Two Bits

I wanted to shave my head for over three weeks by the time I finally did it in the spring of 2004. I spent twenty bucks on clipper kit and spent a Friday evening shearing away my two inch long hair in the dirty bathroom of my then one bedroom apartment in Troy, New York. In front of a small medicine cabinet’s mirror, I covered the sink and surrounding floor of cracked title with dark half circles. If I left the music on in the other room, all I heard was the constant bumblebee buzz.


Bare, cold, my head had this odd feeling being mine but being new. Identity. For the rest of the night, I took pictures and ran my hand over my head to feel the bumps and contours of my skull.

My hair hadn’t been that short since I was ten years old. I used to get routine buzz cuts from the only hairdresser in the small drive-through, blink-whoops-you-missed-it town of Clintonville. From that barber’s chair seated in the middle of that mud-blue, sneeze-green building to that bathroom in Troy, my hair rarely changed. I usually settled on a style and kept it that way. When I made a radical choice, it usually came out horribly wrong. I once ended up with hair incredibly curly, thanks to an ill guided decision to get a perm (which resulted in my shock, horror, and immediate cry to cut off the brillo pad growing off my head). I kept things simple until an afternoon decision came and I decided to grow my hair long.

From sixteen until twenty-one, my hair dangled in the space below my shoulder blades and above my waist. Growing out my hair was taxing, at first. While in 2009, the unkempt look is fashionable, back when my hair was that shaggy, it was the itch I couldn’t scratch. Too long to be short but too short to be long, my hair was uncooperative. At best, my hair looked like the laurel crown of Creaser; at worst, it was a trichobezoar, a mass of hair removed from the gastrointestinal system of animals or people cursed with the mental disorder of eating their own hair. 

When it was long enough, I pulled it back and tied it in a tail and kept it that way until the very end. Occasionally, I would literally ‘let my hair down’ but pictures of me from that period show it held back by a hair tie. I wanted straight hair—I got curly. Ringlets. Bologna curls. It wasn’t side effects of the perm but my natural state. Frustration. But once you get locked into a serious hair condition, the tendency is to keep it as long as you can. It took me forever to get to the spot where I had long hair. I wasn’t going to let the outcome ruin it for me.

It lasted five years. One night, when I drove up to the Elks Lodge in town on an errand for my parents, I walked into the bar section and drunken older woman shouted, “Oh, your hair is GORGEOUS. Please, let me see it.”

This happened all the time, though never to my other friends with long hair. Their hair was straight, however. And they wouldn’t take such shit, but since it was five years of this reaction, I complied. She reached out and felt it, cooing and gasping.

“And it’s all natural?” she said. “You better be careful. Jealous woman might just cut it off!” She let go of my hair and laughed.

The next day, I found a stylist who could donate my hair to Locks of Love, the foundation that fashions wigs for cancer patients. The following Monday, I went in. It was only a few snips and nearly two and a half feet of hair was held out to dangle in front of my eyes.

“No turning back!” said the stylist, as she worked my new short hair into something she thought looked good. It didn’t matter to me. She could have given me a mini-mullet or shaved a question mark in the back of my skull. It would all look the same in the mirror, now that I didn’t have that hair any more.

This wasn’t some preemptive strike against the imaginary, nonexistant jealous women and their  scissors of revenge. When the stylist asked me why I was cutting it off, I said “I’m just sick of it.” I was. I was sick of it being an object. It grew out of me but the hair was lifeless and excessive. It was some inanimate extension I had lost connection to. I had forgotten what motivated me to grow it long in the first place. Teenage rebellion the mountain town that stranded me? I doubt it.  More like a need for a fashion shift, something to partner with the black jeans and black t-shirts I had started wearing back then. I was in blue Levis when I had it cut. It took only half an hour to reassert control over that part of myself. Five years gone and given to a woman undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.

There was no single moment that triggered me shaving my head, though it was for similar reasons that I cut off my hair. By 2004, I had recently graduated college and established my first apartment, my first full time job and that sense of being ‘out on my own.’ And it all had started to suck. The job was going nowhere, paying too little and I was ending up with late rent and my utilities getting turned off and on by a quarterly basis. Things were not working out.

These actions were my attempts to signify a change, or have some kind of visible evidence that I was not the same person. If I wasn’t the same person, that meant I was doing the right thing and that I wasn’t stagnant, stuck in a rut or sticking to my comfort zone. I stayed at that poor job for three years, when I should have quit after one. I had my long hair for five but I could have ditched it after three. These are lessons to be remembered whenever I seriously consider a tattoo, start dressing in suits or wanting to buy a new phone. These are symptoms, skin deep things that are always indicative of a bigger problem.

Or poor fashion sense. Take your pick.