The hot screaming bubble gum hair disaster

Hair can be a magical thing. Whether it drapes down a woman’s back in long curtains, curls circuitously about a baby’s cherubic face, or pokes out in whitened shocks from under an elderly man’s knit cap, hair defines us, adorns us, distinguishes us from others.

But hair is also notoriously prone to tangles, fires and bubblegum. And more hair often means more problems. These are things I learned as a child.

Another thing I learned as a child, during a boiling hot summer day, is to never scream with bubblegum in your mouth, because that gum may go launching out of your mouth and into your four-year-old sister’s hair.

And your little sister loves her long, curly locks and has been growing them all of her life and now you have threatened to destroy all of that just because you’re bad at chewing while screaming.

I did this one day, back in the 1970s. In those ancient times, girls had long hair and boys had crew-cuts, at least in the Midwest. There were no colorful hair dyes or mohawks or fancy styles on kids back then, and there were rarely any short-haired girls.

That’s why it was a big disaster for girls to get shit caught in their hair back then — because you’d have to get your hair cut short, and then your gender would be constantly called into question while it grew back out.

Was it wise of us to put such gender bias into hair styles back in those days? Not really. It probably also wasn’t very wise of us to demand that half of the kids in the country grow a head full of hair that was almost as long as they were tall, and then trust them to care for it like a professional, all before they learned to read and write. That’s why there are horror stories like mine now.

Why was I screaming, anyway? Probably because I was about six years old. Remember those days when you found it hilarious to play that game where you see who can scream the loudest? Like we were somehow busily honing an ancient survival skill that we had no idea how to apply to real life?

So yeah, I was screaming because my mother had gone into a store and I thought: Wouldn’t it be fun to have a contest to see who can scream the loudest?

So there I was one hot summer day, sitting in the back of my folks’ jeep and trying to top my sister’s shrill vocal skills, when suddenly: “Ker-thoom!” the bubblegum I had been holding between my back molars careened out of my mouth and plopped right into the middle of my sister’s waist-length hair. So then she looked down, saw the huge bubblegum wad in her long, curly locks and started bawling.

I immediately panicked and tried pulling it out of her hair, but of course that just hurt her and tangled it in there more. So while she’s crying and slapping my hands away, and I’m apologizing helplessly, that’s when our mother comes out of the store, and she’s all: “What the hell are you girls screaming about? I thought someone was killing you.” By that time, the little wad of gum I’d spit into my sister’s hair had somehow quadrupled in size.

My mother couldn’t help us because she didn’t even have long curly hair so she didn’t know a thing about troubleshooting it. In fact, she was one of the rare women in town who had short hair as a little girl.

In fact, on the day of the screaming bubble gum hair disaster, she was sporting an ultra-modern, short-haired pixie-cut, just like the lead actress in the horror film, Rosemary’s Baby.

Therefore, my mom couldn’t solve the gum problem, but my grandma saved the day. She had big, curly hair and decades of practice with it. So with her wisdom, she taught us about how peanut butter gets gum out of hair, because the oils in it helps gum slide out.

It made me wonder how my grandma learned about the peanut butter trick. Did she and her sisters used to spit gum into each others’ hair, too?

Peanut butter saved my sister from the horrible fate of getting all her long, curly locks chopped off and spending the summer being called a boy, all because her older sister couldn’t scream and chew gum at the same time.

But karma has paid me back mightily since then. Tree branches have yanked out hanks of my hair as I ran past them, and a willow tree practically snatched me bald-headed a few years after that day.

This happened at a friend’s house after we had tied two willow branches together to make a swing, and I was swinging along when suddenly my hair got tangled up into the little leaves on the branches. By the time I could stop the swing, my hair had turned into a massive ball of twigs and leaves, and I ended up hanging from the tree by my hair, my feet dangling inches above the ground, my scalp on fire with pain.

My friend was able to save me by running into her house and getting a butcher knife, which she used to hack away at the tree branches and my hair until the willow could finally let go of its death grip on me.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a mixture of terror and relief at the same time as I did while watching a panicked twelve-year-old slashing away at my hair with a butcher knife in order to save me from asphyxiating to death.

Then when my hacked-up hair grew back, a boy in my high school who had a crush on me tried to surreptitiously run his fingers through my hair as he passed me on the hall stairway.

However, he got his class ring all tangled up in it instead and he ended up yanking me up the stairs by my scalp for a few moments. I think we both felt the same feelings of desire, confusion and alarm, but I don’t think our attraction to one another grew even a little bit that day.

So I’m really glad that our society is finally allowing little girls to get whatever hair styles they want, and not demanding them to be consigned to a life of really long hair and the annoyances and dangers that come along with it.

At least I’ve learned that if you’re ever going to chew gum and scream, you should probably do those things separately so that nobody gets hurt. And also, if you do have long hair, keep some peanut butter and a butcher knife handy, just in case.