TAKE IT ALL down to the lowest common denominator, shake off all the dust and heave out all the bull, and most of the problems we had with each other in the late sixties and early seventies really were about hair.
Think about it. Let’s suppose that student protesters who were burning buildings and marching and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam had shown up at the rallies wearing khaki pants, nice button-down, blue Oxford-cloth shirts, Weejuns, and short hair. I contend we wouldn’t have had near the commotion that we did.
Older people would have looked at them and instead of saying, “You godless, bed-wetting, pinko, Commie, nasty, long-haired hippies,” they might have said, “Gee, those youngsters certainly are vocal against the war, but isn’t it wonderful to see boys and girls that age taking an active interest in government.”
I’m not certain why, but most rebellions, however small, usually start with somebody doing something funky with their hair. Remember that at the Boston Tea Party, American revolutionaries grew their hair long, put it up in ponytails, donned feathers, and went out and started a war. Almost two hundred years later, a bunch of actors started a rebellion on Broadway with a musical called Hair. Some things never change.
The history of my own hair is one of coming and going.
When I was a baby, so my mother says, I had blond curls. She cut them off and still has them in a box somewhere. She can keep them.
When I was old enough to have my first haircut, my father, the soldier, took me to a barber shop and had them cut all my hair off. I doubt that he asked the barber to sweep my chopped locks off the floor so he could keep them in a small box, because like most military men, my father had no use for hair whatsoever. I never would have attempted to grow Elvis ducktails, had I lived with my father at the time, for fear he would have called me “Louise” instead of the name they gave me.
After I got over the ducktails thing, I went back to a crew cut because that’s what all the other boys wore. I allowed the crew cut to grow out before I started college, but I remained a relative skinhead through college and into my early adult years. I didn’t want anybody to think I was having anything to do with the hippie and anti-war movements.
Actually, I never saw a live hippie until after I was out of college. Come to think of it, I didn’t see any dead ones, either. The University of Georgia was not exactly a hotbed of activism when I was in school there between 1964 and 1968. We were too busy enjoying the school’s recent upsurge in football success after a long Dark Age. The only drugs I knew about were those pills you took to stay up all night and study because you’d been drinking beer and partying all weekend, celebrating Georgia’s victory over Auburn.
I distinctly remember the first hippie-in-the-flesh I ever saw. The year was 1968. I had just taken a job in Atlanta. One day I was driving along Peachtree Street and entered the 10th Street area, once known for a country music juke joint called Al’s Corral. Often had I been to Al’s, where the beer was cold and the music made you want to cry.
But by 1968, the 10th Street area had changed. It had become the Deep South’s answer to Haight-Asbury.
Hippies were everywhere — tall hippies, short hippies, boy hippies, and girl hippiettes. Gaggles of hippies sat on the sidewalks; one played guitar, while the others sang along or sat quietly listening to the music or picking their feet.
I must admit that I have done, and still do, my own share of foot-picking, but I consider it an exercise that should take place only in private and only occasionally. A person who picks his feet more than twice a month probably has some serious mental disorder, possibly dating back to his youth when he went around barefooted in the front yard and suffered stubbed toes or came down with planter’s warts from stepping on places where frogs went to the bathroom. (It is common knowledge that one thing that causes warts is frog pee-pee. You probably could look it up in a medical book somewhere.)
Foot-picking, I also admit, can be an enjoyable experience. When I pick my feet, maybe once every three or four months, I first dig under my toenails and remove any foreign matter such as sock lint. Then I rub my fingers between my toes, which also removes weird stuff that hides in there. Rubbing between your toes makes you tingly all over.
Next, I pick at any callouses on the bottom of my feet. Since I rarely go barefoot anymore, especially outdoors where I might step into some frog pee-pee, I don’t have to worry about warts.
I conclude my foot-picking by washing my hands thoroughly.
As I sat at a traffic light on Peachtree Street in the 10th Street area that day back in 1968, I watched one hippie in particular who apparently thought nothing of picking his feet in front of five o’clock traffic on the busiest street in town.
He had taken off his sandals and parked them next to him on the curb. I never could have been a hippie, if for no other reason than because I refuse to wear sandals, the official shoe of hippiedom. Sandals look awful, especially if you wear long, dark socks with them.
As a boy, I had noticed tourists from up north who were driving through Moreland on their way to Florida and had stopped at Bohannon’s Service Station for gasoline. Yankee men tourists inevitably wore Bermuda shorts and sandals and long, black socks they pulled up almost to their armpits. Occasionally, however, a yankee tourist would come through and go to the other extreme. He would roll his socks down all the way to his ankles, which made him and his sandals look even sillier. I vowed never to wear sandals, even if it meant walking through a frog latrine barefooted.
