Until my mother put her foot down, I got whitewalls at the barbershop as a kid, along with my two brothers. The barber shaved smooth the sides of my head around the ears with a straight razor.
If I Google “whitewalls haircut” now, I find a literal explanation. On a light-skinned head, the shaving forms a “white” wall next to the hair. But when I first heard the term, I assumed that it was comparing the sides of my head to tires with that ring of white rubber.
I didn’t know that I had whitewalls until the other boys teased me at school one day:
White Walls!
White Walls!
Kenny has White Walls!
Hey! White Walls!
I was very young and had to figure out what exactly they were teasing me about. I looked all over my person to find out whatever it was they were calling “whitewalls.”
Then, in a flash, I connected the taunts to a pleasure I felt getting my head shaved.
My mother had already complained about how my dad was telling the barber to cut our hair, but she didn’t use the term “whitewalls.” The fact that it was now a matter of contention between my parents must have been what made me aware of how much I enjoyed the shave. The contention made me notice this part of the haircut and the fact that I enjoyed it.
The barber Mr. Harold laid a cushioned plank across the barber chair’s arms so that I could sit high enough. He first gave me a crew cut with an electric trimmer that hummed around my ears like a fat benevolent bumble bee. Then he did some snipping around my head with his silver scissors and gently scratched here and there with his comb. Then I felt Mr. Harold smear the hot lather all over the sides and back of my head, followed by the scrape, scrape, scrape of the straight razor.
This all induced a hypnotic bliss.
But now I was aware of the pleasure. I was aware that I looked forward to it, aware that I felt a sadness when the shave was over. Why couldn’t my hair regrow instantly so that Mr. Harold had to start all over again with more hot shaving cream. Then the scrape, scrape, scrape again.
His chair was up front by the window. The sun was glaring off the cars in the parking lot. Behind the razor’s scraping was the ambient hum of men telling stories and laughing, trimmers buzzing and barely audible music playing on a radio down by Mr. Logan’s chair.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
But my mother didn’t like the results. And now on the playground I was realizing that this source of secret bliss made me look like a car with whitewall tires.
I had heard adults ridicule people with whitewall tires. Maybe they were considered classy in the old days, but now they were an indication that some tacky person had wasted money he didn’t have to look more important than he was. The driver was too backward to be embarrassed about it. Whitewalls screamed “I am a fool! I am a clown!”
And there I was by the monkey bars with whitewalls on my head. I was a clown.
I got at least one more whitewalls cut before my mother won the battle.
As soon as I felt the hot lather above my ears, the tingle of bliss started rising up my neck. But now my mother’s displeasure and the playground taunts tried to push it down. Like the adult pervert who is disgusted by his own fetish even as indulging it puts him in ecstasy, the pleasure of the scrape, scrape, scrape had an added note of degradation.
The pleasure was also offset by a sense of guilt that we’d be rejecting Mr. Harold when we stopped getting whitewalls. He seemed to enjoy giving them. We would be pushing him away.
He already had a Basset Hound look.
I had learned at some point that his wife had died.
At that age, I couldn’t begin to comprehend this grief other than to understand that Mr. Harold had a special kind of sadness inside the mysterious cloud of grownup reality. Mr. Harold was broken in some unimaginable way.
He lived across the street from my best friend Charlie. I can’t imagine what Mr. Harold and I talked about during the haircut, but I have a memory of sustaining an unbroken conversation about all the stuff Charlie and I did. It was probably just him mumbling softly while he snipped with the scissors: “You and that Charlie are always up to something! <snip, snip …> I saw y’all jumping off his front door step and hit the ground rolling and y’all rolled almost out to the street. <snip … snip …> Yeah, I tell you. Always up to something.”
He was usually outside his house spraying the hose on thick azalea bushes while Charlie and I ran around in our yard. Sometimes I had a vague sense that we were performing for Mr. Harold. Performing boyhood.
He liked to talk about me and Charlie so much during the haircut that I couldn’t help but feel that he was watching us just to talk about it at the next haircut. He didn’t have kids of his own, I don’t think.
And now we were going to tell him “no more whitewalls.”
Only a few years later, my brother and I were obsessed with growing our hair as long as Alice Cooper or Jim Dandy or Pink Floyd.
How old do you have be now to remember that long hair on men was a big deal? The musical Hair! is iconic for a reason.
To explain his attitude toward hippie hair, my father stood in the living room and re-enacted the arrival of some freedom riders who came to Jackson.
“We all see this bus pull up and the doors open and … in this cloud of stink … out come these … MEN.” He twisted the pronunciation of that word like it was killing him to acknowledge that the beings in question had been born male. “Out come these MMMMEN … all with long, stringy, nasty hair.”
He waved wiggling fingers down from his temples to suggest a visualization.
Nonetheless. We wanted long hair.
One day when it was time for us all to get a haircut, he took out the Sears catalogue … this was in the mid-1970s … and he told us to look at how sharp all the clean-cut male models looked, with their button-up shirts tucked into off-brand jeans. We responded by imitating the pictures. Mark froze with a football ready to throw while pointing into the distance and making a big fake grin.
