Five Inches Of Hair

"Is that all it will take?" I asked.  "Yes," he said.  "Just five inches of hair."

He had shifty eyes.  Night shifty eyes.  More comfortable with cold, uncomfortable fluorescent light.

"That's not a lot of hair," I said.  "It's enough," he said.

I looked around his office.  The place was untidy, like a teenager's room.  It smelled of coffee stains & unfinished tuna salad sandwiches.

"What're you looking for?" he asked.  "A ruler," I said.  "If you don't have a ruler - or a tape measure - there's no way to know if it's exactly five inches of hair."

Being exact was important to me at that time in my life.  It was a kind of mental punctuality.

"An inch is about as big the length from knuckle to tip of the average finger," he said, pointing one finger at me & using another (from the other hand) to demonstrate.

I hadn't looked at his hands yet, & now I wish I hadn't.  They looked like they'd been broken at least twice in the past, & repaired by an arthritic doctor.

"I guess that's fair," I conceded, pushing his hand out of my way.  "Five inches of hair is fair."

He clapped his malformed hands together & it made a pathetic noise.  He was happy, & I saw him reach into a desk drawer & remove a pair of scissors that could have doubled as shears.

"No, no," I said.  "Not now!"  "Not now?" he repeated as a question.

I made strange gestures over my head that I initially thought might be self-explanatory, but instead looked like I was trying to clumsily mimic a fashionable dance popular with trendy commercial music.

"I'll need to grow it first!" I finally explained.