By KEVIN POTTINGER
For The Beachcomber
Our youngest boy got a Mohawk.
To say that he “got” a Mohawk, like it fell from the sky and landed neatly on his head, or that it arrived one morning in the mail, is not completely correct. I gave him the Mohawk.
I’ve given our kids several unfortunate haircuts, especially when the clippers have become dull and yank out whole stands of hair, or itchy shards of hair work their way into a kid’s underwear. How well my homemade haircuts turn out is directly correlated to the length of time that the kids will sit still for them. It’s not very long; the haircuts aren’t very good.
Our youngest boy had been asking me to give him a Mohawk for almost a year. I tried to convince him that a neatly trimmed buzz-cut might be more useful. With a nice buzz-cut he might be able to be seen in public without feeling like he needed to wear a ball cap. The Mohawk might leave him open to taunts and cruel playground ridicule.
My wife Maria is not fond of buzz-cuts or Mohawks; perhaps they make her think of ringworm, but regardless, she refused to discuss them. Our youngest son is persistent, tenacious, forgetful. One night at the supper table, with a wave of a weary hand, Maria surrendered. One point in the trilateral peace accord stipulated that there would be no Mohawking before First Communion.
She might have secretly hoped that a thunderbolt of practical reason might smite him at First Communion before he submitted to the clipper’s mechanical maw, but more likely she calculated that the beginning of summer might be the perfect time to float a trial Mohawk. First Communion photos for Grandma would already be taken, and next year’s school pictures would still be several weeks away, ensuring that memories of the summer Mohawk would eventually flicker and fade.
In front of the bathroom mirror with a damp towel wrapped around his neck and the clippers chattering in his ear, he balked, his cold feet dangling over an imaginary swimming pool, daring himself to jump in. He eyed the clippers apprehensively, one blue orb peering through thickets of brown hair. As the clippers hummed in my hand I realized that I hadn’t any idea how to cut a Mohawk.
Regardless, I began pushing the clippers cheerfully through his hair, hoping for the best, humming in a sort of jaunty mumble. Every few seconds he whispered “ow” for no clear reason, watching giant pillows of hair fall from the clippers onto the floor. I advised him to sit still at regular intervals, pushing his head first to one side, then the next. Gradually, the Mohawk came into focus, like a clipper-ship through fog.
It morphed into a mostly Mohawk/high-and-tight mashup, perhaps a faux-hawk. It made him look beefy and a little menacing, like he’d dressed up for Halloween as some kind of punk-rock freaky-tweaky meth-head, missing only homemade tattoos on his knuckles and weird symbols etched into his forehead with a ballpoint pen.
His 10-year-old sister said he looked hot. He admired the faux-hawk in the bathroom mirror, reflexively rubbing his stubbly scalp, fanning his fingers through the longer hair that sprouted from the middle of his scalp like some small furry mammal stuck to his head.
A couple of days later his second-grade class staged a play, apparently set in Shogun-era Japan. Throngs of parents with iPhones crowded into the cramped basement classroom.
Our boy played the commander of a squadron of drum-beating samurais, all dressed in silk robes with white hachimakis wrapped around their heads. For most of the first half of the play he stood scowling and stock-still, arms crossed with a drumstick in each hand, staring straight ahead. At a prearranged signal, he shouted a series of commands in clipped Japanese and began pounding his drum in a sort of hybrid kamikaze/flamenco frenzy. We stared slack-jawed, transfixed.
Where did this this freaky samurai kid come from? Just last week he was wearing a pair of black jeans with one ripped-out knee and half of an athletic sock on the opposing forearm, peering through a crush of stringy-straight brown hair looking like Dee Dee Ramone.
He probably has a future in the military, if not punk rock. The faux-hawk is the only haircut I’ve given him that he’s liked.
It’ll grow back. With 8-year-olds and homemade haircuts, time can be the best tool of all.
— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria live near Portage with their four children.
