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
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