Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  I pushed back harder. The tone went from conciliatory to clipped. I’m not sure who started the fight. Me, probably. I was itching for one. I was enjoying the feeling of baiting him. In the midst of the screaming, he snapped. He began shrieking in rage. He cursed me, my mother and my brother. He made threats that I cannot bring myself to write down here.

  He was insane—he’d been institutionalized when I was in the seventh grade—but this was the first time I realized just how sick he was. No person in their right mind could say these sorts of things. He had always been erratic—something much more than moody. He swung violently from up to down on the emotional meter without any warning. One minute going on about some bit of news he’d heard, the next minute ranting about some half-connected thought. You learned to approach him from the side, like a large animal, never quite letting him get a fix on you.

  This all seems quite normal when you’ve never been used to anything else. It isn’t discussed or rolled over in your mind. It’s a simple reality to be handled as best you can.

  When he was put in the mental hospital, it was presented to me in the same way that I might’ve been told he’d got a job in a foreign country or gone on a long vacation. Since my mother didn’t make a big deal of it, I didn’t either.

  I’d go to see him once in a while. I recall sitting across from him on a stairwell landing that had a barred gate. We’d both pulled up chairs to either side. I wasn’t allowed in with him, which I suppose should have struck me, but didn’t.

  It went on like that for weeks. And then he was out. We never discussed it, but that was after the debacle in North Bay and I wasn’t seeing him much or at all. It was the beginning of our long drift apart.

  Now, four years later, as I sat in the dark, he was finally revealing to me just how damaged he was.

  It wasn’t an epiphany. I didn’t weep or sit there trembling half the night or any other sort of cinematic response. I knew it was the end, but it didn’t feel like a milestone in my life. He’d been absent for so long in every meaningful way that I no longer felt he’d ever been there at all. So I didn’t feel the loss of him. He was someone I once knew. That was all.

  I hung up and went home. I never spoke to my father again. He died when I was nineteen.

  HAIR

  AFTER MY PARENTS DIVORCED, we briefly moved in with my mother’s only brother, Michael, and his wife and kids. Like my mother, Michael was not an effusive person. I remember him as I do the rest of us—sitting around the kitchen table for hours at a time. We were like some renaissance Flemish painting of a burgher family—stuck forever in a scene of bland domesticity.

  Michael was the first man I’d spent time around who was bald. Going back through the family albums, it was clear that Michael had started losing his hair in his twenties. By the time he had kids, he also had a monk’s tonsure. He looked sixty when he was forty.

  My father on the other hand had the hair of a badger. It spread over his head like shag carpeting. He could grow a decent beard in the space of a day. He had a moustache like the Kaiser.

  After a while, it occurred to me that these two men represented the polarities of my hair possibilities. I was going to end up like one or the other.

  Well, Jesus, Christ, what if I was headed in Michael’s direction?

  I went to my mother for the good word on this. Was I going to be bald?

  My mother had the Irish way of saying things she wasn’t at all sure of with enormous certainty. She wasn’t lying or making stuff up, as such. She was telling you the thing she knew would get you off her neck. She was busy and so wasn’t going to waste time on semantics. This tendency toward the easy way out was reassuring, but you had to take the Stalin route with her on many things—Trust, but check.

  No, my mother said, you are not going to be bald. Michael was bald because he worked in construction.

  Sorry, how’s that?

  According to my mother, concrete made you bald. Or rather, being in the vicinity of concrete in its powdered state caused people to lose their hair. The physics of this corrosive process were not explained.

  On its face, this is ludicrous. Go to any construction site. It is not a collection of differently bodied Mr. Cleans. Women work construction. None of them are bald.

  If concrete made you bald, they’d have figured out a way to make skyscrapers out of popsicle sticks.

  But like most people do, I chose to believe the comforting lie. It became an article of faith. I talked about it a lot (i.e., I worked very hard to talk myself into something I knew in my bones was not true). I went so far as to convince many of my friends of the insidious secret of concrete. Avoid all building materials. That’s what you have to do if you want to be your own Omar Sharif. If you’re mindful of that, you have no need to worry.

  For as long as I knew anything about hair, say from the age of seven or eight years old, I was possessed by it.

  In summer, the sight of chest hair or underarm hair enthralled me. When would that happen to me? It was visual confirmation of maturity.

  This fixation drove me beyond the bounds of decency. When I first spotted a small growth of pubic hair, I invited my mother to get a load of this, waistband of my underwear pulled out, stupidly proud. I was young, but not that young.

  My mother jerked her head away and said, “That’s fine. I don’t need to see that.”

  I took for granted the hair on my head. It wasn’t good hair. I knew that even then. Indeterminately brown, thin, lank, with a cowlick.

  It hadn’t been first cut until I was about four years old, so through most of my early childhood I looked like a feral member of The Beatles.

  The Greeks in the neighbourhood repeatedly shaved the heads of their children in infancy—boys and girls—to promote growth and thickness. Obviously, this sort of foresight is why the Greeks invented democracy. We, on the other hand, waited timidly for the problems to land on us from a great height so that we could enjoy the pleasure of complaining about them.

  My mother cut my hair for the first time with a pair of household shears. It was never right again.

