I had really great hair. Longish, middle ear to shoulder at the time,
and luxuriant it always seemed to get a lot of attention. Usually
that attention was from young cowboys and Hispanic males who thought
it made me look like a skater and/or a fag. I know they thought that
because they would mention it to me as often as they could. Somehow
in the cultural distillations of my Junior High skaters became the
archenemy of anyone with a mind over-soaked in the chemicals and
ideals of the machismo cultures that were still current in Payson at
the time. The really sad irony of the whole deal was that I was
neither gay nor a skater and I was taking flack for those jokers
because I liked the look of my hair a little bowl-cutty. Anyway, the
particular instance of follicle oversolicitude was in Ms. Clowns
class where we sat not at desks but in pairs at trapezoidal tables. I
was shuffled a couple different places to keep me from talking to my
neighbors or disrupting in other was. Unfortunately for the teacher I
was a persistent little cuss and would not let a little ignoring stop
me from talking to the good kids she had tried to use to hem me in.
My table mate was the girl who had ratted me out about my Miss Makeup
skit and in front of me was a kid named Seven who I am not sure could
talk. Behind there was a Hispanic kid who for some reason like to
inform me of my sexual preference and pull my hair about twenty times
a day.
“Hey.”, he would whisper.
“...”, I wouldn't answer.
“Why do you have long hair like a girl? Because you are a fag?”,
he would ask, I assume rhetorically.
The irony is that in the next couple of years this kid would grow his
hair out to show how tough he was. After he would whisper sweet
nothings about me and my hair for a bit he would always pull it of
mess with it or something crappy and I was growing increasingly
unhappy with his behavior. A second fact needs to be put on the table
here and that is that I had been a chronic chair tipper and leaner
backer. The teacher had warned me lots of times that the plastic
topped metal leg chairs were not designed for two leg use and if I
did not stop leaning back in it I would break it and have to pay for
it. This turned out to be exactly true at a bad time. I was leaning
back in my chair and the hair kid was doing his thing I thought right
now would be great time to teach him a lesson so when he leaned
forward over his table to molest my hair again I spun on my chair and
kicked his table as hard as I could, driving it into his solar plexus
and knocking him to the ground. The force of my kick broke my chair
into half plastic half metal and I was on the floor too. He recovered
a little and crawled over to start fighting me on the linoleum of the
HomeEC demonstration kitchen. We were both fairly out of it so it was
not really much of a fight more just some sloppy flopping. The
teacher came and broke us up and told me to pick up the pieces of my
chair because I was in big trouble. She was correct in that as well.
