The Beard

For awhile now, I've had a pretty big beard, but a couple of days ago I shaved it completely off, not just with clippers, but with an actual razor; and I bought an electric shaver (foil, not rotary) to use from now on.

The whole time with the beard, was really my first experience. I've gone unshaven before, but I've never actually been bearded until a bunch of months ago, when I really stopped shaving, and would do things like let the barber trim it for me. The first time he tipped my head all the way back and started in with the scissors, I was like, "whoa! You mean this is what happens?" I really wasn't expecting it.

I felt pretty comfortable with a beard. It covered up my face. Instead of all my crazy facial expressions, people just saw... a beard. Instead of judging me by the way I was looking at them, people judged me by... the beard. Growing up, I never had the kind of hair I could hide behind, but if I'd had it, I would have hid behind it. The hair would have been like the tall legs of Mommy that I used to put between me and strangers when I was little. I never had that kind of hair; but now, I had... the beard.

It completely changed my interactions with the world. That's really not surprising, since I essentially had an entirely new face, and it stands to reason that when people meet for the very first time, for example as they pass each other on the street, they respond to the face and the rest of the initial appearance, more than any particular inner quality.

With the beard, I sometimes noticed a woman checkin' me out. I'd never noticed that before. And sometimes someone would give me a smile as we passed each other. That was also new. I had always been more used to the other person getting an annoyed expression, and keeping their eyes aimed elsewhere.

What can I say. There are only a few possibilities here, for the clean-shaven Zack. First, I could be so devastatingly gorgeous that women are too bowled over to look directly at me. Second, I could be simply ugly, to the extent that they want nothing to do with me. Or third, my face could just naturally express itself in ways that people find creepy or lascivious, or in some other way unpleasant.

Traditionally, I've taken door number three. And while the many people who love me tell me there's nothing creepy about me, I have indeed gotten that kind of feedback from people who didn't love me, from time to time over the years. Apparently I do creep certain people out.

The beard wiped that entire identity away, apparently. Suddenly I was just... that good looking guy with the beard.

Before the beard, I also always used to wear my glasses. The glasses were a permanent fixture. They went on in the morning and came off at night, and had rimless frames that allowed them to seem to merge like alien technology with my face.

Every once in awhile someone would tell me they wanted to see me without the glasses, and they'd be very enthusiastic about it. Then I'd take the glasses off, and they'd get this disappointed look, and say something like, "oh... ok, put them on again." For me, this tended to confirm my door-number-three hypothesis.

But I've never been overly awed by negative opinions of me. I was the kid who got picked on in school, and I learned fairly early that the only opinion that matters about me is my own. So the whole door-number-three thing isn't really this great millstone, though definitely I would have preferred door number one (devastatingly gorgeous).

In any case, negative opinions about me are not so hard to take. I wouldn't keep a beard or keep a pair of eyeglasses, just so I'd be less disturbing to anyone. So actually, around the time I started growing the beard, I also got rid of my glasses, and replaced them with contact lenses.

That was a great, great decision. I don't think I ever consciously realized that a big piece of equipment sitting on my face was not likely to work very well. But it's true. Contact lenses are so much more like having my own eyes just work right. Glasses always distorted the world, ignored my peripheral vision, changed the colors of things, and sometimes even reflected the sunlight directly onto my retina off the edges of the lenses, causing pain and perhaps damage. I'm very happy with the contacts, and I don't really plan to go back.

It's actually funny too, because Kar loves men with beards and men with glasses; and I've always worn glasses, and she's always been all sparkly-eyed about me and my glasses; but on this last visit to San Francisco I had the beard but no glasses, and it was kind of like turning my face upside down for her - all of a sudden she was sparkly-eyed about the beard, but there were no glasses. At one point during the visit, she told me how shocked she was that she'd been able to accept me without the glasses; and that she didn't think she could've done it if I hadn't also had the beard. (of course she could've - she loves me deeply - but that's what she said)

So a couple of days ago when I finally shaved off the beard, I realized I not only didn't have the beard, but I didn't have the glasses either. My entire set of defensive armor against actually being seen, had been wiped out in one blow. Nothing stood between me and the yawning maw of door number three.

In fact, it was really the first time I'd been able to even see my own face in the mirror without glasses, since I was a little kid. Permanent fixture, remember? If I took off the glasses, my whole head would just look blurry, like a big pink puffball, with brown on top, in the mirror. But now with the contacts and the clean-shaven face, I could actually see myself at last.

I'm pretty! OK, not devastatingly gorgeous, and I think even I can see some of those creepy facial expressions from door number three. But actually it's a half-way decent face! I was surprised. I never would have suspected that I might actually look human with all the coverings removed. I'd figured me for maybe a Steve Buscemi look, at best. He's not actually bad looking, but he sure plays some funny looking people. I figured that was me. Donny, from 'The Big Lebowski'; or Carl Showalter from 'Fargo'. But it was nice to look in the mirror and not have the sense that people would run screaming, or cross to the other side of the street, or do something else weird.

So that's the story of the beard.