Conked Out

When I was a little kid, my mom would always comb my hair before I went off to school. She would drag me into the bathroom, and there she would take a rat-tailed comb, dip it into a jar of green goo, and then run it through my hair. With great care she would move most of the hair to one side, and then take the rest and comb it down the other side of the line of demarcation, also called the 'part'. Mom would then take another load of green goo, and comb a huge crest of hair off of my forehead, going up and over like a giant wave breaking towards the back of my head. This was called a pompadour. Within fifteen minutes the glop in my hair would dry, and my hair would be frozen in that shape as if it had looked into the face of Medusa.

Every once in a while Mark reminds me that we grew up in different worlds. In the idyllic yet isolated world of the suburbs, I was happily unaware of many things that a child in the Bronx might know of. This afternoon Mark and I were watching the news on a local television station, and I noted that the black news anchor looked somehow dated. Kind of like a young Sammy Davis Jr.

"His hair is conked."
"His hair is what?"
"Conked."
"Conch, like the shell fish from Key West?"
"No, conked. c-o-n-k-e-d, conked. That's what we called hair like that back in the Bronx. Conked."

As I slowly recovered from my hysterical laughter, I asked Mark how the hell did they get conked as a word for a black guy with a plastic hair helmet.

"I don't know, it's just what it's called."

That's when I remembered my hair back in first grade. It seems that if I had been living in the Bronx in 1955, my hair would have been considered conked. My mom conked my hair. I can't wait for my next lesson in black Bronx culture.