Coyote's Den

As some folks know, I used to have long hair, and lots of it. When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I decided not to cut my hair any more, except maybe for an occasional trim. I'd lived through the eighties, when people were constantly doing stupid things with their hair, and every six months, you were a dork for having short hair, then a dork for having long hair, then a dork for not having hair with enough chemicals in it to mummify a bactrian camel.

Enough was enough. I decided that I liked how my hair looked when it was long. Long hair also symbolized a certain self-expression and individuality to me. I decided that, if I had to dress in various foolish costumes to fit in with society (including different outfits for work, play, school, home use, etc. that I'd be damned if I let anyone tell me what to do with an aspect of my appearance that was actually growing out of my body.

I mean, you can change out of dorky corporate clothes when you come home from work, but if you cut your hair, it's not like you can just make it long again in the evening, unless you want to wear a wig, which I had no intention of doing.

So... I grew my hair long, and left it long for years. I think in ten years, I had maybe a couple of trims. The maximum length my hair would grow would be roughly down to the middle of my back, and it looked pretty good. I also had lots of hair - wavy, thick hair. For the most part, I did nothing to it but wash it, occasionally comb it, or tie it into a ponytail. People would constantly ask me what I did to my hair to get it to look that good, and I'd tell them "I leave it the fuck alone."

You see... for a while, in my youth, I worked for places that marketed cosmetic products, including all manner of hair goops. I know what's in them. I know what distortions and lies we would put on packaging and product lines to get people to buy goop. And at the time, the healthiest hair products were the ones you could get for ninety-nine cents.

But I digress. The point is, I used to swear I'd never cut my hair again. Unless it started to fall out or something, at which point I'd go bald gracefully. I've always thought that nothing screamed "insecure" quite like a bad toupee or a comb-over, or the other things guys do to conceal thinning or absent hair.

Well... a few years ago, I met the love of my life, Coryn. A few months after we met, he got a job working in a hair salon. This had two major effects. One is that he was constantly trying out products and demos from the store on my hair. One or two were actually nice, but most of them were various kinds of foul-smell goo or weird chemicals, or did nothing much that I could tell. My hair, for one thing, had the consistency of spring steel, so there is absolutely no styling product that will hold it in any position it doesn't want to be in. My hair will shrug off even butch wax. Hell... my hair won't stay in place if you put surfboard wax in it.

The other major effect was that, with him working at the store, all our friends were buying hair stuff there, and Coryn was buying stuff for himself with his employee discount. So, all around me, all my friends are doing all this cool shit with their hair. They've all got blue hair, pink hair, green hair, spikes, mohawks, sparkly stuff. It was a blast. I'm sure everyone used so many different hair colors and products that if they ever have children, they'll be born with three heads from all the chemicals.

Keep in mind, most of my friends are either women, gay guys, goths, metrosexuals, or various people in the lunatic fringe. Some of us look normal at a glance, but under the hood, we're a mass of tattoos, piercings, brandings, and counterculture tribal neo-tradition. So everyone's having a blast with all this cool hair stuff.

Well... I decided that I wanted to do something crazy - maybe color my hair some wacky color or something. Now, my natural hair color is a dark brown - almost black. When I put in those temporary hair colors - even the ones that were opaque pastes, my hair would suck that shit down, burp, and ask for more, without changing in appearance hardly at all. I put bright neon-blue paste in my hair, and three minutes later, it just looked like I'd gotten it a little damp.

That meant that the first step would be bleaching it. Well, that was cool anyway! I'd always wondered what I'd look like with blonde hair. I figured that, worst-case scenario, I'd dye it back to normal if I didn't like it, and anyway, my hair grew at a prodigiously fast rate. When I first grew it out, it went from two inches to eighteen inches long in about nine or ten months.

So... we buy this giant tub of hair bleaching stuff. Now... yes. I have heard that you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever under any circumstances, ever, ever, ever let your friends bleach your hair or give you a permanent. Anyone who doesn't know this has never even lived on the same planet with Oprah.

But Coryn worked in a salon, and he's very intelligent, and knowledgeable. He was, after all, made into the acting manager in only a couple of months.

One of the things that should have been a further warning sign was that his store did not carry bleach or permanent hair color. They were a salon-style store, and their policy was that they would not sell those products because they're bad for your hair, and amateurs should not apply them. The store's official line was that if you want a bleach job or permanent color, go to a real salon hairstyling professional and pay to have it done right.

So, we went to Sally's Beauty supply, and bought the hair bleach there. The ladies at Sally's asked over and over if we were sure we knew what we were doing. They told us amusing anecdotes about people who tried to do this at home and burnt their scalps off down to their shoes, or came out looking like Bride of Frankenstein on acid. We bought it anyway. Coryn assured them (and myself) very glibly that all was well-in-hand.

