Long As I Can Grow It
Meredith Maran
Word Count 433
She wanted to touch my hair. I almost always said yes to her, but I did refuse her this one thing. My curls, like me, are Semitic, sensitive to seemingly imperceptible shifts in barometric and homoerotic pressure, relationship status, locale. As desperately as my body craves touch, that’s how desperately my frizz-prone curls eschew it.
She begged me for a waiver. “They’re not waves. They’re curls,” I punned. She frowned prettily. “I hate puns, remember?” she said.
Me without puns is like Oxford without commas. But as we went on, I made fewer and fewer of them, consistent with my nonstop apology for being me. Sorry, I’m old. Sorry, our no-future romance crimps the edges of my lust, my hope, my heart. Now that we’ve excised each other, I wonder, does she miss my wordplay? My rose petals in her mailbox? My untouchable hair?
If I seem fixated on hair, please understand: hair was everything to my generation. It’s everything to me still. In the late 1960s, when Amerikkka was an anthill teeming with trails of runaway teenagers carrying our belongings on our backs, our hair was the beacon that lit our way. Headbanded, bandanna’ed, woven through with ribbons and flowers, hair was how we found each other. Hair was how we found ourselves. They called us hippies. We called ourselves freaks. Our hair was the freak flags we let fly.
Late one night in ’69, my Dylan-lookalike boyfriend and I pulled our VW bus into Kansas City, hungry and and broke. We drove around till we spotted some longhairs lounging on a funky city stoop. They pointed us to the local head shop, where the proprietor passed us a joint and a hand-scribbled list of places to crash.
Our hair was a neon sign visible to all, a recruitment tool for the peace-and-love army. While the adults slept, we crept into American cities and suburbs and towns and blew our dog-whistle, Pied Pipers stealing the country’s kids. Our recruits were eager escapees, fed up with their neatly shorn parents, fearful of the futures their country offered them: the corporate cubicle, the Valium marriage—if they survived the draft, the draft dodging, the war.
When we protested outside induction centers, the pigs dragged us into paddy wagons by our hair. Inside, army barbers targeted the longhairs with their psychiatrists’ letters, flat feet, and student deferments, viciously shaving heir heads.
The Beatles’ first claim to fame? Hair. The black nationalists’ badge of pride? Hair. The Rastafarians’ symbol of strength? Hair. Skinheads’ warning sign? No hair. The endlessly-running, Grammy-and-Tony-award-winning Broadway show of our generation? Hair.
Meredith is the author of a dozen books, and a contributor of op-eds, essays, and book reviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, O Magazine, and many other outlets. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and a passionate proponent of independent presses, bookstores, and thought, Meredith lives in Los Angeles.