YOU know you got a bad haircut when everybody asks if you got a haircut. You know you got a really bad haircut when they ask, "Did you get a haircut or are you undergoing chemotherapy?" You know you got a godawful haircut when people glance at your head, avert their eyes and burst out laughing as soon as they think you're out of earshot. Why barbers manage
to stay in businessI got such a haircut this week. Actually, I gave myself such a haircut. This is the good story behind a bad haircut.
It started a long time ago with my disdain for the way people fuss over their hair. I swore that if my hair ever started thinning, I'd just cut it all off. I said it with the confidence that my dad died with a full head of dark hair. I didn't factor in the cue balls on Mom's side of the family.
But I was good to my word. As my hair thinned I cut it shorter and shorter until the barber was down to the 3/8-inch attachment on the buzz cutter. I got tired of paying $16 for a buzz cut so I got my own buzzer and started doing it myself.
Which brings me to Wednesday morning. I was on my way out the door to work at 3:45 a.m. when I glanced in the mirror and noticed a little clump of hair longer than the rest. I compulsively pulled out the buzz cutter to even it out.
Still half asleep, I didn't see that the 3/8-inch attachment wasn't on the buzzer. I ran the naked blades through my hair and cut a wide bald swath across my scalp. I stared in horror. I panicked. I raced through my options.
I could leave it alone and hope nobody would notice. Fat chance. I could say some !%&@$# doctor did it for some #$@&%! medical test. Not credible. Nobody would believe a doctor could cut anything that straight.
I could wear a hat until it grew back. Hmm. I wear my hair short and it wouldn't take long to grow out. I could blame the cold office air conditioning for the hat. I pulled out my schedule to see if I had anything where I couldn't get away with a hat. Rats. Lunch with the UH brass at the College Hill mansion. Not a place for baseball caps.
Desperately out of ideas and late for work, I woke up my poor wife Maggie for advice. She graciously got out of bed to assess the situation and limited her amusement to a few quiet chuckles, saving the riotous laughter for when she got home from work that night.
"I don't see where you have any choice but to shave it all down to the length of the patch you cut," she said. I took a deep breath and she helped me hack it into an Uncle Fester look.
I survived the ridicule only because I've had practice living with even dumber things I've done to my hair.
The dumbest was when my daughter Treena was a teen-ager dying her hair a different outrageous color every week. I tried reverse psychology. If I did it, I figured she wouldn't want to do it anymore.
SO I took her new dye - Halloween Black - and applied it to my hair. I was shocked how black Halloween Black could be. Worse, the stuff also dyed the peach fuzz on my ears jet black, making me look like a fat Eddie Munster doing an Elvis impersonation.
I spent half the night bleaching my hair and ears - turning them an unnatural yellow - and then re-coloring with brown dye. My hair was so offended by the insult that it refused to hold the brown and ended up an orangy blond.
And that's why I was able to take my latest hair disaster in stride. But please, Mother Nature, I'm no longer worthy of hair. Add me to the family cue ball collection already.
