I’m not like most women and I know it. Case in point: I hate going to have my hair did.

I just hate it.

I’d rather go to the gynecologist and that isn’t saying much. I mean, if I am forced to choose between getting naked in front of a stranger, covering myself with a cold bed sheet, then slinging my legs up into stirrups, airing out my parts so that said stranger can shove metal tubing up me, thereby leaving my personal integrity somewhere between three and seventeen notches below that of decent breed stock, or getting my hair cut, er, I’ll opt for the cattle treatment, leaving my hair to grow and grow and grow.

This problem started with my birth. You see, I was born into a family of aliens, folks with stick-straight hair that hung from their heads and grew straight towards their feet. My hair was different: it grew in meandering routes, north, south, east and west, and in a few directions not yet designated by even the most technologically advanced modern navigational devices.

As a result, my parents grew tired of the battles with my tangles of curly hair. It’s likely because all they had to do was grab the comb and the bottle of No More Tears and I’d dash violently about the house screaming “OWWWW!” Their attempts at consolation, that they hadn’t even touched me yet, were utter nonsense, crazy talk from these alien sort. Just the appearance of a comb and that spray bottle was painful.

So they compromised in that way that parents do: they nearly shaved my head. The new “haircut” was a pixie, short, cropped so close to my head that there wasn’t enough hair to even curl. And the result was that I no longer carried on like a dervish, thrashing through the house during those Sunday night battles of “hair care.” But when I was out in public, I was more often thought to be a boy than anything else. And when you’re a young girl with a brother just two years older, big enough to protect you and/or menace you through your entire childhood, being mistaken for the other gender is nearly a death sentence.

As I grew older, when I no longer considered hair care to be punishment, I grew my hair out. And yes, I said that I grew my hair “out” instead of “longer” because, living in a humid climate and having curly hair often meant that my hair, not confined by the constraints of mere cans of hair spray, swelling with the atmospheric moisture, took on a life of its own, thereby giving me the appearance that Medusa’s little sister had come to town. But by God, NOBODY thought I was a boy.

Hair style after hair style, I’d model my new ‘do for my father and, with each, he’d laugh and say “I’ve trained bird dogs with less hair…and they looked a lot better too.” My mother, well, I learned not to ask for her opinion of my hair. And by the time I was college-bound, she’d learned to keep her beauty suggestions to herself: “short and curly looks best on you” was only mumbled, her chin tucked to her chest, as I walked out the door after having spent 45 minutes battling the last curl in my hair that I’d fried in my efforts to get it straight, only to have it explode into puffs of blonde chaos when I opened the door and walked into the subtropical climate in which we lived.

Oh but it didn’t end there. The road to Hair Nirvana is a long one, indeed.

Once, back when I was married and living in a much more temperate climate, I took the day off from work to get my hair “whooped.” I’d been going to the same stylist for about five years, which, for the record, is a lengthy stylist relationship for me. “Let’s cut it off for the summer,” she recommended.

“No,” I said firmly.

“Oh a curly bob will look great,” she continued as I sat there, seething, remembering a childhood that left me wondering if most folks thought “Ann” was short for “Andrew.” I searched for the words to explain…

“As a kid, I was forced to wear my hair short. I hated it. People always thought I was a boy and it was a miserable experience.”

She laughed, heartily, loudly, then spun my chair so that she could look me in the eye when she said, “Well, honey, with titties like that, nobody’s going to think you’re a guy now!”

The beauty shop exploded in laughter because, yeah, she was right and yeah, it was funny. But I thought that if I wanted to be treated like this, I could go to a truck stop. From there, however, the conversation steered back into the usual shoptalk of the beauty world, the chatter that makes me feel utterly inadequate.

“Oh, girl, is your hair dry. What do you use on it? Are you using a blue shampoo or, for God’s sake, I bet you’re using a gold one, right? Well, if you have 30 minutes, for $18.50 or so, I can set you up under the dryer there with some horse placenta on it—that’ll put some moisture back in it.”

“Horse placenta?”

She rapped me on the shoulder for being ignorant of the girly ways. “You mean to tell me you’ve never had a placenta treatment? Maybe it’s cow, I don’t know, but you’ll feel like you’ve got a new head of hair when we’re done.”

“Let me get this straight: you want me to give you $20 to smear some animal’s birthing discharge into my hair? Are you crazy? What—is some Haitian woman in the back, brewing a tea of fruit bat ears and donkey shit for my eyebrows too?”

My stylist gave me the evil eye then smiled. “Honey, if you don’t want the treatment, all you have to do is say so. I do mine once a week, though, and you can see how good it does for me,” and with that, she pushed her fingers into her highlighted hair, hair that barely moved for all the mousse, gel, and, perhaps, placenta that cemented it in place.

And then I remembered what my dad had repeatedly said to me when I was a girl and it finally seemed apropos. When I’d run, run, run from the comb, he’d say, “But Annie, you have kind hair,” and then he’d chuckle to himself before he could spit out the punch line, “the kind that grows on a horse’s ass.”

Now, finally, I’d met someone else with kind hair. Literally.

I stopped going to that stylist for a while, in fact I even forgot about her until the night when I sat watching Sex and the City with the then love of my life and Sarah Jessica Parker dazzled me with her new, short, curly bob. It looked great and I couldn’t shut up about it, drowning out all the dialogue of the show with my gushings over her hair. I finally had a hand cupped over my chattering mouth and then, he looked me in the eye and said, “No matter how much you go on and on and on about her hair, you’ll never have the guts to cut yours like that so please, for the sake of my sanity, shut the fuck up.”

And so the gauntlet was thrown.

