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As a kid, I liked facial hair. It intrigued me. Perhaps, in part, this was because my father never had it, not that he couldn't. Sitting on his lap on our yellow rocker, I would rub my hand against his scruffy chin. I probably asked him a few times why he never grew a beard. I don't know whether he ever answered, but the reason was my mom. She didn't like facial hair.
While we were growing up, my mother babysat for a living. For a few years, she took care of a couple of kids from eight houses down the block, adopted brothers--David and Johnny. Johnny was two and had deformed hands that were perennially being surgically altered, fingers created out of stubs: His real mom had been on drugs, and her uterus was weak, and Johnny had managed to punch his way through it. That was the story, at least. He cried for all of the first day that he was at our house. David was about six and "normal." I liked David, and I came to like Johnny. They were fun kids.
One day, David asked his father to grow a beard, and his father complied. David told me about it while we were playing in the back yard. There were, in those days, usually six to ten kids in the back yard, after school, before parents came to take their children home, the same kids we spent the summers with. I was about four years older than David, which in kid years was a lot. I was knowledgeable about the world. "It will take a while for him to grow a beard," I said. When his father came to pick them up that day, there was already a beard on his face. I was amazed. One day. All that growth. Perhaps I had been wrong about this beard thing.
My friend Mike grew a beard while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, a year after we graduated from high school. The beard never came off after that--or came off only once or twice. The reasons he kept the beard varied. I didn't really like it, but I never said anything. The choice, after all, was his.
I grew no such thing. This did not mean that I didn't want to try. I was curious to know what I'd look like with a mustache or a beard. I was curious to know what I would look like blond. A shaving cream beard never gave a realistic sense of what it would actually be. And cutting out strips of yellow paper to paste over my hair in a photograph didn't either.
Growing a beard was not, as it had been for David's father, however, a one- or two-day affair with me. And this was the problem. I did not want to experiment on the job, and I did not want to look scruffy for church, so a long weekend never helped. At most, I could get a day's growth, and then it was time to shave.
I had attempted a mustache around 2000 for a themed costume party that my friend Eddie gave, but I had given up after a week, nothing but deep peach fuzz covering my upper lip, making me look like some sort of creep. My friend Claudia's urging of me to take it off (though she had earlier encouraged me) spoke more loudly than any other friends' encouragement to give the mustache time.
Now, however, I had a new job, and I was living in a new place. In this job, I had a full week off each winter at Christmas time, and this year, there was no church service dead in the middle. Now was my chance--a full week without shaving--and I took it.
The growth started in much the same manner as it had in attempts past. By the third day, I was greatly tempted just to shave off what little had grown in. By the sixth day, I was even more tempted. A full week had passed, and I would have to see people I knew at church the next day, and I would be scruffy and ill kempt. But I didn't shave. Only one person commented on it, that I remember, at church that day. "Forgot to shave this morning or are you trying to grow something?" she asked. "Grow something," I said.
By Monday, a day before I had to return to work, the beard had grown in significantly. To my disappointment, the beard was a blondish red, quite different from my brown hair, and thus odd in comparison and harder to see than something darker would have been. Still, to my eyes, the beard looked fairly nice, better than I would have expected. I had done it, grown a beard, seen what it was like. I could shave it off now. Such seemed like a good idea. I was, after all, bound to run in to people I knew that night.
I kept it, though. All that work for nothing. That didn't seem right. I would let some folks see me with it, and then I would shave it off. That night, when I showed up at a concert, most of my friends commented on it, and the comments were largely positive. In fact, they were so positive that I opted to keep the beard, as I was told I should.
I returned to work with it. Some there commented on it as well--most really seemed to like it. Still, I felt awkward, like I was playing a part that was not me, like I was a little boy pretending to be a man. When my boss asked me, "Are you trying to grow a beard?" I said yes. The fact that she'd said "trying" confirmed what I felt--that it wasn't real, that I couldn't really grow such a thing, that I couldn't really be a man. When my student employee noted that I'd grown a beard, my response was a less-certain "sort of."
But the beard stayed, and I let it grow in more heavily. It stayed, in fact, through most of May. I trimmed it regularly, even clipped it down to near nothing at the same time I clipped my hair to an equally short length. All the while, I felt like a fake.
And beyond that, having a beard was annoying. I found my fingers refusing to stay away from it so that I was a perennial chin rubber. I found drinks escaping the sides of my mouth to reside in the hair--or worse, food, especially semisolid food like yogurt. I would wipe or lick the liquid, the food, away, but the hair where the filth had been would remain drier, more stubborn, than the rest of the hair, like a day-old spot on a shirt. Or my tongue would venture outside my mouth, and hair would be there to greet it. Even when stroking the hair, I noticed it was more like wire than the smooth hair at the top of one's head. This hair seemed out of place. About the only thing that was nice about the beard was that it kept my throat warm. I didn't wear a scarf all that winter.
But winter subsided, and summer was fast approaching. I'd started running again, an activity that restarts each spring. And I was sweating, and that sweat was dropping into my beard. Soon, the humidity would be here, and I would sweating all day, anytime I wasn't in the air-conditioned confines of work. The prospect of a beard in such weather, of perspiration seeping out from underneath my skin to sit in the hair on my chin had no appeal. I warned everyone that it would come off Memorial Day weekend, and that weekend, for the first time in months, I shaved.
It was more difficult than I would have expected. I had to clip the hair first, but clipped hair is, in fact, still quite long, even on the clipper's closest setting. A new razor took off swaths of centimeter-long hair--and shaving that hair hurt like I was pulling it--and still there was stubble beneath. I had to shave twice.
There were few comments when the beard came off. I suppose my warning was a way to keep people from being surprised, a way to avoid feeling like a fake all over again, for ridding myself of the hair that had come to belong, like I was pretending to be a little boy instead of a man.
And then there were the other friends, the friends who had said nothing to the beard when it had grown in. Now, it was these friends who commented. They liked me better without the beard. They thought I looked younger. They had kept silent for the five months during which I had gone hairy. They had bided their time. They had let me try something I hadn't tried before, and they had not tried to put a stop to it with their opinion. I liked that. I respected it.
The next winter--although originally, when the beard first came off, I thought I would--I didn't grow the beard back. It was a nuisance. And it made me look older, and I didn't want any help with that.
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