One of the indignities of getting older is having hair that will no longer express your personality in a way that adequately represents who you think you are, deep down. Our hair betrays us with age. My own hair, like my eyesight, has grown feeble. It is thoroughly inadequate to the task of personality-telegraphing in its 50s. It is thinner, unlike the rest of me, and after decades of radical expressions, paintbox dyes, startling tricks and backflips, it has grown tired of the mom life. My hair protests. It has ripped off its apron, thrown it on the kitchen floor, and stomped off to go lie down in a darkened room for a nap.
My hair was never interesting in and of itself; it was never much to look at without some fun dye or a rock-and-roll crop performed at home in front of the bathroom mirror while X-Ray Spex played on the turntable in the next room. Indeed, it’s one of my lifelong grievances that I was saddled with a redhead’s Ivory Snow-white, but pink-mottled, complexion without actually having the red hair to go with it, but at least it used to be thicker and a chestnut-brown. Now my hair is an active problem. It insists on being a washed-out and unfortunate orangey gingersnap color that sounds better in writing than it is on my head.
Do you sometimes have dreams at night in which you revisit the most intense scenery of youth? No? I do. It’s actually a bit annoying. Very early this morning, between 3 and 5 a.m., I was chasing Joe Strummer of the Clash up and down under the Westway Viaduct to the tune of “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.”
When I was a 15-year-old Clash fan, I wore my hair shorn, in a variety of colors — matte black, bleached, greenish — that circa 1982 still had the power to intimidate and offend strangers. I do mention from time to time to my children that I feel sorry for their generation for no longer having the power to intimidate or frighten squares with their hair. The only thing a kid could do with their hair that would frighten and shock me would be if they decided to shave only the crown in the style of a monk’s medieval tonsure. (If you see any teenagers rocking the Trappist monk cut, will you please let me know?)
Around 1985, I went to the famous Antenna salon of Kensington Church Street, in London, to be among the world’s first customers for hair extensions, which were invented there. My extensions were long, thick, synthetic dreds that fell all the way to my lower back and were streaked with magenta. Looking back at the photographic flip-book of my own vanity, that was the best hair I ever had. I am wearing my Antenna extensions in all the best Polaroids of my youth, on a lark at Disney World, standing for a kitschy snap by the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage ride; on a barge in the Port of Amsterdam that weekend when we missed the flight home, twice; in the upstairs rooms at Shakespeare and Co. on the Left Bank, blowing smoke rings and reading Pound’s translation of Li Po’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” How we did jet around in those years, the years of the $99 transatlantic flight on Virgin Airways! It’s hard to tell if The Kids These Days will eventually grow into this problem as they age — the exterior, in the form of hairdo, no longer corresponding to the inner self — or if this overinvestment in the message being sent by your hair will die out with the passing of the generations of “the 19 Hundreds,” as the young’uns say.
Teenagers and 20-somethings have not gone in much for subcultural hair over the last 25 years or more. Hair-identity politics — or however you might express it — has gone the way of the Sony Walkman and Crystal Pepsi. Since the pre-millennium, young women have mostly been wearing their hair ironed flat and long. I’d date this homogeneity to 1996, the year Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy popularized the Madison Avenue-blonde blowout. I do not have a window into the hearts of Kids These Days but I seriously doubt this double-basic, bougie, ironed-flat look could possibly inspire the same feelings of intense emotional investment that generations between 1920 and 1996 poured into their boy bobs, their greaser D.A.s., their earth-mother hippie tresses, their Manic Panic green mohawks, their antiracist-skinhead buzz cuts, their locs. The Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy ironed blowout is the visible tonsorial embodiment of the globalized corporate homogeneity of the internet-commerce age.
When I was younger I mocked people who relied on hats to telegraph their persona: the tool in the yacht-captain’s cap, the poor fool who went everywhere in an Australian cattleman’s tan cowboy hat. Who’s laughing now? Maybe I should get into hats.