I let my goatee come back a few weeks ago.
“With or without?” I asked my wife Katie.
“I don’t care,” my wife Katie told me.
I guess it’s harder to get fired up facial hair as you get older. Or my appearance in general.
“How do this look?”
“Who cares?”
Vanity fades with age, maybe. Well, hopefully.
My mom, despite being in a state of financial ruin, wanted botox in her sixties. Clinging desperately to the cultural capital of her good looks.
They fade, I’m afraid. Lament against the dying of the light, I guess.
***
I made it a few months with a clean-shaven face. An attempt to return to 1997. Mostly, it was too much work. Hacking away at my face with a razor. I was a bloody mess. I can’t seem to work my chin without leaving a few flesh wounds. Gaping flesh wounds, usually.
“Are you okay?” Katie asked when I came out of the bathroom.
I shrugged. Am I ever okay?
So I let the goatee come back, gray hair and all. I’ve had my goatee since about 1998. I looked like I was twelve for most of the 90’s. The 2000’s too. This was something of a problem when I was selling long-term care insurance policies to kindly elderly people with my dad. The goatee made me look older. At least I thought I did. People could probably smell my youth from a million miles away. Incidentally, if you’ve ever smelled youth, you should probably surrender to the authorities.
I started student teaching in like 2001 or 2002. I’d get yelled at by hall monitors.
“Where’s your hall pass?”
“I’m a teacher,” I’d say.
“Prove it.”
The goatee didn’t prove it. But it helped.
So the goatee came about as a way to look older. And it makes drawing sketches of my face so much easier. That’s a page out of Kurt Vonnegut’s book. Or books. Signing off with a sketch instead of a signature. My sketch has a goatee and, importantly, muscles and a six-pack. The scrawl doesn’t look the same without the goatee. Neither do I, I guess.
***
So the goatee is back for now. Gray hairs and all. It makes shaving easier. And I can stroke it when I’m anxious. Play with the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin.
I’ve always made something of a game out of my facial hair. Big Neil-Young-sideburns. A Hulk-Hogan-esque handlebar mustache. Soul patches were kind of cool in the late 90’s. Only kinda.
I suppose a time will come when, caution be damned, I just let the whole thing go. A beard like Rasputin. Down to my toes. Wondering the streets of America like a wizard.
“The end is near!” I’ll shout.
Everybody will nod. We all realize the end is near. It’s an election year.
For now, my neatly trimmed goatee will adorn my face like an old friend. Reminding people who don’t need to be reminded that I’m not twelve anymore. Justifying my existence in the adult world that, so far as I can tell, ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I remember Dad teaching me how to shave my middle-school mustache. It was so smooth when I was finished. I often let my sons shave with me when they were little. Hose ’em down with shaving cream. Give them the plastic that protects the razor to simulate my disposable blades. Slap some aftershave on them when we were done.
“It burns!” I’d howl. Then they’d go show Katie.
“How does it look?” They’d ask.
“WONDERFUL!” Katie would howl in a voice that she didn’t use to describe the return of my goatee.
Kids have it easy, in some ways.
Then there’s me. Plodding forward, not looking twelve anymore, and starting not to care as much about any cultural capital that could be won with a handsome face.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 