Women, I have been told, do not like beards. Their coarse hairs, women say, grate against soft feminine features. Their dense but shapeless growth obscures the clean angle of the jawline. They remind the fairer sex of the Civil War era, when men in blue and gray rags and oddly squashed hats proudly sported muttonchops along with their necrosis and chose to kill each other in horrible, unsanitary ways rather than stay at home and discuss agriculture. Women themselves tell me this, and yet I see women hanging on the arms of scruffy indie chaff tossed from the Great American Music Hall mill, running their fingers through Shenandoahs straight off a Thomas Nast Democrat.

When I confront them, they deny it. It was not a beard they were touching, they tell me, but rather a mere five o’clock shadow, some forgivable evidence of hurriedness or apathy earlier in the day. Ha ha ha, they say, hoping to perhaps defuse my sense of despair. Ha ha, I reply, necessarily. These women mean well. But the occasional subtle twitch of their eyes toward the fine, translucent down that dots my upper lip betrays their true motive. They are, I have found, simply consoling me over my personal inability to grow a beard.

In the beautiful michoacana town of La Quemada, a child once informed me that I would look good in a mustache. She was a young, absurdly cute and vaguely murine girl who found my name impossible to pronounce and ceaselessly carried with her a handbag whose sole content was another handbag shaped like a rat. I stated that, yes, I was in agreement with her assessment. Irene’s father had a mustache — a gloriously black Franz Joseph that swept easily across his jowls — as did a substantial portion of the men in the town, and my response was partially an effort not to alienate this demographic. I did, however, feel strongly that I really would look good in a mustache. I hoped that it would come as part of a larger beard-and-sideburns combination platter, but at that point in my development I would have happily settled for a simple Nietzschean brush.

Then I should grow one, she insisted. Yes, I repeated, but I was very busy at the moment with work, too busy to devote time and energy to hair growth. She was not convinced. Why don’t I just go ahead and do it? What was I doing right now? I was writing an educational song about diarrhea, but I didn’t want to just come right out and say so.

Look, I told her, bending slowly to her dwarfish altitude like an enormous gringo heron. I cannot grow a mustache. I would like to, but heaven continues to ignore my petitions. It is like a Greek tragedy, I said. A Greek tragedy about a beard.

She took the news in the nonchalant way that children sometimes do, where it is unclear that they even grasp the enormity of the confession made to them. Irene bobbed her head and ran away to draw flowers on sheets of graph paper loaned her by the older children. But her respect for me was clearly diminished. Though she still shared candy with me and offered timid gifts of colored-pencil self-portraits, in her generosity was the spirit of charity. Pity for my incompleteness informed her later interactions with me, and the last I would see of her was as the brief flutter of a summer dress the night before I left the country, dancing in her peripatetic way with three older brothers whose faces already advertised a swell of testosterone.

See, facial hair ideally inspires respect and fear, beards being signs of virility. My eternal pubescence, however, has never done more than produce a slight prismatic sheen when exposed to direct light, light that both bends and emasculates as it passes through the pale blond follicles. This has been spun as a good thing. It means I shave about as often as I do laundry. Nevertheless, there remains that solid substrate of shame that the callow or naïve occasionally expose in me.

Maybe extrapolation from the unconscious attitude shift of a six-year-old is not the most reasonable foundation for a lifetime of insecurity. There are some females who, at their very core, prefer the embarrassing baby-faced nakedness I exhibit. But it seems to me that these women are misinformed. Those hipsters with iron filings on their cheeks, the ancient Norwegians soaked in the smell of cod and two-strokes, Ulysses S. Grant, they are the advantaged here, with their faces warmed and their sexual prowess on display. I must stay in the shadows, a resentful eunuch waiting for the day his hormones will finally toggle on and transform him into the hirsute beast nature must have intended. Necessarily.