my ridiculous hair

i'm not sure if there was ever a time in my life when my hair was anything but ridiculous. whether from my point of view or from others, on stage or off or in that netherworld where the two get mixed up. maybe, when i was a boy with a whiffle, it was ok. in the family scrapbook i look 'regular' - buzzed, traditional and predictable from the end of high school through Yale, the song remaining the same - short all over, wisp flip above forehead and fat face. this was followed by the acid years: carefree undulating slippery hippie Jesus hair. in my LSD trip to the mirror i looked almost cool, a dude, under a gandalf wide-brim, hanging in soft shirley temple clumps that came alive like Medusa snakes. i added an under beard and looked Amish. in my passport photo i resembled a dagger-eyed Rasputin. it turns out that facial hair is as much trouble as head hair. I can't grow sideburns. they stop a quarter inch below the spot where they are supposed to weave in with the hair hair. my soul patch is a triscuit. a sad off-yellow piece of patch punctuation that takes weeks to become noticeable. i tell my friend Ben there's a long list of people who don't like it. 'add me to the list,' he says. that's the other part of the problem - other people. they hate whatever do i do. i say fuckit. buzz the shit off. go for Dachau. get a cinchy no-haircut hair cut. what the Doyles girls go for. 'makes you look younger, ricky,' they say. which is absurd. nothing can make you look younger. it's like a facelift. the neck crepe is a dead giveaway. next up: the dye jobs. i tried them all - ugly black, peroxide green-blonde, irish setter red. my favorite was Mallard duck, a dark, neon blue/green. 'honey,' squeals my poofter hair dresser, 'you will look FABulous!' hours-in-the-chair-and-under-the-dryer later my do becomes a diaphanous swimming pool blue. i race home, squirt CVS product all over myself to repair the damage only to make it worse, a drab buster brown. not cool. going in another direction i attempt a do-it-yourself cellophane, a translucent iodine which, at a visit to a local swimming hole populated by African Americans, the colored girls dug the do. 'dat color is da shit, girl! how you do dat?' no one else agrees. in fact, traveling to Prague i realize that all the x-commie old ladies have the same cellophane job i had and it looks like the color of a nuclear sun. in the meantime the hair cuts get wilder. i shave the sides, froo froo a limp rooster tail on top, try braids, bangs and perms. where am i? who am i? is there any hope? lately, i just let it grow, long, tired and stringy. in the morning i am Neil Young on a bender dancing with a bag lady. at night i slop on a glue-like Hispanic gel, smear it hard as glass and hope for Pat Riley but wind up with planet of the apes or worse, a sociopathic sex offender. 'when are you going to cut it, rick? it's really ugly and it makes you look old'. at this point i don't give a fuck. i like that it's odd. i'm odd. berlin as a b-movie rubber monster.