Whiskers

Hey, look! I used to wear a...watch.

I am not growing a pandemic beard. I haven't even had any temptation to do that. I'm not a big fan of shaving, but I'm less a fan of that grungy sensation I feel when I let the whiskers accumulate for too long. Scratchy? Scratch that. I'm not shaving every day, but I'm shaving an average of three times a week. And even though I've been furloughed from work, my daily schedule at home is relaxed, not comatose. I sleep in a little bit later, but not by much. I take a shower in the morning, and another shower before bed. I wear the same sort of clothing--black jeans and a pullover--that I would wear anyway. I go to bed around midnight, as always. None of this is really a conscious effort to retain an illusion of normalcy; it's just natural, so I do it. Growing a beard would be unnatural for me now.

It wasn't always so. When I was a teenager, I imagined the look I would keep as a cool young adult: long, long hair and a full beard. This drawing offers a fair representation of the image I had in mind, how I envisioned myself looking as I shed my foolish youth and became a foolish older person:



I know what you should do first there, Jerry: get a shave and a haircut, man.

But that was my target image. When I was 16 years old in 1976, stray whiskers would sproing out in between my acne spots and moody teen attitude, and I refused to do anything to manage them. I thought I was cultivating cool; everyone else thought I looked like an apprentice hobo. I finally agreed to shave for the first time that summer, for the occasion of Mary Saur's high school graduation party. I spent like an hour in front of the bathroom mirror, a novice shaver attempting this strange process of cutting down the myriad tiny little scragglies jutting from my teenaged face. No blood was spilled. Aftershave was applied, in perhaps a slightly more generous amount than was really called for. I was smooth! Presentable. Off to Mary's party. How ya doin', Mary?

For dramatic purposes, the role of Mary will be played by singer Linda Ronstadt

I don't remember if I shaved much during my senior year in high school, 1976-77. Nor do I remember if I'd willfully given up on the more hirsute look I'd previously fancied or if I was just biding my time until I achieved grown-up status. Around the time of my freshman year in college, though, a seismic shift in my pop cultural perception consigned my earlier vision of hippie Carl to a discarded spot alongside the flowers in the dustbin.

Punk rock.



I fell for punk hard. The Sex Pistols didn't have beards. The Ramones didn't have beards. The Stranglers...well, never mind The Stranglers. I wasn't gonna have a beard either. As punk flowed seamlessly into power pop in my musical cosmology, that was the image I adopted with vigor. I wanted to look like the early Beatles, not like the later Beatles, or The [shudder] Grateful Dead. I picked my image and stuck with it. My whiskers still weren't growing fast enough to necessitate constant shaving, but I shaved as often as my pursuit of a Mod face mandated.



It wasn't until the mid '80s that I grew my first beard. I was living in Buffalo, recently married. You may have heard stories that it sometimes snows in Buffalo. Those stories are true. Early in '85. the snow in Buffalo was sufficiently heavy and persistent that the city basically shut down. Unnecessary travel was prohibited. I couldn't go to work for a week. There was nothing to do but drink and play cards with my neighbors, and to let my face grow long.

It's a Buffalo winter, everybody's shovelin' snow, oh yeah....

I didn't keep the beard for very long. My wife Brenda wasn't fond of the extra facial foliage but she did like the mustache, which I kept for a few years. I think I retained the mustache through the rest of the '80s; I'm pretty sure I still had it when my grandfather died in the fall of '89. After returning from his funeral in Missouri, I...I dunno, I just didn't feel like shaving. I grew another beard, kept it for a few months, and then finally got rid of both the beard and mustache in 1990. From that point on, I again embraced the clean-shaven look.

There was one final period of exception to that. One day in December of 1996, I was at work and just felt itchy, grungy, and unclean. I couldn't shake that discomfort. Finally, my coworker Andy looked at me, and I could just about see the lightbulb clicking on above his head when he asked me, Carl, have you ever had chicken pox?

What? No. NO! I hadn't. But I had chicken pox now, less than a month shy of my 37th birthday. For the sake of my sanity, it's good that I didn't realize at the time how dangerous chicken pox can be for someone at that age. I just slinked home to sulk, trying not to scratch. I wanted nothing in the world more than a hot shower, which was out of the question. And I certainly couldn't shave, so I had a new beard before you could say "Cro-Magnon."

We couldn't prevent my one-year-old daughter Meghan from catching chicken pox from me; I believe she's forgiven me by now, or at least I hope she has. It was a rough, rough month for all of us, but we got through it. I shaved not long thereafter, and have remained mostly whisker-free ever since.

We'll get through this current rough patch, too. Brenda and I keep busy--she's still working from home--and we try to remain grounded to some sense of stability in unstable times. We Skyped with Meghan a few days ago, and she's similarly doing what she can, too. 

Oh, and Meghan's boyfriend Austin has grown a beard. Austin's 25, the same age I was in 1985, when a Buffalo blizzard made me stay home and stop shaving. Austin's beard looks really good on him. Better than mine ever did, anyway. I guess some people can rock a beard, and others were just meant be clean-shaven.



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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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