When I was a teenager I feared that I would grow hair all over my back. I prayed to god that it wouldn't happen.I have hair on my back, not a blanket like I feared. Most of it is on and around the scar I have across the middle left from having shingles at age four.
My mother once warned me from shaving too high on my cheeks, said that I would make hair grow there by shaving it.
In the fifth grade I went into my mother and father's room without knocking. He was lying beside/on top of her plucking hairs from around her nipple. There was a frozen moment in time during which we all grew old and died and so did all of our relatives and offspring before Daddy said, "Get out!"
My hair started thinning when I was in my early twenties. I saw my uncles' hairlines on my mother's side, basic male pattern baldness. My grandfather, too. On my father's side, they all had thicker hair, more of it. His was the thinnest of that family. It had receded pretty far back by the time he died at 39. But I'd heard you get your hair from your mother's side of the family, so I was already fucked.
I moussed my hair. It became a spiky thing as it thinned out. I was always putting shit in it. Sometimes desperate about it, sometimes pleased with what I had created.
In NYC, I wrote a play that starred two popular black drag queens. They shaved their heads -- back when this hadn't yet caught on in so big a way. It made it easier (and more comfortable) for wigs. That Halloween I went in drag, shaved my head. I lost the wig early on -- drunk -- and became Sinead O'Connor in my black lace dress, Doc Marten boots, and heavy eyeliner.
My mother was wrong about one thing: Shaving my head has not made hair grow there. (My mother is wrong about more than one thing!)
I started plucking my eyebrows into submission around '93 or '94. I was thirty-something. I was a performer pretending I was twenty-something. I figured wild professorial eyebrows were a dead giveaway. I plucked them for eight or ten years. Now I don't care so much about my eyebrows. Not so much. I still pluck some of the hairs sometimes if they touch my eyelashes or eyeglasses. That's annoying.
Occasionally I find a hair growing out of the end of my nose. I usually pull those out.
I scissor my nostrils sometimes or pluck out the gray ones that grow thick and wiry in there.
I also have a collection of hairs on my ear knobs. If I rub them with my fingertip it sounds like a fly stuck in a microphone real loud in my ear.
The hair on my shins is very thin. For a while it was completely gone when I was wearing socks every day, but now it's growing out sparsely since I rarely wear socks. Maybe I should shave my legs.
