The reign of House Targaryen begins.
“Some of the worst mistakes in my life were haircuts.”Jim Morrison
I think we’ve known each other long enough by now, so I can share this story with you. It is both personal and public and there’s no way around it. The thing with hair is that other people see it, no matter what you see when you look in the mirror.
Speaking of looking in the mirror, show me someone who is capable of completely ignoring one, especially when it is in their line of sight. Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. I, too, am guilty regarding how I look, no matter how hard I try to seem like I don’t give a shit most of the time.
For a bunch of months, I’ve been fiddlin’ around with letting my hair continue its white march down my back. I hate to think of it as some latent, biblical sensibility, conjuring the persona of the old, wisened Man of God. What I do know is that I got a gift from the Gods of Hair and I owe it to all the bald guys to fly the flag.
Lest you think this is some hairy fairytale, you’d be wrong. Growing hair, so it is the long enough to be captured in a pony tail, takes months. Think about how long hair has to be to go from your hairline, bordering right above your forehead, to be captured by a rubber band in the nape of your neck, with a couple of inches to spare.
In the beginning, when my condition was barely showing, I started wearing the Kangol hat, made seriously famous by Samuel L. Jackson. Over time, it was getting increasingly annoying to corral my hair. If I took my hat off outdoors, I’d be seeing my way through a seriously, shredded white curtain.
I realized I needed to commit to going all the way, resigned to being covered by one of a half dozen Kangols, for however long it took. Growing up, and for that matter, my entire life, I never liked hats. Without having the words back then, I’d say I wanted God to see me, for the sun and moon to find me and for her breath to exhale through me.
Just around two weeks ago, my life changed. I was shown how to do something called a half ponytail. Once I saw myself in the mirror, yes the mirror, I realized I was free, truly free. My hair was never a pain in the ass before, but it was really pissing me off these past months.
Once I got used to the rubber band business, I realized how liberated I felt and I’m not kidding. Now, the first day, the half pony was done for me. I was very nervous about replicating it on day two, because I had a lot riding on the new style. Happily, I can report I got it down.
Yeah, the new do got some kind of theatricality about it, but that’s not my fault. It did look familiar. I was immediately referred to as, King Viserys Targaryen, a key player in House of the Dragon, which was new to me. His austere visage is a bit much and my character is not nearly as serious.
Pulling my hair back has opened up my past to me, almost transportive in a way. I have started traveling around back then, with sensory flashes of all kinds, imagining myself in those scenes. There are no details whatsoever, just delicate threads of a time. For some reason, I just feel lighter.
Two people from my past chose to surface within days of each other and let me tell you, that is a curious coincidence. Hector was my neighbor in Park Slope, Bklyn in the early eighties. We became partners in a bar in Easton, PA, a financial mistake of gargantuan proportion. Subsequently, he moved to Perth, Australia, making him a Puerto Rican Australian.
I met Paul sometime in the late sixties, as a result of my being a Page at NBC, calling 30 Rock home. I was on the younger end of a bunch of hard partying, hard drinkin’, pot smoking crowd. I lived with a half-dozen of these guys in a dinosaur of a once luxurious building in the East Village, down the street from the Hells Angels on 4th St.
Every now and then, I do think about my life and some of the incredible adventures I have had. Most of the time, like all of us, I kind of take my life for granted. I do love quietly reminiscing and just found myself doing it a bit more than usual.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t sit down and knock out these classic stories in one shot. It is predictably the result of two sits, each one contributing about half. Just before pressing the button, I give it a final read and fix.
This Saturday evening is the second sitting and it started somewhere up there and who cares exactly where. Earlier in the day, I was introduced to a legendary Buddhist figure, Guru Rinpoche. I pride myself in my ignorance about this practice and I was stunned to learn about the legend and lore of this person and his extraordinary significance to this day.
I immediately thought about this unfinished story of mine and the metaphor of pulling back the covering, opening myself up to history and possibility.
The perfect ending here is my buying The Lotus Born, the story of the second Buddha, which is how he is referred to. I do not remember the last time I bought a book for myself. It has to be decades, seriously. On top of that, my Zen practice could use a shot in the arm and there was something about him that I have been waiting for. I suspect there is more to come here.
Well, there you have it. My beginning, cosmetic conversion somehow worded its way into my private cosmology, my place in this world of ours.
Isn’t it funny how life works?