Image provided by: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, NE
About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 17, 1992)
Hairy Ordeal Dealing with a hereditary coat of cro-Magnon, Rorschach-like fur By Charles Lieurance Diversions Contributor I am a hairy man from hairy slock. I woke from the nearly comatose sleep of childhood and descended the stairs of my childhood home. I approached the kitchen table where my father sat disemboweling the morning newspaper. A series of guttural whole notes strummed the muscles of his throat. His face was like old Nantucket skrimshaw, yellow and intricately incised. His body was covered with while hair the texture of Halloween straw. It covered what ever surface on him could accommodate its outrageous growth. I waited for him to look up from the sacred fatherly chore of approving or disap proving the daily news. During the night, I’d changed. Gone from the naked cipher that cut lake water clean and curled at night in race car blankets, the sun’s fever still rising off uncompromised skin. During the night my genetic due found its purchase. first, with textbook precision, tangled hair disclosed my glands to me. But that conquest was bureaucratic. Then the pelt thickened and chose new, entirely abstract and ornamental paths. A mushroom cloud w hose blossom ob scured my breasts and its fall-out crept in waves between mv ribs and shoulder to shoulder. On my back grew a confusing Korsehach resembling a fruit bat w ith teller perching atop a bust of Voltaire. The hair gushed, then trickled, past my bell line to .._ II ' Villillv I lilt / II ill 'Iv. In rOihcr words, seemingly overnight, heredity had had its wa\ with me. 1 stood before my lather a minor image " through tile \aselmed lens and cool blue light of a dream. 1 le grunted and snapped at the news for 1 unc lime, fi nails folding up the new spa per neatly, selling it aside and looking me up and dow n, i here I was, 10 years old and C rick and Watson’s double helix already dragging me down, The hair hung from me like great sheets of seaweed I here now . son,” my father said, thump ingthe kitchen table solidly. "You're just like ■ me." Wind came in from the screen door. My hair rustled and the domino effect of hair on hair made it feel as though thousands of beetles swarmed on my skin. And don t worry," he looked around as if this were a conspiracy. I lew inked. “You’ll grow into it." I hadthisdreamoften. Hut myfatherdied and the model of this hirsute nightmare died with him. Still in my early 2()’s, the croppings of hair were manageable, if unpredictable Perhaps I d make it to sedentary old age before the house caught fire l or now, the little blazes — an extra coarse silver corkscrew that spiraled out from my left breast; the dark, sporty slashes of hair that creased my sides — were amusing. In short, I could pass through a world of bodily hairlessness without giving myself away 1 could even strip away my shirt if the day were slightly overcast or if the room were particularly dim. 1 he countermeasure to which 1 suppos edly belt>nged fetishist hairlessness from t he neck down in males Smooth chests Naked smew in high contrast black and while rippling around some lithe annoyance in "w M perfume and cologne ads. My father and his father dealt their coup dc grace when 1 reached the age of 28 The coarse hair, in unruly bunches, besieged my shoulders and succeeded in secre t missions all along iny back. Where hair had already won the da\. it w as substantially bolstered with reinforcements, in case I was bom - barded w ith radiation By tlie age of 30, the hair on my head was nearly gone, a recession Ural look as its distressing path the middle front of my head leaving me bozo-like tufts of hair on either side. I took to watching washed-out Super 8 films of hast Coast beaches during the 1950s. Raunchy Italian boys leered around wet cigarette bulls and flaunted their full, black coatsoffur. I even developed certain roman tic associations with the doomed old fat men asleep in the hazy sunlight, lying on impos sibly bowed lawn chairs, the while hair on their shoulders blowing visibly in the sea breeze like eel grass. 1 lOUAc I^i i ■ r*w \ r*t I Act / \l> { radical poet, Robert lily, on television, being interviewed by the estimable Bill Moyers, lily, who had championed draft resistance during the Vietnam War and refused the National Book Award, was up to something new. It seemed men, in the wake of femi nism and hyper-corporate dehumanization, had lost their souls, their obscured warrior selves, their inner wild men. I le was packing halls around the country with malaise-stricken lawyers, doctors, min isters, firefighters and ex-astronauts wan ting to be “real men " As he sat across from Moyers and the camera backed away to reveal him whole sale, I noticed the man bore a striking resemblance to the figures of my childhood nightmares, a cross between my father and myself lie was a hairy man and he was balding As an added bonus, he was pot bellied I saw' in him the anti-Calvin Cline, * David Badders DN I pitching ihc credo of the hairy man. To think I had spent summers with my shirt on, w hole summers afraid of baring myself to my hairless peers. Bly made hairlessncss a form ol denial. 