Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

Listen, when you get right down to it, the whole thing was my fault. I know this, OK? But that still doesn’t change the fact that the hairdresser was a brain-dead fuckwit.

You see, Zan and I get our haircuts together. When we lived in Massachusetts, we had a specific woman whom we went to exclusively for six years, and we since have replaced her with a suitable Pennsylvanian counterpart. And because the same woman always cuts our hair, she knows how we want it done, thus negating the need for me to instruct her about what to do with Zan’s head.

Which partly explains why things went so horribly wrong a couple of Saturdays ago.

We were overdue for haircuts, and the only time we could fit them in was a Saturday morning that turned out to be a rare day off for our Personal Hairdresser … but, hey, all we were getting was a couple of generic, close-cropped haircuts, so how hard could it be, am I right?

Clearly, I’d forgotten how difficult it had been for me to find someone competent and trustworthy enough to administer our generic, close-cropped haircuts in the first place. You know, not that I’m a major control freak with serious trust issues or anything.

Anyway …

Since we weren’t able to get with our Personal Hairdresser, we scheduled simultaneous appointments with Persons Unknown. Stranger #1 got me into her chair a minute or two before Stranger #2 got Zan into hers, so I wasn’t fully paying attention to what was happening with him at the onset of his haircut. [Please refer to my opening statement, RE: MY. FAULT. I know this. Let's move on.]

So a couple minutes go by, and I overhear his hairdresser say something that sounds like “slow sock” or “no shock” or “feaux cock” or … hey, wait a minute …

No. Fucking. Way.

Yes fucking way.

The bar over his eyes? It’s mostly there because he blinked … but I also think it quite nicely complements his "I'm a convicted killer" look.

You know who deals really well with surprises? Someone other than me.

Faced with this phenomenally unexpected hair-cutting crisis, my brain seized up. I knew I had to do something … but my mind was flooded with conflicting thoughts as to just what that something should be.

Chief among the thoughts slam dancing in my skull was the fact that there is a Mohawk haircut in my past. And it caused much turmoil in my family. Like, kicked-out-of-the-house, mother-throwing-my-clothes-down-the-stairs, beloved-grandfather-not-speaking-to-me, lived-at-a-friend’s-house-for-three-weeks kind of turmoil. Which was fucktastically ridiculous. So part of me was thinking, “Hey, let the kid have a Mohawk.”

But part of me also was thinking, “You were 17; he’s 8.” And a close-by part of that part of me was thinking, “And he looks like a convict, and he’s still trying to make friends here, and we’re still trying to establish ourselves in The Community, and I don’t think the vibe I want him giving off right now is ‘Hey, that Zan kid is a little punk whose parents probably are shitheads.’”

Eventually, though, it came down to this: He didn’t ask his mother and I for permission before telling the (galactically stupid) hairdresser to give him a Mohawk, and his mother and I therefore didn’t have an opportunity to consult each other about whether or not we wanted to let him get his freak on. And so:

Which is a drag, because neither he nor I walked into the place with the intention of him ending up bald.

“I know he asked you to give him a Mohawk, and it’s my fault for not paying attention, but I really wish you had asked me before you did that to him,” I said to Braindead Hairdresser, because I was pissed off to the point that I couldn’t not say something … especially after she informed me that I would still have to pay the full price of a haircut for something I could have done to his head at home for free.

And I’m sure that, after we left, she and the receptionist had a good chuckle about what an asshole I am, but I don’t much give a shit, because I really needed to let her know what an incredible moron she was.

“Zan, when you asked her to give you a Mohawk, did you think it was totally OK, or did you think maybe you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing?” I asked him in a huff after we got back in my car.

“The first one,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes.” … “I feel like I’m in trouble now.”

“You’re not in trouble, buddy,” I said, feeling bad about having made him feel bad … because I knew he was telling the truth, and I knew he didn’t want to end up bald, and I knew that the fact that he had ended up bald was because I, essentially, hadn’t protected him from himself and/or from Dumb Dumb The Hairdresser … and there are few things that feel shittier than the parental guilt that accompanies the sense of not adequately protecting your child.

“Daddy, can you teach me what to say next time we go get haircuts so that I get the right thing?” he asked me out of the blue while I was brushing his teeth before bed the other night … which killed me, because he’s such a sweet kid, and the grumpy-fuck reaction I’d had at the hairdresser’s had upset him enough that he still was looking to make it right many days later.

I told him what to say next time. And I hugged him. And I told him how much I love him and what a good kid he is and that I was sorry for making him feel like he had done something wrong.

Because it was my fault.

But that hairdresser? Total shithead. Just sayin’.