I continued to watch the hippie pick at his feet. He dug under a nail with concentration and resolve. Since he wore no socks at all, I knew it wasn’t sock lint he was removing. Perhaps it was road tar or some sort of animal leavings. The man looked as if he’d been sleeping with goats.
After completing his nail work, the hippie turned his attention to between his toes. I don’t know what causes strange substances to get between your toes, especially if you’re in an urban setting and far from the nearest chicken yard. But I do know from personal experience that if you don’t wash your feet often and your feet sweat a lot, you will have a gooey material between your toes. This substance normally is referred to as toe jelly or toe cheese. Since hippies seldom washed their feet, I figured he had a blue-ribbon supply of toe jelly between his toes.
At any rate, the light finally changed, and I drove away convinced that besides the political differences between me and hippies, there was one other major difference: I don’t pick my feet in public.
That was just one of the reasons I never considered becoming a hippie, of course. Another was that they reminded me too much of The Goat Man, who is another story.
* * *
Once or twice a year, when I was growing up, The Goat Man would come through Moreland and park his goats and the wagon they pulled in front of the Masonic Hall, where he would camp for a couple of days.
The Goat Man had a long beard and wore tattered clothing and a pair of high-top tennis shoes, which he probably slept in. When, and if, The Goat Man ever got around to picking his feet, he probably found all sorts of things between his toes — even small animals that had gone there to hibernate for the winter.
The Goat Man was a fairly nice person, if you could stand the smell. Herds of goats give out a distinctive aroma, reminiscent of chitterlings while they’re being cooked. People who live with herds of goats and sleep in their tennis shoes in the back of wagons take on the smell of their goats, which mixes with their own noxious odor, thereby creating a blend that would shock the olfactory nerves of a buzzard.
The Goat Man always carried around chewing gum for the children who came to see him and his goats, and we normally could hold our breath just long enough to get a couple of sticks of Juicy Fruit from him before we had to run for fresh air.
The Goat Man told great stories, though.
“Been all the way to Alaska and back since I was here last,” he would say. “Got so cold, I had to sleep between my goats to keep warm.”
Somebody would ask how long it took him to get to Alaska and back.
“These old goats here,” he would answer, pointing to his herd, “were just babies when I left. They were great-grandparents by the time we got back.”
The more I think about it, perhaps The Goat Man was the original hippie. He spurned the establishment life and indicated that he would rather share his being with goats than with other people.
I’m not certain if The Goat Man is still alive, or if he even lived long enough to see the hippie movement. I sort of hope he did, and I hope he took credit for starting it. A man who has spent his life huddling against the cold between goats needs to know he has left some sort of legacy, no matter how much it might smell.
* * *
There were certain beliefs, whether real or imagined, concerning hippies that were strongly held by those of us outside the movement.
There was the hair thing, of course. It was The Beatles who first hid their ears under their locks, but the hippies took it further and grew their hair over their shoulders and down even to their rears. And they grew long beards. That is, the male hippies grew long beards. Girl hippiettes, most of whom couldn’t grow beards, allowed the hair under their arms and on their legs to grow.
In some cultures, men find female underarm hair to be quite desirable. Not so with American men — not even hippies, I would wager. That makes me somewhat suspect of one of those beliefs we had about hippies, that their “Make love, not war” ideas meant they were spending a lot of time having sex with one another.
I really doubt that now. Sleeping with goats is one thing, but making love to a hairy-legged girl with hairy underarms is an even more disgusting notion. I suspect that when we thought hippies were having all that sex, they probably weren’t doing anything more intimate than picking one another’s feet.
We firmly believed that hippies didn’t wash their hair often and probably had cootie bugs roaming around on their scalps.
I’m not exactly certain what a cootie bug is, but there was a boy in my school whose head was allegedly infested with them. He was always scratching at his scalp, and he soon absorbed the nickname (or should I say nickmane?) of “Coot.” The teacher finally called the health department and they came and got “Coot” and gave him some sort of treatment. He never scratched his head much after he was de-cootied, which was one of the first miracles of modern medical techniques I ever saw.
It was the fact that hippies wore their hair long and probably had cootie bugs that caused me to begin shampooing every day. Previously, I had not shampooed more than once or twice a week, because when I did my hair would become quite dry and stick up all over my head. A date once remarked that it looked like I was wearing a cocker spaniel on my head. I decided, however, that it would be easier to get another date than to get rid of cootie bugs.
It was the order of that day to make fun of hippies’ long hair. The most popular game was to question the gender of a male hippie whose hair flowed down his back like Trigger’s tail.
“See that?” somebody would ask, pointing to a nearby hippie.
“I see it, but I don’t know what it is,” would come the reply.
“Is it male or female?”
“Can’t tell.”
“It’s wearing a man’s clothes.”
“But it’s got hair like a girl.”
