I am currently bald. I say currently because I am holding out for medical science. Yes, I have heard of Rogaine; no, I haven’t tried it. I don’t want my hair back. I want to take a pill and get John Legend’s hair. I know you’re thinking, Have I been sleeping on John Legend’s hair? Is it extraordinary? No. It is fine. It’s very nice hair. It looks good all the time without being showy about it. I’m not asking for a crown of glory; I just want a nice, unremarkable full head of hair that does its job competently and attractively like the third lead on a crime procedural. Is that too much for modern science to give?
Other people seem to notice my baldness more than me, which makes sense because I am incredibly humble and never look in a mirror. Also, I just kind of don’t care. But it’s still a surprise to me when little kids draw me as a round-faced bald man. Are little kids drawing me a lot? Why, yes, they are, thanks for asking. I’m a kindergarten art model. It’s a living. I look at these drawings and I see Gordon from Sesame Street or Steve Harvey but never myself. I suppose I don’t know what I look like, or maybe I’m just waiting to memorize my look after I get my John Legend treatment.
My hair, when I had hair, was no great shakes. I didn’t really have a plan for my hair. I was too shy to try most fun hairstyles, and it felt like, when it was just cut normally, it didn’t have any of the verve, sheen, or glow of other people’s styles. I now realize that it’s because I wasn’t putting any product in it, products with names like Verve, Sheen, and Glow. I mean, it said it right on the tub of metallic blue gel, but how was I supposed to know?
Most of the time I don’t think about my hair, which in and of itself seems like a dereliction of my duty as a black person. Hair is integral to cultural blackness—how we do our hair, what products are available to us, whether we let white people touch it (we don’t), and the messaging we receive from nonblack people about our hair, it’s all part of the experience. I know this; I’m sometimes affected by it, but I find it hard to internalize. I am proud to be black but I’ve never been able to harness pride about my hair. I just don’t really connect with it, or the lack thereof.
Baldness is a legitimate black hair choice, too. Why don’t I make Taye Diggs my hair idol and keep it moving? Do I look like Taye Diggs? No, but has the tyranny of facts ever stopped me before? Again, no. One year for Halloween, I went as Kanye West. Sort of. I wore sunglasses and a sports coat because I am the laziest Halloween dresser known to man. Did my bald ass look like Kanye West? No. Somebody asked me if I was Lex Luthor. This was hilarious to me because this person was obviously costume color-blind and very woke. But still, let’s not be ridiculous about this. You see my bald ass walking down the street on Halloween wearing a suit, you don’t think, Hey, that’s Lex Luthor! I can tell from the context clues. You also don’t think, Hey, that’s Kanye West. More likely, you think, That guy is dressed as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Or, most likely, Why is that bald man going to a job interview at 8 P.M. on Halloween night? And why does the suit have shorts?!
The suit has shorts because I’m dressed up as Sexy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Also known as Lex Luthor Vandross.
Back in college (the golden age of Terrible Hair Decisions), when I had hair but wasn’t putting Verve or Glow in it like I should have been, I didn’t particularly like my hair, and only once did I deign to try something adventurous with it. This was after I had dropped out of Columbia, enrolled at UMBC, and after I had accidentally written something that caused a campus-wide controversy and got me briefly labeled as a white racist. Things were not going well. I didn’t yet know about the concept of a depression beard, so crisis hair seemed like the next best thing.
One of the things I didn’t mention in the last essay was that during the blowup over my viral Black History Month satire, the local NBC affiliate got involved. They emailed me asking if they could interview me about the imbroglio, and this fame-obsessed bitch immediately said yes. I’m the president of the Showing-Up-on-Television-Anytime-I-Can Society. Well, technically Gore Vidal is the president of that society. I’m the vice president. The Al Gore Vidal. The news crew showed up at my after-school job, which was waiting tables at a comedy club. (Just a note, if you’ve gone viral for writing something that a lot of people think is racist, maybe don’t tell the news trucks to meet you outside of your place of employment.)
