Hair, there and everywhere

I recently got a tragic haircut. Well, it’s a minor tragedy. I now resemble a hairy egg. No, maybe like someone trying to look like a Stroke but ending up as a Monkee. I knew there was trouble the moment the stylist told me, "Alam mo, bagay sayo ito…" and then I heard the scissors do what scissors do. Snip. Snip. Sniff. "O, ayan, kamukha mo na ‘yung singer ng Side A." No, I look more like somebody’s B-side.

My girlfriend Becca, ever the supportive one, told me it looks fine. She’s just being nice. I have such a history of bad haircuts that I knew right away that this is one of them. My latest hairdo ranks up there with my awful crew cut and my Hall & Oates mullet. Suddenly, it’s the ‘80s all over again, it’s a bad-hair day, and Maneater is blaring from the radio. "(Oh-oh here she comes) Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up," Daryl Hall once sang in leather jacket and leopard-skin tights. While John Oates, the future Andrew Ridgeley, strummed his pantomime guitar.

I have an uncle named Cesar, a barber with a heart of gold, a pair of phantasmagoric white pants (it always, always, rains whenever he wears them), and a Nazi-like bent of giving his nephews a haircut. On Sundays, he would take us out to the yard, bring out his leather satchel full of razors and scissors, and give us Gestapo haircuts.

My uncle hated long hair. Still does, I suppose. He used to tell me during the time I was trying to grow my hair like Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page’s, "Mukha kang Tarzan!" and then promptly gave me a regulation 3x4.

I would look at my posters and the pictures on my Circus magazines: David Bowie (with his orange extraterrestrial mullet), Robert Plant (with his curly Norse god of thunder locks), Bob Dylan (with his wild amphetamine mane), Robert Smith (with his Gothic Barbie tresses), Morrissey (with his last-of-the-international-playboys quiff), and the Glimmer Twins Mick and Keith (with their patented Satanic Majesties haircut). And then I’d look in the mirror and see Alfalfa from The Little Rascals.

I was the butt of jokes of classmates who sported the latest New Romantics hairstyle. I got teased a lot. Especially by a guy other Duranee classmates called "Dura Dura" because of his nasty habit of forming spittle around his lips while singing A View To A Kill.

That was why my brothers and I would make ourselves scarce on Sundays. We disappeared like Batman out of fear our uncle would give us a Captain Planet hairdo.

But talk about jumping from the frying pan and into the Auschwitz incinerator.

In high school, I had a hairy Practical Arts instructor who was as benevolent as the guy whose face is festooned with nails in Hellraiser. He loathed this rebellious male student who didn’t want to follow the required hair length: Me. I remember standing in front of the PA class and being given an impromptu haircut with a rusty pair of garden scissors. I went home one afternoon with crooked bangs, like a Beatle caught in a freak gardening incident. It would take my uncle, with all his barbershop acumen, to undo the damage.

The bad-hair years continued. I tried copying the curls of Curt Smith of Tears for Fears, Randy Santiago’s mullet, and Johnny Rotten’s anarchic spikes – all with hilarious results.

In college, I was herded, along with other boys, for citizen’s military training, which (to steal a line from Jerry Seinfeld) is like an episode of Lord of the Flies. Imagine marching to the orders of campus fascists while sporting a pseudo-soldier haircut every Sunday. It was Full Metal Jacket meets Police Academy.

I flipped once I saw Bono sporting a ponytail in the With Or Without You video, and promptly grew one. I had long hair for a really long time, until I applied for a job and had to look "presentable."

What is presentable, anyway? Serial killer Ted Bundy, who bludgeoned girls in their dorms, was clean-cut. So was Hitler with his fresh-from-the-barbershop look. In photos, you could almost smell the mysterious green barbershop liquid on the Führer’s nape.

What is that green shit, anyway? Why do we fuss so much about hair? The moment I find out, I have a feeling the whole universe will hum a Hall & Oates song.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.