Free Exile on Kalamazoo Street by Michael Loyd Gray Page B

hair as she disappeared into a sunset created by fate.
    * * *
    I had entered exile with short hair, though not a crewcut or one of those concentration camp looks so popular among metrosexual men determined to extinguish individuality, and at first I didn’t think much at all about my hair, which was still mostly brown and thick. As it grew and I acquired bangs, and the growing hair dusted the collars of shirts and beyond, I rather enjoyed a glimpse of myself in a mirror, slightly unkempt, disheveled, but not quite in Aqualung album territory, either. I supposed I had begun to look like a hippie of sorts, which also pleased and amused me, because unlike the men I went to high school with—who now had graying hair or the balding pates befitting the insurance agents they had become—I could still imagine Woodstock Nation as a viable replacement to capitalism.
    The growing hair required a bit of maintenance. My sister commented playfully on my new shampoo and conditioner needs. As my hair grew longer, I began to envision how soon enough the snow would disappear and the grass would grow, too, and all through the neighborhood those men who had become insurance agents, or subservient middle-management flunkies, would obsessively cut that growing grass as though letting it get out of hand was to be avoided at all costs. They saw close-cropped lawns as desirable alternatives to actual nature, while I saw them for what they really were—symbols of the taming of unruly nature—because the men mowing the lawns had traded in their own unruly natures years earlier in favor of uniformity, and they resented anything that contradicted their world view.
    * * *
    As my hair grew, I joked to Black Kitty that I could imagine getting honorary membership in what was left of The Allman Brothers Band. I realized that some trimming was in order. That was a task I could do, I supposed—with minimum confidence—but perhaps not well. I worried that having self-cut hair would give me the look of a man in a cave, so my main concern was how to get it done without doing it myself, or violating exile. I ran all these considerations by my sister on the phone. She arranged for a friend who cut hair out of her house to come by, which sounded good until I realized she would be the first stranger to set foot in my house in months. Perhaps some brushing up on my people skills was in order. I had to make a good run through the house’s first floor to make sure it appeared clean enough, especially the kitchen, where I imagined we would perform the transformation, creating a more refined look for an old would-be hippie who didn’t think he was all that old or truly a hippie. Hippiedom, I always believed, had died not long after Woodstock, at Altamont, but I knew my sister called me a hippie sometimes just to give me some semi-good-natured grief—I say “semi,” because at least a slice of it didn’t come off as all that good-natured. After I straightened up the house I had the brilliant idea for a trial run at being in the same room with a stranger.
    I waited by the side door, and when the chirpy letter carrier approached with my mail, I smiled and thanked her and assured her that I would clean up the thin coat of snow on the driveway, and she assured me that it was no impediment at all, that it looked more like a coat of white paint than snow. Abruptly I suggested she come in for a blueberry muffin—an idea I’d had once before—and she said she had a schedule. I asked where she was at on that schedule, and she looked at her watch and said she was actually ahead of schedule. After looking down at her black shoes for a moment, she came in and we sat down at the kitchen table with blueberry muffins and coffee.
    She checked her watch as she munched the muffin, which she said was quite tasty, and all I could think of was how odd it seemed to have a stranger in my house. Soon Black Kitty jumped up on the table.