The whole newspaper dustup occurred during a period when I was between haircuts. This happened frequently, as I was very uncomfortable at black barbershops. To start, I was a not-especially-masculine man who never successfully learned the name of the kind of haircut he wanted, so going to a barbershop was always a losing proposition for me. But there’s more to it than that. There is something specifically hierarchical about my experience of a black barbershop. The space exists for the cutting of black men’s hair, of course, but also to host overtly heterosexual camaraderie and community, which I’ve found most often expresses itself through machismo. The more macho one was, the blacker one was. This showed up in topics of discussion, in grooming, in the unspoken rules of who could and could not be there (rarely any women, besides moms, and even they would sometimes drop their sons off and come back). The rule, as I understood it, was that a successful man devoted time and attention to his hair to attract women and to be presentable in a largely white society that had a limited capacity for accepting new hairstyles. But you also wanted your pride and your preening to be rooted in masculinity. There wasn’t, and isn’t, a wide spectrum of ways a black man could express himself—his beauty, his pride, his love for his own being—in the spaces I passed through. This came from centuries-old external pressures on him, namely the presumption that he was a savage and therefore not actually a man at all. Having a strict understanding of how a black man operated in the world kept us safe. As someone whose deviations from that model were always clocked by others, I understood that.
And, I should say, there were certainly barbershops that catered to men who put Jheri curls in their hair, and pretty men who always had a girlfriend, dandies with bespoke suits, fly politicos with big pockets and slicked-back coifs, high-siddity boys with “good hair,” but those weren’t the shops that I was going to. The barbershops I went to were full of working-class men with natural hairstyles, the whir of razors, and stacks of Playboys in a corner somewhere.
I was never even close to the top of the hierarchy in the barbershop. My internalized discomfort with my own blackness seemed to be writ large, like a message shaved into the back of a high-top fade. And my hair didn’t seem to want to lend me a hand, anyway. Apparently, it was the job of every black barber to give me a stern talking-to about my razor bumps, the fact that I had waited too long to get my hair cut, the things I was supposed to do (and obviously hadn’t been doing) to maintain it. The barber, with his hands in your scalp, knows who you are, which is more than I could say for myself.
So I didn’t get my hair cut a lot. And I didn’t know how to cultivate a ’fro, so when the news truck showed up at my job during the Black History Month satire imbroglio and started asking me questions like “What is your race problem?” I appeared on the evening broadcast with my Resting Bitch Face sitting beneath a medium-size mass of matted, dense, unpicked curls. My hair looked like the kind of hair you give a black Muppet if you haven’t taken enough cultural sensitivity classes and all your materials come from the clearance bin at A.C. Moore. But at least I got on TV.
A month later, still with no haircut, I got the newspaper to send me to a college journalism conference in Manhattan. I desperately wish I could remember that conversation. “Hey! So you know how I wrote a satire that no one thought was a satire and brought down the fire of the nascent internet on myself and this paper and then had the audacity to appear on the news talking about how I’m not sorry? You want to pay for me to go to New York, where I really want to be anyway, and learn how to actually write?” Whatever it was, they said yes.
I was obsessed with being back in New York. I felt I’d taken it for granted when I was there, struck dumb and immobilized by all the changes I was undergoing and all the dynamism of the city. I wanted to claim a second chance. I realized I felt freer in New York and sometimes more lovely. In Baltimore, I was inarticulate and tender-headed. Just not cute. Not cute all around.
The conference was in late March. I was still receiving little dribbles of hate mail from my unsuccessful Black History Month satire. What can I say? The fans can’t get enough. I didn’t yet have a smartphone, so escaping to New York also meant leaving behind an inbox that had nothing for me but insults. It meant allowing myself to tiptoe back into the life I had at Columbia, where, in my gauzy memories, I was always happy and my hair reached up to the sun in an exuberant explosion of sex appeal, like Maxwell’s. This kind of delusion can carry you far in life, I’ve found. But you can never let it slip.
