Hair Power: Those Locks Send A Message

The last time I grew my hair long enough for a ponytail, it was 1969 and it wasn’t really fashionable for a man to pull his hair back - it was considered, well, a little feminine. And while I loved my shaggy locks, I wasn’t interested in that interpretation.

Fast forwarding to 1995, the hair is definitely pulled back in a ponytail (much more gray now than brown) and the notion that any man with his hair tied up in a red hairband is automatically gay has been banished by legions of Colombian drug dealers, Steven Segal’s painful high kicks, Robert DeNiro in “Cape Fear” and even Al Pacino in “Revolution.”

What hasn’t been banished is the same old thing I encountered in 1969 but forgot during the intervening years of once-a-month conservative haircuts: the discrimination because you look different, or perhaps because the way you look or dress identifies you with a group.

My first contemporary encounter was quite innocuous. Two older women clerks in a hardware store ignored me at the counter while they waited on several less hair-gifted males who had come in long after me.

I chalked it up to Alzheimer’s or perhaps a bad reaction to the rinse that had turned their hair the same color blue as the fishing line they sold at the cash register.

But then another ponytailed fellow, a little rough-looking with tattoos, got brushed off the same way, and turned to me in the spirit of brotherhood to help me navigate through what must have been obviously unfamiliar waters. “These old broads think we’re hippies,” he said to me. “So I just start fingering the expensive dishes and they help me real quick.”

The negative reaction of the clerks was nearly erased from my memory a few weeks later when an attractive young waitress at a tavern kept tugging on my ponytail every time she walked by the table.

And pretty soon, when the semester started at the university where I teach, I found the coeds coming up to me after my lectures saying my hair looked “cool.”

The reaction around the university was a little less enthusiastic among faculty and particularly from the button-down administration whose members began eyeing me as if I had joined in a resurgence of the Weather Underground. The president of the university, in a talk to several hundred faculty, stumbled over several words in his speech the first time he made eye contact with me in the front row.

His reaction seems to be shared by the local police.

When I zoom around town in my little red pickup truck, I have noticed I get more scrutiny than I did a year ago when my hair was close-cropped. Ironically, it’s worse the better-dressed I am.

Not long ago, wearing a white linen suit, dark shirt and fashionably loud tie, I strolled into a local restaurant with my family and sat two tables away from six deputies from the Sheriff’s Department, some kind of drug task force from the dialogue the restaurant could hear a half-dozen tables away.

During our meal, I noticed that several of the deputies were watching me, occasionally pointing directly at me when the waitress went by. And if you want to chalk up their attention to paranoia, you should consider that one of their units followed us home after dinner right to the condo driveway. (Maybe they thought I was Robert DeNiro and wanted an autograph.)

Perhaps most startling in all this hasn’t been these stereotypical reactions which might have been predictable. The startling thing has been my introduction in the subculture of “cool,” whereby growing a ponytail I suddenly have been given the secret entry into a whole male society seemingly based on length of locks.

At traffic lights, Hell’s Angels nod sagely at me while we wait for green, and in saloons, the same people who a year ago would’ve considered picking a fight with me, now greet me with a warm, “Hey man, how’s it goin’?”

At a Monterey ship’s chandlery, I was the one waited on first, when the clerk spotted my hair flipping about as I looked for some boat parts. I was a little embarrassed when he grabbed my hand and I couldn’t remember that handshake thing - popular in the 1960s - where you grip the same way your father taught you, but then you do some kind of thumb-twisting followed by moving in close. (From a distance I’ve always thought people were about to arm-wrestle.)

More than a few short-haired male acquaintances, in private moments, have asked me the quintessential questions about my ponytail:

Am I protesting something? Am I going through another midlife crisis? Did my wife make me do it? Is it a wig?

No, no, no, and please no! (If I ever had to wear a wig, I won’t choose one that makes me look even older than I really am.)

The hair is long and now in a ponytail because I missed several months of haircuts in a row and the young woman who cuts my hair told me it would actually be easier to take care of, and well, OK, she did say she thought it would be cool.

Cool in the ‘60s, cool again in the ‘90s. Every 30 years or so, I’m going to save money on haircuts.

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