Shearing Off the Years : A ponytailed urban sophisticate decides to sweep away an image, an attitude--a fashion statement that took five years to grow.

Thirty years ago, when I was younger, skinnier and a lot more of a whiner, I perched in the big leather chair at John the Barber’s shop on Front Street in Vestal, N. Y., and cried my eyes out.

It was haircut day, and my mother had brought 6-year-old me, kicking and screaming, into the shop for a trim. It wasn’t so much that the haircut hurt (other than getting a few flying red locks in my eyes); it was just such a mystery to me. All this attention by these serious-looking adults with pointy objects in their hands. I felt like a lawn that was about to be mowed. And it scared me.

The other day, I sat in the chair of Mitchell Field’s Headlines hair salon in Burbank--balding, 36-year-old, ponytailed me, looking at myself in the mirror, feeling like crying those little-boy tears all over again.

See, I was going under the stylist’s scissors for the first time in more than five years. I was about to have part of me cut, swept and thrown away.

But I knew that I was about to lose a lot more than hair. I would be parting with an image of myself as a hip urban sophisticate who dared to go long-haired in a world of short-cropped, middle-of-the-roaders.

But I was there for another reason--I’m a changeling. Every so often, I like to create some sort of new slant to my look. I grow a beard. I shave it off. Then I grow it back shorter, like Yasser Arafat. Then it’s a goatee.

This haircut action, however, was going to be one humdinger of a change. Unlike my scrub-weed beard, my long hair wouldn’t grow back overnight. My hair was like a tree that had grown wild for more than 60 months, or 2,000 days. Five years! Anything that took so long to grow should not be disposed of lightly.

At the same time, though, I was growing tired of the ponytail look. Around my office, it’s something slightly off the beaten path because most of the men I work with look as if they walked out of some button-down IBM office. Squaresville.

But on the streets of Los Angeles, ponytails are like palm trees--there’s two or three to every block. Anything this common ceases to be different. In my eyes, the look was becoming Cro-Magnon. It was old, tired, outdated. Like looking into the mirror every day and seeing yourself in bell-bottoms and a bolo tie.

In any event, my hair didn’t even look that great ponytailed. It was as if I were hiding something, compensating for my oncoming baldness. So I had this ponytail to convince myself that I could still get away with wearing the same hairstyle as those 20-year-olds.

Still, for all its length, I rarely, if ever, wore my hair down. One friend told me that with my thinning red crop flying in the breeze, I looked “vaguely Hasidic.”

For one, I didn’t take care of my hair. Conditioner? Never touched the stuff, even if my ‘do was full of tangly snarls. See, I rarely combed my hair out. It was frizzy and fly-by-night.

But I didn’t care. I just strapped it back in a ponytail and went on my bleary way. I didn’t have to look at the back of my head. It wasn’t my problem.

Every morning, I dumped on a few handfuls of mousse and then some stiffening spray. For years, my hair lived underneath an ocean of chemicals, as hard as a vinyl hard hat.

So there I was in the chair. I had chosen Mitchell Field after consulting with several writers and editors who cover fashion, who recommended him from experience.

I took an immediate dislike to the salon, a fruity-smelling place where women sitting under hair dryers called each other “sweetheart” and “hon” and had their nails done.

And Lady Fate, well, she’s a cruel mistress. The day of my cut, I saw all these great-looking ponytails. The men looked so happy, so hip, so L. A. In the morning, I stopped to get coffee, and this woman said to me: “Oh, I just love your ponytail!”

I said, “You’re joking, right? I’m having this sucker cut off today.”

“Oh, don’t do it,” she responded. “My friend and I were just talking about your ponytail the other day. It’s so . . . red and so curly. We both agreed that ponytails still turned us on.”

Great. After six years, I learned that my ponytail was a sexual magnet for plump, 45-year-old women with poodles. Get me to the chair. Quick!

Good thing Mitch Field was gentle with a scaredy-cat like me. In his smooth British accent, he advised me that I was making the right decision. He had cut his own tail off six years ago. They were as de rigueur as, well, brush cuts.

And so he did it. He gathered my tail in a rubber band and he cut it off. No messing around with Mitch. No snip-snipping here and there. One second it was there and the next it was gone, resting in his hand like some sort of wet rat. Like some greasy sea creature.

“It has to be cathartic,” he said.

Suddenly, I felt lighter, newer, sleeker. My tears dried right away. I was a new man. I thought that I’d be traumatized. I wasn’t. I was 10 years younger--immediately.

Once severed, that ponytail looked less like some counterculture image than a crutch, an alibi to take attention away from my Jimmy Durante nose and oblong forehead, making me look like one of the crazies in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

When my man Mitchell was done, I hopped out of the chair and ran my hands through my new, spiky hairdo. It was short on the sides. Short on top. Short in the back. And no tail. I wanted to hug the guy. He hadn’t just given me a haircut. For $35, he had given me hair therapy.

As a souvenir, he even gave me back my ponytail.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the thing. Frame it, perhaps. Or maybe glue it to a piece of Velcro so that I can wear it around if I ever got nostalgic.

So far, the response to my new ‘do has ranged from “You really are ugly” to “You look a lot better, a lot better.”

But the question remains: Can a wanna-be hipster lounge-lizard kind of guy like me survive in this city without his tail? Can you still be an alternative character with short hair and a Honda Accord?

You bet you can.