When I arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel for the conference, I got in line to check in and spied an attractive black guy two people ahead of me. He had beautiful skin and gorgeous, black hair. It was freshly cut, shaped up at the nape of his neck, tapered on the sides and longer on top, with waves. Waves? Is that what they’re called? Sure. Honestly, sometimes I look at a guy’s well-maintained hair like it’s a crop circle. I marvel at the achievement but I can’t for the life of me imagine how it was done. In any case, the aliens had come down and blessed this man’s head.
I continued to openly stare at the back of his beautiful head the entire time we waited in line, because I am a creeper. I felt immediately self-conscious, aware of my small, unruly ’fro, and the gulf between what I looked like and a Maxwell album cover, and the fact that I could not say for sure if the waves in his hair were naturally occurring or something that a barber or someone had cut in or what. He must have felt the fiery intensity of my total confusion, because he turned around and caught my eye. He nodded at me in acknowledgment and then went about his business. I love when hot people nod at me; it reminds me that I exist. But something in me broke a little bit when this particular hot guy nodded at me. I remembered what I looked like and felt the need to shout, “Sorry to bother your eyes with all this. Work in progress! ‘This Woman’s Work’ in progress!” It might have been the better option. At least he would have kept looking at me. Instead, I said nothing. He turned, got his key, and disappeared into the hotel.
For whatever reason, that fleeting feeling of freedom and loveliness that I’d been clinging to slipped away. I don’t know why I needed more than a passing acknowledgment from this stranger. Like, I was in a city of six million people. Why didn’t I go get nodded at by literally anybody else? Despite the fact that much of my self-worth was wrapped up in my rapidly disintegrating academic career and the fact that the National Association of Black Journalists thought I was a racist, I decided to hang my emotional health on the nod of a stranger.
Is there such a thing as internal validation? I know we’re not supposed to hang our hopes on external validation. “Love yourself!” everyone says. “Or at least like yourself. Tolerate yourself!” But a lot of the time, being told that everyone else—or anyone else—finds worth in you carries more weight than telling yourself that you’re worth it.
I weighed this as the hot guy at the college newspaper conference nodded and ignored me, as he checked in and then I checked in, as I lay across my bed and patted my matted ’fro. And then it occurred to me: I didn’t have to let our interaction die like that. I could do what anyone who needs the attention of a boy to feel complete would do: I could She’s All That myself. You know She’s All That-ing: it’s that ancient African tradition wherein an unremarkable nerd transforms into a beautiful hottie just in time for the prom, usually by combing their hair and taking off their glasses. I didn’t even have glasses! I was halfway to hot already! (Though, truth be told, I always thought I’d look better with glasses and was constantly vexed by my perfect vision. I’m a one-man O. Henry story.)
When I’d been enrolled at Columbia, I once wandered through Morningside Park to explore Spanish Harlem and came across a Dominican hairdresser. They had the same haircut chart that my brusque barber on the West Side had, but here there was music coming from within and the shop was full of women and it seemed unlikely that anyone would leave in the middle of the cut to go get lunch and buy a bootleg. I stopped in, asked them to cut my hair, didn’t suffer any emotional damage, and left. Lying across my hotel bed, hands tangled in my Muppet hair, I remembered the Spanish Harlem shop and decided to make a return trip. I would have them fix my hair and in so doing fix my life. Like a reverse Rapunzel, I would be freed by having my hair cut, and I would return to the hotel a new person. A swan. And this swan would, of course, captivate this stranger who was just trying to live his life. It seemed improbable and not terribly well thought out and I was very excited about it.
The Dominican beauty shop was just as I remembered it: music, pink chairs, chill feminine energy, and no customers. This was my idea of heaven. In a grooming situation, I really don’t need to be around a lot of other people. This goes for haircuts, manicures, massages, trying on clothes, walking, talking, existing, etc. A lot of people have a therapeutic relationship with the person that does their hair. I am and have always been someone who could really use a lot of therapy but never found that safety in the barbershops. I felt safe at the beauty shop. And, as the name would suggest, I felt in the presence of beauty. So when the beautician asked me what I wanted her to do with my hair, some desire buried deep inside me rushed to the surface and leapt off the precipice of my lips. I didn’t say the usual, a mumbled variation on “Can I have a low fade or whatever it’s called.” Instead, I said, “Can you straighten it?”
