From the issue dated July 27, 2001
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Inside His Balding Head, the Freak Flag Still FliesBy MELVIN JULES BUKIETOnce I had it down to here, down to there, shoulder-length or longer, but that was then. Nowadays I've got to look in the mirror at just the right angle to see the few precious strands that remain. Being follicularly challenged doesn't really bother me. I've never considered transplants or Rogaine or shoe polish on the pate. On the other hand, I do tend to wear headgear -- most frequently logoless baseball caps, but also narrow-brimmed fishermen's hats and, on special occasions, a beautiful gray Borsalino that is the single most expensive item of apparel I own. Maybe this predilection reveals a deep-seated anxiety, but even years ago, when I could have been justifiably locks-proud, I sported a shapeless black felt that I pinned into the contours of a dashing tricorn. I thought of that hat and the hair that flowed from under its cheap material the other day when my daughter, Madelaine, and I made a trip to Massachusetts to commence the miserable ritual known as "looking at colleges." Strolling the ample grounds of Hampshire, guided by a grubbily jeaned young woman with a nose ring; and later that afternoon visiting Smith, guided by a young woman who could have posed for a J. Crew advertisement; and still later at Amherst, with a young man who, unlike Maddy or the rest of the high-school juniors in our group, appeared to be dressed for an interview, I saw posters tacked to the campus bulletin boards announcing a production of Hair, the 1960's ur-rock musical, scheduled to open that night at the University of Massachusetts. How I could have suggested that we check out the show without realizing that I would practically drown in a swamp of nostalgia -- with all the sweetness and pain the word entails -- I don't know, but that night we drove to the enormous, dystopian state university that I had attended for several months in a previous lifetime. The second we walked through the doors of the Deco-style student union, which I had last been in when Hair was playing on Broadway, I realized my mistake. Mind you, I now teach at Sarah Lawrence, the college I transferred to and graduated from, so I'm used to the frisson that belongs to faculty members who teach at their alma maters, but this was something else entirely. The place didn't seem to have changed. Ranks of blocky furniture built to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous undergraduates remained. So did the dingy shop in the lobby that sold candy, soda, and sundries. Even the ranks of student organizations that lined a balcony seemed lost in time, my time. Beside the student-newspaper and studentgovernment offices, there was a gay-pride office and a Jewish-students' office directly across the hall from an Arab-students' office. There was a cannabis-liberation office, and one belonging to a group called Spirals that posted a list of topics discussed at its meetings, my favorite being: "How to tell your parents that you're pagan." Yet despite those clear statements of cultural and political affiliation, the students themselves, lingering, loitering, waiting in line for the box office to open, were different than I recalled. I wasn't sure how until we entered the auditorium, where the cast of Hair wandered about in bell-bottoms, paisley dresses, and furry vests, the boys wearing long-haired wigs and headbands. That was it. The last time I had been in this room, the audience looked like the actors did now. My friends back then had formed a self-consciously avant-garde collective called Roadarte, which installed a so-called "inflatable," rather like a small tennis bubble, in the center of the student-union ballroom. A heavy-duty fan whirred to keep the bubble inflated, and at the other end was a small entry through which we crawled to the eerie interior. Inside was like a suburban den when the folks were away on a two-week vacation. Students sprawled on cushions hauled in -- liberated -- from nearby couches, and Jimi Hendrix and Grateful Dead records played as someone spilled a bag of toy money in front of the fan. The bills swirled along the curved walls together with a psychedelic light projection. Purple-tinted mimeograph sheets that announced some grand credo or other were passed out, as were some of the students. I saw it all again as Maddy and I took our seats, and I kept visualizing the faces of friends who had graduated from Roadarte to become schoolteachers and architects and computer gurus and parents and to make money and have cancer and die. While the rest of the audience filed in, a soundtrack played songs like "Incense and Peppermints," "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)," and "Eve of Destruction." I knew every word, though a banner hung from the ceiling advertising a forthcoming appearance by DJ Skittle mystified me. The lights dimmed. The play itself was incoherent, the lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni insipidly repetitious lists of drugs or sexual acts, but Galt MacDermot's music was catchy, and the students performed with benign good cheer. Yet I wasn't paying much attention, not even to the daringly seminude tableau that concluded the first act, because I suddenly remembered how several friends and I had hitchhiked to New York to see the original play that season. We slept on the sidewalk in front of the Biltmore Theater, off Times Square, and scored same-day, standing-room tickets. For all I know -- and assume -- that performance was incoherent, too, but back in the fall of 1970, I didn't mind, because one of the actors mistook me for part of the cast. Leaping off the stage to mingle with the audience, he grabbed my elbow and said, "Cubby, you're on." His mistake was probably the result of my cool tricornered hat, but I took the error as a sign of true belonging in the counterculture. Whether I genuinely belonged or not may be subject to debate -- at least I hope so -- yet I couldn't have been more of an outsider to UMass's reprise of Hair if I'd had three heads. I was there with a 17-year-old child whom I might as well have diapered ... yesterday. During the intermission, some of the students obediently went outside to smoke their Marlboro Lights -- the room itself would have been in an illegal fog 30 years earlier. When I bummed a cigarette, the smoke went straight to my head. I swear I got high -- as I hadn't been for decades. That feeling, however, dissipated during the second act, when one of the play's main characters, Claude (the self-proclaimed "genius, genius" from "Manchester, England, England" -- the latter phrase reminding me of a recent novel by Julian Barnes that I had reviewed, perhaps unkindly, rather than the music of Mick Jagger or Gerry and the Pacemakers), is drafted and has his own hallucination. Claude is killed in Vietnam, but he doesn't undergo the final indignity, which that sexy, hairy tribe couldn't imagine: He doesn't grow old. Madelaine sat there, enthralled by the performance and more so by the audience, probably counting the days until two autumns from now, when she'd be able to sit in these same folding chairs, or in plusher seats at Amherst, Smith, or wherever she ends up as part of the class of '06, on her own -- independent, free, without a parent. That hurt, but age itself suddenly felt just fine. I don't act the way I did in those days, but I still believe most of what I believed then. There are worse values to live by than peace, love, and happiness. Baldness doesn't hurt either, but not being young creates an ache in the soul, because the great secret of aging is that the world thinks you're older, but you feel the same. That's one lesson students don't learn in college. We don't teach it. They wouldn't believe it. Melvin Jules Bukiet teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent novel is Strange Fire (W. W. Norton, 2001). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B5
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education