“Maybe it’s one of them she-men. They got those operations now, you know.”
“Naw, it’s just one of them nasty-headed hippies.”
“Yeah, see it doin’ that peace sign? All them hippies give that peace sign.”
“Yeah, well give the son of a bitch half of it back.”
The truth is, those of us in the straight world didn’t like hippies and didn’t trust them and wanted them to go away so our world could go back to being normal.
We wanted to win the war in Vietnam and bring the boys home victorious and have ticker tape parades for generals and show the evil communistic world that you don’t mess with the United States of by-God America. Hippies wanted peace, even a dishonorable one. The cowards.
Hippies smoked dope and took LSD and God knows what else. We wondered why they couldn’t be satisfied with beer like the rest of us.
Hippies liked flowers. We liked football.
Hippies listened to musical groups with names like Led Zeppelin and Cream and Jefferson Airplane and Blind Faith and The Grateful Dead and The Moody Blues. We still liked Merle Haggard and “Okie From Muscogee.”
“Leather boots are still in style if a man needs foot-wear.
Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen.
And football’s still the roughest thing on the campus.
And the kids here still respect the college dean.”
Hippies looked filthy. We smelled like Aqua-Velva men.
Hippies didn’t work. We busted our tails for promotions.
Hippies wore sandals and patched jeans. We wore wing tips and three-piece suits.
Hippies joined communes. We joined the Rotary Club.
Hippies danced nude in the mud. We worked on our golf games.
There were, of course, many people in my age group who broke away and went off to become hippies. I knew of only one, however. He was Stinky Drake, who was from Moreland and was a couple of years older than me.
As I look back, I can see now that even as a child Stinky showed evidence that one day he might grow up to be a hippie. He never played baseball with the rest of us. He spent his time making belts and Indian moccasins from a kit he had ordered from an ad in the Grit newspaper. He did other strange things, too, like the time we went on a Boy Scout trip and we caught a large number of catfish and tied them on a stringer. When nobody was looking, Stinky took the fish off the stringer and set them free.
“What if you were a fish?” Stinky asked his irate camp-mates. “Would you want to be stuck on a stringer, or to be free to go back to your family in the river?”
We realized there was no point in arguing with anybody who worried about fish being taken from their families, so we tied Stinky to a tree and went back to breaking up fish families for our evening meal. Stinky wouldn’t eat that night because he said it would make him feel guilty eating somebody’s father or mother.
It wasn’t long afterwards that Stinky became the first vegetarian I ever met. At school they served him a special plate; nobody would eat with him and Stinky soon became known as “Bean Breath.”
In high school, Stinky joined the Drama Club and wrote a poem for the school paper entitled “An Ode to Vegetables.” I remember the closing lines:
“Just because I don’t eat meat
Doesn’t mean that I’m not neat.”
I suppose we were cruel to Stinky, which caused him to rebel against the norm even more. After he graduated from high school, we heard he went off in the mountains somewhere and ate a lot of roots and berries and lived on what he could earn selling the belts and Indian moccasins he still made.
Next, we heard that he had broken his parents’ hearts by growing his hair long and taking up dope-smoking and running off to Canada to avoid the draft. He also was living in sin with a woman who didn’t wear shoes or shave under her arms. He had met her at a rock concert.
I don’t have any idea what ever happened to Stinky, but I suppose he’s still out there in the hills somewhere, dressed like Cochise and munching on sunflower seeds.
* * *
It is odd — and beneficial, too — how time changes ideas and mends feelings. After the war in Vietnam ended, most of the hippies bathed themselves, cut their hair, quit wearing sandals, and quit picking their feet. Today most of them are stockbrokers or fertilizer salesmen.
But they left their mark, and again it was the hair. Do you know who wears their hair long today? Good ol’ boys, that’s who. You can see it coming out from under their International Harvester and Red Man caps. Know who wears their hair neat and short? Gays and those men you see in clothing ads in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (although that may be a redundancy).
As for my own hair, here’s the rest of the shaggy story:
After the war, longer hair became the accepted fashion for men, and I followed suit. Sideburns even made a comeback. I had long hair and sideburns, and all of a sudden it wasn’t possible to go to a regular barber shop anymore. Men had to go to stylists, and where they once had paid three bucks for a haircut, it was now costing them $12.50 and they had to make an appointment.
The first time I went to a hair stylist — it was around 1974 — I made an appointment with the renowned Mr. Phyllis.
“What on earth have you been shampooing with, my dear boy?” asked Mr. Phyllis.
“Soap,” I said.
“Oh, God, no,” Mr. Phyllis recoiled in horror. “Soap dries the hair and splits the ends.”
I started to say my end had been split my entire life, but I decided it would not be wise to talk about such while I was alone in the room with Mr. Phyllis.