“You want a perm?” she asked, pointing to the box of lye relaxer on the counter. I charged ahead. “Yes,” I said. “Just straighten it and maybe cut down the sides.” So she did.
I had never straightened my hair before; I can’t say I ever thought to straighten my hair before. But as I leaned my head back into the sink so she could apply the chemicals, I realized it was what I had wanted for a long time. Did I want to be white? No. Did I want white hair? Well, I wouldn’t mind it. Wasn’t I always absentmindedly sweeping hair behind my ear like all my friends at school did, even though there was never any hair to sweep? Didn’t I spend far too much time thinking about the concept of bangs? Failing to find access to an understanding of black male attractiveness, I reverted to the white version, which somehow felt more accessible, perhaps because of its ubiquity. She’s All That-ing rarely happens to black characters, after all. In lieu of a therapy session where I could work out this racial disassociation, I put my head in the hands of a kind Dominican woman who gently and expertly dragged a comb smeared with chemicals from the roots to the tips of my hair. She set a timer for fifteen minutes as I sat up, looked at myself in the mirror, and smiled.
At around minute nine it started to burn. “Is this normal?” I asked.
“You’re ripping the curl out of your hair,” she said. “It’s gonna feel like violence.”
That was a bit more lyrical than I was ready for, so I was just like, “Okay, cool. Well, um, I trust you. Also this is terrible.”
She was like, “Quiet. I’m watching Entertainment Tonight.”
I love celebrity news, so we watched Entertainment Tonight for six more minutes together in silence.
When the timer went off, she put me back in the sink, washed and shampooed my hair, and then dried it. She removed the towel, and for the first time in my life, my hair fell into my face and I felt an unfamiliar thrill. It was bone straight. White straight. It was like a limb had appeared in a space where there was previously just phantom feeling. It was a surrogate solution to all the conflicted racial feelings I had. And it was a lie. But I had never felt lovelier, and beauty beats truth any day. At least that’s what I took from my half-remembered viewing of She’s All That.
In the movies, quite frequently you’ll see black people going to sleep and waking up, because that’s what human people do to keep themselves alive. However, very rarely in a movie do you see a black person wrap their hair in a silk scarf or a do-rag before bed, apply moisturizer or oil, or do any of the other myriad things it takes to maintain some black hairstyles, like, say, relaxed hair. As someone who learned absolutely everything from movies and yet also nothing, I didn’t know that once you straighten your hair, you can’t toss your head and go like you’re a hair model in a L’Oréal commercial. It takes a lot of doing. That never came up in the beauty shop, and for twelve hours, roughly, I lived in blissful ignorance. My hair was so light and so straight. I returned to the hotel and strode through the doors like Julia Roberts at the end of the shopping montage in Pretty Woman. Anyone who wasn’t immediately beguiled by this awkward twenty-one-year-old with J. C. Penney clothes and Prince hair was out of their damn minds. I went to bed that night like a black person in a movie. Not a care in the world and not a thing on my head.
Like a character in a fairy tale discovering that a terrible prophecy has come true, the next morning I found that a natural curl had already started to seep out of my scalp, and my hair, which once fell gracefully, stood angrily from my head. I panicked. I didn’t know that the chemicals had left my hair desiccated and that I’d need to condition and wrap it if I wanted to keep it looking nice. I thought I’d been cursed! I was late for a workshop session, so I just ran some water through it—another cardinal sin of black-relaxed-hair care—and rushed off to the day’s first workshop, a session on minorities in college newspapers, looking like black Kramer.
