A lifetime of bad hair days

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Friday morning was a normal one: I woke up, made coffee, puttered around the house for far too long, eventually went for a run, took a shower, shaved, rubbed SPF50 moisturizer into my face because my dermatologist said, and smeared some schmutz into my hair. When it was all done, I looked in the mirror and thought, Ah, shit.

What can I say? My hair looked terrible—flat where it should have been full, wild where it should have been coiffed, just basically distorting the basic proportions of my skull and my face. It sucked, and of course this was nothing new.

Here’s where I feel like I’m supposed to say something like “what hair I have left” or “the thin, gray tendrils that make an increasingly half-hearted attempt to cover my scalp” or some other self-deprecating reference to the fact that for half of my life, my hairline has been retreating up my already El Capitan–esque forehead. These little jokes are supposed to make me feel better about balding, but balding isn’t really the issue here. At times, I almost wish I were a lot more bald, and then I could just shave off what little was left. I wouldn’t have to care about my hair. But in this case, the hair itself is the problem, and always has been.

As I write these lines, I have now been at war with my hair for 37 years and 11 months.

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For the first twelve and a half years of my life, I did not touch a comb. And I had great fucking hair. If you look at photos of me as a little kid, you’ll see a blue-eyed boy with a tangle of blond hair—he’s angelic, adorable. (When he was nervous, which was often, he’d twirl that hair with a finger.) As I got older, my hair thickened and browned, but retained a full, wavy volume that was just a bit, but not completely, out of control. This whole time, I didn’t give a damn about my hair: I never combed or brushed it, and my mother cut it shorter when she felt it was too long. It was not something I ever, ever thought about.

Then came Passover 1987. Amherst College held a Seder for students and faculty, and I attended with my mom. I remember it as taking place in a large basement or ground-floor function room—lots of big, flimsy round tables covered with cheap tablecloths and surrounded by folding chairs, with a few ancient, threadbare, comfy couches scattered about. On arriving, my mom and I sat in one of these couches, and immediately I heard a crunch! I moved aside the cushion beneath me to find the afikomen, the cloth-wrapped piece of matzoh that, at some point during the Seder, children are sent to find to earn a gift. But I had found it already, and I knew that to seek it out, an hour or two later, would be unfair; I would, I could, no longer remain among the children. Never would I have a bar mitzvah, but at that very moment I became a man.

And that night, perhaps compelled by this metaphorical testicle-dropping, I picked up a comb, wetted it in the sink, and tried to comb my hair.

I can’t remember how I styled it, but it began a nearly four-decade war—one in which I have lost every single skirmish. Starting that Passover week, I experimented with mousses, gels, and hairspray, much of which I borrowed from wiser, cooler friends, and some of which we surely shoplifted from convenience stores. Was the wet look in? Then I guess I tried for the wet look. Was everyone feathering their hair? I did likewise. I also can’t remember how those first few experiments turned out, but no doubt they looked idiotic.

When I got into skateboarding, though, I was desperate for the California skater do. You know, the flop of hair emerging from a side part to cover one eye, with the remainder cut short and bristly. A teen-boy combover, more or less. I tried and tried for it, growing parts, trimming others back, gelling and smoothing until, for a split second in the mirror, I resembled the kids I saw in Thrasher. Moments later, however, it would revert, curling and falling and flopping the wrong way. My hair simply would not comply with my demands. It was going to do whatever the hell it wanted to.

Still, I persisted. I got into punk and hardcore music, and used Knox gelatin to craft a mohawk that almost instantly collapsed. I spiked my hair to the best of my ability, but gravity and the intractable willfulness of my tresses flattened it into an unrecognizable mess. Somewhere in there I probably had a mullet, because I was into heavy metal and wanted to bang my head like they did on MTV.

Deeper into high school, I tried to give up and went for a buzzcut, but even there I failed: Unwilling to pay a barber for the job, I had my “friends” help out with clippers that often jammed or died mid-cut, leaving me looking, as my mom described it, like a concentration-camp survivor. Eventually, I gave up on giving up, and let it all grow out, unwashed for weeks at a time. There is one black-and-white photo of me at age 17 with a thick, full head of wavy hair—it’s a record of the last time my hair ever looked good.

In the years that followed, I dyed my hair, got a buzzcut, dyed my eyebrows black, grew it out again, had a faux-hawk, dyed my hair orangey-blond, combed it forward into a Caesar, combed it back, parted it to one side, then the other, then the middle. As my hairline receded, I began to see the futility of my actions, and for perhaps a decade and a half opted for a modified buzzcut, with a slight fade, that showed off the oblong glory of my surprisingly small skull. But at least it was streamlined and felt cool in summer, and I didn’t have to think about it too much. Which is good, because it didn’t look great. None of it had, ever.

But then, two or three years ago, I realized something: Although my hairline had receded and my hair was now equally gray and brown, my follicular situation seemed to have stabilized. I’d always expected to become fully and truly bald, but this was not going to happen anytime soon, so I decided to make the most of my remaining coverage and grow it out as long as I (and my wife) could bear. For most of a year, I let it go, with only minor trims to give it some sense of shape. I imagined it flowing over my shoulders. I imagined a cumulous cloud floating above my earline. I imagined slumbering follicles prodded into wakeful productivity by the energy of their neighbors.

Instead, I looked like a crazy person. Not a mad scientist, just mad. Luckily, I happened to switch barbers after about a year, and my current one has reined things in.

Now I just look normal: a normal 50-year-old white guy with normal-length hair where the hair is growing, and wispy, weak stuff on top. I am no longer trying to do anything special—and it shows! My do is unexceptional. I’m fine with that.

But apparently, my hair is not fine with that. Because even though I’m now trying to do essentially nothing with it, it still won’t comply. Half the time it falls into a combover, as if I’m ashamed at the disappearance of my hair and am vainly trying to hide that fact from the world. The other half of the time, it spirals out from my head at odd angles, recalling the curls of my youth, perhaps, but more often giving derelict vibes.

I wish I could not care. You would think, given my devotion to Sisyphus and existentialism, that I would have learned by now to handle this intractable struggle, to accept that I look the way I look, and always will—to find some triumph in the absurdity. But that’s the thing: I do accept that I look this way. My expectations here are very low. I just want some consistency from my scalp, a standard procedure, a regimen of products, that will make me look normal from day to day. I don’t want to look like a slob—is that so much to ask? Instead, it’s as if Sisyphus showed up each morning at the foot of Mount Tartarus to find not his familiar boulder but a rusty tractor, a chunk of ambergris, Michelangelo’s David, or a hypercube—but less amusing, less inventive, more simply annoying. This is no mythological punishment; it’s Descartes’ trickster demon at work, a modern curse for postmodern times.

I wrote this essay first thing in the morning, and a couple of paragraphs back I took a break for the usual routine: shower, shave, styling. This time, using some hair wax, I slicked my hair back. I think I look like a 1980s Wall Street tool, but Jean likes it that way, so what the hell, why not? When last I glanced in the mirror, it was actually … not bad. Maybe even okay. But now I sit at my computer, and I can almost feel that do undo: It’s curling and flopping and collapsing and retreating, and by the time Jean comes back from the gym I’m sure I will be looking again, on the outside, like the sloppy man I dread becoming on the inside. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe this will be the day I win the battle, and I finally present to the world, for a whole unbroken twelve to sixteen hours, the Matt Gross it truly deserves—slicked back and put together, in control and unflappable, all his fractals coalescing into a vibrant image of solid, whole-number dimensionality. And then, finally, we will be able to answer the question that has plagued philosophers since time immemorial: Hot or not? 🪨🪨🪨

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