In India, head shaving is practiced by many Hindus and seems to have more ritual significance than any other kind of hair removal.
At first I think we will do a head-shaving ritual. I will invite all my friends and I will take the bodhisattva vow. I imagine bowing down, humble, bald, stripped, away. But in the planning, the whole thing feels a little over the top and not so humble. Then my friend Sonja, who is super hot with a shaved head, tells me about her Italian barber on Tenth Avenue who charges only twelve dollars, and it seems so straightforward. So I go with Toast, Paula, Sonja, and Sonja’s lover, Claire, to an old-fashioned New York City barbershop. A whole group of Italian men debate my hair. Two of them wonder why I would want to get rid of it, and one super fit sexy man with a tattoo and shaved head keeps saying, “Go for it.” I don’t say I just had cancer, it’s not a choice, or that I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night with Silkwood clumps in my hand and bald patches in my scalp. I don’t say that this is a kind of eviction from a hairstyle that had become my home, or that my bangs and Louise Brooks bob were me. I don’t say it took me a lifetime to find that haircut and I swore I would never change it, or that when I was ten the boys in my class stripped me and called me “seaweed hair” because my hair was stringy and oily and pointless, and that having lousy hair was more painful than being half naked in front of most of my class.
And before I can say an absolute yes, Antonio is suddenly standing behind me with loud boy 4 clippers that are moving very close to my head. It never occurred to me that he would begin with my bangs—the fringe, the curtain, the veil. In less than a minute—gone. I watch Paula taking pictures of clumps of my dyed-black hair like little animals on the barber’s floor.
Some people think I look sexy with a shaved head. Some say I look like a boy and it turns them on. Some get that I’m sick and this is not a hairdo at all. Many think I look like a dyke. I feel exposed. Present. Humble. Clean. Clear. I don’t have to DO ANYTHING … with my hair. It is not who I am. I am suddenly face. All face.