I baffi é morto Lunga vita al baffi

My moustache came off today. The Erbetux rash got beneath what experienced bushwhackers said was impenetrable scrub and started acting up, causing some significant discomfort. With one brief exception, this moustache has been with me for 42 years, warming my upper lip, gathering crumbs, getting in the way, especially when I forget to trim it. The one brief exception was when Mary lost her hair due to chemotherapy. After telling her I would meet her halfway, I shaved the right half of my moustache the day her hair came out and asked if that was enough. At her suggestion, I shaved the left half as well. Less than two weeks later, Mary was asking me to grow the moustache back again.

In December, 1966, I dropped out of high school in the middle of my senior year (public education has to be stopped somewhere) and ran away from home on the same day. Running off seemed like a good idea since I did not think my parents would take too kindly to having a high school dropout son. Although I was gone for a mere six months, there was nothing mere about the time to Mom and Dad who were subjected to all manner of suspicions concerning my fate. Imagine them finding out in the end that that fate simply meant a vagrancy charge in Las Vegas along with a sentence of what then was known as "thirty days or out of town." You had a choice of doing 30 days in jail or getting out of town. I told them I would just as soon get, but they held me due, I suspect, to a missing person report. My parents' revenge was in not sending me a plane ticket. I rode a Greyhound bus from Las Vegas, Nevada to Detroit, Michigan, reading Lenny Bruce's self-congratulatory How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and a great book by Wilfrid Sheed, called, Square's Progress. Bruce's book I suppose was subversive while Sheed's was simply fun. While I became more of a fan of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, Wilfrid's parents, the junior member of the family always makes me smile with his writing. It was on that bus trip I discovered I would rather be fun than subversive, although subversive fun had and still has its attractions. My subversive life was not nipped completely in the bud, however, since I had fomented a plot to grow a moustache.

Moustaches were not quite in vogue when I left Haight-Ashbury in 1967 on that ill-fated trip to Las Vegas, but I knew enough Old and New Testament history to know that changes in name (Abram to Abraham, Saul to Paul) usually indicated a change in life. Why, I reasoned, would a moustache not mark me as a changed man? I was barely 18 and had traveled (hitchhiking) the length of Route 66 (Chicago to Long Beach) long before it was closed by the interstates, been to Haight-Ashbury, smoked some of those left-handed cigarettes (nope; don't do it no more; sorry, can't help you) and could roll my own, drank whiskey and wine out of the bottle, could down a 40-pounder of beer without letting up, stay up half the night and get up first thing in the morning to get it started all over again. I had already roughnecked in the Permian Basin of West Texas and worked as an underpaid loader and unloader of trucks; rough work and sometimes dangerous at long hours for low pay. Always managed to find good people to work for, though, no matter how lousy the conditions. In short, I was a full-grown man and my upper lip was prime real estate to display a proper sign of my testosterone-fueled ego.

It was only later that people began to call my initial attempt a Sergeant Pepper moustache. I never claimed that name for it. Originally, what I was going for is called in the old hairstyle charts a, "chevron." Just a basic moustache stretching the length of the lip and turning down at the corners just a bit. What I ended up with has always been sort of its own creation. It keeps the original basic shape, but goes into free-range mode with the slightest encouragement. Now, moustache maintenance is a critical task, especially to the gentleman who wishes to appear well-groomed, and to maintain an attractive and comely moustache is no mean feat. It takes work and dedication on an almost daily basis. There are those who succeed admirably in this task and they have the growth to show for it. Moustache maintenance also takes a home base and this is where I came up short.

Shortly after returning home, I took off again, hitting the road for what would total 19 1/2 years before settling down with Mary. All those years and beyond, my moustache was one of the first things people would speak of when describing me, usually noting its prodigious growth. Comments ranged from the sarcastic ("Nice moustache") to the envious ("Wish I could grow me one like that"). Usually it was somewhere in the middle with people trying to pass a compliment and that is how I usually took their remarks. But I could also see for my own eyes that life on the road was not conducive to establishing a shining example of topiary on my upper lip. "Brush islands" are those areas in, say, a well-groomed park, where brush seems to simply grow up on its own and sit there. What I ended up with was more akin to a brush island on my face than a moustache. But is was my brush island and I was proud of it. It kept the basic shape of a moustache, but just barely.

Through the years it has been a part of my face, of me. I am not sure it is gone for good. It may just come back on its own but probably not until the Erbetux is all used up. And that's all I have to say about that.