The following is part of a serialized story, Everyone Thinks I Dream of Chocolate. You can find the first chapter here.
I had a phase when I used to spike up my hair using wax and wear a bandana. I thought it was fun until the health inspector came in one day and decided that we all needed to wear hats.
“Since when did we all have to wear hats?” I asked.
“Technically, we should have been wearing hats this entire time,” Dick said.
“Why didn’t he say so before? This is like the 5th time he has been here since I started.”
Dick shrugged.
“He didn’t feel like it.”
Finding a hat to wear was a pain in itself. I have a larger-than-average head size. Luckily, my head is proportional to my body so it’s not that apparent. In high school, I had the 2nd largest head in the entire student body but luckily the first place went to Bobby Pak (who later got the nickname, Pac-man).
Still, narrowly dodging social ridicule is one thing. This doesn’t change the laws of matter. I still needed to find a hat that fit my head. So that weekend, I went to three different stores until finally, I found a snapback that fit if I put it on the very last notch.
At first, I just found this annoying but nothing more. Sure, I couldn’t do my hair up and look nice but at least it saved me several minutes in the bathroom every morning.
As time went on, however, small things started to get to me. My hair is thick and jet black. If I keep it in a hat for more than five minutes, my hair is going to stay flat for the rest of the day. Worse, the hat seemed to trap all of the sweat and grease of the day. After a long day, I would take off the hat and find a layer of slick, greasy slime caked into my head.
Worst of all, It made me feel ugly. Sounds vain but it is more than just aesthetics. I felt like a gross person with all of the oily fumes that were expelled from the grill and fryer in the kitchen along with the perspiration my body exhumed from the heat of motion and sweltering humidity of east coast summers.
After a while, I was constantly aware of it all. Every inconvenience, such as an itch on my scalp was an itch to my mind. I could either take off my gloves to dig into my head for a split second of relief or simply let it exist so I could finish the current batch of chocolates.
There were times when my hair had grown too long. I tried my best to keep it in the hat but the thick texture of my hair allowed it to fight through the cracks like branches of a tree digging into the earth. Stray bangs would peek out, itch my face or scratch my eyes. Beads of sweat would travel down these branches and land somewhere on my face, continuing down until it became nothing but a wet, salty trail. Again, I would have to make a decision whether to take my gloves off to wipe them off or finish the batch.
Then, there is the acne. Somehow, the hat had trapped the disgusting particles in my head, driving them into my pores. To this day, I still have this issue where clusters of acne come up in the back of my head and I have not found a way to get rid of them. I have used different soaps, tried scalp scrubs, changing my diet. It is like a living scar, reminding me of my past there.
The sad part about it is that I like the idea of hats. I want to be able to wear baseball caps. Maybe my giant head is something of natural evolution. Thousands of years ago, my ancestors foresaw a future where humans would wear these things on their heads purely for fashion purposes, leading to a lack of scalp hygiene. This led to my family line having giant heads, a Darwinian evolution designed to keep these contraptions far away as possible.
Still, humans are humans. We found a way to overcome that I guess. All I know is that there is still acne on the back of my head two years later. All because a health inspector told me, too. I get that he had to do his job. After all, I wouldn’t want to find hair in my food, either.
On the other hand, go fuck yourself. You should have said something from the start.
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To Be Continued…
Danger Wonka 