A Lifelong Battle With My Hair

Gravity is a strange thing. It can keep the Earth in an orbit around the sun and all of us from floating off into space, but it lacks the power to make my hair lay down flat. I’ve been fighting a battle with my hair as long as I can remember. It’s thick and dark, and tends to stick up when short. The amount of Brylcreem I put in it on a daily basis makes me think twice before standing within ten feet of an open flame.

The way I see it, there seem to be two types of Latino hair. (I’ll acknowledge all the blond Latinos in the world, but for the sake of my discussion, will pretend they don’t exist). There’s the dark and wavy hair like Mr. Rourke’s on Fantasy Island. My dad has this hair. Growing up I’d wonder exactly why it was I didn’t inherit the smooth waves, although I have inherited the early graying gene. (When I graduated high school, my barber told me I already had more gray hair than his father did when he died.)

Then there’s the thick, coarse hair I was blessed with. When untreated, it either stands, if short, or puffs, if long. Before I discovered the wonders of Brylcreem, a greasy men’s hair product surely placed on earth by God himself, I would walk around with my hair “untreated” and standing up all over with its powerful anti-gravity characteristics.

My junior high school classmate Carl Fishback often joked that Inch High Private Eye, a cartoon character who had his own show that played every day after school, lived in my hair. During a seventh grade science class discussion of acids and bases, my teacher, Mr. Kocik, came over to where I was sitting and pretended to bounce his hands off my hair saying, “Boing!!!!” when he described my head as what happens when the balance between acids and bases in shampoo is upset. Needless to say, I was mortified.

It wasn’t too long after this episode that I began to use Brylcreem, which gives hair a constant appearance of looking wet. Until very recently, it came in a hard plastic tube. Sometimes I wonder how many of these tubes I have gone through since I began using the product. I’ve tried other gels and mooses, but nothing quite does it like Brylcreem. The company motto is “A Little Dab ‘il Do Ya,” which I find misleading since I usually have to apply a handful.

Although it keeps my hair from puffing out or standing up, Brylcreem is not without its drawbacks. It causes a very unnatural shine that has not gone unnoticed by classmates and coworkers through the years. The biggest downside is probably it’s tendency to run down my face when I sweat, leaving a thin, disgusting coat of grease that never easy to wash off.