And then he’s up, after a while, out of bed, when he knows his parents are asleep, and he goes quietly to the kitchen, where he knows his mother keeps a bottle of sleeping pills. Only Sominex, not exactly an efficient poison, but they’re what’s at hand, so he shakes them out and stands at the sink with dozens of white tablets in his hand, looking at the little white discs, each incised with a line down the middle like an aspirin. He hasn’t turned on the light; he holds the pills over the sink, and they’re lit by the street light outside shining onto the carport and the silvery roof of the parked Dodge. He pours a glass of water and swallows the whole bottle, in a handful, all at once.

I cannot quite, now, put myself in the place of that boy, that stupid, fourteen-year-old boy, shorn to a military severity—humiliating in 1967, and exactly the way I wear my hair today. Now a body seems so precious to me, so embattled already. Dramatic boy, he doesn’t see how dangerous it is to make a point with your life. (Had he really wanted to die, I suppose, he would have; certainly under the sink were the ordinary household chemicals that would have done the job. But he didn’t think of them; does that mean he wants to live, finally, or just that he doesn’t want to suffer? I cannot tell you; I can’t read him that clearly.)

Doesn’t he know hair grows back in a hurry?

But it isn’t about hair; nothing to do with this haircut is about hair. For the parents this is one thing they can control, when everything else is going awry; for the father it’s one way to get that harpy off his back, and she’s right about this one anyway.

But for the boy hair is power, too, or rather seems to grant him access: a way to be a person people might like, a way to be seen. (Little ripple of memory: pictures of Samson in Sunday school, oiled and spread-eagled, a muscle man chained to the columns of the temple, writhing like Steve Reeves, his beautiful shorn head the emblem of his sexual defeat.)

Hair was a defense, too: a way for that mistake of a boy not to be seen. He wants that so desperately he’d die for it.

Or kill? Suicide’s a misplaced homicide, most of the time; that boy’s rage is immense, and unthinkably dangerous, since he’s also utterly dependent on the people he’s coming to loathe.

And there isn’t any way, not that he can see, to get away from them.