I grew up living with my grandparents. My grandfather watched nothing but Spaghetti Westerns, and I, as a child, watched them whether I wanted to or not—I simply had no choice but to follow horse rides and chase scenes. I never caught the line about Sarsaparilla, except inside Bugs Bunny cartoons, and slowly, the lines of images and character depiction blurred, because of when the animation and films were produced. They had given birth to each other—the humor and wise guy glee were all there. Aside from sheer wild American bravado that the Wild West initiated, nothing else stuck with me except the image of mustaches. Every villain and top-notch hero, up to a certain point, wore one handsomely above and over their lips, hanging like a lip curtain that accentuated the sneer, smile, or laughter that expanded the characteristics of their own raw humanity.
When I became a teenager, being wild in the streets of New York, especially during high school when we all reach for power and freedom, but rarely responsibility, I had a smatter ’stache, which is a mustache that hasn’t come into its own because the body is younger than the inhabiting mind perceives. I kept it all the way through high school and into my late teens. “Hey, you’ve got some dirt on your face,” is what everyone said, and that’s not far from the truth considering that was what I had—it looked like an Etch-A-Sketch was placed upon my face and someone swirled the knobs one way, then the other, and finally giving it all up as a lost cause. My grandfather and father both had mustaches that were distinguished and push broomy; I had never seen them shave or trim theirs and their mustaches, simply, were there, thick like straw and left room enough for shining teeth to reflect laughter from. And, of course, all the crazy machinists of science fiction video games had them. Einstein had his as well as every villain from Hitler to Dick Dastardly, mwah ha hawing with Mutley by his side in Wacky Races and so on. But the best mustache from my youth that I can remember is Yosemite Sam who was the shortest villain and took no shit from law man or rabbit. He had simple guns that had the power of rockets, and he often times propelled himself off the ground in fits of rage and frustration and always wore a permanent robbers mask around his eyes, but his mustache was red like Bodhidharma, who came from Western India to China carrying Buddhism in his soul. Bodhidharma, too, is depicted as a fellow with fierce bulging eyes and a red mustache, humble and prominent.
All the wild men of the ’70s bled out their mustaches, letting them become what they were—shagged, sheered, greased, waxed, grown out, and kept. Jimi Hendrix kept a wiry ’stache that drew wispy whiskers across his smiling stargazed face. Duke Ellington kept his thin, and Charlie Chapman kept a mustache never to be recreated again—the same as Salvador Dali and his mustache, which was the rawest, most prominent facial hair of all the artists, save for Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Frida Kahlo, who was the only woman to retain her sexuality while rearing a cosmic lip brow that is as tender as a fresh mother’s bosom. But somewhere along the lines of time and culture, mustaches were reserved for the ultra distinguished old oil tycoon of Industrial America I never knew, being born in 1980 into the universe of bare cheeked men without straight razors or hot cloths to drape themselves with and constantly scraping their faces to the texture of a shark’s skin.
I remember growing up and watching all those damn razor commercials proclaiming the smoothest shave and computer animated hair being cut off by blade technologies. This included the unspoken tonic of aftershave, which burns and stings every open pore of the cheek. I never understood any of it until I went to the barber when I was twelve. He shaped my sideburns with a straight edge and slapped my cheek with blue aftershave that set fire to my skin. I loved the straight edge shave because it was so clean and exact, but the aftershave was a punishment to my cells. When I complained, he leaned the chair back and put a hot cloth on my face—this is a Turkish Shave and is still the best way to handle the face were you to shave—chemical free, son.
But what happened to the mustache? All the men somehow had become pretty baby-faced seals in clothes ads. The last American president with a mustache was Teddy Roosevelt, and he took no shit setting children loose in the White House for the first time and pushing the nation through new doors of experience. None after him bore the lip beard that he strode with in his pioneering manner. Men had been reduced to alabaster statues of beauty and elegance that was normally reserved for women with grace. In some way or another, the mustache then became the symbol of homosexuality in New York, so to dare grow a mustache was to present your sexuality for the scrutiny of corner thugs, secret fagots, and straight women to laugh at behind the backs of the adventurous. The sea lion bears whiskers and a toothy gaped maw. The chicken doesn’t even have lips.