And I acted accordingly the very next day, calling to schedule an appointment, going to get my hair cut, picture in hand of SJP’s new ‘do. I was nervous, of course, but there was no way anyone was ever going to say anything like that to me without paying the price.

So I sat there in the salon chair and my train-wreck curiosity forced me to watch and wince as each and every of my lopped locks leapt like lemmings, hurling themselves in dives towards the floor. The pain of it took me back to those dashes about the house in my failed efforts to avoid my evil mother who was armed with my mortal enemies: the comb and that bottle of No More Tears.

But I walked out of that shop holding my head high, looking damn good, having gotten rid of about 10 inches of hair. Within two weeks, I’d gotten rid of that man too.

Every once in a while, though, I still have my hair cut short, often in response to a stressful event. Like last spring, I had 6 inches lopped off. And each time I do this, I swear that I just love it short and then, in no time at all, I’ve grown it out again. And people, they feel free to make comments as though their opinions matter to me.

“Long, short, curly, straight—you’ve got to make up your mind what you’re going to do with your hair,” a friend told me once.

“Why,” I asked him, “so you’ll feel better? Worry about your own bald spots and then get back to me.”

But lately I’ve become acquainted with a man who begins our every conversation by remarking on my hair. “Jesus, it’s curly one day, straight the next, pinned up, hanging down, hell, I never know what you’re going to look like when I see you. I do know one thing, though, you’ve got a whole lot of money invested in wigs.”

“Huh?” I said. A wig? Never had anyone accused me of wearing a wig.

“That bushy blonde style you wear, I know that’s a wig. And it looks terrible on you. You look best when we can see your face. You’ve got a nice face, you know.”

I sat there nearly overwhelmed with the responses that were brewing in my head when he said this. I tried a polite one. “You think I’d pay good money to purposefully have big, blonde, curly hair like that? My hair, it’s naturally curly. On rainy days, I can’t control it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you should pin it up or something.”

I felt invaded, as if the conversation had veered towards the ol’ “does the carpet match the drapes” question. Why do people feel as though they have a right to tell me their opinion of my hair when I specifically DON’T ask for it?

And it is always the guys who tell me, those whose knowledge of that which is fashionable is limited to that which they’ve garnered from the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated: “Women pay a lot of money to have curly hair—you should feel lucky.”

Ok—here’s your heads-up, men, seeings how you must have missed this ever-so-subtle shift in hairstyles: the market for Farrah perms has dried up. It was perhaps easy to miss, especially since it happened a mere 27 years ago. Curly ain’t in and hasn’t been since just about the time your sister’s prom date got a whiff of that Ogilvie home perm solution and said, “Uh oh—I think there’s been an accident down at the rendering plant.”

That said, last weekend, I startled a stylist when she innocently, perkily asked, “Got any idea what you want me to do with your hair?”

“Bangs, layers.” It was my unrecognizable act of defiance, my thumbing of the nose to all of those magazines that lay scattered in the waiting area, to all of those prettygirls with the glossily straight hair that I’ll never have.

She gasped. “The bangs, okay, but with layers, it’s going to be even curlier.” She caught the look in my eyes and yielded without further discussion. “I’ll do it,” she conceded, “but I’ll flat-iron it before you leave.” I guess she was concerned at being the outcaste of the tightly-knit clique of recent beauty school graduates, the one whose members swore the oath of never, ever letting a customer leave their chairs with a hint of body or vitality in their hair.

So she cut. And combed. And sprayed. And brushed. And blew. And then she did it all over again, in seemingly random order, before, in a Herculean effort, she ironed my hair into submission, leaving it straight, straight, straight. Until I got home. And headed directly for the shower, where I wet it down then stepped out, letting it dry naturally, curling and swelling to widths far greater than that of your Aunt Verlie’s ass.

* * * * *

Last night, as my son and I were seated at our local Mexican restaurant, our Friday night date, I noticed a young girl at the table next to ours. She was a country mouse, so to speak, having come to the city, Tuscaloosa, for supper with her boyfriend. She’d ordered a glass of water and he, being a bit worldlier, perhaps even the bad-boy, risk-taker type, had ordered Dr. Pepper. She was shyly asking for refills when we sat down, having looked up from her menu as the waiter walked by. I knew that she was taking her time ordering, as she was likely considering ordering something exotic, like tacos, maybe even chicken tacos.

As I waited for my drink, I looked at her, at her hair. She had one of those butt-crack parts, straight, right down the middle of her scalp, her hair pulled dramatically in opposite directions on either side of the great divide. But her hair was wanting to curl, obviously, since it fell somewhat rebelliously, undulating down her scalp only to flirt with the tops of her shoulders before it headed back northward in defiant flips.

I decided to try the mindless drivel that comforts so many women, that annoys the everloving shit out of me. “Your hair, it’s naturally curly, right?” I ventured, startling her.

“Yes,” she perked up, beaming from ear to ear as if the cutest cheerleader in school had just complimented her on her new shoes. “And yours is too. Yours is really, really curly.”

“Yeah,” I said, blowing one of my Shirley Temple ringlets from my line of vision. “Do you straighten yours every single day?”

“I try to, but sometimes it don’t do right,” she sighed, running her hair nervously over the surface of her hair, perhaps in an attempt to smooth it, comfort it as we spoke of it’s unruliness. “What about you? Do you ever straighten yours?”

“Only on days when it’s windy and not humid—otherwise, there’s no reason to bother.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I never considered wearing it two different ways on account of how the weather is.”

“Oh, sister,” I said, as I leaned in conspirationally, just as her food arrived. “That Mother Nature, she’s a real bitch. You need to take her into consideration because, I guarantee, she’s going to win every single damn time.”

She laughed nervously as she picked up her fork and knife to cut into her taco.