The Secret Voice of Leif Garrett

Once when I was eight, I accidentally spent thirty minutes in heaven in my mother’s closet with stacks of two-dimensional women—courtesy of my mother’s enthusiastic subscription to Victoria’s Secret.

These women were spread across glossy pages, like sacrificial lambs. They kneeled on beaches, thumbs aggressively hooked into swimsuit bottoms. They stood half-submerged in pools, swaybacked. They had frozen strides on runways, with skeletal gaits. They grouped in front of ambiguous backdrops, wearing animal print and lace and satin. They fingered their bellybuttons and sniffed their armpits. They resembled manikins and amateur contortionists.

And they were the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

I was in the middle of admiring the angular possibility of a blonde’s spine when the door swung open. My parents were standing in the doorway, witnessing their eight-year-old son hidden between two windbreakers, clutching a borderline nudie mag.

To my surprise, no punishment followed. Just collective laughter that continued for years.

One afternoon weeks later I returned to my mother’s closet only to find the magazines were gone. I confronted her about their disappearance and demanded their whereabouts. Much to my chagrin, her motherly role became her literal word.

However, a fortnight later I found them buried under dust-coated winter clothes in a storage chest. I swiped one and stuck it under my mattress.

For weeks, in the early hours of dawn while getting ready for school, I ogled and salivated at those glossy pages until one unfortunate morning my mother caught me with a brunette.

After discovering the allure of half-naked women, I started noticing marketable beauty everywhere.

Golden shells on televised commercials for makeup, superstores, and now-discontinued candy products; on billboard advertisements for underwear, dentistry and expensive cologne.

Upon seeing those gorgeous people showcased through television screens and car windows, a desire to emulate the male variety surfaced.

Though they had all of the natural characteristics of a human being I could relate to, it was what I couldn’t relate to that appealed to me.

Their airbrushed abs, digitally trimmed jawlines, bleached teeth, color-enhanced eyes, all complete with long locks of hair.

Indeed their hypertrophic muscles were hypnotic and the sharpness of their faces was impressive, I was more captivated by their hair, which fell onto their shoulders with such grace.

Being a malleable adolescent, I longed for that. So I asked my parents if I could grow my hair out. They said no, with ambiguous reasons that have yet to be explained. After some wallowing, I changed my approach and suggested extending haircuts to once every few months rather than every few weeks. Another resounding no.

And just like that, the male models’ influence had ignited a fifteen-year-long strife between my parents and I.

There have been wars shorter than that. 

In retrospect, wanting to resemble billboard models definitely arose from my juvenile desire to fit in. I blame our biology. One’a those stupid side effects of being human.

It seems that when something becomes mainstream, an inclination inside us, a secret voice, emerges with an inner monologue that is simultaneously endearing and meddlesome.

The earliest recollection of my secret voice was in fifth grade, which involved an inspired wardrobe change and public humiliation.

See: meddlesome.

The three years that followed fifth grade consisted of fashion obsessions that defined social status, so my hair growth yearnings took a brief hiatus.

Although when high school came around, my desire to emulate those male models resurfaced due to the hair craze circa 2013-2016.

It was called: The Flow.

Hordes of teenage boys, one after another, sprouted manes, and eventually the majority of the male student body looked like extensions of a ’70s rock band.

Overnight, they went from infantrymen to rockstars.

Each day I would cross paths with a newly-inducted boy, and each day I would go home and propose the opportunity for me to be a part of the “long hair, don’t care” movement. This was always sent back for review and eventually rejected.

“Try again in a few years,” my father said.

“You look so much better with short hair,” my mother said.

“Blame your mother. She’s the one who gave you those coarse, wiry hair genes.”

“I just really like you with short hair.”

Although throughout our warfare I constantly gasped at my parents’ obstinacy, their reluctance wasn’t totally misguided. Without TLC my hair is pretty bad. But they just couldn’t suffer that awkward stage where my hair resembles a conflation of Willy Wonka (1971) and Kitty Forman.

I had become a prisoner of war, sulking with my head hung low, grimacing in mirrors at my visible scalp, daydreaming of a fleeting future with hair that fell onto my shoulders with such grace.

And that’s how it went… until one December evening in 2014 my father walked into my bedroom, holding his phone. He showed me a picture of a boy with long, golden hair that touched his shoulders.

“Nice hair, huh?” my father said.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Cat from the seventies. Leif Garrett.”

I grabbed the phone and scrolled through the collage of image results. “Never heard of him.”

“Used to be a teen idol. Your mother loved him. Had a couple posters of him, too, I think.”

My eyes were glued onto the screen. “See… That’s what I want.”

“Think you can pull it off?”

“Yes, yes. I can. Please. I know I can.”

“All right. But the minute it looks like shit—clipper time.”

Enter ’70s teen idol Leif Garrett.

In the upcoming months I learned things about him, things I shouldn’t know.

I shouldn’t know the hypnotic cadence of his name. I shouldn’t know that his birth name is Leif Per Nervik. I shouldn’t know that his mother briefly dated Burt Reynolds. I shouldn’t know these things, but I do.

Our one-dimensional affair developed into a three-dimensional fellowship when he appeared in my dreams.

For six to eight hours a night he shifted into my subconscious, gracing me with encouraging one-liners.

“You can do it, dude.”

“Go for it.”

“Fuck it.”

“Be cool.”

“Just be cool, man.”

’70s teen idol Leif Garrett granting me permission to fuck it, what more could a sixteen-year-old boy ask for?

Winter slid into spring, and along with the plants, my hair sprouted well past the hoods of my ears. The bad hair days definitely outnumbered the good ones, but as long as I had ’70s teen idol Leif Garrett by my side, his voice snuggled between the folds of my brain, I was untouchable.

But my emulation of ’70s teen idol Leif Garrett abruptly ended on a random Sunday morning when I woke up to my father unraveling an orange extension cord on the back patio, with a Tupperware container full of clipper guards on the patio table. Standing behind the glass-paned back door, watching him plug the hair clipper into the extension cord, I realized I had lost.

’70s teen idol Leif Garrett quickly became a ghostly remnant that was progressively impossible to personify. An afterimage, disappearing beneath a mirage somewhere.

The next two years consisted of monthly rendezvouses on the back patio until I went to college where I delivered automated instructions to various hairdressers for the next four and half years.

It wasn’t until I graduated and moved two thousand miles away from home that ’70s teen idol Leif Garrett returned in a dream.

And all he said was, “Fuck it, man.”