  After that, I got my hair cut up on Dundas Street by an old-timey Italian barber named Joe. It was always an occasion, because it was one of the few things I did with my father. My mother would not have been able to keep her peace with all the nudie magazines spread about the place.

  Joe began each session with a long consult. What would I like him to do? How long? And the sides? Sure. What about style? Then he’d cut my hair the way he liked it—a proto—Wall Street crewcut, parted severely to one side. For years, that was my hairstyle—The Joe. Every kid I knew had the same haircut, because most people I knew went to Joe. He was cheap, professional and did not obviously hate children, which was a more socially acceptable position in the eighties.

  Once I got to high school, I got philosophical about my hair. What is it expressing about my inner self? When people see me, what are they thinking?

  My hair aspirations changed with my musical tastes. I would have liked to have had long heavy metal hair. But my hair did not grow quickly, and the intermediate stage—shoulder length with curling, Farrah-Fawcettish bangs—made me look like a squirrel hunter from the Ozarks.

  Many of the biggest new wave acts were then showcasing what might be called “The Exaggerated Elvis”—tight on the sides, bangs swept up off your forehead into a gelled wave that breaks toward the back of your head. The higher the better.

  Some kids could get that front facade six inches or more over their hairline. But they had good hair.

  I tried it for a while. I could just barely make it work at home. But by the time I got to school, my cowlick had assumed control. The front edge split and collapsed. The bangs fell over my face like drapery. I’d have been okay if The Happy Mondays had been a thing, but Britpop was still a few years off. I had that dull, mopey look before it was a rage. It’s still no consolation.

  By this time, I’d abandoned Joe. His charting of trends had been behi
nd the times when I was eight and now that I was fourteen, it had become medieval.

  Like most ambitious young men, I began to visit my mother’s hairdresser. She got her hair done at a unisex salon in the basement of Simpsons department store downtown.

  When you see a modern hair palace in the movies, it has the feel of a daytime nightclub. A thumping soundtrack, a lot of laughs and beautiful people, stylists leaned in over women’s shoulders shrieking, “My God, you finally look like the real you!”

  This wasn’t that sort of place. It was small, dingy and overlit. Most of the customers in there were like my mother—hassled, middle-aged women who worked in nearby offices who needed to get in, get out and get home.

  I’d meet my mother down at Simpsons every six or eight weeks after work. We’d both get our hair done by her lady, Kay. This was my way of getting out of paying. When we got to the register, I’d put my hands in my pockets and become fascinated by something off in the distance.

  Kay was lovely, but workmanlike. She’d do what I asked, but I wasn’t sure what to ask for. It never quite turned out.

  One day, while waiting for Kay to finish up with my mother, I spotted him across the room—the man who would become my spiritual advisor, Mike.

  Not all the important moments of recognition in your life are romantic. Or, not in the way you think. I had never seen anyone who looked like Mike. At least, I’d never seen anyone who looked that way at work.

  He was in his twenties. He was wearing Lycra tights, half-laced combat boots and a v-neck t-shirt that he’d cut at the neck so that it billowed open nearly to his belly button. The entire ensemble was black. He had make-up on—eyeliner and maybe a hint of lip gloss.

  And his hair. He’d shaved it to stubble up the back and sides. What remained on top was pushed over his face in an asymmetric arrow that slashed at forty-five degrees toward one corner of his chin. You could see only one eye when you looked at him.

  This was what I wanted. I wanted to be this guy.

  Not exactly, of course. Some of the elements of this look were a bit too ambitious for me.

  Mike was also the first bodybuilder I’d ever known, an enormously muscled man.

  Nowadays I would say of him, “Only a man that fit could get away with wearing yoga pants out of the house.” Back then I thought, “Only a man that muscly could leave the house in spandex and not get the shit beaten out of him.”

  Here was someone who was his own man and who did not care. He was Joan Jett in real life. He stood out. I wanted that.

  I asked at the desk if he had any openings. My mother finished up. I explained what I was doing. She looked over at Mike, shrugged and left. She did not leave any money. My free-loading days had ended.

  I expected Mike to be haughty and aloof. He was not. He was bright and chatty. For a man so large, he had a nervous, twitchy way. He was excited by the idea that I’d asked for him. That’s what he said—“excited.” He asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say. “Something cool.” Mike tidied my Exaggerated Elvis into a more manageable shape.

  He said that before the next time I came in, I should think about what I wanted. Bring a picture. He shook my hand and said that it had been great to meet me. I swooned.

  I went out and spent a bundle on imported British music magazines. I found what I needed in there—a moody black-and-white portrait of Robert Smith. Smith was the lead singer of The Cure, one of my favourite bands. He’d combined the ghoulishness of horror punk, the garishness of glam metal, and the loopy stage aesthetics of prog rock and subverted them all by producing irresistible, factory-style pop. Like all the rock stars I most admired, he projected the air of a man who did not care what you thought of him. He was going to do what he liked.

