Pictures of me as a small boy show very short hair, cut in a burr, often jet black in contrast to my brother John’s blond. My mother, a harried woman with four boys, often did all our hair at once, and waited a long time between cuttings, either because of the work involved or laziness, I could never tell. I remember baths as particularly painful because she would dig her nails into my scalp in an effort, I suppose, to pull out the crud I had accumulated during the day. I’m pretty sure the conventional wisdom was to get each child to near bleeding. Later in life, when I saw the shampoo commercial that would declare, “The tingle means it’s working,” I thought, “That would be great if Mom hadn’t killed my nerve endings.”

I have no recollection of what my hair was like between the time my mother divorced and her marriage to my step-father, a letter carrier, who had grown up on a farm, went to Vietnam, and whose closest association with long hair prior to my entrance into his life was the cover of his copy of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album. However, I do not recall combing it or washing it much until about fifth or sixth grade. Like my bedwetting, my mother didn’t seem to notice the problems I might be causing myself, but only seemed to take offense at the results. How I avoided lice or ringworm is largely a mystery. I assume it was because I had no friends.

Not long after my step-father married my mother, and we moved to Irving, Texas, I learned about the concept of having a set of guys. He had a tire guy, a mechanic guy, and a hair guy, all of whom lived within walking distance of the house. After a couple of bad haircuts from my mother, he began to take me to his barber up the street. I was just about to hit that part of pre-puberty where I thought maybe washing my hair more than once or twice a month could keep some people from making fun of me. After a few times with him, he made the mistake, so he considered it, of entrusting me to go alone.

The barber knew a solid mark when he found one. My dad had sent me up there with a twenty-dollar bill for a five-dollar haircut. I brought home, I think, three dollars. The barber had talked me into a Prince Valiant style razor cut. That I strode into the house like royalty did not appease my frugal parent.

Dad was livid and stormed about the house before storming up to the barber to give him a couple of pieces of his mind. It would take years for my step-father to get over this event. On the other hand, it was the first time, and one of the few times in my life I actually liked what I looked like and felt good about my appearance.

I started carrying a comb with me. I actually washed my hair every single day, not just because I thought girls might pay more attention to me, but because I liked the way cleanliness felt.

Before my mother remarried, I could not connect  bedwetting to the mean things people would say about the way I smelled. “Piss pants” was the most painful of the appellations. My mother even called me that, usually after waking me up with a slap for soiling the sheets. She never had me change out of my underwear, and I took my baths at night, so it never occurred to me to change again. Thus, I smelled bad at school, and even a few teachers gave me grief over it until one took a moment to gently suggest that if I wet the bed, I might want to wash in the morning and change. So until the barber incident, I did not notice the link between cleanliness and how much I felt like the devil’s dung.

Until barbers came into our hair-cutting picture, my mother let the hair of my three brothers and I grow to great lengths before giving us all burr cuts, all in one torturous swoop. I suspect this happened because she was overworked, as all mothers are, and didn’t want to deal with too much. My grandparents took me a few times to barbers, but that was usually before something important, like First Communion or Second Grade. By the time I’d reached middle school, I wanted my hair long, as did a lot of kids in the seventies. Mine was straight and fairly stringy, or at least it was in my memory. I wanted long wavy hair like Barry Gibb or Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Golden Richards (the only athlete whose long hair my mother approved of).

I didn’t have my eyes open that much in the seventies (maybe because I had hair in them a lot), and from what I can gather, there were two main hairstyles for white males during this curious point of history: long and short. Sure, there were variations. Some guys had extremely straight hair (me), and some guys had wavy hair (which I coveted because girls seemed to like these guys better). There were those Caucasions who sported afros too, but it was generally agreed those guys achieved that deliberately and were living an alternative lifestyle.

Two different people decided when I needed a haircut: me and everybody else. I usually wanted a trim when the bangs got into my eyes or when the ends looked frayed and someone like a grandparent remarked that I looked unkempt. The reasons other people had for wanting my haircut were, to me, mysterious and vague.