Supplies in hand, we head over to Coryn's apartment, and he begins to apply this foul, toxic-smelling horrible stuff to my hair, rubbing it carefully into my hair and scalp to make sure that we don't have any roots. As it's going on my head, and my scalp is beginnign to tingle, I note that the smell of the bleach is very similar in some ways to the smell of products that are used to remove hair. Or clean a drain. It is about at this point that I glance over, through the haze of toxic fumes, and begin reading the instructions. Specifically, I am reading the part under the giant red letters that say:

"Honey," I say to Coryn, "The packaging says never to allow this substance to come into contact with your scalp, under any circumstances."

"Don't be silly. You don't want black roots, do you?" Coryn replied, turning the tub of hair bleach around so that the warning part of the label was no longer visible to me.

"It says it can cause severe burns, and to never let it come into contact with skin or scalp," I said.

"I know what I'm doing," he replied, "I work in a salon."

"But the label says..."

My pleas fell on deaf ears. He was in the zone. Well... he was actually very convincing and confident in his actions. His every movement exuded confidence and knowledge and professionalism. Well... except perhaps for the part where he turned the warning label around so I couldn't read further along to the part about what to do in case of severe burns. But I was blinded by love. Also... fumes.

After applying the mixture, I was supposed to wait for a while - I forget how long, fifteen minutes? Forty-five?

But the stuff was just burning more, and more, and more. I've had chemical burns before (one of the suntan lotions a company I'd worked for in my youth could cause severe chemical burns if the coloring and fragrance used in it came into contact with sunlight, and I found that out the hard way.)

I said that the stuff was burning my head. Coryn told me to stop being a wuss. But it kept burning, more and more.

Now, just to let you know, that despite the fact that I have been known to scream like a girl when a spider falls on me, that I am not a wuss. I have a very high pain threshold. I've had to develop one, because I've had lots of pain (like the time my foot got nailed to a board, and my shoe. But that's another story). I eat hot peppers that make lesser men not only cry, but lose control of their bowels. Once, some guys hit me with a car, knocking me into a gravel pit, before attempting to mug me, and I got up and beat the hell out of them, even with a concussion, a sprained knee, and some broken fingers - after they kicked me in the head (also another story).

So... around the point that I realized that I was starting to cry from the pain, I decided enough was enough, and announced that I was washing the crap off my head before it burned through my skull and into my brain.

The warning label also said something about not letting water touch this shit, but what the fuck else was I going to wash it out with? Motor oil? How the hell do you even use this crap?

So... I washed the bleach out of my hair, and gingerly toweled my head dry - my whole scalp was livid red and burned under the hair.

Needless to say, some of my hair had bleached a lot, some had bleached a little, and some had not bleached at all. There were patches of toxic chemical yellow, patches of almost-black brown, and patches of gorgeous honey-red color. I looked like an African Hunting dog. It was horrible. And of course, my scalp was burned, so the last thing I ought to do is put more chemicals on it.

Now... I never go to the mall, and hate going out in public unless I have a good reason, but I'll tell you, I made sure to take that fright-wig out everywhere for the next several days. Now, normally, I am somehow invisible to normal people. I don't know why. Sometimes, I have to grab customer service people or cashiers in stores and shake them to get them to even tell I am there - even though I'm nearly six feet tall, and loud and boisterous and talkative. So... I'd be walking in the mall, and nobody noticed a thing... until somehow I guess some poor mundane would pierce the veil and notice that I had African-hunting-dog hair. It was great fun. Or I'd be talking to someone for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, they'd look up and just get this look on their face.

The novelty did fade quickly though. So... as soon as my scalp was mostly healed, we tried again. This time, I insisted on following the directions under the giant words that said "WARNING!!!" in big red letters. No burning goo on my scalp... just very, very close to it. It still burned.

This time, my hair came out a color which can only be described as "chemical yellow," except for big, pencil-thin rings near my scalp where it stayed brown. The rings looked like giant ringworm. There is a substance called "toner," which is supposed to turn the weird chemical yellow into a normal color. Apparently, my hair laughs at toner. The strongest stuff had no effect. Also... my hair was fried to utter brittleness.

I now looked like the second-in-command evil henchman from an action movie. You know, there's always one of the villain's henchmen who has weird hair and then gets killed ignominiously with a ball=point pen after failing to shoot the hero to death at close range with a fully-automatic machine pistol loaded with 10,000 rounds.

So... after a couple of days of enjoying the effect of that particular hair-disaster (about ten strangers asked me if I was in a band, and one asked if we were making a movie), we bought some dark brown hair dye and returned my hair to its normal color, if not its normal consistency and texture.

But this is not, of course, the end of the story. Fark.com has a Florida tag for a reason, and while I left Florida years ago, I did grow up there, and the curse lingers.

Shortly thereafter, I went on a trip that took me through Texas, where we stopped to visit some friends. While we were there, they were apparently having "Purple" pollution days in Dallas. Many people are familiar with the color codes in pollution alerts for big cities. They go from green, to yellow, to orange, to red, in increasing levels of pollution.

Did you know that there are levels higher than red? Purple comes after red. It means "Try not to go outside if you can avoid it, and wear a mask if you do." The only thing higher is black, which means "Do not go outside, and while you are at it, make sure your will is up to date."

