Give Me a Face with Hair…

By John Addyman  |   john.addyman@yahoo.com

 

Beards.

I got my first beard started when I was teaching 10th grade biology in Bristol, Pennsylvania. That was the mid-1960s, and our blue-collar town was having racial unrest that was migrating from the community into our school, a grade 9-10 “intermediate” high school.

This was my first teaching assignment and I weighed about 140 pounds soaking wet. My roommate (who years later became superintendent of schools) and I got to school one bright morning and couldn’t help but notice the 50 or so motorcycles lined up on one side of the school, belonging to the Hell’s Black Cobras group.

On the far other side of the school buildings were 20 or 30 state police and local police cruisers.

We walked in the middle doors.

It was going to be a fun day.

School lasted eight minutes before the first fight broke out in a hall right down from my room. My roommate, who taught in the classroom next to mine, and I parked our homeroom kids with a warning not to leave the rooms, and headed for the fray. I pulled the first kid I encountered in the melee and pinned him up against a set of lockers as teachers struggled to separate the combatants.

Things were great until a female phys ed teacher grabbed me and tried to pull me off the rather large young man, a basketball player, whom I had managed to immobilize.

“I’m a teacher!” I screamed.

But she was bigger and stronger than I was, and pulled me off the kid who, thankfully, stayed right where he was.

Later that day, when all the kids had been sent home, the phys ed teacher came down to my classroom and apologized.

“I thought you were one of the kids,” she said.

Right that second I said to myself, “I’ve got to grow a beard.”

So I did.

In my next teaching assignment, a middle school in a well-to-do area of southeast Pennsylvania, I had a Fu Manchu beard — more like a moustache — and I must have looked pretty fearsome. The second day of school our guidance counselor, John Cowley, came into my room and told me that one of my 7th grade students wouldn’t come to school that day because she was afraid of me.

“You’re kidding,” I told him.

He shook his head.

So the next morning, John led me into his office, where the young girl was sitting, looking awfully uncomfortable. We talked for a few minutes and we decided if she could call me “Dr. Fu Manchu” because of the beard, everything would be OK. She left with a smile.

And she started a trend. By the end of the week, nobody knew who the heck Mr. Addyman was, but everyone knew Dr. Fu.

I kept that beard for years. I was married in a barbershop-trimmed version of it. My wife and I started a family while I had that beard.

Then I bought my first motorcycle, and I found out just how valuable a beard is, while realizing that I needed more of one.

You see, when you’re riding a motorcycle, stuff blows in your face at 60 miles an hour. So you wear goggles or good glasses. I decided early on to wear a full-face helmet to provide even more protection, but there was a problem – a full-face helmet from those days, the 1970s, was like a wind tunnel and all kind of stuff zooms in under the piece in front of your chin and joins you inside. I can tell you how exciting it is to be sharing the inside of a full-face helmet with a wasp, large beetle or bumblebee. You don’t know what the word “panic” means until you’ve had such an encounter.

This is where it helps to have the right friends.

Marv Yeager, who taught me how to ride (“Every time you get on the bike, believe that everyone else on the road is out there to kill you”), had a large and fairly scruffy beard.

“Bug-catcher” he explained to me, running his fingers through his beard.

I could see what my problem was: my Fu Manchu was comprised of two large shards of hair on either side of my mouth, so anything coming in under my full-face helmet was headed straight to my mouth, nose and eyes.

Clearly, my beard needed some filling in. I worked on that. I did beard exercises, which required me to make weird and tortured facial expressions for 10 minutes at a time to stretch skin and let hair follicles breathe. I put lotion stuff on my face. I massaged the skin…and hairs began to spread.

Now I’ve got a beard about as full as it can get on my face. There are areas of my countenance where hair does not grow luxuriously, so I spread things out as best I can.

A fuller beard, I’ve found, requires some special accommodation.

For instance, remember the discussion in the original “Miracle on 34th Street” movie? Attorney Fred Gailey asks Kris Kringle to answer an age-old question: does Santa sleep with his beard under the covers or on top of them?

I think about that exchange every night when I go to bed. Kris responds that he likes his beard on top of the covers so his hair can get some air. I do the same thing.

What the film didn’t answer is what do you do at the dinner table, because anything in little pieces on the plate may well end up peppered throughout the beard at meal’s end, only to be discovered — and sometimes enjoyed — hours later. I just experienced that with the little crumbs in Entenmann’s crumb doughnuts. Yum!

The truth is that when you have a beard, all the womenfolk in your house keep an eye on you to see what you’re going to spill into the forest on your face. Mustard is a favorite because it’s easy to spot. Whipped cream, gravy or jambalaya are especially noteworthy.

What this means is that when we have our grown kids and grandkids over to the house for a meal, I’m getting stared at, and the reactions are different.

“Honey…” my wife will say sweetly in motherly tones, “you have something in your beard.”

“Dad…” my youngest daughter will say matter-of-factly, “you’re spilling.”

“Granddad…” my youngest grandson will say, gesturing to his own face to indicate I’ve got something loose on mine.

“You saving that for later?” my son-in-law will ask. “Your flavor-catcher is working.”

“Oooh, gross!” my middle daughter will suggest.

It’s all good.

The thing that’s not good is that beard hairs get long and decide to jump off your face without warning. You find them on your laptop keyboard, on the page of a magazine, resting on your pillow or floating in your tea.

But there’s more good than bad. When I shovel the snow off the driveway, my beard helps keep me warm. When I stroke it absentmindedly, people see that and think to themselves, “Gee, he’s really deep in thought! What a wise man!”

And when I get up in the morning and comb out my beard to get rid of all the tangles, I look in the mirror and see a Briton living in India, or a mountain man in Utah, or a captain of industry from 150 years ago.

Then I see my wife, staring at me, standing behind me and looking over my shoulder at the same mirror.

“You know,” she says, “that thing tickles.”

“It tickles me, too,” I say. “Give us a kiss…”

And she runs away.