The Haircut

“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” Over the years, I’ve read those words of that styptic nineteenth-century scold, Henry David Thoreau, dozens of times, and each time I found myself nodding in assent, agreeing that the thingness of the world fissures our lives, my life, burgles its force, scatters it, shards it, makes it full of a littleness that we, I, should leave behind. And each time, of course, I have allowed myself the narcoticizing delusion that reading the words and acceding to their wisdom substitutes for actually acting upon them. But for some reason that I cannot name, on my most recent reading I decided to send delusion packing and honest-to-Godly simplify my life.

Now, I had no intention of heading off to the woods, building a ten-foot by fifteen-foot microhouse, and cultivating a beanfield. Thoreau declares himself “determined to know beans,” but I don’t know beans about beans, and what I know of forest skills would fill a demitasse cup and leave room for a bowling ball. For me, roughing it is staying in a motel room without WiFi. No, I had no intention of squatting by a pond, contemplating the heavens reflected on its surface, and meditating about closing the gap between the spiritual and the material. Instead, I decided to start small. I decided to stop combing my hair.

I have always worn my hair long, not, as I did in the 60s, “shining, gleaming, streaming, waxen, flaxen . . .shoulder length and longer,” but long enough to require spending time planted in front of a mirror each morning, engaging in various manipulations of brush and blow drier to achieve a certain “look,” a look that entailed several touch ups throughout the day. A waste of time, surely, but more than that, a self-absorbed, self-regarding, unseemly bit of narcissism that I came to see as a shameful vanity—a vanity so indurate that I forsook a warm stocking cap on even the most frigid Iowa winter mornings for fear of matting my work at the mirror. Who was I, after all? What was I? Who was I trying to impress, and why? All this hair combing seemed shallow, somehow, a rather venal fetish, an overreaching for sophistication when I knew perfectly well that, as Da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Me, a sophisticate? I’d have better luck trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. You can draw cubes, but that doesn’t make you Picasso. We long to hear our echo in the world, but, it suddenly seemed to me, the self I would trumpet seemed more suited to a kazoo.


A haircut, then, and a drastic haircut at that, offered a way to simplify my life, to buy both time and a chewy morsel of moral satisfaction. I would be shorn and shriven. I called Joyce down at the Clip Joint and told her I wanted a haircut that would obviate my having to comb my hair. “That’s pretty radical for you, Jerry,” Joyce said. “Yeah, but, you know, I’m trying to make my life less complicated. But here’s the thing, though: I don’t want a buzz cut, but I don’t want to have to comb my hair. Can you do something along those lines?” “No problem,” Joyce said, and I scheduled an appointment.

Joyce cut my hair close on the sides and back, and left it just a bit longer on top. “Just towel it off after you shower, and you’re good to go,” she advised, and then added, “but you can also do something like this.” She squirted a bit of mousse on her fingers and applied it to the top of my head, creating spiky tufts. And here’s where I learned that the breeze created by shutting one door to vanity blows open another.

I liked the tousled look she created; I liked it a lot. My wife Kathy, whose taste I’ve always considered unrivalled—except, perhaps, in her choice of husband—declared her admiration for the look, too. And then some raspy-voiced gremlin in me urged me to go online to research men’s hair products. I succumbed and found myself, blinking and dazed, in a magical world filled with volumizing texture wheys and soothing serums and defining shine gels and frizzy polishing milks and bodifying cream mousses and styling pastes and clay matte texturizers and structure waxes, and mint shape-forming pastes—all guaranteed to defy gravity and sweat, to clump thick and thin, to shine and shimmer and glaze; all permitting me, urging me, to Walt Whitmanize, to “dote on myself” because “there is that lot of me and all so luscious.” So tempting, all so tempting, the things I could do, the looks I could create with those products, the twirls and swirls and curls—and, yet, I held back, refrained from the siren song, refused to genuflect before their offer of metrosexual self-tribute, shook off the intoxication of their heady, distilled spirit. A long career reading and teaching literature sensitized me to the irony of what I was contemplating. No SPF, I quickly realized, no matter how high the number, can prevent us from being sunburned by the glare of vanity. So quickly, so easily it slips the vigilant leash, hurdles the hedgerows of rationality, and streaks with steroidal speed to taser the feel-good limbic circuit. No, no tussling with tousling for me. I was out to quell my vanity and simplify my life. I clamped down my desire to clump.

And should the hot-house flower of vanity blossom from my sally against vanity, should my efforts at simplifying my life tempt me to star in a vanity production, I had the compliments of my colleagues to effectively mortify it. “Jerry, I love your hair,” one colleague told me; “it takes ten years off.” And here I had thought I looked far younger than my age. “I like what you’ve done with your hair,” another said; “It’s so contemporary.” And here I had thought I was contemporary, was “with it,” was trendy and cool. “Nice hair,” yet another exclaimed; “did Kathy suggest it?” And here I had thought I was decisive. Was my cluelessness in matters of fashion and grooming a fact universally acknowledged? Those compliments were a bruising encounter but, I think, a salutary one.

Vanity is, I suspect, an unconquerable passion in human nature. Likely, Ishmael is right in saying “the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. `All is vanity.’ ALL. This willful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.” Perhaps an anointed vision of ourselves had value in the long evolutionary slog and we are incapable of singing ourselves in a minor key. Could be that we can never be shooed away from wistfully gazing in a self-reflecting pool. Maybe the silty seepage of vanity requires a dredging operation that will always be partial, incomplete, ongoing. Possibly we are destined to be Will Kanes, facing down the perpetual high noon of overweening pride. But with complimentary colleagues like mine, I’ll never have to step into that hot, dusty street alone.