When JW moved to town and started attending school with us, our
fourth-grade teacher decided it was necessary to prepare the class
for his arrival. "I want you to be nice to JW," she said. "His
haircut is a little different from what you might be used to seeing.
People come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. It's just a haircut.
Nothing special. I want you to welcome him to our school and show
him what good citizens you are."
We all beamed and cracked our knuckles in anticipation. We couldn't
wait to get a look at this motherfucker.
A few hours later, when he finally finished whatever important public
school orientation program had been arranged for him, JW walked into
our class. It was way better than we had even dared to hope, for JW
had a haircut that, in 1982 and in our particular corner of the Midwest,
constituted a giant leap toward social suicide.
JW had a crew cut, or, as we called it at that time, a "buzz."
Imagine if you will, a pressure cooker. A very faulty pressure cooker.
As it starts to heat up, you hear a few random squeaks and gurgles. Then
the whole thing starts to shake. The shaking becomes more and more violent
until at last something has to give way. A valve cracks. The weakest point
ruptures. Suddenly, the steam escapes in one loud, cacophonous roar.
Windows break. Dishes fall from their shelf. Someone gets hurt. That
someone is JW.
When you imagine a moment from your past, it's impossible to gauge
the accuracy of your memory. Your mind doesn't record memories, but
rather reconstructs them as needed. Here's what my mind reconstructs:
a room full of kids, hysterical to the point of tears. Pounding on
desks. Pointing. Covering their mouths in shock and glee. I was not
innocent in any of this.
I don't remember the rest of that day, but I do know that the
ostracism of JW did not stop at this one event. You'd think we
would have gotten over the shortness of his hair, but we never
did. Pantomiming a hair clipper and making a "meeeeeeeeoooooooooooow"
sound never got old, and JW never gained any kind of social purchase
in our classroom or the school at large.
I think the stupidest, most hypocritical part of the whole thing
is that none of us had a decent haircut either. A lot the boys had
mullets, and when you look at photos of them it's easy to imagine
the beginnings of the pubic 'stashes they'd grow in high school.
The rest of them had long bowl cuts, the sides poofing out like
earmuffs. The girls had bad, mousy versions of their own mothers'
hairstyles: lopsided, feathered Farrah-dos that had long fallen
out of fashion in the rest of the world, but would hang on
seemingly forever in our neck of the woods.
My own hair fell into a style I want to call "The Default," the
style that arises from an obvious lack of combing, washing, and
cutting.
JW didn't last long at our school. I don't know why he left. It
probably had something to do with his parent's profession, which I
also don't know. If I met JW today, I wouldn't recognize him. In
fact, if you showed me a photo of him from fourth grade, zoomed in
on his face so I couldn't see his crew cut, I probably wouldn't
recognize that either. I literally know nothing about him except
that he had a crew cut, and that we found his crew cut intolerable.
The last time I saw JW, his father came to school to pick him up,
accompanied by JW's younger brother who was about five years old.
Both the dad and the little brother had crew cuts identical to JW's.
That, to us, was the cherry on top of our cruel sundae.