At the workshop, a Samuel Clemens–looking dude recognized my name from the imbroglio I’d recently been involved in with my school newspaper. He struck up a conversation with me about the reaction and we talked about satire and race. My head started to itch and I nervously smoothed it. It resisted. The hot black guy from earlier popped up behind Samuel Clemens. He grinned at me and apologized for eavesdropping but told us he couldn’t help but be intrigued. “I edit a literary journal at Emory,” he said. “This article sounds like just the kind of thing we’re looking for.”
Despite the fact that the entire young internet had gotten mad at me for writing a satire that no one thought was a satire and everyone thought was written by a white person, I immediately told him I’d be happy to let him read it and republish it. Maybe it was his beauty, maybe it was my white hair privilege, maybe the chemicals had seeped into my brain. All I knew was that yesterday he nodded at me and today he was asking to read my writing and if that isn’t the payoff of a She’s All That-ing, I don’t know what is.
The hot guy asked me what I was doing for lunch. “Nothing,” I said, resisting a persistent urge to scratch my scalp. “Let’s continue this over food,” he said. I high-fived my rapidly fraying split ends of indeterminate racial heritage.
We walked to a coffee shop around the corner, talking all the way about my article and his journal and what life was like for him in Atlanta and what life was like for me in Baltimore. We had an instant chemistry that I was sure must have been one of the side effects of the hair. We sat at a counter by the front window and I caught a glimpse of our reflections—he, darker than I, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect smile, and me, overeager smile, hair berserk.
After lunch we discovered that we were going to the same afternoon session, a presentation by some folks from the Sesame Street Workshop. If I were a good journalist, I suppose a question that I should ask would be, “Say! Why are there Muppets at a college newspaper conference?” But everyone knows I am not a good journalist. I just like a good story. AND MUPPETS. And the story here is two black dudes, one with a sort of Bride of Frankenstein thing going on with his hair, leaning into each other as they laugh at the antics of a special guest star Cookie Monster. It was amazing how quickly my life had become perfect. Here’s the place, were this a movie, that the montage would kick in. Us, eating and deeply engaged in conversation, us randomly in the presence of a celebrity puppet, us getting hot dogs for dinner from Gray’s Papaya…and us with our beautiful black skin illuminated by the lights of Times Square as we walked after nightfall, as he grabbed my hand.
Parts of my identity that had felt unresolved and at odds with each other for years found harmony between our pressed palms. We didn’t talk about what it was like to be both black and gay in that time, or where we’d come from, or if we were out in our other lives, our real lives. I think we both knew it was temporary, though if he’d asked me to pick up and move to Atlanta, obviously I would have. What did I have to lose? What was waiting for me back in Baltimore?
As a kid, I’d never gone away to sleep-away camp or studied abroad, so the idea of a chance meeting and a sudden romance was new to me and wholly cinematic. And in movies, you live happily ever after following the She’s All That-ing. Occasionally, you have to have a dramatic scene in which you confess that you’re not really a swan—in my case, I suppose that meant admitting to the Emory boy that I did not possess naturally straight hair. (I think he might have suspected.) But everyone knows those revelations are quickly sorted out and forgiven. There was nothing standing in our way. I was also, at this point, unaware of the concept of a conference hookup. If I had known it was common practice for people to go to conferences, drink in hotel bars, and hook up with other conventioneers, I would have joined a lot more professional organizations. But isn’t not knowing better?
I went to bed that night and dreamt of him. He was playing in the sheets, pulling them over his head and then revealing himself. Over and over. We were in the hotel. I didn’t know him in any other context. But I think we’d been there forever.
When I woke up, I was alone. Well, not quite—my hair, another night un-do-ragged, continued on its journey of self-actualization. It was even drier, even coarser, and even wilder than the first day. I sat in the bed and looked at myself in the mirrored closet across the room. This person was unrecognizable to me, not because the hair was transformative but because the thing that I wanted was so deeply rooted and so unruly that I wasn’t even aware of its breadth. I’d told the woman in the beauty shop to straighten my hair in a moment of wild freedom that, to me, in that time, was a hallmark of whiteness, but also of a kind of black maleness that was so different from my own experience. It wasn’t about the texture so much as a loosening of external reads on my body. Well, it was a little bit the texture—hair-ography is a powerful force. But I could have flipped my hair out of my face with dreads just as easily. Ultimately, the how didn’t matter so much as the result: a new me, beautiful, free.