Since my experience with the smatter ’stache in my early twenties, my girlfriend at the time convinced me to cut it. I had kept it so for nearly a full decade, occasionally experimenting with the sensation of hair pushing out of my skin like plants rising to the sun, which set off my sense of reality and perception to wild untamed situations where I would drink for days straight and start hilarious poetry fights and write fierce poems. I was convinced that the mustache made me crazy and had prohibited myself from growing one for my own sanity. Though every now and then, I would think back to hazy Jersey City days where my friend King Otho would twist the ends of his mustache with a gleam in his eye, or of the many parodies of old time 1920 gentlemen on tall bikes, speaking complicated refined speech. My heart, being in love with the old style of everything, always fell for the image and mastery of the mustache.
Nowadays, guys have a lot of cheek hair, which is mostly sideburns and beards that they combine with a mustache. The idea and image of the ’stache becomes lost in the enormous hairy facial overtaking. They go the extreme of facial hair, rarely cutting or refining a tempered style (hipster boys of Brooklyn, I’m addressing you). Young colored men keep little, if any, facial hair, retaining their boyish looks, expressing their masculinity in clear cut facial expressions while their pops crop their hairs up and down in the forgotten ways of gentlemanhood. Girls younger than thirty turn their noses higher than their skirts and wouldn’t dream of giving it up to a mustachioed one, and surely, if the girls embraced what they lacked, they would probably beg their real man to grow it out long and coarse with sweet kisses and pretty pleases.
I recently decided some months ago to search my soul for Yosemite Sam, my own mustache guru, along with Salvidor Dali who is my mustached hero of the 20th century artistic movement. I have not shaved for nearly two months, and after seeking out the only store in the city that sells mustache wax (Clubman’s), I am cultivating a proper handlebar mustache. With it, I have gained notoriety of being a social vagrant and a proper gentleman in mixed groups of people. Women giggle and men point me out. Children stare and I smile back at them because the curled tips hug my small upraised cheeks; I feel like a child of the sun. My eyes have become magnified dishes and lips more pronounced. In someone else’s light, I appear as a dark Frenchman, though I am totally Puerto Rican—the only Puerto Rican in Harlem with a handlebar mustache, speaking lots for culture and masculinity which I can afford to expand and express, because, after all, I am a man. Men understand the mustache completely. Boys think it’s “gay.” If I were faced with the comment of being a man lover, I would dare anyone to bring me a girl, to whom she would be faced to understand and experience what a real man is in this day and age of ice smooth boys and men holding onto their youth in vain.
Not every man can grow a wonderful mustache, but those who can should take up the opportunity for the sake of men and universal manhood. There are so many styles of mustaches that any man can decide to grow any sort that their bodies will allow. Any girls who instantly hate the mustache are obviously jealous because they have mustaches that they have to wax and secretly wish to avoid the wax and let it grow out, but there was only one Frida. All the other Spanish women with pursed lips and lip hair are so beautiful that they are all taken by rugged men in the world already—wait a few years and you’ll know what I meant by drinking whiskey and hot sauce, eating luxurious dishes with fierce spice, and embracing humanity head on. That is the way of the mustache. Some young men already know and have it happening, not including the hipsters of raw matted maw that floods their teeth like coarse seaweed, but the true humanitarian men of the galaxy who are sincere in their ways and understand the unorthodox nature of keeping a mustache. Yes, I know I feel crazy and seem strange with it. Dali said his mustache was purely eccentric and I agree, but in embracing this feeling is to be a diamond sitting in the fire—some are fearless and others are simply filled with fear.
Photo belongs to The Fleece
