[Since apparently not everyone knew about the contest: I shaved my head for charity.]

The Night Before

Walking down Smith Street after dinner, I keep getting nods and smiles from men on the street — more than usual. It’s a fairly cold night, so I’m pretty bundled up, and I have a skirt on, but it isn’t particularly short; I can’t figure out what’s prompting the sudden cluster of attention. It’s not offensive, just mysterious, and I wonder if it’s the last of it for a while, until I have “girly” hair again.

The Day Of

I want it over with. The not knowing what it will look like has me distracted all day — I know I have a bumpy head, but no way of knowing if it’s bumpy in a cute cartoony sort of way or bumpy in a threatening aliens-from-V sort of way, no way of knowing how far my ears really stick out or whether it’s really obvious that the right ear is “marked,” no way of knowing how it’s going to work, out in the world.

I put my hair in teeny ponytails, because I still can.

On the train, I think about my vanity. I don’t think of myself as someone who identifies herself, her self, all that strongly with her looks or whether she’s pretty. I haven’t had long hair since college, and I’ve never had what I’d call “good” hair — if I looked good, I looked good in spite of my hair, not because of it. In fact, at times my hair almost seemed to hate me — the weird patterns it made in the front, the sweet time my bangs took to grow out, the fact that I could never put it up in a ponytail without it lumping up on the left.

But…not to have any? At least with hair, I could march into Roger’s salon and wail, “Fix iiiit!” Not anymore. Now I’ll have nothing to fix.

The Process

Considering that it’s just a chin-length bob, it takes a while to shave my head down to scalp — about an hour. I can see the faces of the other people in the kitchen, but I can’t see anything else, which I find out later from pictures is just as well, since at various points in the depilation procedure I look like Gollum; my grandfather; my other grandfather; the surface of Ganymede; W.C. Fields; Alfred E. Neuman; Mr. Sheepman from Clone High; a peeled potato; Gene Hackman in Superman II; the South Dakota Badlands; and the baby in the Quiznos commercials.

In a lot of ways, it’s like any other party at my house; the furniture is all akimbo so we can sit in a circle and talk about the new Sopranos season, and the table is littered with deli bags and bottle caps. The only difference is me sitting in strong light, surrounded by drifts of my hair, straining to hear the conversation over the brrrrr of the clippers.

Towards the end, with Gen rushing through the top of my head because that part hurts (she doesn’t cut me, but there’s maybe two millimeters of flesh there and it feels bruisy), then touching up behind my ears, I realize that I will have to go into the bathroom soon and see it, and that if I hate it or want to cry, I will have nobody to blame but myself and nothing to do about it but wait for 2007 to come.

I march into the bathroom, hoping for the best. I’ve had everyone in front of me to read for the last hour, and their faces tell me it’s okay — strange, but not terrible. And sure enough, it is. It’s strange, for sure, but it looks all right. That groove I could have sworn I felt at the front of my skull all those years, that sunken part — hair must have caused it. I look different — but not that different.

But as strange as it looks, it feels even stranger. My head has no filter, and it starts to feel like it’s constantly exhausting steam. My neck is naked; I have nothing tucked behind my ears for the first time since the seventies.

It’s done. Now, we go out.

The Aftermath

As of today, four days post-shave, I have a little stubble going; it looks kind of G.I. Jane-ish at the moment. There’s the world’s teeniest cowlick on the top right corner of my skull, and I can’t stop touching it.

Temperature regulation is kind of a problem; it’s warmer today, but over the weekend, I couldn’t seem to calibrate. Scarves made me too hot, my usual hat is a crochet stitch and let too much cold air in, and I didn’t want to bother with a wig just to run down to the deli for milk. My head always feels like it’s sweating slightly — which it probably is — but when I touch it, I don’t feel anything.

Showering takes two minutes. I wash my head with bar soap. After my shower, even though I know there’s no hair to wring out, my left hand still reaches up to lift it off my head and squeeze out the excess water, and I still whip my neck forward to flip the hair over my head for winding in a towel. I’ve just walked past the mirror, five minutes ago; I’ve just felt my head, the Velcro-y stubble. But that’s how I did it for probably twenty years: grab a towel with the right, my hair with the left, flip, twist.

The time I used to spend doing my hair, I now spend “doing” my ears. They have no place to hide and I Q-Tip them obsessively.

I haven’t gone around outside much without a scarf or a hat, but even when I do, people look. At the Laundromat last Friday, I could feel everyone there trying not to look, trying not to stare. I took the scarf off to retie it and everyone else in the place was suddenly captivated by the floor.

Women stare more than men and express more naked dismay. Men seem to like it okay; sometimes they think it’s hot (the guy in the wine store yesterday: “Whoooaaa, neat!”). Other times they think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. McK laughed for ten minutes yesterday when he saw me, and he wasn’t the first — I made the counter guy at a deli on Henry Street giggle like a schoolgirl. Certain women can’t deal. Waitresses address themselves firmly to my eyebrows or my chin. In a bar on Friday, a girl with waist-length hair kept looking at my crown with this about-to-cry expression on her face, then shaking her head.

I thought I would look like a boy — a knobby boy. But in a weird way, I look more like a girl with just my face up here, my little pinhead and my silver earrings. I still don’t wear any makeup and my eyebrows have kind of lost the plot as of late, but in a weird way, it’s like…my face is it, the only signifier, no frame, and it’s not sending the message I expected.

It looks a little different every day. I kind of can’t wait to see what it’s doing in a week’s time, or in May. I wonder when I’ll part it again, or use shampoo. I wonder how long it will take my brother to sense that I’ve fashioned an ironic faux-hawk, call me up, and order me to comb that shit back down right now.

I kind of can’t wait for summer.

March 27, 2006

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