The mullet’s ‘business in front, party in back’ hairstyle has been around since the Greeks and Romans, even though it had to wait for the Beastie Boys to name it in the 80s.
Mocked by arbiters of fashion under various nicknames, “Kentucky Waterfall,” “Ape Drape,” “Coupe Longeuil,” “Camaro Crash Helmet,” and similar pejoratives, the Internet made the short-but-long haircut into a joke. Who hasn’t received an email message with the subject line “Worst haircuts of all time” that didn’t have a picture of some redneck fool with a mullet?
My personal mullet disaster started innocently enough. With a box of S&H Green Stamps.
You remember that quaint customer loyalty gimmick your mom used to get when she paid for the bags of family groceries.
In 1972 Adèle and I had just moved to Austin for grad school. It’s redundant to say we were broke.
My mother wanted to help us out and gave us a box overflowing with loose Green Stamps and a stack of booklets to paste them in. We could pick up some things at the Green Stamp Redemption Center.
The problem was that once we got to the store, there was nothing we wanted. No record albums, no tie-dyed shirts, no bell bottoms, no roach clips, no tickets to shows at Armadillo World HQ, no purple latex interior paint, no alfalfa sprouts.
And then Fate intervened, and I saw the Oster electric hair clippers.
Hey! I could save money cutting my own hair! In the first falling domino of the train wreck (to throw two metaphors in the blender), we traded a bunch of Green Stamps for the DIY haircut kit. Why wasn’t I put on my guard by the Oster brand, whose best-known product was a blender?
Backing up for a sentence, the first domino had been the Rod Stewart “Every Picture Tells a Story” album cover the year before, the one with the image of him rocking one of the first mullets.
The cascading disaster culminated in our garage apartment that afternoon as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and started shearing off the hair on top. If you don’t know what you’re doing, trying to cut your own hair with electric clippers is like trying to plant lettuce seeds with a backhoe, and predictably, the result got worse and worse with every buzzing pass. I quit when I couldn’t stand to look in the mirror any longer.
Unfortunately for my self-esteem, I was underemployed in a 4-to-midnight shift pumping gas at Delwood Shell, so I took my humiliation and a bologna sandwich off to work.
Around 10 o’clock, a sleek University of Texas fratboy rolled up in a ’70 GTO convertible. The top was down. He had an expensive tan, Glen Campbell hair, a polo shirt, and madras pants. But what was most conspicuous in the front seat was the 20-year-old Anita Ekberg date snuggled up next to him.
I took off the gas cap and started filling up the rag-top with Super.
Back around to the front to check the oil and water. Then I’m cleaning the windshield in a fog of self-pity.
At that point, Biff takes his eyes off the starlet beside him and asks me, “Hey, buddy! Where’d you get that haircut?”
Too ashamed to admit that its ugliness was self-inflicted, I blurted mendaciously, “My girlfriend.”
He turns back to the blonde and says, with ice stirred by a dagger in his voice, “See that? That’s why I don’t want you xxxx-ing with my hair.”
Yeah, I had a mullet.
For about half a day.
