Thread by @EnswellJones

In 2009, I was driving to Montana to teach at U of M. (I can only apologize to my former students. You can imagine how many mistakes I made.) Plan was, I’d drive with all our stuff. My then-wife and still-current-kids would fly out after I got settled. What could go wrong?

At the time, I had a very big beard. En route, I decided I would look younger, and therefore seem cooler to my students, without it. I was 36 at the time. There was no way any student would ever think I was anything like “cool.” Still. It was time for my manky beard to go.

I was in a hotel in Fargo when I took it off. If you’ve never removed a beard, I must tell you: A beard looks better on your face than in the sink. My mum hates when I have a beard, and two Christmases ago, I shaved it off and wrapped it for her as a present. It looked like this:

I’m self-conscious about housekeepers seeing how I live at the best of times. I couldn’t leave a vaguely pubic mound for some poor woman to find. So I did what any normal person would do: I took the clear plastic bag out of the garbage, filled it with hair, and put it in my car.

I continued my drive across North Dakota. I kept some big sideburns and admired my new, badass self in the rearview. Pulled into Bismarck for gas. I was having a friendly chat with the fella pumping gas next to me when I remembered: Oh, my beard! I can throw it out here.

I ducked into my car, retrieved my giant bag of beard—clear bag, remember—and began stuffing it into the already full garbage can at the pumps. In my efforts, I failed to notice the man’s face, filled with a growing alarm. Of course, I knew what I was up to. He did not.

This is what he knew: A strange man with big sideburns, alone in a Toyota Corolla, filled to the gills with things like children’s clothes and household goods, was a little too chatty after pulling into a gas station in Bismarck, and now he was throwing out a bag of human hair.

I’m reminded of the scene in Snatch, when Brick Top explains about feeding bodies to pigs: “You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out, for the sake of the piggy’s digestion.” Turns out there are 150,000 pigs in North Dakota. How convenient.

So that man also did what any normal person would do: He called the police, who arrived, screeching tires, in 12 seconds. Now, I ask you: If you were a cop, would you believe my story? That I was shy about a maid finding my beard in Fargo, and so I ferried it to Bismarck?

But bless that credulous member of the Bismarck PD. He sent me on my sweaty way to Missoula, where I soon found myself at a student party. I waded through the crowd of kids into the kitchen, feeling pretty swell about my slick sideburns. I was the cool professor after all.

Until I heard a girl behind me say: “How old is THAT dude?” I nodded to myself, put my drink on the counter, walked outside, and kept walking all the way home, ruing the bite of the wind on my naked face. I left my beard in Bismarck. In Missoula, the last of my pride.