Perhaps I was reaching for authenticity through a funhouse mirror. I didn’t know. I just didn’t want to be who I was. It turns out that’s not a specific enough request. The natural curl had returned, a day and a half past the point when I tried to chemically rip it out, stretching furiously from root to tip, standing straight up, matted no more. A protest. It was almost inspirational.
On Saturday, the conference ended but the Emory boy wanted to prolong our time. He asked if I’d go with him to run some errands. “What errands?” I asked. He answered, “I need to get my hair cut.” He’d found a barbershop up in Harlem and, despite the fact that his hair looked good to me, he wanted to get it trimmed and shaped up before going back to Atlanta. I’ve always believed, apropos of nothing, that Southern blackness is the equivalent of professional blackness, so I can see why he’d want to be vigilant about his follicular freshness.
I immediately got nervous. I pictured the barbershop, in my mind a combination of every barbershop in which I’d ever had an uncomfortable experience. I could smell the Newport dangling from the barber’s mouth; I could hear the mocking laughter, feel the sidelong glances. And then I remembered what I looked like and shivered thinking of what the barbers would say about my hair. Barbers, I’ve found, often stand outside their shops and shout like carnival barkers at passersby about what’s wrong with their hair and what they can do to fix it. In the present, I am always grateful for my baldness because it exempts me from this public critique as marketing ploy. But back then, head full of over-permed, badly maintained hair, on an errand date with a boy, I was sure I’d be asking for it. “How about we do something else?” I asked. The Emory boy insisted. He really needed a haircut but he also really wanted to keep hanging out. I volunteered that I’d walk him there, hoping to somehow convince him to change his mind before we stepped through the threshold.
We caught the subway together up to Harlem and he grabbed my hand again. I had never held a boy’s hand in public before that week, and it felt magical and slightly dangerous but, more important, right. It felt safe. The neon-edged brightness of Times Square at night had been switched out for the flat, clinical light of the number 1 train, but yet we remained unharmed. No one even said anything. We were just two people, going through some things in our lives but experiencing a moment of beauty. We passed Columbia and got off at 145th Street, still talking, still holding hands. He turned boldly down Seventh Avenue and came to a stop in front of the barber shop he’d found online. I let go of his hand. “It’ll be real quick,” he said.
“Unless there’s a bunch of people waiting in front of you like there always is,” I replied. He pushed open the door. “Wait,” I said. “I’m going to go hang out. Grab some lunch. But I’ll see you back at the hotel before you go.” He stared at me and I knew what he was asking was so little; it was so inconsequential in the scope of things. I knew that what he was offering me superseded the discomfort that a space like the barbershop had previously held, if only temporarily. But I couldn’t go in. I wouldn’t. It would have been easier if he’d asked me to move to Atlanta and become a professional black person. “I’ll see you later,” I said, knowing that I was lying. He walked into the shop and let the door close behind him. I scuttled down the block to the corner, out of sight of the barbers waiting within.
What to do now? I turned and wandered back down Broadway, toward Columbia, out of instinct and habit and an unrequited love. I thought of rushing back to the barbershop and catching the Emory boy, but my feet knew not to waste their time turning, for it was just a thought. At the corner of 125th and Broadway, I stopped. I scratched my head and winced as I felt a sharp pain. I drew back my hand and saw a thin crescent of blood on my fingernails.
My entire scalp radiated a dull ache. I gingerly dug down through my hair with the pads of my fingertips and felt the skin. It was rough, calloused from the hairline to the crown of my head. I crossed the street to a closed storefront and inspected my head in the ghostly reflection of the window. It was as I suspected: my scalp had a chemical burn. All of it. Burnt. I had tried to kill my hair and now my hair was back for revenge.
Truth be told, I was rooting for it to succeed.