My Barber Cut Off the Cowlick. I Wore a Hat for Nine Weeks.

Number two guard, left temple. Those were the words in play at 6:15 on a Thursday evenin', May 21, third chair at Exact Cuts on Delmar, cape still clipped at my collar when the new guy spun the mirror around. There was a lane above my left ear the width of a thumb where hair had simply stopped existing. I could feel air on it. A grown man, 38 years old, feeling breeze on a part of his head that had never once been outdoors.

The cowlick and I had a deal goin' back to little league. It grew forward and slightly down, it made every flat top of the 1990s impossible, and in exchange I never let anyone near it with a short guard. The new barber buzzed straight thru the whorl like it was a patch of carpet that had personally offended him, then said the word texture and moved on to my beard without waiting for a reply. I paid $32. I tipped $6, cuz my father raised me to tip before I raise a scene.

Two more barbers would examine that lane before July ended, and the one who finally fixed it did it by cutting less than anybody, with a laminated chart on his wall for reference. Nine weeks, start to finish. Here is the ledger of a haircut that would not die.

the third chair at Exact Cuts

Exact Cuts is a six-chair shop between a Verizon store and a wing place, $32 a cut, walk-ins only, and I had been goin' to a different chair there for two years. The regular was out that day. The new guy was fast, friendly, and asked no questions before the clippers began, which is the root cause of everythin' in this article. A cowlick is a whorl, it grows in a spiral that fights the rest of the head, and mine sits exactly where a number two guard checks out. He absorbed that from my head. So did I.

the chart on the wall

Barber number two worked out of a shop on the north side and charged me nothing to deliver the worst news of June. He looked at the lane, pulled a laminated chart of growth patterns off the wall, and pointed at the whorl diagram like a man explaining weather to a tourist. Four weeks minimum before anyone touches it, he said, and if you want it evened now, I buzz the whole head to a two and we call it a lesson. I kept the hair. I tipped him $10 for the consult anyways, because that chart did more for me in four minutes than the $38 I had spent on May 21.

week two, the hat receipts

The hats began in week one and I kept the receipts in a drawer like evidence. A gray agency cap from the company store, $34, worn four days a week. A black beanie for the one cold week we had, $22, worn indoors at my own desk, which nobody challenged. A bucket hat for a backyard engagement party on June 14, $30, photographed from six angles by people I am related to. Eighty-six dollars in hat, all of it because one barber said the word texture and kept walking.

the June 4 pitch, shot in 4K

The shoot was eleven days after the buzz, too early for cover, exactly on time for panic. Our producer retained a makeup artist at $150 for the half day, and she spent four of her minutes on my temple, patting powder into a lane of scalp in a way I did not know was a professional service. Camera on my left, key light from the right, and the editor kept my close-ups under four seconds each. The client in Chicago saw a pitch. I saw a man in a video folder who owns three hats.

the panic buys

Week three I began buying solutions instead of waiting, and the same drawer holds the receipts. Toppik hair fibers, $24.99, marketed for thinning crowns, orange under sunlight, useless on hair a quarter inch long. A matte pomade, $18, which needs length to hold and had none to work with. A dermaroller, $15, rolled over the whorl zone on the advice of a stranger on the internet, and it is the one purchase in this story I still cannot defend. Panic spend: $57.99, none of it returned.

barber number three

July 16, week eight, a shop on the south side of Delmar that my cousin swore by. The barber asked zero questions, ran his hand over the lane, and said the first smart sentence of the summer: the cowlick decides the cut, not the other way around. He scissored around the whorl, left the length on top, blended the sides down to meet it, and charged $40. Least cutting of anyone all summer, highest price, only appointment that ended with the lane gone.

week nine, no hat

Week nine landed on July 23, and the gray agency cap stayed in the drawer for the entire week on purpose. The lane had filled in, the whorl lay flat under its own weight the way it had before May 21, and the breeze-on-the-scalp era was over. Exact Cuts can keep the $38 from May. The $40 barber on the south side has my name in the book for September, first chair I could get. Nobody has spun a mirror around at me since July 16. There is nothing left to reveal.