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Volume XIX, Number 4, the newspaper reads, even though it is actually only number 3 for the year. Somehow, the school newspaper from two years ago got rounded up into the same volume. The newspaper two years ago was the first in about five; the year that I joined the staff, we got out three; the next year, we would publish five. The year after I graduated, there would be one. And then the year after that, the paper would take off, published, once again, for the first time in decades, regularly, twice a month or once a month or something like that, but I was gone and didn't care.
May 12, 1987, I was a junior in high school. May 12, 1987's newspaper would feature within its pages, a piece by me in the "Fiction Corner" called "A Shave to Close." I read it now embarrassed by it--by its overuse of "then" and by its overwriting in general, and by the title, with its misspelled "to" that I do not think was intentional. And I am surprised, also, that our faculty supervisor did not catch the error, since in part it was the perfectionist tendencies of the faculty that kept the newspaper from coming out regularly, lest it come out riddled with errors (and it would have).
"A Shave to Close" opens with this line: "Bill dipped his hands into the wash basin and then brought them to his face." I won't quote the entirety (a short short story, indeed--maybe a thousand words) lest I bore you (interested readers can check it out here), but the gist of the story is this: Some kid, after washing his face, discovers two little hairs on his upper lip and takes them off with a razor he finds in the medicine cabinet, in the process nicking himself. The nick, he believes, proves his manhood and will make him a popular kid at school that day.
This was not my own experience. I remember, even at the time that I wrote it, how much of this piece was merely my imagination. My shaving did not begin in joy. My shaving did not start in pride at growing older, at becoming a man. My shaved face began in fear.
If you were a guy at my school, hair was evil. It was not to touch your collar. It was not to touch your ears. It was not to adorn your face--not even peach fuzz. I examined myself in the mirror, worrying that I would be sent home. Had I let my hair get too long? Did I need another haircut? Will the teachers notice that hair actually touches my ears today? If I button the top button of my shirt, my hair touches the collar but not if I don't. Does this matter? What constitutes a touch? What constitutes fuzz?
My fears had resulted in a slight change in hairstyle around the time I started at the school in fifth grade. As a kid, I had combed my hair down everywhere. But this meant that hair reached my hair relatively quickly after a cut, and this meant more cuts. A neat trick could prevent me from having to get a haircut quite as soon: I could comb the hair on the sides of my head back. In this way, the hair could grow much longer but never touch the ears.
Just as my fears had caused me to make a minor adjustment to hairstyle, so too my fears resulted in my first shave. Like Bill, it would come using the razor in the medicine cabinet (my dad's). Like Bill it would come after examining my face. But unlike Bill there would not be any distinct hairs. There would be merely this fuzz, this fuzz that in fact seemed to encompass every part of my body--my arms, my hands, my legs. Wasn't fuzz natural? How could you rid yourself of fuzz? And how long after shaving the fuzz off could you really go before the fuzz came back?
This was the manner in which I began shaving. It was rare, maybe once every few months, later every few weeks. It was accompanied by guilt. I was not a man. I was not old enough to shave. I was not even trying to be a man--it was the school that was forcing me to pretend to be older than I really was. I was just a kid with some fuzz.
I do not know when this shaving commenced. I know only that the fear accompanied me for the first several years that I shaved.
And I do not know when my parents bought me the electric razor. I remember it, the gift, as being around one of my birthdays. It came in a faux red-leather case. Not even my dad had an electric razor--his facial hair too tough for such a thing. My reaction? "Thanks," in a half-hearted voice. "I don't need this. I'm too young." I was just a kid. I didn't need to shave. "But you will need it," my parents said.
And in a sense, I was also relieved by the electric razor. I was relieved because now there was no more denying that I could shave, that I would shave from time to time. And I did. It might have been weekly to start, but as the years went by, it become daily.
Soon after high school, one of the Mike friends would grow a beard. He would grow it, if I remember correctly, during his hike in the Appalachians one spring and early summer. He would return a mountain man. He claimed that it helped him buy alcohol, although he was never, at least around me, the type to want to drink alcohol at a pre-twenty-one-year-old age; many years later, he would give me other reasons for the beard that he would shave off in his thirties, never to be worn again. Unlike me--a person who did not embrace manhood, who in fact had tried to do to put it off as long as possible, who had tried to deny it--Mike had been trying to be a man.
I would continue to shave. I did not want to be older. I did not want to have a beard. If I tried, I'd likely look foolish, some half sparse droppings along my chin. The electric razor would last me for at least a decade, into years following graduate school. And then parts of its screen would begin to fall off, and it would pinch my chin and burn. And replacing it, as I discovered in shopping for a new one, would be more expensive than I would have imagined. By then, I was carrying razors of my own on any trips I took, an electric shaver bag too cumbersome for my light packing, and I resolved to use razors full time.
I shave every morning now. I barely think about it. It comes right after brushing my teeth, which is right after I bathe and wash my hair. I am told I look older when I don't shave. Like I said, I shave every morning.
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