My Tribe

As a redhead, I’ve always known that we were different than the rest of humanity. Growing up as a redheaded teenager in sunny California, I saw having red hair as a physical manifestation of my differentness, a sign to the planet that I wasn’t interested in doing things in a straight-forward, obvious way, like all the tanned, blond folks laying out next to me at the beach. I lived my life as the proud inheritor of recessive genes, a scrawny kid, subject to allergies, not at all the upfront kind of winner like my cousins, most of whom were not only blond and a few years older than me, but high school football heroes, then fraternity boys, and then the prototypical fair-haired young men who go on to glad-handed success in the world of American business. I knew that I wasn’t going to be like them, that constitutionally I couldn’t be like them, and that I wouldn’t want to be, even if I could. Not that I didn’t like my cousins; it was fun to go to their football games, and I kind of admired the easy way they seemed to slide into all the good things in life. But I was never interested in doing things in a straightforward, obvious way.

I looked at fellow redheads as my tribe, and most of us seemed to be setting out in life using a different jib than the rest of the planet. Our rock stars were surly and missing teeth, like Johnny Rotten. Our sex symbols were a little weird and off-kilter, like David Bowie. Even our sports stars, like Bill Walton, seemed to dance to the beat of a different drummer.

I am also a lefty, and the one sport that lefties tended to dominate was tennis, a much more cerebral game than most, one where an off-kilter individualist would have a shot. The greatest player of all time was, and probably still is, that red-haired lefty, “Rocket” Rod Laver. It seemed for a while that tennis was destined to ruled by a left-handed king, be it Laver, Connors, or McEnroe. Which is why, back in the day, I despised Bjorn Borg, a worthy number one and possibly the best athlete of the bunch, because he was not only right-handed, but also blond.

Whenever I saw some successful, attractive lefty who had capitulated to the status quo, I always wondered what had gone wrong, be it a beautiful, red-haired girl dating some obvious guy, or be it a red-haired dude who had joined a fraternity or who I saw hanging out with the jocks and talking like a dipshit. On those rare occasions, I would feel that person had betrayed our tribe. “I know that you’re better than that,” I would think.

Sometime in my early 20’s, I read Tom Robbins’ “Still Life with Woodpecker”, and it filled out my thoughts on the matter. A major theme of the book is about what it means to have red hair, and, while I’d probably find the book a bit sophomoric now, and I quickly tired of Robbins’ indulgent phantasms, it meant a lot to me at the time. Here it was in black and white: redheads were people of the moon, while the rest of the planet were people of the sun. Robbins even listed the most famous redheads of all-time, and how, while a diverse bunch, all were manifestations of the same rebellious spirit. I forget most of the names on the list, but I remember that one was Thomas Jefferson, and he seemed like an intellect imbued with the spirit of the redhead: cantankerous and diffused, yet probing.

Being a redhead has always been an important part of my identity, but I haven’t given it much thought for about 20 years now. That all changed when we adopted our son. Milo has pale skin and a big shock of reddish hair. Just about everyone says how much he looks like me, although Melissa is convinced that he is destined to be even more handsome. It’s almost creepy that I, an adopted son myself, have adopted a son who looks just like me.

I keep hoping that Milo will grow up to have red hair, that my son will be one of the tribe, so I did a little research on the subject. As it turns out, recent scientific studies have validated much of my late-adolescent musings. Redheads have a recessive mutation on their MC1R gene, which dictates the production of melanin. Whereas both brunettes and blondes have the dominant MC1R gene, triggering the production of eumelanin, redheads instead produce phaeomelanin, which generally leads to pale skin, freckles, and, sometimes, red hair. If only one of your parents pass on the recessive MC1R mutation, you will tend to be pale and freckle easily. Only when both parents pass on this recessive gene will you have red hair, and this is the case for about 2% of the planet. The scientific evidence now suggests that there are other characteristics associated with this gene that go beyond simple hair color, ranging from the susceptibility to certain diseases to a greater tolerance for anesthetics (maybe that explains why I popped up, fully conscious and eyes wide open, during the middle of my colonoscopy a few years ago). The recessive MC1R mutation has even been found in the DNA of Neanderthal remains, and, while it remains controversial, some suggest that our own recessive MC1R mutation is evidence that some Homo Sapiens of northern Eurasian descent are actually part Neanderthal.

So what does it mean to think like a redhead? It means to challenge convention, to look askance at the world, to lift up rocks in the forest and celebrate the bugs underneath. Let me give you an example: I work in the futures markets, where probably the most repeated trading advice is that “the trend is your friend.” In other words, if you want to make money, the best and easiest way is to try to find out what everyone else is going to do, and then to do it with them, preferably finding a place near the front of the herd, just before every shoe salesman and cabbie in town catches on to the idea. The fact that everyone around you starts to parrot the same thoughts as you is proof that you have struck a vein. This is how most folks get rich.

But I have no interest in trading like that. I trade like a redhead. When I start hearing a bunch of folks parroting the same idea, I immediately want to do just the opposite, even if what they say makes sense, because I just hate all of that obviousness. So as soon as I can find a reason to go against these folks, I do. And sometimes it even makes me money. But I wouldn’t trade like all those other guys, even if their way made me tons of easy cash, because I am just not built that way. My mind won’t stand for it. All of those guys who’ve made money the easy way, the obvious way, I want to fight them, to knock them down a few notches. And hopefully make a little money in the process.

Whether it be Mark Twain or Vincent van Gogh, Oliver Cromwell or Malcolm X, folks with red hair, feeling the pull of the moon (and captivated by sex and sugar, as Tom Robbins would have it) have left a mark on this planet far greater than our numbers would dictate. Sometimes, when I look down upon my sweet, blessed son, I dare to believe that he might be one of us.