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I was looking to change my hair. I had been out of graduate school for two years. I was twenty-nine, half of a year from thirty. I had never had a girlfriend. I had tried to date a girl at work and, after a couple of outings, had been told that we should just be friends. I had more recently tried the Internet and had managed two dates in two months. The Internet had seemed a great place for a shy guy like me, a place I had dreamed of having access to until that September I finally managed to score a home computer, but I soon learned that the kind of girl I wanted would not, apparently, be on the Internet. Both of the girls I had managed to get dates with held no attraction to me, which made me feel very awkward with them, especially after the first got angry at me for not being attracted to her. Or rather, the kind of girl I wanted might be on the Internet (I met such women, usually through others, their Internet-gained boyfriend already at their sides), but she would not have any more interest on me there as anywhere else. And so, winter had arrived, and some unpleasant dating encounters behind me, I had once again given up--at least online.
I needed a new image. This was the problem, I decided. I was losing hair. I had glasses. I was skinny. I was a nerd. No girl would ever take an interest.
I began to run, but that did little to change my physique. Neither did weights, though admittedly I never did manage to become truly devoted to them. I seemed to have little control over my weight, and fears that automatic weight gain would take place come my thirtieth or thirty-fifth birthday kept me from wanting to put on extra weight at this point in my life.
But I could change my hair. I worked in an office surrounded by women, and it was in their hair that the most frequent changes in appearance occurred. The coworker I had gone out with a few times had gone from plain to gorgeous, from country to sophisticated, with a touch of the scissors, with a shift from long hair to short. I didn't have such long hair that I could reduce to something shorter, but I did have brown hair that had always been brown. A change in color seemed potentially fruitful.
In the grocery store, I examined the hair coloring. I would not be a redhead. I had never liked them. But a blond, yes, a blond might do me well. I thought of movie-star blonds. I thought of hunks. I thought of myself. Blond was right.
But I dare not.
As much as a change appealed, the possible reaction among those I knew did not. If the dye did not work out correctly, I would look even uglier than before. If it did work well, I would thereafter have to dye and dye and dye some more, all of which involved money I could spend more profitably on something else.
Winter was also time for the second-annual white trash party, a travesty put together by my friend and coworker Eddie. The year before I had simply dressed in torn jeans and an old tee shirt and watched others in their rollers and bathrobes, their muscle shirts and fake mullets, stride around pretending to be something just a little different from their usual selves. This year, however, I decided to be more of a participant, to find a costume people would remember. I would be Macho Charo. This is what I told others at work. Most of them didn't know what that was, and I wasn't entirely sure either.
But one thing Macho Charo certainly was was a change or an excuse to change. In preparation for my costume, I went without a haircut for a month longer, mostly to disappointing effect (my hair was still too short to do much with). And I went without a shave.
I returned to the grocery store. I looked at blond hair coloring. I needed light hair to use it. I did not, I thought, have light-enough hair. I would need to apply a round of bleach first. Another fifteen dollars beyond the dye. I looked at the bleach. Warning: Overapplication could burn, could cause hair to fall out, other things. The bleach seemed too full of uncertainties, too dangerous. All for a one-night costume. I opted out.
After a week of not shaving my upper lip, my mustache had not grown in. Instead, a light peach fuzz grew across my lip, and as it got thicker, I looked more and more like the child molester played by John Torturro in The Big Lebowski. I wondered if others thought the same. And in that opinion, I was confirmed. My friend Claudia, who had encouraged me to grow facial hair long ago, insisted I take it off. I ignored those who encouraged me to let it grow, to see what it would truly look like--these words, meant to be encouraging, were not: "It looks awful, but maybe if it gets long enough it won't." I could only imagine. A few days before the party, I shaved. I would go to the party with more peach fuzz, but I would not go to work looking like pervert.
My hair still brown, my mustache nonexistent, Macho Charo became merely a feather-boa-clad, ukulele-playing dispenser of Hershey's chocolate Kisses in all white, with a sleeveless button-down white shirt. He tried to be macho, but he was not. He was some oddly confused man, some genderless freak. And he was a hit. A tremendous joke.
"How do you have such confidence?" my coworker and friend Kathryn asked me in regard to the getup, the act.
I told her I didn't know. She looked skeptical, but it was the truth. It wasn't confidence. I was dispensing chocolate kisses. I was playing love songs on my ukulele. I was doing everything I could to be noticed, and I had been noticed. But while I was drawing laughs, I was not drawing a single woman.
It was not confidence. It was ignorance.
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