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Toastmaster Tom Part 1 by Doug
Toastmaster Tom Part 1: Beware of What You Wish For
I suppose I could blame this whole obsession I have with buzzed hair on my parents and their unwitting commitment to fairness across their 6 sons. My only problem was I came along at the end, long after the haircut "rules" of my household had been established when clipper cuts were king back in the early 60s. To help make ends meet, in my family my dad handled simple "butch" haircuts with everyone using his handy dandy Toastmaster Home Haircutting Kit until you hit middle school, at which point you could grow the top out and have it handled by the barbershop downtown. Come high school, you could wear it however you wanted. For most of my older sibs it worked out fine, but for the last two of us who hit school in the early 1970s, it became an elementary school social nightmare. At the beginning of second grade I was the last clippered boy in my grade, with the rest of my cohort succumbing to sloppy, long feathered bangs and sides that hid their ears. With me in tears on the stool one day and my dad firing up the clippers, my mom reversed the rule and suggested he just trim up the sides and let us grow out the top. My parents weren’t mean about the rule, after all—they were just following it until then in a spirit of equal treatment to all their kids.
Thanks to my mom, by Christmas I had switched to a local "styling salon" and looked like every other boy in my grade. One of my Christmas stocking stuffers was a comb and brush combo—tools I had never had to worry about up until then. The ironic part of all this is that I had barely reached the point of sporting socially acceptable hair when I was becoming quietly sorry about my decision. I loved the feeling as the clippers hummed over my head, I loved the tight velvet at the base of my neck where dad tapered it to nothing, and I hated the upkeep of long hair. I just didn’t have the nerve to tell anyone to buzz it all off again and deal with the mocking at school.
One other funny thing about the Toastmaster Kit: on the cover of its instructional book was a photo of a 1950s boy about my age sporting an awesome high and tight flattop, just long enough in front so it went up and flipped forward just a tad, with his bare sides as smooth as silk. I used to look at the picture every time the box came out. I loved the way that kid looked—so cool with his perfect "brush"—but in a case of ironic marketing, there were no instructions in the haircutting book about what that haircut on the box was called or how to cut it. I know, because I checked. There were also no kids in 1973 sporting anything like it. The closest thing in the book was a page describing a butch cut and a crewcut, with an illustration of the crewcut being flat in the front and the butch being rounded. I loved that crewcut drawing almost as much as the photo on the box. Something about squaring off the front and flattening the top so evenly—it just seemed so cool to be able to change the shape of your head and make your hair do what you wanted it to. I loved the symmetry and the control of it. In retrospect, my parents chose the perfect haircut for me as a youngster. Once I grew it out, my fine straight hair was always out of control and messed up, so the possibility of maintaining a perfect look all the time really appealed to me. I just couldn’t ever talk to anyone else about it. The Toastmaster was shoved onto a shelf in the basement storage room and forgotten by everyone but me.
For the rest of elementary, I just loved it when I came across boys in public whose parents had their head buzzed down nicely—they were a rare sight in the mid-70s. In fifth grade, a boy down the street showed up at school in May with a rough buzz cut completed by his frequently drunk father. I remember walking home from school with him asking if he liked the haircut even though other kids had been mean. I told him I liked it, but I politely passed when he offered to have his dad help me out. Poor guy was probably excited at the prospect of having a buzz buddy!
In fifth grade I became an altar server. Now there was a great job for a kid looking for short haircuts. During communion we held the paten under people’s chin to catch a wafer if they dropped it, but my eyes were all over any parishioner who approached with good short hair. There were two men in particular who sported impressive, well waxed flattops throughout the whole 1970s. I was always impressed with their confidence and willingness to disregard the fashion pack. Neither had white walls like my Toastmaster boy, but I would love it when they approached right after getting tightened up. After showers sometimes, I would comb my wet hair into a stack to try to imagine how I’d look with the same haircut.
By middle school, one of my brothers returned from college for the summer with a full beard, and much to my private delight, dug out the Toastmaster to trim his beard occasionally and left the box in the bathroom. There was Toastmaster Tom staring at me as I sat on the thrown for every #2. At first I’d sneak in there and just plug it in and turn it on. Then I started playing with the side length lever. Then one day I lifted my neck hair and buzzed just a little patch under there. No cool velvety feeling, although I did spill more hair than I expected onto the bathroom floor. I looked at it again and realized it had guard on it. Snapping off the guard, I went back on my neck and removed the ½-inch of hair I had left behind. Now I could feel a little bristle patch that took me back to my butch days, hidden under my long hair. That got me excited and out of control in a way I didn’t know how to handle. I cleaned up all the hair and flushed it. After a few days, my secret patch needed buzzing again. By the end of the summer I had buzzed off my pubes twice, long before manscaping was common—first down to a neat inch, and then down to the skin. It was my private buzzcut in my shorts. It didn’t feel that great, but I loved the process of removing the hair and wished I could practice on my head instead. Multiple times I would stand in front of the mirror with the unplugged clippers at my forehead and a #2 guard on it and start pushing it back through my bangs, imagining how it would feel to finally get back to what I really wanted. In spite of all these "sessions," I graduated high school in ’82 with classic long, side-parted hair and just a tiny tip of ears showing on the sides.
