shone on a field of long, tall curly grass, while I ran free and easy, my Jim Morrison-like hair billowing behind me in the Pepsi-scented breeze. Of course, I was snapped back to reality when the clippers went silent and my father held a hand-mirror up to my face, and an inmate from a French tropical prison stared back at me in the reflection.
My brothers, Barry and Erich, being younger and more nimble, weren't as broken and reservation-bound as I'd become. They weren't about to sit on that stool and let dad do to them what he'd just done to me. They had wild and untamed spirits. They began to run--stampede, really--around the basement, whooping and yelping, hoping that by amping up some top shelf chaos, they might be able to escape in the confusion-- but it's hard to create a really good stampede when there are only two of you, and after a minimum of effort, my dad caught Barry by the arm, and pulled him in.
Barry struggled, but was no match for our powerfully built, 6'3" father. Dad had decided Barry would never be broken to the stool as I'd been, so he pinned him between his knees, like a farmer pins a sheep he is about to shear, and went to work. Ten seconds later, he released my wriggling, bleating brother, who ran up from the basement and out the backdoor, and was soon seen peacefully grazing in the yard.
My father turned next to Erich. Cornered, my baby brother's "fight or flight" reflex kicked in. With a bellow, he charged, his little four year old hands curled into claws. Ten seconds later, he too was nibbling the rich green grasses of our backyard, his head looking as if it were covered with mange.
This terrible dance of death between my father and I finally stopped later that year. Dad had given up cutting our hair himself, when he realized that the time he spent corralling and pinning us down could better be spent doing ANYTHING else. The clippers lay dormant for a short while, till Erich discovered how fun it is to shave cats. Talk about the descending ladder of abuse!
Dad took me to a new barber one particular Saturday morning, a guy who'd opened a shop in a little strip mall just outside the Athens city limits. Looking back, that fact seems somehow ominously significant--outside. city. limits.--a no man's land, where a barber isn't bound the laws of civilized society. Where rusty scissors and chainsaw-strength clippers won't be sidelined by some weasly little safety inspector. I was doomed.
I had also been thinking about something I overheard my dad, who was a cop, say to one of his cop buddies--he said most barbers in Ohio, of a certain age, were ex-offenders. It seems the state's reform school system taught most of its juvenile delinquents the trade of barbering, to help them build a solid, respectable life on the outside. This seemed like madness to me. To put these tools in the hands of dangerous, angry men seemed like a massive failure on the part of the Ohio penal system. To let these same desperadoes ply their trade on an innocent boy who only wanted to see if his hair would curl if left to grow for a few years, seemed like negligence of the first rank.
So, I went to the chair as if I were going to the CHAIR. My father sat by the front picture window, and picked up a hunting magazine, and was lost to the eye signals I was trying to flash to him. The barber whipped the smock around me, and tied it with some serious Boston Strangler torque. I placed my hands along the arm rest, half-expecting to be strapped in. The barber sprayed down my head with water--I thought of the wet sponge they use as an electrical conductor. Then, he went to work.
When I came to, my father was frowning down at me. I was still in the barber chair, but someone had removed the smock. I thought at first I'd done something to make him mad, but then I realized he wasn't frowning at me, he was frowning at my head.
"Oh, boy, " I thought, " this is not good."
My father's frown lifted from my scalp, to the barber.
" Thanks," he said, passing over some money. " Keep the change."
By my dad's expression, I knew this barber had done a particularly horrific job on my scalp. I also knew my dad had just tipped him for it. This was just one of many of life's nuances that puzzled me about the grownup world. I was afraid to look in the mirror, but when the barber spun me around in the chair, I was suddenly confronted with a visage that, years later, I would recognize as "middle-stage radiation therapy."
Dad said nothing as we left the barber shop. I wasn't able to. We sat in the front seat of the car in silence for a while, and then he seemed to make a decision. We sped to the exit lane of the parking lot, but instead of turning left toward home, dad gunned the car across the street, into the parking lot of a little private airport. This was one of those airports that had a pretty small runway, designed for Piper Cubs and planes like that. I believe there was a little flight-training academy in residence. It was an odd place for a landing strip, it seemed to me--one missed approach, and you were landing on the Ohio University campus green.
But dad ushered me into the office at a pretty fast clip, as if we were late for something. He spoke to a man he seemed to know pretty well, and they laughed a bit (I was sure I was the subject of that laughter), and then the guy called me over and had me stand on a large cargo scale. Then he weighed dad. Then some money passed between dad and the guy, and before I could say " I am not an animal!" I was strapped into the backseat of a little four-seater plane, and dad next to me. The man, who was a pilot, or least I hoped so, climbed in front at the controls, started the engine, began to taxi down the runway, and that's how I got to have my first airplane ride.
The man yelled back for us to keep swallowing, that our ears were about to pop, and swallowing would help ease the pain. It didn't. Or maybe I didn't follow the proper swallowing procedures, but either way it hurt like hell for a little while. Then it subsided, and as we leveled off, I realized that hideous as I looked right then, I could very well be the coolest kid in Athens County. At least I was higher than any kid in the county, if you didn't count the hippies on campus.
We took a long lazy flight all over the county. My dad was grinning--he'd always been interested in planes, and as a kid had cut out all sorts of pictures of aircraft and pasted them into a scrapbook. He joined a Civil Air Patrol summer camp as a teen ager, and got to fly around in small military planes for a few months. He'd hoped to be an Air Force pilot in Viet Nam, till I came along and ruined his life's dreams. He pointed out various Athens landmarks to me, and for a while we traced above the brown ribbon of the Hocking River, and passed directly over our house, where I fancied I could see my brothers grazing in the yard.
Then we cruised back to the airstrip, landed, and we both shook the pilot's hand as we stood beside the plane, then got in our car and headed home. After a few minutes in which nothing at all was said, dad finally cleared his throat.
"You...uh... don't have to tell the other kids about this, you know. This can just be our thing. They don't need to know."
And I agreed to keep it as just our secret. This was to be, as he said, "our thing." Two guys, two pals, slipping "the surly bonds of earth" together.
When we got home, I immediately ran in the house and told everybody. The outcry of jealousy was exactly what I was hoping for, the mad, clammering rush of my five siblings to dad's side was as good a feeling as I'd ever experienced. In the week that followed, all five got to have their turn circumnavigating the county from the clouds, but for that moment, I was special. I was first. And it was still, even though I ratted dad out as soon as possible, "our thing." The difference was, of course, my brothers and sisters all landed looking the same as ever. Only I landed still looking like a victim of a grievous head wound.
In the years afterward, dad relented on the hair thing, so much so that by high school I had shoulder-length hair for a short while. But it wasn't for me, ultimately. I began to schedule haircuts on my own volition-- but to this day something in me tightens when I meet a barber. I look for jailhouse tats, for a certain Sweeney Todd glint to the eye. I move around a lot, never settling on one barber for too long. Maybe someday, I'll come across a barbershop with a little airstrip across the street, and if I do, I will let the barber do his worst to the dwindling stock of hair I have left, and maybe afterward, I will reward myself with a nice little flight over the Athens county of my baldheaded childhood.