1 legalhered up the hairy men into a.w ild tribe, shirlless and cavorting through the nether woods of the great North. The men burned sage and recapitulated the rituals of myth and tradition. ! sold my record collection and headed north, far north, past Minneapolis, for the W ild Man Retreat. I followed the course of BMW's, Saabs and Subarus, of Buicks and Oldsmobilcs, through stands of while pine, rock elm and balsam poplar. At the gas stations along the way I saw my comrades pumping fuel shirlless, their body hair dan gling, circling, spiraling, clumping, tendrillmg, cross-hatching, wisping, knotting and l<x>p ing. l .achbody wassome new chiaroscuro— woven i mages of senseless, cro-Magnon fur. That nicht I inhaled the saue ami boiled away my inhibitions in a sweat lodge. We ran through the woods in the cool blue moonlight and I nestled into the pack, all bristled backs, sides and haunches welded together, heads low and bouncing, a rosary of shining eyes. 1 could tell 1 would snatc h • something great from this night. Something to be hung on wood hooks, to be trapped with leaf cover, something to be best in fire, charred with smoke rising off its shanks. A doctor from Minneapolis was barking furi ously, tearing at tree bark with his new found claws. I heard every kind of noise, including the noise of my father disembow - eling the morning paper. Some noises were animal, but others came from conclaves of crying men, crying because they had just remembered the feel, the shape, and the military academy advertisements of old Hoy’s Life magazines. I sal shaking in a bar in Minneapolis the dayafter. I'd spent the night in fever dreams. I had a few beers and eyed everyone in the joint An old man sat at the bar. I le looked # like one of those cartoon boozers on bar napkins from the swinger clubs of the 60s, minus the water bottle on the head and the inebriated x’s for eyes. His face was long and skin that at onetime must have been divided equally over hishead had settled in houndish pouches around his chin and jaw. He smoked a dead cigarette and look deep, hissing breaths as he drank. He must have seen me looking at him, because he scooted down next to me and jumped into a story without introductions. “I had this little dog and screw his little dog I i fe i f he didn ’t gi ve m y bu It so big a pa i n it made my throat hurl. I named him Chan dler, after the guy who wrote them detective books. Ale those up back when my eyes worked beller’n a jigger of spit. “Little brown dog, like a meatloaf with legs. 1 thought, train him not to be such a pain in the bull all the time. There are dog books, ain’t there dog books? I gel some, y’know. ‘T rain YourDogto Drool Pearlsand Bel the Horses.’ I read them all and I can’t really find anything I wanna teach him. Who cares if he plays dead or shakes your hand? I want a dog can play dead, I’ll buy a dead dog, okay? Then I think, biggest pain of all is taking the little meatloaf for a w alk so he can crap or pee on a hydrant. Middle of the night, nine in the morning.” lie lit the dead cigarette but nothing much came of it. “I’m thinking, time to give this dog a little civilization-Who gets up at nineJin the morning? The pope gets up at nine in the morning I’ll teach him to use a toilet Not sit on it likeyou or me, but slandon the.seal on all fours and take a wizz, whatever. Chan dler?^, ell, he’s not giving it his ail at first But I give him a few w hacks on the* nose with the funny papers and some doggie snacks and finally he’s Irvin’ it out, standin' on the seal, little shaky, but he s geltin it “Month later, maybe two, I get up in the middle of the night to relieve myself and therc’sChandlcrsiandin’ontheseat, his legs shaking and his eyes real big and scared, but he’s doin’ it. He gels a little on the seat maybe, but who cares? He’s wi// V in the pot I wanna call the Daily Planet, sure. Got a dog who’s usin’the john. Page One. Pretty soon he’s an expert. Do it on two legs, big pooch grin on his face. Cocky, real cocky." 1 le look a big, ugly sigh. Nearly a sob “I le’ssomckinda ballet dancer. But things get weird for me, like I start geltin’ embar rassed walkin’in on him. Sometimes he’s got this look on his face, standin’ there peein’. 'foo familiar, like he wants his privacy or something. I say, sorry, and close the damn door like’s he’s Joe takin’ a dump at work. Hxcuse me, Chan, sheesh, learn to shut the d(X)r.” “A month later and I’m thinkin’ I wanna buy him some pants or something, little doggie trousers. No way, but I’m thinkin’ it just the same." “Well, if I can train him, I can untrain him, huh? I start whacking the mull on the nose he even looks at the john and hauling him outside next to trees and hydrants. But he holds it. I keep the bathroom door shut but he uses the kitchen sink then, any hole he can straddle. Sometimes I don’t find his mess fora week. And he’sgcllin’ savage,bitin’ my hand and such like. Now, I love this dog. What I didn’t say, right? Whole story and I didn’t even tell you that. I’m a schmuck I g< >t a dog uses the john I trained him. And I can’t See 1IAIRY on P