My Aunt Barbie was a special soul who dabbled in a number of things, such as nursing. I remember after a series of idiocy at a particular hospital resulted in the death of my father that she attempted to explain, with her expertise in not being there and dumping bedpans, that the medical staff had not really made any mistakes though it was plain they had. After cutting my Uncle Bob’s hair in a soldier’s cut for several years, she was sure that not only could she cut mine, but that it was absolutely necessary.

My Uncle Bob was a real live Army man who would have been at home with the mob on January sixth. He told me several times that the only way to serve my country was to die for it in the U.S. Army. Couldn’t be some other military service and couldn’t be in any other way. If you love America, you join the Army, kill bad guys, and die in the process. This same uncle tried to convince me that the law compelled all men to serve their country in this way, and that I had no way out of it. Uncle Bob had a special way with the Constitution that was ahead of its time. I wouldn’t notice this broken line of reasoning again until after 9/11.

This is the same uncle who would, years later, use money from my grandfather to go to SMU’s Methodist seminary. He and my aunt would later divorce, and I don’t know why, but I suspect it had something to do with Jesus. Or some other woman. Or hair.

I’m fairly sure that my uncle had something to do with my Aunt Barbie deciding one day that not only did I need a haircut, but that she should be the one to give it to me. Aunt Barbie lived in a house about a quarter-mile from the place where my grandmother spent much of her childhood in Linden, Texas. I was spending a couple of weeks with my grandparents there, some of the time working “for” my grandfather failing at jobs such as digging post holes and stringing barbed wire. There were days, however, which began at my aunt and uncle’s house, sometimes because she cooked breakfast, sometimes because we were waiting on my Uncle Bob, and sometimes because there was some task that needed doing.

Since I didn’t end up, exactly, with a military cut, one might not say I should assume Bob had any influence at all. But since I did end up with what my aunt thought was some amalgamation of military and “hip” (think early Beatles if they had had their dos created not by shears, but a fork), I cannot help but think he had a hand in it.

A few weeks later, I would be sitting in a salon in Miami trying not to cry. My stepmother had taken me to where she got her hair “done,” and thought I could get a good, professional cut. The stylist (a moniker which should tell you right there I should have run away), whose name I’ve since lost, but for now will call Shithead, stated that I looked “like Frankenstein” with the cut my aunt had given me, though it had had some time to grow out of the mess and into a different mess. I was stunned as I heard chuckling behind me. I looked at my step-mother, who cocked her head at me, then turned it, owl-like, at the stylist who repeated, “Just like Frankenstein.”

Of course, they didn’t ask how I might have wanted my hair cut, and I would probably not have answered had they done so. I sat there, allowing this woman to upbraid me for allowing my aunt to so harm me. She probably had not cut the hair of too many children or teenagers, and if she had, they were most likely girls. Questions like “How could you?” and “What goes through the mind of..” were spat out of her as if she was my mother and had caught me masturbating in church.

Whatever I ended up with was apparently acceptable to all the adults involved, another sign — this being the seventies — that something was amiss. When my father saw me, he listened to the story from my step-mother and then sighed, giving me a look that said, “It’s man’s world until a woman doesn’t like what you look like.” Years later, I would gratefully learn from a feminist grandmother and a double-feminist aunt that women grow up and often live with much greater expectations about their appearance. I am forever grateful to have learned from them before I had daughters of my own. But at that moment, and for months after, I could not shake the feeling that I was the butt of jokes for something outside my control.

For years before we met and several after we were married, my wife took her hair to the same place in Farmersville, a town that once was the onion capital of Texas, but has for decades merely been a closed little community gathering together once a week to worship at the Altar of High School Football. The woman who ran the establishment trained all her daughters to cut and style hair, and so the daughters of many patrons also followed their mothers, far into adulthood, into the little building located in the downtown square.

