Hair Scouts

As a teenager, I didn’t have much; if any, body or facial hair. My dad affectionately called me a “Mexican Hairless,” which I believe is a small dog without fur. Of course he could joke about it. I envied him with his big beard, hairy armpits and the flowing long, blonde hair on his arms. You could practically feather the hair on his chest. I hoped and prayed that one day I’d be hairy like him. Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees were popular during the time that I was in junior high and I was the short, hairless wonder, the furthest thing from cool.

I couldn’t do much about my height. Although they were all the rage in London and New York, platform shoes were nowhere to be found in rural Idaho. Hair on the other hand, hair was to be had if you knew where to find it and the right place to put it.

Before school one day, I summoned the courage to change my station in life. I cut a little of the black, synthetic hair from the head of one of my sister’s dolls. With the help of Elmer’s Glue, I applied the hair to my skin just above the opening of my button-down shirt. I examined myself in the mirror for several minutes, from several different angles. In the end, I decided that the dark, black hair looked too obvious, so I washed it off before I made a fool of myself in front of my friends at school.

My sister Nina started shaving her legs recently and it seemed to stimulate hair growth on her legs to the point that I overheard her complain about it to Mom. If it worked for her, it had to work for me because I am two years older than she is.

I began to lose my nerve as I stood in the bathroom, razor in hand. At least now I had small smatterings of hair here and there, a small, elite team of hair scouts performing reconnaissance, checking out the scene before calling in the rest of the troops for an all-out, hair assault.

What if I scare them off for good by shaving them? They could view this as a hostile situation and never return!

After two weeks of careful consideration and no more hair scout reinforcements in sight, I lathered up with Dad’s fluffy, white Barbasol shaving cream and started going to town with his razor. I started shaving my face first and then everything else was fair game. Any hair on my arms, my arm pits, legs, feet and everything in-between was eliminated. There wasn’t much there to begin with but now I was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.  

That night I lay in bed, nervous but happy, hoping that I’d become a hairy beast of a man in a week or two, the kind that made all the ladies weak at the knees…like Magnum P.I or one of the Bee Gee’s or if I was lucky a mixture of Magnum, one of the Brother’s Gibb and a smidge of Chewbacca, the ultimate trifecta that would drive the ladies mad!

Panic set in the following morning as I got dressed for school realizing that my friends would surely notice and give me a hard time when we dressed and undressed in the locker room for P.E. class.

Good Lord, what have I done? Maybe they won’t notice. I’ll just shower really fast and get dressed in record speed.

If they noticed and teased me, I’d have the last laugh when my hair grew back, thick and dark.

Days turned into weeks and four months later, the hair began to grow back only to resume its original state of sparseness. The hair wasn’t longer, thicker or darker. I guess I was the way God wanted me to be and that was disappointing.