Bad Haircut: Stories from the Seventies begins with a tour of a vehicle designed to looked like a hot dog by a corporate mascot called the Wiener Man who turns out to have a much more intimate relationship with the narrator that he ever imagined and ends with a solemn funeral procession. The tonal shift marking this divide is no mere accident. This is a coming-of-age story about a kid name Buddy growing up in the 1970’s that is constructed as a series of self-contained short stories. Some of the stories are darker than others, though none are exactly what one would call representative of the paranoid character of the decade. In a way, the book is a little schizophrenic in its juggling of light and dark, comic and serious, important and trivial. In that way it is very much like the decade it portrays.
There is nothing essentially outstanding about Buddy. He is not revealed to be telling a story to a psychologist at the end and is certainly no catcher in the rye trying to save wayward kids. He is a wayward kid himself; basically decent, but lacking the will or strength of character to stand up to negative peer pressure. He goes along to get along and winds up being the worse off for it, but not dramatically so. And, to his credit, Buddy does seem to learn little lessons from those episodes in which he was easily led off course. It is difficult to see Buddy becoming a criminal or falling into the perils of addiction, but at the same time it also difficult to see him accomplishing anything of lasting important, much less greatness.
But then that may be the whole point. This is not a story featuring a character like Holden Caulfield who really seems to be a lot more than he actually is. Buddy is Buddy and that’s okay. Holden Caulfield is Holden Caulfield; he is the only one who really confuses himself with being that catcher in the rye. For Holden, American life represent phoniness. For Buddy as a young kid in the scouts, the Weiner Man is nearly a demigod along Mr. Clean and Chef Boy-R-Dee. Buddy is as familiar with the patient lesson Mike Brady imparts to his three sons about learning to respect girls for being different as he is aware of the phoniness of that advice. The difference is he can enjoy the phoniness of The Brady Bunch for simply being what it is. That places him at a point in the spectrum of development way ahead of where Holden Caulfield is. Buddy is, in fact, representative of an onslaught of characters in literature written by authors who were heavily influenced by Holden Caulfield but, by the time they came to write stories of their own, had long since realized that it is Holden who is the biggest phony in his own story.
Buddy in these stories links thematically if not psychologically even to a distinctly and profoundly different teenager like Izzy Richardson in Little Fires Everywhere. Toss in Shirley Jackson’s Merricat Blackwood to add texture from another time and what one concocts is the new breed of rebellious teen who collectively form the Anti-Holden by rejecting passivity in favor of some sort of active engagement with a world full of phonies. Merricat is a killer, Izzy is an arsonist and Buddy is just pure potential who could go to their extremes or could just as easily—if not more so—wind up exactly where his creator most vocally desired he would not: joining Kevin Arnold of The Wonder Years in becoming the equivalent of Thirtysomething’s Michael and Elliott toiling under the oppressive regime of Mile Drentell.
