Every year, as the days get shorter and a chill starts creeping in, I try and grow a winter coat. This usually means I don’t cut my hair for a couple of weeks, then cut it all off when it gets too hard to manage. I have a rule I live by, as far as my hair is concerned, and it is this: You must never spend more time doing your hair than it takes to brush your teeth. When I find myself wasting 10 minutes in the morning wrestling with the curls that sprout from the front of my scalp, it’s not long before I cut it all off.
This year, unmoved by the failures of every winter stretching back to when I was 19 and had really long hair, I tried again. I was gonna take it up a notch, though. This time, my face would also sport a winter coat.
The thing is, as anyone who has seen me shirtless can attest, I have no chest hair.
This is odd because a) I am nearly 30, and b) my arms and legs are hairy enough to give Robin Williams a run for his money. The lack of hair on my “core area” means that, for some reason, my facial hair is patchy and uneven. The area surrounding my mouth gets decent coverage, but cheek hair and sideburns are an absolute impossibility. Thus, a full beard would be impossible, but a goatee was possibly attainable. It was time to give it a shot.
Luckily, my job does not force face-to-face contact with customers, so appearance and hygiene are not really an issue except to those whose cubicles are directly adjacent to mine. This is fortunate because my appearance was going to suffer in the coming weeks and it was going to be hard enough just dealing with the fact that women were going to be appalled or amused by my attempts at looking like an adult.
Sure enough, it came in weak, looking like something you’d find on the face of a junior-high football player or an Italian grandmother. Three weeks in, though, it began to fill in, and look halfway decent, presentable at the very least. Then, at about the three-and-a-half week mark, there it was: A Full-On Goatee.
The Roomies liked it, but most females either hated it or had no opinion. As for me…
It was like a child to me. I haven’t worked this hard on something in a long time. I didn’t really know what to expect. It didn’t sing me to sleep or magically open doors for me, but it gave me something that I hadn’t had before, and that was something on my chin to fuck with besides pimples. Until then, I had no beard to stroke thoughtfully as I pondered things. I had nothing on my upper lip to catch beer foam. Now, though, I could rub my chin and take extra long to answer questions I knew the answer to, because that was what men with facial hair did. When I did answer the question after the allotted chin-stroke time, the answer had more gravity, and a lot of times it had shock value because whoever had asked the question didn’t have a goatee of their own to rub thoughtfully, and were hypnotized by my fine specimen. Or maybe it was jealousy. Whatever the case, the goatee was awesome.
On my annual October trip to San Diego, I got a lot more support for the goatee, but this may just have been because people in San Diego like me and don’t want to hurt my feelings.
The last night I wore the goatee was Halloween night, where my bangs and facial hair added to the Emo look of my costume (see Dall-o-ween post for costume details). The following night, a bar in my neighborhood was having a costume party, and I switched to my other costume: 1970’s-era tennis player. This consisted of a tight white polo, short (short!) white shorts, tall socks, head- and wristbands, my aviator shades, and a pink sweater tied around my shoulders. I had worn this to an 80’s party months ago, and everyone loved it because grown men in tight clothing and short (short!) shorts is funny. This time around, I was bringing something else to the table in the form of facial hair. But goatees weren’t very 70’s. I needed less. I needed a mustache.
The costume was a success. I was hanging out with Adam, who was going as Paulie Bleeker from Juno, so the men-in-short-shorts power was strong with us.
My legs may have been cold, but my upper lip was warm. I figured I could rock the ‘stache for a couple more weeks, at least until I could curl the tips. Mustaches are cool, right? Of course! Just ask The Tick:
Sadly, I only wore the mustache for two more days.
Sunday I went to the King Tut exhibit and I looked, frankly, like a child molester.
Luckily, there was no trouble; I was afraid the authorities would drag me away to the gas chamber, no questions asked (the death penalty here is, as I have mentioned before, swift and arbitrary). I wore the ‘stache to work on Monday, as I had promised some co-workers that if I did ever take it down to that level I would at least show them. They were not disappointed, but goddamn, I looked creepy. Monday night, without fanfare, I shaved it off.
I miss it now.
“Why not grow it back?” you might ask. Because I am lazy, is my reply. I value interaction with attractive females more than I value the support of guys I know that insist facial hair looks good on me. I cut my hair off shortly after this, and I was back to Nik as usual.
Even though the ladies may love my clean-shaven look, I know now that I have lost something more. It’s hard to tell when it happened. At first, I was a boy pretending to be a man. Now that I’ve shaved it, I feel like a man pretending to be a boy. My face looks naked to me.
Next winter, though, it’ll be back. Maybe by then I’ll have some chest hair to match.
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