I'm Ready For My Close-up

esterday, I got a wild hair and got a psycho-killer haircut.

The time between my haircuts varies according to some kind of hippy zodiac alignment of the planets I remain blissfully unaware of. I don’t have a regular appointment. I don’t have a barber. I go to the Hair Cuttery over on Milwaukee where the person cutting my hair is a stout Polish woman who looks like she might milk a cow by throwing it over her shoulder so it doesn’t interfere with her plowing. Somehow she always manages to make me look less like Elton John than Steven King and for that I am marginally grateful.

Truly, I think the stimulus for scobbing my noggin is when my bangs start stabbing me in the eyes. Then I know it’s time.

And I always struggle there for a second to explain to Ms. Donstrykwytshdnski that I want a cut that is relatively corporate yet carries a sheen of the insouciant bohemian so I can go to a office meeting in a suit yet still stand out clearly as the writer in the room to which she responds “So, shorter, djah?”

In between these visits to the Balkan Barbers my hair grows like some kind of nuclear infused roadside weed, like Kudzu, until it’s grown into an exact replica of the contour of my skull and I have to spend an inordinate and insufferable three to four minutes every time I want to go somewhere applying various pomades and chemical mudpacks to make it stay in the cool pre-mullet halcyon day style I am accustomed to. This sometimes amounts to—brace yourselves—work, to which I am allergic.

So on the occasion, like once every ten years, I get a wild hair up my blog and get a haircut like I have now, a cross between a mental patient and a 1950s history teacher. Give me a short sleeved white shirt and a skinny black tie and
I’m a street preacher. Jesus loafs you, man.

And my kids have given no end of merciless hell for it. My daughter just flat out called me ugly and my son said it makes my gay glasses look good. My wife’s friend, my adopted Sicilian sister, Annabobannadanna, actually sighed and put her hand to her mouth, whispered something in Sicilian then blurted out, “Oh, Chris, what did you do?”

Thank god my hair grows fast. Almost as fast as my eyebrows so with a little coaxing and maybe some mustache wax I can get the Leonard Nemoy eyebrows to reach up and lock their fingers with the earliest scraps of bangs which might eke themselves out of my head like spring tulips.

So, gird your loins and shoe the children and the weak of heart into the basement and scroll down. You have my permission to replicate this in rubber for a Halloween mask.