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I acquired a home computer for the first time in September 1999. I remember the month and year because in those early years of home computing I kept statistics on how many e-mails I received and sent, and even though those stats are long gone in a computer crash, I remember the dates well because of how many times I reviewed the statistics during the years in which I kept them. The statistics were a manner of giving shape to my life, seeing where improvements had been made and where more improvements were to come. Indeed, the number of e-mails rose, the number of phone calls also, but the rise in calls and e-mails did nothing for improvement in the thing I really cared about. My phone calls, broken down by category, still had 0 under calls to/from my girlfriend. And it seemed like the more I wrote and called, the more friends I made and kept, the more difficult it would be to have time to fit a girlfriend's calls or letters among them.
These years I spent in Texas, around the turn of the millennium, were also hair years, for not only was I trying to improve myself in terms of communication, I was trying to improve myself in terms of looks. I had always been a skinny guy, so worrying about gaining weight was not an issue, at least, I figured, until I was thirty-five--in fact, I could have used some more weight, but weightlifting never did me much good, and I was unwilling to slap down the dollars necessary for the high-protein diet that was supposedly my way to muscle mass growth. And so I lifted weights, but to no avail. More often than that, however (for I hated lifting weights), I ran. I ran because I wanted any girlfriend I had to put forth effort to stay in shape, and I felt that I couldn't well expect that of her if I wasn't doing the same, even though I could not have gained weight were I to have strapped myself to my bed and eaten Oreos from waking till sleeping each day. And I ran, eventually, because I didn't have a girlfriend, and because running was a way to get my mind off that, a way to get "high," to feel better about myself even though I had no reason to.
Hair was another means toward the change necessary for such a girl, but such change was hard to come by. For a few years, I thought about dying it, but I never dared. I thought of growing facial hair, but I dared only once and gave up very soon into the process, ashamed of what my face had produced.
Doing anything substantial to change my hair style was difficult because I was going bald. Or perhaps, I was already bald. The process had started in my early twenties, with a receding hairline, and had kept on going. It was slow enough that I could pretend that I still had hair, that the baldness wasn't really there. Even today, there is hair on the top of my head, but not enough to cover it.
I was in luck, however. Bald was apparently coming into fashion--or at least shaved heads were coming into fashion. And shaving my head was something I thought about and thought about some more and never dared. Or dared, finally, only in increments, my instructions to the barber each time including the command to go shorter, shorter yet, shorter than before.
Somewhere in here my friend Claudia dropped by my apartment and shared part of a meal with me--or something like that. Guests at my apartment were not frequent and never have been. More often, I ended up at hers. I have always been somewhat wary of visitors, as if a trip to my apartment would provide that person with too much of a glimpse into myself and that that glimpse would prove how unworthy I am of that person's companionship, as if, in my apartment being found wanting, so would I. (Paradoxically, while uncomfortable, I am flattered by such visits--especially surprise ones.) But Claudia, as I recall, had invited herself, perhaps scared of the rapist that was at that time terrorizing her neighborhood, and that night she ate of my spaghetti and looked through my scrapbooks and photo albums (for I didn't have a TV with which to entertain her). She read some of the decade-old poems in the albums, and I was embarrassed by them, by the longings that they revealed, and had no good answer as to why I kept such poems in the albums if I preferred folks not read them other than that few ever visited me and fewer yet ever looked at the albums and once an item was in the album it felt wrong, simply wrong, to take it out. So I evaded her questions and probably blushed but mostly refused to talk.
One photo, however, that Claudia came across, done for the high school newspaper but never used, me, in the white button-down Oxford shirt that was our uniform, my wavy hair swooping down onto my brown, Claudia gushed over. I was so cute, so hot, so whatever in high school. Was I and I hadn't been aware of it? I had had hair then. I had had hair then, and I had been hot or cute or whatever, and I had never taken advantage of it.
Something needed to change, and it needed to change now. I had been cute in high school, and now I was not. One day, not too many decades, hence, I would be even older and even less cute, and it was time to take action, as I had not then.
Sometime also in here I purchased new glasses. I had thought of going for contacts, but cheap me won out again, as well as practical me, the me that hates the thought of sticking anything in my eyes. Still, the frames I chose, more than twice the price of the cheapest frames in the store, were ones that others had recommended to me: thin frames, light and silver, so that they could be barely seen. They were what was hip at the time. (Now, years later, in another town, the thick frames are what are cool, and I am, once again, one of the unhip. But somehow, it doesn't matter--I still like the glasses.)
And so, with new glasses across the bridge of my nose and knowledge that I had once been cute (at least in one high-school photo), I walked into the barber's for the last time. I did not know, at the time, that it would be the last visit, but I had an inkling. For one thing, the price of a haircut had gone up--again--to thirteen dollars. Thirteen dollars for a simple business cut. It seemed unreasonable.
For another thing, I was going to go shorter, shorter yet. I wouldn't go shaved. I wouldn't dare. But I was going to go short. I was going to go fingertip-length short--truly fingertip-length short. I told the barber how I wanted it, and she gave it to me. But it wasn't short enough. Always, before, I'd thought the barber knew what she was doing when she stopped, but I saw now that it was merely fear. There's no undoing a job that's gone too far. "Shorter," I said. And she went shorter, but still not short enough. "Shorter," I said again, and she went shorter yet.
She spun me around in the chair a last time. It was too short. I saw that now. I'd told her to keep going, but I should have stopped at the last round. I paid my money, and I left. I looked at my hair in the car. I felt it against my hand. It was a crew cut, essentially--all clippers. It was too short.
Or was it? New glasses on my face, new cut on my head, the women at work didn't exactly swoon, but they said the new look was great. Indeed, the shorter hair wouldn't have worked with the old black-rimmed giant glasses, but it worked great with these. I was like something out a German art-house film. I wasn't young, with swooping strands of blondness over my brow, but I couldn't be that anymore. I was halfway bald, and I wasn't going to fool anyone trying to pose as a surfer. But I could be the German art-house guy. I could be smart and sophisticated and, as my friend Derek would years later describe the cut, "efficient" (Derek was one who preferred the mad professor look for me--wisps of hair crashing down around my bald head).
There was another benefit to the new cut: no more barbers. Sitting in my car that evening, I had felt a bit gypped. The cut was so short, it could have been done by myself with some clippers. One didn't need to pay thirteen dollars for this. Within a few months, confident in my new do, I went to K-mart and bought some clippers for nine bucks. Nine bucks, less than a haircut. I've had the clippers ever since and have never again paid for a cut.
But I've also never completely shaved my head. I don't particularly like being bald. One's head is cold in the winter and more prone to sunburn in the summer. To take off what is left seems a needless nuisance. In addition, given my small stature, I've feared that such a look would, rather than making me appear smart and grandiose, make me appear as if I had just endured three weeks of chemo.
The thing about the shorter cut, the clippered cut, that I soon realized afterward, is that it makes what little hair is left seem like a statement. I might be "bald," but with so little hair anywhere else on my head, those little hairs at the top seem more profound, heavier. If I am still balding rather than definitively bald, it is at least in part because my haircut makes it seem so. And in the end, that is what a flattering haircut is supposed to do: put a few more hairs on our head, take away a few grays, make us young again.
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