Bad Haircut
I was four years old and entranced by the red, white and blue peppermint stick barber shop pole when I went for my first haircut. The barber told me that all the little boys cried the first time. I was excited. It was my mother who cried. She still talks about the day she cut off my “lovely curls.” My brother tells me that pre-haircut I looked like Shirley Temple. It's been all downhill since then in the beauty queen department.
I liked going to barbers and continued to go as long as I could get away with it. There was no nonsense with these guys. It was a little unusual for them to cut a girl's hair, but they were cheaper and, as my mother had already temporarily given up on making a diamond out of a tomboy, she didn't object. My favorite part was getting my neck wrapped up in some kind of soft narrow barber's paper and the way the barber would whip the paper off, then wisk stray hairs from the back of my neck with a fat powdered brush. The men in the shop talked sports or current events over my head. There were no noxious chemical smells. I can't remember ever disliking a haircut I got from a barber.
Then the Toni years began. Toni was the brand name of a kit of chemicals used to give hair a “permanent wave.” What a horrible thing to do to a perfectly nice head of hair! What an abusive thing to do to a little girl! I may never have cried in a barber shop, but permanents were excruciating, partly due to the extended period of sitting required of this squirmy little kid, mostly because of the results. Pictures from that era show a miserable sulking put-upon face framed by a shoulder-length halo of frizz. Shudder.
I don't know whether my attitude made my mother give up her beautification project or if she realized that curled hair did not a young lady make. She turned me over to the professionals – the “beauty” professionals, that is.
We talk about how hard it is to grow up gay in a straight world, but usually we're referring to street taunts and violence. I can tell you, going to the beauty parlor was torture enough. I didn't have a gay male hairdresser who might have made the ordeal easier nor a woman with a soft touch. No, he was a married guy who knew just what my mother wanted: the taming of the baby dyke, the feminization of a baby butch.
I think “pixie” haircuts were invented for gay women and mine was as freeing as a cut could be. I wouldn't brush long hair, never got the knack of combing a tangled bird's nest. At least the pixie style was very, very short. Bangs were required to stamp me as female, and just in case anyone was still confused, the beautician left wispy tendrils – spit curls he called them – that curled forward in front of my ears. I was supposed to spend my life wetting them against my face to give myself that feminine touch.
Bull hockey. Sometimes I did wet them – to wear as Elvis-style drag king (or drag prince) sideburns. A pompadour was, sadly, impossible, so I'd sweep the wisps up under my glasses to make them disappear. I combed the bangs to the side, reaching for an ivy league style, but the trouble with feathery bangs is that they just refuse to be anything other than what they are, unless one borrows a handful of Daddy's slimy hair tonic, which this one did at every opportunity. Now that was a toxic smell I didn't mind, especially when mingled with a few drops of after shave. Old Spice smelled like the barber shop. Who knew what harm these chemical fragrances were doing to my already unhappy sinuses?
Things got no better when I left home. I'd lost my innocence with the knowledge of what I was: a lesbian. I learned to use bangs and modified spit curls as building materials for my closet. I learned that there were social penalties to pay for going to a barber rather than a beautician. Even as student uprisings, the civil rights movement and then feminism turned society ass-over-teakettle, it wasn't okay to look androgynous. I learned that the world would scar a woman who didn't toe the beauty parlor line.
I haven't noticed a barber pole for years, and I still go to places the phone book lists as beauty parlors, but the beauticians now call themselves unisex hairstylists. The terrible self-consciousness I once endured is gone. Now the only trauma left to cry over is a bad haircut.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2000
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