Now people should have safe spaces to express themselves, their fears and anxieties, even if those emotions come out as passive-aggressive moralizing. I suppose Headquarters is such a place for a lot of women in the area. While females of all ages and all shades of white (I saw no other ethnicity in there) chat about the awfulness of their husbands and boyfriends, and lament the same dooms that have plagued humankind since humans learned how to be unkind, the stylists offer advice by way of left-handed compliments (“Honey, aren’t you too smart for that kind of nonsense?”) and anecdotes (“You remember what happened to Loretta’s husband, don’t you? One day he was refusing to take out the trash, and the next he was shacking up with his secretary.”)

It was probably at some point when I had not had much sleep (which means any day with a child in it) that my wife told me that she was going to have my son’s hair cut at Headquarters, and I probably consented groggily. Don’t judge me: some combination of fatigue and desire to avoid quarrels got the best of me. The boy did have something unruly on the top of his ginger scalp and even I, who believes fairly strongly that kids should be allowed to do almost anything with their hair while they still have some, was starting to think we needed to do something.

I dropped off the boy with his mother, then left to do the errands I had been assigned. When I returned, my son was in the chair looking vaguely serious, but otherwise unbothered. I was instructed to sit in the waiting room, a tiny area by the square-facing window with two chairs, a heavily varnished bench, and dozens of magazines, none of which had a target demographic I fit into.

For the next six hours (probably only twenty minutes), I listened to three stylists, two mothers (not including my wife), and some old lady in another chair who was getting a perm all engaged in the classic philosophical debate over whether men were naturally evil or just plain stupid. As they traded lines about how to best keep males in line, one of those stylists jabbed at my son’s hair with all the attention one gives to killing a shark with a knitting needle.

When it was over, I felt like I needed to ‌ counteract what he’d been exposed to, like buy him a beer. However, he was only four, and worse, didn’t have a clue he was supposed to be upset.

“He’s not going back there,” I informed my wife.

I think she asked, “Why not?” but I continued.

“I’m not having my son subjected to that male-hating crap.” I might not have said “crap.”

“What would you think if I subjected our daughters to a bunch of guys talking about how women are either bitches or whores?”

She indicated she would not like it. But her main argument was the urgency of the matter: “I had to do something with his hair. It was awful.” Awful, I would eventually learn, is code for “an emergency that occurs when I get tired of other people complaining about the state of the child’s hair.”

My wife eventually relented, but it meant making appointments for the both of us with my “guy,” and driving an hour each time to get to him. The irony is not lost on me, that I stopped going to this guy, a lifelong friend of the family, because of his misogynistic remarks that would have me trying to calm my wife on the ride home.

A couple of years ago, my children, grown and some making beautiful heads for hair to sit upon, I saw a picture of myself playing with one of my grandchildren. What stood out to me was the size of the bald spot I knew I had, but had largely pretended did not exist. For a moment it was the only thing in the picture. Then all I could hear were the comments I assumed people said when I had left the room, most loudly, “Who does he think he’s kidding?”

It’s silly, at my age, to even care what people say or think about anything regarding my appearance. I wear appropriate, but comfortable clothes instead of suits and ties. I have had a beard even then it hasn’t been in fashion and despite the Hell preparing heat of Texas summers. But at that moment, I was back in that stylist’s chair in Florida, exposed and ashamed.

The only consolation I have given myself is that I have lots of hats, not to hide the growing bare mass upon my scalp, but to keep that continent of mortality from being a distraction. I’ve realized that no matter the length or style of my hair, I am not going to look cool or attractive. The only comments about my appearance I ever see or hear are from students on their evaluations, whose expectations are so all over the map as to be useless. Forgive the elitism, but neither the student who says my earring is cool nor the one who says I’m a terrible teacher because I’m overweight are telling me anything I need to know.

All the people who made decisions about my hair have gone, except my wife, who says if I am happy, she is happy. What a kind lie. My son has grown to be a loving and tolerant young man (except toward Republicans, all of whom have close-cropped heads). I guess I could claim to have been a success in raising him. But I’ve only taken the one stand; he has pretty much done the rest.

– Michael Neal Morris