He immediately took charge of my hair. He shampooed it with an odd-smelling substance, put conditioner on it, and then “sculptured” it. Finally he put the blow dryer to me, and when it was over, I paid him the $12.50.
I felt a little cheated. At the barber shop, not only had I been charged a mere three bucks, but the barber usually told me a joke, too.
“Fellow had these two sows he wanted to get mated,” went my barber’s favorite joke. “He didn’t have a boar, but he knew a fellow who did. So he called him up and asked if he could bring his two sows up to his farm and let that ol’ boar have a go at ’em.
“The fellow said to bring ’em on up, so he put the two sows in the back of his pickup and drove ’em to his neighbor’s farm.
“That ol’ boar got real interested in his job and really did some work on the two sows. There was all sorts of gruntin’ and oinkin’ goin’ on, ’cause when you got three thousand pounds of pork in the heat of passion, you got something wild.
“Anyway, when the ol’ boar was finished, the man asked his neighbor how he would know if the job had took. His neighbor said to look out at his hogs the next morning, and if they were layin’ up in the sunshine, everything was okay.But if they were still wallowin’ in the mud, he’d have to bring ’em back.
“Next morning, he looked out his window and his hogs were wallowin’ in the mud, so he put ’em back in his truck and drove ’em back to see the boar again.
“Same thing happened. His neighbor’s wife broke out in a sweat watchin’ them hogs, and the dogs got to barkin’ loud and they had to throw cold water on ’em.
“Next morning’, though, it was the same thing. Them two hogs was still wallowin’ in the mud. Man took his hogs up there a third time. Next mornin’, he couldn’t bear to look out at his hog pen, so he said to his wife, ‘Honey, look out there and tell me if my hogs are sittin’ in the sunshine or wallowin’ in the mud.’
“She looked out the window and said, ‘Neither one.’
“The man said, ‘Well, where are they?’
“The fellow’s wife said, ‘One of ’em’s in the truck ridin’ shotgun, and the other one’s blowin’ the horn.’“
Mr. Phyllis didn’t know any jokes, or at least not any like that. He was always too busy talking about his cat or watering the plants in his salon to tell jokes.
After I had gone to the trouble of having my hair styled, I thought it would be wise to take care of what my $12.50 had bought me, so I vowed never to wash my hair with soap again and went out to buy some shampoo.
“Do you have any shampoo for men?” I asked a saleslady in the cosmetics department.
“I think you will like this,” she answered, handing me a bottle of shampoo. “It has the faint aroma of apricot.”
Apricot?
“If you don’t care for apricot,” the woman continued, “perhaps you would like something with an herbal essence.”
What I really wanted, I said, was something that smelled like soap. I didn’t want to go around with my head smelling like a fruit salad.
I also purchased an electric hair dryer, of course. Previously, I had allowed my hair to dry naturally. When I was in a hurry, I would simply shake my head back and forth like a dog does when he’s wet. With longer hair, however, I was told that this was impossible, even though I knew I’d seen a collie dry itself off with just two or three good shakes.
After purchasing the hair dryer, I also had to buy hair-spray. When I bought it, I said a silent prayer that my father wasn’t somewhere looking down upon his only son buying gook that sprayed out of a can to keep my hair in its original, upright and locked position after it had been blown dry and styled each morning.
But it had been so much simpler for my father. He hadn’t needed shampoo or hair dryers or hairspray, because nobody else used anything like that when he was a young man about town. Men were men in his day. He would have hit Mr. Phyllis square in the mouth if that dandy had tried to sculpt his hair.
The hair situation is even more confusing today. Mine is shorter than it was when I first allowed it to grow in the seventies, but it still covers my ears. I got rid of the sideburns, but now I’ve got a beard and a mustache. I’m not certain what my father would think of that.
“Ain’t but two kinds of people who wear beards and mustaches,” he likely would have said. “That’s queers and movie stars, and I ain’t seen none of your movies lately “
But if he’s concerned about my hirsute appearance, I wonder what he thinks about punk rockers who have their hair styled to look like the back of a horned frog. And I wonder what he thinks of people these days who dye their hair all sorts of colors, including orange and pink. My only hope is that heaven has mellowed him.
But what of me? I’m still here trying to deal with all this craziness. Hair and music have been a problem, but I have managed to cope with them after some degree of agony. But there have been so many other changes and dilemmas in the modern world. For instance, whose idea was it that men all of a sudden were supposed to be sensitive and enjoy fooling around with flowers and were even supposed to cry in front of women if they felt like it?
Each time I thought I knew all the answers to modern-day questions, somebody would up and change the questions.
And just when I thought there was nothing left to go haywire, I lost complete touch with the reality that was once men’s clothing.
Excuse me for a moment, while I change into my leisure suit.