The Age of Aquarius
The coming of age of a child of the turbulent 60's
In 1968, the song Aquarius from the musical Hair played over my tinny transistor radio speaker.
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
The age of Aquarius
Aquarius!
Aquarius!
Fortunately, I pressed the record button on our family’s cassette recorder in time to capture the song. I had perfected the art of recording songs into our 1960s shoebox size version of an iPod. The rudimentary technology enabled me to listen to songs repeatedly and hear the words and spirit of revolution in the air.
I didn’t know what to make of the age of Aquarius. It sounded spooky, as if a cult were taking over. I saw boys returning home from the Vietnam war with extremities blown off or in body bags. We watched the roll call of dead soldiers on the 10pm news. Assassin’s bullets rang out. Police sprayed protestors with hoses. In the late 60s, my world of discipline from conservative parents and catholic school, had evolved into a ball of adolescent confusion.
Many rock stars and older kids on my block had grown their hair long. My family watched the Ed Sullivan show on which “hippie” groups like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Mamas & The Pappas appeared. The musical Hair generated another hit song:
Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy
Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair
Many adults in my conservative family circle expressed discontentment.
One uncle said, “Commies.”
Another said, “Hippie freaks.”
But I saw teens waving flowers, painting their faces, and smoking pipes filled with an illegal drug that made them smile. They chanted, “Peace now!” Meanwhile, in Catholic school, we saw pictures of Jesus in a book. He wore long hair and a beard and preached a message of peace.
I saw bandanas around heads, necklaces hung around necks, and bellbottom jeans. I looked at myself in a mirror and saw a white buttoned-down shirt, green tie, and brown uniformed pants. The Jesus lookalikes made me feel like the odd person out.
Shouldn’t I be like them? I said to myself. Don’t the priests and nuns want us to be more like Jesus? No. My parental support system sensed a threat by the invaders. They could incorporate me into their faith, and then what? I didn’t know and I don’t think the adults knew either.
During school season, I wore stiff, close-cropped hair. To get my hair to stay in place, my mother used a product called Brylcreem. The company’s commercial comprised the slogan “A little dab will do ya.”
My mother would massage a white dollop of the chemical goo onto my head, then rake a comb across my scalp. The sharp teeth of the comb slammed into my skin. Sometimes the black plastic would encounter a knot. Mom needed to get me off to school, so used extra muscle to rip through the knot. When she did, my head snapped forward and back from the momentum of the instrument.
“Ouch!”
“Stop it. Let’s go,” she said.
Later in the day, I’d tap a wave of hair on my head and felt it give a little, but the hair refused to flatten. In the summers, my parents opted for the crew cut hair style for us. The military style hair cut made our hairdo easy to maintain and kept us cool in the steamy Queens summers. My mother would march me down Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens, NY until we stood before the candy cane barber pole in front of a little shop owned by Vic, the Italian barber, the general in the conservative army.
How ironic, the disciplinarian responsible for a key component of our looks used a candy cane to symbolize his trade.
Might Vic and the hippies agree on how cool the candy cane was? Then we could all gather and sing Kumbaya. But the culture clash would continue.
Once inside the shop, my eyes would dart to the mysterious blue liquid-filled jars within which the barber with the jet black close-cropped stiff hair and thin pencil mustache would store the tools of his trade. Perhaps he stored human appendages from haircutting accidents too. Vic’s chemical stew could easily preserve a human ear lobe while he sat home watching The Andy Griffith Show.
I saw pictures of hairstyle models on the walls and mirror too. The ultra-handsome magazine figures wore fancy clothes and sported slick, wavey hairstyles. In the 60s, Instagram models didn’t exist to make me feel inferior. Vic’s wall of fame did that.
Italian music played in the background. The square jawed proprietor forged a smile to assure my mother of his skill and care. His lips curled over his yellow garlic-stained teeth.
In the hot weather, my mother would point to the summer special. The crew cut. The stoic barber would nod his head and point me to the center chair with his glistening straight razor, as if he were a gladiator in the Roman coliseum, showing me his weapon of choice. My mother nudged my shoulder to move. I would reluctantly step up on the dirty metal footrest to vault myself into the hard red leather chair. A split in the center with tufts of yellow stuffing sticking out revealed the chair’s old age.
