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Email this articleHairstyle can say a lot, sometimes
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"How do you keep it up?"
Matt Gardner, 25, of Wausau is asked that question eight or nine times a night. "It depends on how busy we are," he said.
If you've been in Scott Street Steak & Pub in downtown Wausau, you know who Matt Gardner is. He literally sticks out in a crowd. He books the bands that perform in the bar, and is a bartender and night manager there. But the attention grabber is the mohawk haircut that he fashions into a row of nearly foot-long "liberty spikes" that seem to defy the laws of engineering and gravity.
"How do I keep it so stiff?" Gardner says with a crooked smirk. "I tell 'em Viagra."
The hair elicits all sorts of reactions that makes Gardner's life much more interesting than if he had, say, a flattop or even a ponytail.
"People definitely don't ignore it. A lot of people say it looks really cool. They say they've never seen a mohawk that tall," Gardner said. "And then some people are really appalled by it."
Somebody once threw a taco at him. Other people stop and ask to take his picture, or record him with a video camera.
A couple of Fridays ago, he was in a different restaurant/bar with some friends, having a fish fry, when a person at the bar got so upset at his presence that the guy left the place. "The bartender told me about it later," Gardner said. "I mean, I didn't even know about it."
There are other, more practical disadvantages of the hair spikes. "I have to duck a lot," he said. "And riding in the car is a pain in the ---."
Gardner has had a mohawk off and on since he was about 13 years old and growing up in Antigo. His older cousin had just returned to the United States from Germany (his uncle was in the military), and introduced Gardner to punk rock music.
"It was fast, angry, and talked about things that were relevant to my life at that time," Gardner said. "That made sense to me."
He also relished the defiant punk rock look, and started to cultivate it.
"It was a thing to piss off people," he said. "It was like, 'Look, I'm different than you, and this is how different.' ... It was like giving the finger to corporate America."
He's older now, and looks at life differently, but there's still a nonconformist message about the hair.
"It's about choice. It's about freedom. We live in a free country, and we do what we want with our own bodies. ... I do it because I can," he said.
The rebel hasn't gone away, either. "I almost want to be the guy on the street corner with a sign that says, 'F--- government,' or 'Dissent' or something," Gardner said.
But even considering the message behind the 'do, when it's all said and done, the spiked mohawk still is a hairstyle, and although it tells you a little about Gardner, it doesn't tell the whole story.
"Hair," Gardner said, "doesn't define a person, (doesn't say) what you are."
Keith Uhlig is a features reporter for the Wausau Daily Herald. He can be reached at 845-0651 or e-mailed at kuhlig@wdhprint.com.
Source: Wausau Daily HeraldAll rights reserved.