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Geoff had cute legs, cute because they were hairy and tan. Mr. Achtemichuk was cute because of his mustache. Both of these men were older than me, one by just three years, the other by probably a decade. But they were both hairy, and hairiness was in. One needed only to watch Magnum PI to know that--Tom Selleck was hot.
I was not in. I was not hairy. I was too young. I could hardly wait to be hairy, though. Or maybe I could. I was pulled by two worlds, one the world of the child and one the world of the adult. That I was pulled by childhood at the time confounds me. Did I not want to be an adult? Or was there something else that kept me from embracing the coming changes in my body and in my life? Perhaps, rather, it was that I didn't want to be a teenager.
In my mind, teenagers were evil. They were rebellious. They were long-haired freaks. They took drugs. They yelled at their parents. They drove motorcycles, and if not, they at least drove recklessly. They threw trash in other people's yards. They wore Vans tennis shoes. They cursed and swore. They had vicious dogs and played raucous music. In short, they weren't fun.
These were some of my neighbors: Kirk, whose Doberman terrorized us children by trying to eat our shoes--while they were still on our feet; Kirk, whose night-time arguments with his parents could be heard coming from the windows next door, across the driveway, and into our own; Kirk, who listened to "rock" music (I couldn't tell you what most of the bands were now, though one, I remember, was the Beach Boys); Kirk, whose hair occasionally came down to his shoulders. And then the nameless brood, the rowdies at the house on the other side of us, who listened to rock music even louder than Kirk did, who cursed, who smoked weed, who had parties in our lawn late at night after we had gone to sleep and left the trash for us to pick up (these rowdies, seeing us playing baseball with a broom one day gave us a bat and thoroughly confused us by being nice, seeing as they were "evil").
This was what I was doomed to become. This is what it meant to grow up. It meant being a teenager, a person in trouble with the law, a person neighborhood adults despised. It was inevitable. Body hair meant rebel. Body hair meant trouble. Body hair meant I would no longer be liked.
At school we learned that we were not to let hair touch our collars or our ears. And if we had peach fuzz, we were to shave it off. Keeping the hair off us, apparently, was a way to stem the coming tide of rebellion. I did my best to comply.
Just before my freshman year of high school, however, my voice changed. It came as a surprise. I knew that it would come, but I did not know it had occurred, did not know it would come so quickly. One day, people would mistake me on the phone for my mom; the next day, they were mistaking me for my dad. I was a small guy, which meant that naturally I should be a tenor. But I was not. In choir that year, the director put me as one of the baritones (later still, one of the basses). My friends said that I didn't belong with these low-voiced sorts, and I went along with them, claiming that I thought I'd been miscast--but I never went to the director to contend. A group of seniors, on the sly, tried me out and put me as a second tenor, claiming they had the authority of the director to retry certain students; I was thoroughly confused. Was a tenor or a bass? I could not hear my own voice, but I could see my body. My body was a kid's body. I could not possibly have an adult voice. But adult voice is what the director had proclaimed.
A year later, I would hear that voice on tape, the first time since the "change." It was definitely the voice of a bass, and I no longer questioned my status.
But hair, hair was much longer in coming. I shaved, yes, but it didn't seem like I needed to. All that grew there was fuzz so that I looked, in my mind at least, whenever the hair did grow out, like some second-rate pervert, like what I imagined a child molester would look like (a look confirmed years later by Jesus in The Big Lebowski).
And then there was the body hair. The pubic hair seemed to arrive quickly, almost overnight, as if it has always been there. My legs also took on more hair, but slowly, so slowly that I wondered if it had stopped or if there was to be more. Unlike Geoff, my legs never got tan, in part because I only wore shorts when I absolutely had to, like at PE. And they were skinny, and no one ever accused me of being cute. In addition, unlike what seemed to me like most of the other guys, my chest did not become more full. Nor did any hair arise on the chest, though the fact that I didn't see hair on anyone else's chest in high school was not something that dawned on me. I concentrated on the differences. What I saw were wider chests, bigger nipples, bigger arms, stronger muscles. I, by comparison, was still a kid.
Hair on other parts of my body would already be falling out by the time the chest hair came in. I would have moved to Mississippi, would be in my midtwenties and already going bald. My chest still would not have filled out (indeed, I remain skinny to this day, although I now know the posture can make for much of the "chesty" effect). There, in my midtwenties, in Mississippi, I'd be sitting in the tub, looking at these mysterious new black squiggly things below my neck. Hurry up, I'd think, hurry up before the hair atop my head falls out. I wanted at least a few years to be fully developed, a few years in which I'd have the hair everywhere. But it was not to be. The last stages of puberty would not take hold until the first stages of adulthood had already become manifest. And in a way, although I didn't think so at the time, I had been granted my wish, not this latter wish of my midtwenties but the earlier one of my childhood. I had escaped having a period of body hair completeness. I had escaped teenagerdom. Instead, I had skipped right over it, one day a kid and the next an adult.
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