The dusty blades of a small table fan with a wide-open grill through which any toddler could lose a finger or two rattled the sound of a drunk woodpecker on a pine tree. The sweltering summer air stubbornly layered itself over our heads like a winter comforter. Beads of sweat threatened to roll down my temples.
Vic’s olive skin sparkled with a sheen of moisture in the cheap incandescent lighting. My captor’s deep black eyes executed a stare down as if in a heavyweight championship boxing match. He did so as the rest of his body dazzled me with its perpetual motion.
His cheap lemon-lime cologne smell wafted through the stolid air, entered my nostrils, snaked its way down my esophagus and pounced on my salami and cheese lunch, which threatened to reappear. Mint shaving cream, stale steam from hot towels, and the clear gooey stuff Vic used to stiffen hair rounded out the odor of the oppressive air.
Clumps of hair danced on the floor whenever the 1960s version of Edward Scissorhands do-si-do’d around my chair. Remnants of brown, black, and gray hair gripped the time-worn sheet Vic used to cover me. The hair refused to let go, even after Vic swatted the heavy air with the sheet to clear it.
My eyes crossed, trying to decipher the unique striped pattern. I saw a thin red line encased in faded blue jagged lines; the type of pattern associated with the prison garb of the day.
Oddly, I never saw a hair on the moody barber’s blue smock. As Vic’s scissors fluttered in the air like a hummingbird’s wings, I prepared for my first test of will. A hair fiber would inevitably invade my nose and cause an itch so unbearable my eyes overflowed with hot, salty tears.
There I sat, helpless with that torturous itch. If I sneezed, I could add an ear lobe to Vic’s nefarious collection. Plus, Vic’s customers had to remain perfectly still once he positioned your head. If you violated his rules, the disciplinarian would lose his temper. While the hippies grooved, I reeled in an authoritarian world of rules and regulations.
“Sit-ah, still-ah!” He would say in broken English as he sneakily squeezed the back of my neck with a vice-like grip. In school we lived under the threat of iron fisted nuns. At home, my mother would retrieve a wooden spoon to swat our hands. Vic used the Sicilian death grip.
My mother’s face remained buried in a Look magazine with a psychedelic depiction of John Lennon on the cover while Vic’s pompous Benito Mussolini face glared at me. Fortunately, the sadist would need to change tools, and that was when I would make the move to remove the torment from my nose.
Vic would slather hot shaving cream on my peach fuzz sideburns and back of my neck, which gave me a respite from the rest of the nerve-racking experience. After that, however, the torture would begin again when the haircutter would sharpen his blade on the thick leather strap that hung from the side of the chair. I can hear the sound in my head today “thwap, thwap, thwap” as if saying “All work and no play make Vic a bad boy.”
The stoic barber could blast his blade across that strip at lightning speed. In retrospect, I believe Vic fantasized he was a matador at the bull fights preparing for the kill. Once he sharpened the scary blade, he would slowly scrape my skin with the razor-sharp steel. I had watched the film Psycho on TV with my dad, and I prayed Vic wouldn’t turn into Norman Bates.
Vic finished buzz cutting and scraping, blasted me with a white puffy cloud of talcum powder and whipped off the sheet. Then he held a mirror behind me, in front, and to the side of me. I didn’t move a muscle but eked out an upside-down frown. My mom nodded, gave Vic a dollar bill and some change and we left, leaving Vic’s cowbell door alarm clanging behind us.
Years later, when I attended high school in a public school, I wore jeans, sneakers, and a tee shirt for school. My hair had grown out and its shiny, fluffy texture delighted me. I pulled it over my forehead and into my eyes and buried my ears in featherlight protection. I could let freedom ring at last.
The age of Aquarius had finally arrived for me, but with it came exposure to the potential of a lottery number for the draft to go to Vietnam. Students smoked joints at the park, and an eighteen year could buy a draft beer legally for fifteen cents.
I realized then as I drifted away from the discipline of my World War II era parents, the Catholic school nuns, and Vic the barber, freedom meant vulnerability.
Hippies took drugs and wore wild clothing to express their fears, wants, and desires, and now it was my turn. The ironclad structure I once felt constricted by had protected me. The decisions before me would determine my happiness and sorrow.
John writes for publications on Medium. His other work can be found on https://johnpwrites.com
