Hair today, gone…never!

by RAF KATIGBAK

Dear Drunken Douchebags,

If you’re in a bar and you approach from behind what you think is a 5’4” girl with luxuriously black silken shoulder length hair to ask her to dance, be forewarned. She might not be the sweet Asian honey you were hoping her to be, she might actually be me.

This was the scene last Saturday at a pub where a friend of mine was DJing. As I was nursing my drink at the bar, I heard a slurred baritone behind me inquire, “Hey babe, do you wanna dance?” Now, some guys might take offence at the mistake and quite possibly feel the need to re-establish their manhood with a quick spin-around-head-butt retaliation, but I was used to it. It wasn’t the first time I had been mistaken for a female and frankly I didn’t give a fuck. “So what if my life sometimes resembles the corniest part of a Tone Loc video?” I thought. I calmly turned, tossed back my hair, batted my eyelashes and gushed, “Sure, but I don’t bone on the first date. If you buy me a drink you might get a beejer. But that’s it.” I never got my drink.

I want to see how long my hair can get. Not because I think it’s a hot look, or that I want it to take so much maintenance that—like famous long-hair singer Crystal Gayle—I consider it a separate entity, but I really believe that if I grow my hair long enough, I can achieve official Native Status and I’ll never have to pay taxes for anything ever again.

Let me explain. Besides being confused for a girl, my long hair also has the curious power to cause me to be mistaken for a Native American. I have ample evidence of this occurrence. There was the time in CEGEP that I answered a teacher’s question and the next person raised his hand to comment, “Yes, I have to agree with what the Indian guy just said.”

Then, in 1992, there was the six-month long relationship with a girl who I’m convinced only dated me because she was infatuated with the then-recently released film Last of the Mohicans. Even though I clearly am no Daniel Day Lewis, she would always play the soundtrack when we made out and one day asked if she could give me a “bone choker.” I was disappointed to find out she was, in fact, referring to a traditional native necklace, and not, as I’d hoped, a hand job.

Before you scoff at these instances of white man insensitivity, let me just state that this doesn’t just happen with ignorant honkies. Recently, when I visited the Oka region to interview locals about native roadblocks, several Mohawks asked to which clan I belonged. “Ummm,” I replied sheepishly, “…Wu Tang?”

I’m not sure exactly how I became a long-hair. Oh wait, I know how; I’m a cheap lazy asshole that couldn’t be bothered to go to a salon to pay $75 to argue with some angularly coiffed hipster over why I don’t need to shave racing stripes in my eyebrows.

But damn it if I don’t miss the hair wash. I think there’s a direct link between my scalp and the love centre of my brain. Two things usually happen when strangers rub my head: I either fall asleep or I ask them to marry me. In fact, I want the experience to last longer so I get my hair extra dirty the week leading up to my hair wash. In fact, I never understood why people wash their hair before going to a barber. Aren’t they just going to wash it anyway? Fuck that, I say, if they’re going to charge that much, let ’em work for it. I feel the same way about dentists too. That’s why I consume an entire bag of Nibs in the waiting room before every check-up.

I know what you’re thinking. “Dude, why don’t you just pay 12 bucks and go to the local barber?” While the idea of going to a barber appeals to my desire to “keep it real” (barf), there’s one thing that keeps me from ever setting foot in their establishment: those frightening promotional pictures most joints have in their windows. You know the ones, the invariably sun-faded 8x11s of men with puffy, outdated gel coifs that look like Alan Thicke circa Growing Pains, or the even creepier ones with spiky-haired, blonde, blue-eyed kids, posed in front of an older spiky-haired, blonde, blue-eyed man (presumably their dad), that look like a cross between Aryan Front recruitment propaganda and an ’80s ad for NAMBLA.

So yeah, no way I’m getting my haircut soon. But if/when I do decide to get one, I promise you all one thing: I will march into that salon and with a completely serious face and total conviction demand that the hairdresser give me a “Rachel.”

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca