Hair

August 4, 2017

Floyd Finger (yes, that was his real name) slouched beside me in front of the big mirror in the boy’s lavatory of the junior high school, slicking back his greasy blonde locks in the ducktail haircut popular with the cool guys. Straight back over each ear culminating in the perfect ducktail in back, before making the sweeping curve from the temples up to the crown and down to his forehead where the ends dangled just above his eyebrows, it was a magnificent sight to behold. At least he thought so. Floyd was dressed in the requisite white T shirt with sleeves rolled up to hold the pack of cigarettes that would reside on his shoulder after school, tight jeans, and pointy “hood” boots.

His eyes glued to the mirror, they locked on mine as with a barely disguised sneer he spit out his words like carefully wrought daggers. “You don’t have no hair.” Back then, it was, and wasn’t true. I had just as much of that stuff on the top of my head as did he, but we both knew he wasn’t talking about literal hair; he spoke of the “cool factor,” that rebellious, living on the edge attitude that characterized him and his crowd. It was a crowd to which I clearly did not belong. There was no getting around it; I wasn’t cool. Not even close.

I slunk out of the boy’s room and trudged to my next class. After school, while he was lounging on the street corner puffing away at his cigarette, laughing with his friends and ogling the girls walking by, I was dragging my saxophone home to practice before attacking homework and probably heading for some church youth function later in the evening. I definitely did not have any hair.

Fifty years later, the hair and my head have long since parted ways, and I have no idea where Floyd Finger is today. But one thing has definitely changed. Today, there is no doubt in my mind;  I have hair in my heart.