Joking aside, we were genuinely astonished that my father thought we should go out into our skanky white trash world looking like we stepped out of the Sears catalogue. What world did he think we were in?
The deep cultural threat of feminization was a bigger deal ultimately.
My brother came home one afternoon with Edgar Winter’s album “They Only Come Out at Night.” The hit single was an instrumental called “Frankenstein.” It included a thundering tom-heavy drum solo that culminated in a Moog synthesizer interlude that sounded like a cosmic helicopter slowly descending through a meteor shower before crashing spectacularly in a psychedelic volcano. It was the coolest thing we had ever heard. And still is.
Mark is sitting there listening to it for the hundredth time when my dad comes in, sees something then staggers backwards agape and pointing as if Mark we’re holding a severed head instead of the album cover with Edgar Winter in drag. Winter is wearing ruby lipstick, cobalt eye shadow and a necklace of clustered silver draped over his naked chest. His sideburns are bushy. His long hair is flying back as if he just lunged toward the edge of the cover.
Winter was albino. The white hair and pale skin make the total impression glaring.
My father dragged Mark and the cover out to the shop and slammed the door. I assumed that my dad was about to whip Mark but had no idea why.
That’s important for the story. We did not know what had enraged my father.
I heard him shouting. Screaming. Violent, unhinged screaming. Edgar Winter had unleashed the very depths of rage, the source of all the rage in the world.
But my father didn’t whip Mark. Instead he took the album cover and folded it …
CRACK!!!
That’s right! The album was inside!
In spite of being blind with shock and rage, my father had the cold rationality to first go lift the real conduit for this filth off the turntable. He would destroy the source of evil, that brittle black plate. No outraged father in the age of streaming can feel that same power.
Mark says Dad then folded the album again. And again, until his last fold attempt only went halfway before he slammed the wad to floor to stomp it down.
Aside from traumatizing us, the incident left us less hopeful about growing Alice Cooper hair.
But, again, my mother put her foot down. We were allowed to let our hair reach the bottom of our ears. So my parents got to enjoy the whine of our blow dryer as we scorched our hair in a vain attempt to make it straight. But no matter how long it got, in the Mississippi humidity, our hair still curled up above the lobe. We wanted LONG hair, like the rock stars, hair down to your butt, but we spent our teens looking like we were wearing a helmet.
My father died recently.
After the funeral, I lingered by the grave while everyone walked up to the parking lot. I watched two guys in du-rags lower the wobbling casket on fat straps down into the ground. They weren’t whistling or joking. Nothing disrespectful. But this was obviously something they did every day. They could have been lowering an old refrigerator into that hole.
It felt very final in a flat sort of way. A box going in the ground.
And I find myself trying to see the whole story of his life. That rage was a dominant note.
He simmered in a state of annoyance. I asked my siblings to remind me of some of the odd things that triggered him.
Why was Sears always having a sale?
He thought people who ate sea food were insane: “Shrimp clean the bottom of the ocean.”
When they serviced your car, why did the mechanics say you had to get your oil changed? “Oil doesn’t wear out.”
Nothing annoyed him more than being asked if he wanted cheese on his hamburger. “You don’t ask somebody if they want cheese on a hamburger. If I asked for a cotton picking cheeseburger, are they gonna ask me if I want it with or without cheese?”
As I was just writing these examples, I kept hearing Larry David’s voice, instead of my father’s thick drawl. It’s easy to picture a whole episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm built around this quibble about cheeseburgers.
Indeed my father’s rants could be hilarious, but I always felt that he was genuinely outraged. All of these little things were symptoms of some underlying sickness in the world that gnawed at him. Sure, he was turning his anger into these comedic riffs, but, make no mistake, the McDonald’s employee trying to push that overpriced slice of cheese was a manifestation of a corrupt world.
When, like the Edgar Winter freak-out, he encountered any phenomenon that compromised masculinity, the outrage became rage.
Men wearing any form of sandal, especially flip flops, might as well be wearing a dress and a Dolly Parton wig.
He punished my other brother with silence for having long hair worn in a ponytail. And the silence went on for months. Maybe more than a year. It could have gone on to his grave. To my knowledge, it only ended when my brother, for his own reasons, cut his hair.
When my father spoke directly about homosexuality, he could evoke, without screaming, all of the violent rage he displayed over Edgar Winter. He gnashed his teeth and imbued his clenched words with a spine-chilling disgust … “How someone could do something so … so … NAAASSTY … and FILTHY … I … just … can’t … imagine!”
In his last decades, he carved almost 300 elegant walking sticks. One was bone-white hickory that had grown in a spiral like a unicorn’s horn. Along the swirl he had listed in his perfect calligraphy three historical tragedies of modern times. The first two were Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Golly! What could be the third tragedy? What historical catastrophe is on the same level of importance and severity? May 9, 2012, Obama declares his support for gay marriage.
He handed the walking stick to me calmly, with a smile, but the scream was louder than his shouting at Mark behind the shop door before he destroyed that record.
Yet … yet … as crazy as all of this sounds, as I’ve gotten older, it’s less crazy.
