Hair today, regrets tomorrow

What’s round and bald and looks like an egg shell?

My boyfriend’s head.

Yes, he decided on the Telly Savalas look last week. Just don’t call him Kojak or he gets really mad for he thinks the man a pompous dandy and said he himself would never chew on a lollipop.

The bald look suits my boyfriend well. But getting to that point was no easy task. In fact, it was the only time I’ve seen him enraged.

Not because he freaked out when he realized he no longer had hair, but the process of shaving it was a debacle in itself — especially in a motel room using a crushed down cardboard box as a hair catcher and a defective pair of clippers.

We started with an $8 version of clippers from a neighborhood store. Yes, we had to buy them new, for when you live in a motel room you are lucky if you have a toothbrush, never mind hair clippers.

The clippers nary scraped a strand — he said because they were defective. I said it was because he didn’t read the directions. So he read the directions and they still didn’t work.

Back at the store they exchanged the clippers with no problem. “This happens all the time,” they said. It’s a wonder no one tells you these things as you are buying the exclusively crummy merchandise.

So he read the directions and oiled the blades and — voila! — the second pair of clippers worked like a charm — for a total of one chunk of hair above his right ear.

That’s when I saw him enraged, especially when I tried to snap a photo of the fiasco.

Being the loving, caring, martyr-like girlfriend that I am, I raced back to the store for another pair of clippers. Only to find them closed.

It would simply be inhumane to leave my boyfriend writhing in a motel room with a chunk of hair missing above his right ear. Thus, I ran to another store that was still open.

There I explained to the clerk I needed a quality pair of clippers because my boyfriend was in a fetal position with hair like a drugged-up punk rocker.

We had shorn success with the third pair of clippers, but not before a barrage of memories of my own hair disasters hit my scalp. One included an assembly-line haircut that made me look like an 8-year-old boy when I was a 12-year-old girl.

Another was my own chunk of hair missing above my right ear when I tried to shave stripes in the side of my head and they kept coming out uneven. But I didn’t go totally bald over either one — I merely invested in hats.

The power of hair is amazing. We cry when we have a bad hair day. We throw tantrums if it’s cut too short. I even knew someone who honestly thought she would die when someone screwed up her bangs. We have regrets, remorse and breakdowns over the wrong color red.

The only regret I have about my boyfriend’s haircut, however, is that I didn’t nab a better photo of his drugged-up punker look.

Ryn Gargulinski writes for Freedom Newspapers of New Mexico. Contact her at: [email protected]