On top of the smog-type pollution, there are these plants in that part of the country that apparently pollinate in a fascinating way. They have these little buds that swell up and pop open, releasing little bursts of sticky sap - with about the consistency of creosote - that allows the pollen to stick to things.

The pollution and gummy pollen stuff were so bad that when we left my friend's apartment to go eat, we had to wash the windshield in order to see through it. By the time we finished eating, half an hour or so later, the windshield was again so covered that you could not see through it.

This incredible freak of science airborne death-on-toast crap went into my already crunchy, burnt, chemicaled, and dyed hair. It was sticky and horrid. I had the beginnings of dreadlocks almost immediately. My hair was actually sticky to the touch.

No problem, I thought, I'd just wash that shit out.

Six shampooings later, there was no change, except that now my hair was so covered with goo that you could actually mold it into shapes with your fingers and it would stay that way - only slowly bending back to its original shape. It also smelled very much like burnt tires. I moved on to more and more drastic substances trying to get the sticky crap out. I tried castile soap (not that Dr. Bronner's stuff either - I used the kind that's made of lye and coconut fat, that doubles as laundry detergent). Dishwasher detergent (that will remove almost anything from hair) had no effect. I tried escalating to more powerful cleansers, until finally, I'd tried alcohol, nail polish remover, and even kerosene. Nothing worked.

Finally, I decided that enough was enough. My hair had been tortured and burnt, and finally rendered sticky. I didn't have dreadlocks, which would have been at least briefly amusing. I had one solid dreadlock, singular, sticking out of my head like a tumor inspired by eighties hair bands gone wrong.

Well... if there's a time to try and put a positive spin on something, here it was. I found myself saying "I wonder what I'll look like bald."

Keep in mind - the last time I'd had my head shaved, I was five. Under the hair, it turned out that my head was lumpy, and the other kids made fun of me until I chased one up a tree, and then pushed him out with a stick, causing him to to a belly-whumper on hard-packed sugar sand.

Now, I am not given to revenge, really I'm not. Coryn loved my long hair (and loved doing things to it with hair products), but I just felt like it was his job to help me shave the mess off. So... after careful consideration, I decided to go ahead and shave it off. I'd never shaved my own hair before, and wanted assistance, so I browbeat Coryn into doing it. I'd like to make some poetic statements about how my shorn locks drifted down to the floor of his basement like fallen cherry blossoms onto snow, but basically, they were so coated with chemicals that they just sort of went "thump," or "spluck," when they hit the floor.

Much to my surprise, I began to have a sense of deja vu here. I realized that, years before, I'd dreamed of shaving my head, and it really bothered me - especially because, in the dream, I wasn't upset by this complete departure from normal behavior. When I woke up, from that dream, I actually panicked and grabbed my head to make sure my hair was still there.

But, there in the basement, everyone who'd gathered around to watch the sad procedure (my friends are ghouls, but lovable ones, I assure you), kind of nodded, and looked surprised, and allowed that maybe it wasn't too bad. I think my friend Timber was the first to say that he didn't know what I was bitching about, and that it might be a good look for me.

I looked into a mirror, and was pleased to discover that my head was no longer, in fact, lumpy. Also, I did not look like Curly Joe - a concern that had entered my mind. Maybe it wasn't so bad, I thought. But then... perhaps it was merely shock. What I dreaded was not that moment, of first seeing myself with a shaved head. What I dreaded was waking up in the morning, and realizing that this time, it wasn't just a dream.

Sure enough, I woke up the next morning, bleery as hell, and staggered in to the shower. When I was younger, I used to wake up instantly, and come to full alertness. As I've aged, it takes me longer to become fully conscious. I got into the shower, and realized I had no hair. Oh yeah. I'd shaved it off. There was a surreal moment when I thought I had found a leftover stray hair, and it turned out not to be a loose hair, but an eighteen-inch long hair that had been growing out of the top of my ear. It was a head-hair, but growing out of my ear. It had obviously been there forever, but I hadn't noticed it, with all the other hair around it.

There was that sense of deja vu again. When I stepped out of the shower, I realized that everything was exactly like it was in the dream, down to the Usago Yojimbo comics scattered around the bathroom by a roomate.

And just like in the dream, when I looked in the mirror at my shaved head, after all those years of being a die-hard longhair, I decided I liked it.

No more shampoo. No more fucking around with taking care of long hair (even the minimal care mine required). No more hair in my eyes when driving, or hair ripping free of ponytail ties, or blowing into a giant puffball in wind. Yeah... that also meant no luxurious long latin hair, which would turn into shiny ringlets if I ran plain water over them and let them air-dry.

But also... no more pain in the ass long hair to deal with.

And nothing to put hair products in. Mwa ha ha! I'm free! Coryn's still disgruntled, years later, at losing his favorite hair-product guinea-pig, but still.

In closing, it's working out for me. Another nice thing about having no hair is that people love to rub my scalp, even people I don't know.

But then... on the downside... people I don't know keep trying to rub my scalp.