I can tell that in the eyes of my kids and other young people, I am only marginally less crazy than my father. They clearly regard my failure to remember new pronouns or avoid using “dead names” (the name of the little boy who came over for a hundred play dates and now has transitioned) as every bit as horrific as my father’s use of the N-word.
Before this new generation all started making me feel like a bigoted dinosaur, I would have said that my father and his generation deserved the shock they received when the 1960s erupted. All of these white men ran around blithely in a world where no one made them feel bad about grabbing the secretary’s ass or calling the elevator operator “boy.”
But I’ve spent my whole life trying to be progressive. I absorbed the inclusive messages from Sesame Street. We pressured our parents to stop using slurs. We made my artist mother stop painting scenes of black people picking cotton. I voted as a leftist from the start. Then I moved to New York, married a feminist and have lived as a factory-issue progressive liberal to this day. Yet I might as well be my dad in the living room ranting about hippies for all the good my liberalism has done me.
The only way I can avoid looking like a fascist blocking our collective progress into a future of social justice is to agree with the wild and endless assertions of young progressives. Am I exaggerating? You tell me! I was about to add some humorous examples, but anything I say will get me in trouble. About three people in the whole world will even read this, but one of them will surely share it with my boss: “Check this out! Your employee thinks that Algerian lady boxer looks like a dude and he still reads Flannery O’Connor even though she used the term ‘colored’ in an old letter! Fire him now!!!”
You tell me if I’m exaggerating!
I might as well be my father telling racist jokes with his cousins down in the swamp. These very words of frustration I’m writing now prove that I would obviously be at ease goose stepping in Nuremberg.
I’m not saying that my father wasn’t a racist homophobe. But I now realize that he probably felt very much like how I’m feeling these days, that he must have wondered “How did I become the bad guy just by living my life?”
Take this as you will, but my father says that his black babysitter taught him to use the N-word as the correct term for black people. One day when he was very small, he used some other word that made all the babysitters double over laughing on the square in Kosciusko. When his babysitter finally caught her breath, she coached him on the word he was supposed to use. With the hard R. No, not like that. Like this. That’s right. Say it again.
Then one day a bunch of stinky long-haired hippies stepped off a bus and demanded that he stop using this word and informed him that he embodied everything that was sick and wrong about America.
Okay. Fine. But it’s just a bunch of stinky hippies. Who cares what they think?
But suddenly, by some amazing coincidence, the people who ALWAYS shit on Mississippi agree with the stinking hippies.
Yes, smug journalists, sarcastic celebrities on talk shows, pompous Ivy League professors and, really, everybody everywhere who wants to feel better than someone else … all the people who would call my dad a stupid hick without apology … they all agree … suddenly … out of the blue … but like it’s something they have all been saying for years … they all agree with the long-haired freaks. Mississippi and my Dad are evil!!!
Tax-funded educational TV tells his children that he is a hateful bigot.
Meanwhile, he can’t help but feel that all of this is being orchestrated by the same people who told Sears to always have a sale, the same people who realized that if you get a billion people to add a 10 cent slice of processed cheese product to a burger as an afterthought, you’ll make 100 million dollars.
Long hair on men symbolized this mass insanity.
For my father, long hair on men was the embodiment of dark Yankee evil, a cold iron fist of history reaching through the billowing cannon smoke of the Civil War through a flickering TV screen of modernity down the highway on a bus to Mississippi where it smashed open the doors to fling out these abominations to call him a bigot.
So my father took us to Logan’s Barbershop in Maywood Mart to get whitewalls.
The bare strip of flesh over our ears would take us all back to Kosciusko, running around with his dog Sandy, hunting squirrels and fishing on the Yockanookany River. Back to a place where men didn’t wear sandals.
It’s unlikely that Mr. Harold removed the booster plank from the barber chair for that first cut without whitewalls, but that’s what I picture. I’m sunk down in the seat. Mr. Harold is no longer mumbling about me and Charlie over the snip of scissors at ear level. He is above me. He has receded into memory as a random adult giving me a quick functional haircut.
I can see my brother sitting in one of the vinyl chairs below the long mirror that reflected the row of other barbers and the infinite reflections of their reflections. Mark looks catatonic with boredom.
Coming to the barbershop with Dad was once a fun outing. We burst into the shop and raided the news rack for comic books and fought over the new Superman. All the barbers were comical characters, full of jokes and jargon. We pulled bottles of Coke too cold to hold out of a little door in the machine.
Now all of the comic books left are ones we read many haircuts ago. The light is dull. The aroma of Brylcreem and Aqua Velva smells like the disappointment of adulthood.
At least we were cool in the air conditioning out of the merciless Mississippi summer. But that made you feel sluggish.
I could tell on the drive home in the station wagon that taking us to the barbershop was now as much of a chore for my father as it was a drag for us to go.
A few years later, my father complained that Mr. Logan had hired a lady hairdresser. She played the radio too loud. There was too much gossip and cackling. My dad found another barber closer to his new office. Out toward the Reservoir.
Kenny Nowell 