  I was never going to be Morrissey—waifish, cut flowers in my back pocket, hair swept up four feet off my head. I didn’t have the body. Any part of it. I could be Smith—dour, lumpy and unimpressed by the world. That wouldn’t be much of a stretch

  Though none of my friends dressed this way, I’d begun slowly morphing into him. I’d bought a pair of buckled, rubber-soled creepers. I’d begun rolling my pants around my legs below the knee and pinning them there. I was phasing all colour out of my wardrobe. Everything new that I bought was black.

  But being Smith was not a function of fashion. It was the hair.

  Smith swept his up off his head in a messy, skyward tangle. It wasn’t a style, so-called. His hair just went up where it should be going down.

  I went back to Mike—this time he was wearing a poncho and I made a mental note—“Buy poncho”—and showed him the picture. Then we had a heart-to-heart.

  “This is a big change,” Mike said. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Do you think it’s the right thing to do?”

  “I think you should do what you want to do.”

  “Will I look stupid?”

  “No. You’ll look different. Most cool people are different.”

  How do I remember that dialogue at a distance of thirty years? Because it was the first and only father—son chat I’d ever had.

  I went home imagining the scene this new look would create—horror, tears, recriminations. I was coming in hot, like something out of the Road Warrior.

  I wheeled in the door. My mother was in the kitchen. She stepped away from the counter so that she could get a good look at me.

  And then she said, “It suits you.”

  That took a lot of the juice out of it.

  To my disappointment, most of my peers accepted the hair on its own terms. There were a few comments, but after a couple of days at school, it was a new commonplace. I wanted to provoke a reaction and, in that very teenager-y way, no one wanted to give me what I wanted.

  Then the work began.

  The hair as initially cut was modest in its aspirations. Maybe three inches high. I’d shaved the back and sides. There wasn’t too much of it and it was still relatively easy to sculpt with gel. As it grew, gel stopped working. I moved to hairspray, and a lot of it. After a few months, it was a true Smith-esque mop, which required real industry.

  This was my morning ritual.

  I wouldn’t wash my hair. Once I did that, it took hours to tease back up to attention. My hair went weeks without coming into contact with water.

  This was made easier in my house because our single bathroom was not equipped with a shower. At fourteen/fifteen, looking like the coat-check attendant in a sex dungeon, I still took baths each morning. There was never time to run and rerun separate tubs for each of us. The first person up got the fresh water. Which meant I was always lolling around in my brother’s filth.

  The hair had flattened overnight and required extensive sprucing up. The only product I could now find that was equal to the job was a hairspray called French Formula—Hard to Hold.

  There were other, more extreme options. Egg whites and sugar were popular with the punk set, but I could never get the proportions right. And after an hour, my head began to smell like a rotting dog carcass.

  Modelling glue was another thing I’d heard about. It was used mostly on mohawks. But if you screwed that up in the initial application, the only way to undo the damage was to shave your head. I couldn’t take that risk.

  French Formula was the most extreme tool that had still passed through a manufacturing process. It couldn’t be bad for you. It’s not like it was concrete or anything.

  Most hairsprays give you a little shape and body. This stuff was plumbers’ glue. It didn’t come out of the aerosol can in a liquid mist. It shot out like silly string—already congealing upon contact with air. What it touched, it hardened into sculpture. I’d go at my head with the French Formula for five minutes or so, bent at the waist, letting gravity do the work. I went through a bottle a week. I couldn’t fluff it out because once you got your fingers in there, they weren’t coming back.

  A girlfriend once reached up from behind and tried to caress my hair. She was a little too enthusiastic i
n her thrust and her hand got stuck in at the roots. There were several frantic minutes of struggle before I could get her disentangled without letting half my scalp go with her.

  That hair got bigger. At its longest, it stood a good fifteen inches off the top of my head. Over the course of a day, the French Formula lost its efficacy and the structure began to droop over the sides. (This was a small moment in time in which holding up huge hair had become so epidemic at my high school that aerosol products were banned in the halls. The air was turning toxic.)

  I developed an involuntary tic that involved lifting both hands to the sides and smoothing the hair upward until it regained shape. That was my thinking pose. Fondling the poodle on top of my head.

  From a distance, it must have appeared that I was wearing a large, black mushroom cap as a hat. I looked idiotic.

  Which I suppose was the point. I enjoyed the stares on the subway. I looked cartoonish now—all-black ensembles, leather biker jacket, hair pulled down over my eyes. I liked the way adults shrank from me. Being outside the herd made me feel special.

  The hair did present practical problems. I had a job at a fast-food restaurant for part of this time and I had to net it during work hours. One morning, I was prepping a batch of french fries in a large oil cooker. The considerable heat it gave off was being sucked up into a ceiling duct by an industrial fan. I was half-asleep, my mind drifting, my body leaning, my hair jutting. One of my colleagues came into the back, yelped, picked a filthy cloth off a counter and began beating me with it. My hair had caught fire. A great deal of it went up that day.

  After a while, it wasn’t shocking enough. I needed new tweaks. Mike began shaving lines in the back and around the side—straight ones at first. Then Charlie Brown zigzags. When I asked him to shave words, he demurred. He was only charging twenty-five bucks and didn’t have that kind of time.

  It’s more likely he was trying to save me the embarrassment of taking a step too far. I was headed toward a safety pin through the nose.