Pompadour

The whole thing begins when I step out of the shower and stare at myself. Through the steam and fog on the mirror I can see it, my hair. 

It’s long and curly. I haven’t worn it this long since I was about twelve years old. I’m currently in my early forties, so this look was a long time ago for me. Then the memories start, both the good and the bad.

When I was a child, I spent countless time watching my dad comb his hair in the mirror. My father wasn’t a vain man, but he cared about how he looked. He liked to be groomed, and he liked his hair combed.

He kept a comb in his pocket.

My father was black, but instead of wearing his hair the natural way, he wore it in a cunk, which evolved into an S-Curl. In addition to his dry curl, my father wore his curl with an immaculate Pompadour that he perfected shaping-up over a lifetime.  

He loved Pompadours. 

He loved them so much that he gave me an S-curl, and a Pompadour at nine years old.

“The ladies are gonna love you son dude.” I can recall my dad saying as he shaped up my pompadour.

All the ladies did in fact love my nine year old pompadour.

 All the old ladies. 

Anyone born after 1980 was like, “Who the hell do you think you are? Prince? Michael Jackson? Can you even sing? Do you know how to moonwalk?” Prince is gay, are you gay? Am I gay?”

When I got home, my father would be there waiting with his comb. It was like my hair somehow became his personal pet project. My hair was like his hobby, but I felt like a chia pet.

When I once suggested that I not be a black kid in the ghetto wearing a pompadour in the 90’s, I could see his heartbreaking.

So to please him, I started lying. 

I loved my father, and I was a chip off his block.

Instead of telling him the truth about how all the kids in class took turns making fun of my hair, I told them how they loved it. 

Instead of talking about how I often used to hide in the bathroom and cry, I told him about how we ran and played.

Instead of being the laughing stock to girls that I was, I lied to him and told him that I was popular. I told him that I had a pick of all the girls in school.  I would go to dances just to keep up the lie, and just sit there and watch the actual popular guy’s with 90’s fashions get all the girls and dance with them. Karl Kani jumpsuits, and Fubu, and Gumby shortstop fashions ruled the day. 

I think he knew I was lying, but when I told my father these stories, he would always close his eyes and nod his head in agreement and smile like he foresaw this outcome. The only thing he would say is, “I knew it” over and over between the points in every lie I told.

“It’s the Pompadour son. The ladies can’t resist it.”

My father loved the pompadour, but he could also be sensitive about it. He often got angry when my mother said anything about it, and my mother always had something to say.

Because, as much as my dad loved his pompadour, my mother hated it.

 “Why you always want your hair like that? What, you want to look like you Puerto Rican or something?”

But as much as my father hated this line of questioning, there can be no denial that his particular style choice owes its origin story to the royal court of the French Kingdom of the 18th century. 

The story goes that one day, one of King Louis XIV’s side pieces, The Duchess of Fontages fell off her horse while riding with him. 

My guess is that she was probably doing something attention seeking when she fell.

But just like a proud woman, she hit the ground rolling, and quickly stood up. Showing no signs of injury from the fall, she took her damaged, once  combed hair with leaves and sticks in it and shaped it into a pompadour. 

The king was apparently amazed by her grace under pressure, and most importantly loved her new look. From that point forward Marie Angélique de Scorailles always wore this new style when she came to court, and became commonly known as “Madam de Pompadour.”

You can’t make this stuff up. 

A lot of good that research did me as a kid, because after that all I could think was, “My dad wore his hair like a late eighteenth century side piece?”

Of course that wasn’t the case.

I later learned that like bell bottom pants, hairstyles are a fashion, and fashions come and go. But more importantly, they sometimes come back. As was the case in the doo wop era of the 1960’s when the pompadour made a triumphant return in the black community. 

Brothas at this time were famously putting random combinations of chemicals in their hair in an effort to straighten it. This was considered hip, this was considered the new cool thing to do to one’s hair within the black community.  This was the era in which my father became a man.

“It was a beautiful time son. Don’t let those old newsreels of police dogs biting black folks fool you. I’m not going to sugar coat it, we had a lot of problems back then, but hell, we got a lot of problems now. Just know this, the problems don’t define the era, the good times do. There were a lot of good times in the sixties. The black people in the community were actually together, we knew each other's names. We knew our entire neighborhoods names. We had disagreements, and we had fights, but there wasn’t this violence there is today. I think it’s  because we partied together. Entire neighborhoods. We were black, we couldn’t go nowhere else, and nobody wanted us, so we came together. We had drinking clubs, where everyone just brought a bottle of their favorite thing, and before you knew it, you had a full on bars worth of alcohol. Twenty five to thirty people deep of friends and family coordinating to come together in love and have a good time.Taking girlfriends to three dollar rent parties where shabby furniture became irrelevant in the darkness when the only light that beamed glowed red. Dancing with a lady just feels better under a red light. You should try it one day son. With kitchens that served plates of homemade fried chicken and catfish. And we played the best music. There was no diseases, and sex was fun and free. The sixties wasn’t all bad.”

At my father’s funeral his hair was combed into a pompadour, but whoever did it just couldn’t do it as sharp as my pops. 

Nobody can.

So, on the one year anniversary of my father passing, I decided that I wanted to see him again. And for the first time since I was a child, I grew my hair. When it was long enough I went to a black hair store and bought a bottle of s-curl relaxer and activator.

I went home and gave myself a curl, an old worn out hairstyle. I combed my nappy kinks just like my pop used to. The more I combed the straighter my hair got, and before I knew it, he was looking at me in the mirror. My face is a clone of my father’s and now his old hairstyle was new again. 

As so are the times.

“It’s nice to see you again, pop.” I said into the mirror.

I wore my hair this style for about two weeks with no explanation to the world. The reactions all these years later were about the same. 

The old ladies still dig it.