Until seven years ago, I had a really neat flat top. I was a volunteer in the playground at my kids’ school in Littleton, Colorado, and when the school announced they were going to have a Crazy Hair Day for dads, I said, “Let’s do a mohawk!” My kids thought it was a great idea. So I went to the barber shop and came back with a small mohawk.
My wife, Julie, wasn’t so keen, and I promised I’d shave it off the next day. But my hair went down really well in the playground and I decided to keep it like that for a while. The community we live in is a small one and very conservative, but everyone seemed to accept my new look, even though some people said I must be having a midlife crisis.
Julie works in education and had no real experience of styling anyone’s hair when she started helping with mine. Through trial and error she got really good at it – now she’s the artist and I’m her palette. I think the first picture mohawk we did was a phoenix, then an Irish flag to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.
After that, I’d just suggest whatever came into my head. My mohawk became a billboard for music I liked – Lynyrd Skynyrd, Metallica, Modern English – as well as important causes, both local and international. I’d also celebrate birthdays and memorialise people who had died.
My boss at the grocery store where I worked made no objection, perhaps partly because people would come in just to see what design I was wearing that day. I loved creating holiday mohawks. I’ve had the Easter bunny pooping jelly beans on my head, while for Halloween I’d go out with it covered in cartoon pumpkins. At Christmas, Julie would paint it green and decorate it with real fairy lights and baubles, or shape it into a pair of reindeer antlers.
Early on, we started posting pictures of our designs on Facebook and later we opened an account on Instagram, too. That’s when I started to get attention from outside our town, quickly racking up followers. About a year in, I received my first commission – a doughnut shop in Washington DC got in touch to ask if I had ever considered putting the name of a company on my mohawk. We didn’t know what to charge so we just said $75 (£56), and were astonished when they paid.
Nowadays, we make sure to always have about a dozen colours of spray in our cupboard, as you never know from one day to the next what people are going to ask for. We’ve bought a proper stencil machine, too. At first, Julie cut those out by hand, and did a pretty good job, but now they’re perfect every time.
Getting the mohawk up takes about 15 minutes, but painting it can take anything from one to three hours. Some weeks I become burned out and take a little break, but on others we’ll do five paid ads on one side of my mohawk and five of our own design on the other. We charge more now; we’ve reached the point where the mohawk commissions pay all our bills and I don’t have to go out to work.
I’ve learned to avoid any overtly political messages, as when you’re posting on social media they can become an open door to hell. But I enjoy recording short videos and reels to back up the messages on my hair. My aim when I started out was “Bringing back smiles, one mohawk at a time”. And, several thousand mohawks later, that hasn’t changed.
At this point, I have thousands of followers across my various platforms, do public appearances and have been in a music video and a couple of movies. Given that all this started as a joke, it’s amazing where it has ended up. We’re even looking at opening a themed business, The Mohawk Bob Bar & Grill.
Nowadays, my mohawk is 14in (35cm) tall – a good size for painting messages on, but not too large to be impractical. I’ve seen specimens much taller than mine, but something that big wouldn’t fit in my car. Despite everything I’ve put it through, I still have a solid hairline for a 58-year-old – I’ve been pretty lucky with that. Perhaps one day it’ll all fall out and I’ll have to start faking it, but until then, I don’t think my mohawk’s ever coming off.
• As told to Chris Broughton
Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com
