By Jove!
a tragic story revised
“By jove! You’re a reasonable lad now! Very good. Back to business, eh?” His father patted his shoulder as they left the barber. Calvin’s short-haired head hung. Shame for short hair. Shame for having such a father.
“I bloody hate it!” Calvin jerked his shoulder from under his father’s hand. His 15-year-old mannerisms under pubescent jurisdiction.
“Come now. Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho. Good boys have quiet haircuts. No foolish rock-and-roll fashion keeps you respected,” his father clapped back. “I must be off, son. Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho.”
But Calvin’s entire existence marched under orders of rock and roll. “Mick Jagger won’t ever know me with this haircut,” he worried.
He “by-joved” his father’s back with a compulsory tall finger and stormed off into the alleyway, aggressively humming Paint It, Black.
“I’ll show that fool! Yes, I will! Agh!” Calvin kicked a brick wall and cried in pain. He fell to the ground against a rope pile in anguish.
“I’ll show him what this haircut has done!” He tied a noose knot in the rope, tossed the rope around a wooden beam across the alleyway windows and searched for an inevitable crate.
Maybe then I’ll fade away and not have to face the facts.
His toes braced the crate.
“Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing?!” a filthy-faced child yelled from the window above. Calvin glanced up in anguish. “Go away!”
The child scaled the beam and began to saw at the rope with a rusty knife like a British wild monkey.
Calvin protested, “Leave me in agony!”
But the diabolical child, feet black as coal, black as night, peered down at pitiful Calvin as the rope dropped in disgust and said, “If you look for hell, it will find you. What I wouldn’t give for a proper haircut.”
Calvin stared at that child’s face, the matted hair swiping soot cheeks. A nauseous disgust panged his stomach as he sat on the alleyway floor, noose still adorning him.
“Cut that damn thing off and go home you bloody loser! And may God have mercy on ya!” the child squabbled.
Calvin disgracefully picked himself up and removed the rope. He was about to take it. His own life. Over hair. Over hair he relied on for a Mick Jagger he’d never know. Hair the mucky child would have loved to have chopped. How humiliating, that child had more sense. More reason.
He took one last glance at the child over his shoulder, daring to look as if he’d be turned to salt.
“By jove,” he whispered under his tongue. The sun shone over this child’s shoulders, rays of fluorescent splendor and stillness. The mange barely visible through the striking beams. The sun lingered upon his forearms, his shirt and the bits of exposed hairline on his short-haired head. The calming warmth enveloped him. An infant smile leaked from the nook between his dimpled cheek and parched lip. Calvin thought not of his short hair or Jagger’s painted lyrics, but rather the mercy that washed his troubled soul.
Behind the Writing:
In 1966, a young boy aged 15 took his own life because his parents forced him to get a haircut. His dream to have long hair like the other Rolling Stones groupies lost. I fell upon this story while researching for an in-progress novel and the tragedy of it stayed in my soul. “By Jove” presents a fictional, revised, and merciful ending to a life lost in the midst of youthful expectations.
The news article: https://www.nytimes.com/1966/02/12/archives/english-lad-15-a-suicide-coroner-says-after-haircut.html