Some years ago, while buying smokes at a gas station, I witnessed a reunion between two old high school friends. “Holy shit! You’re bald!” said one of them. “You got fat!” said the other.
Back then baldness was a sore topic for me. I’d begun to lose my hair a year earlier at the age of nineteen, and when the guy at the gas station let loose with his greeting of “Holy shit! You’re bald!” I thought he was talking to me. It was like facing an insult comic who had run out of punchlines and decided to coast through on pure vitriol instead. Imagine my relief, then, when I realized that I wasn’t the one being heckled after all.
Still, in those days I felt as if I were under constant scrutiny. It was a neurotic, self-obsessed projection, I know that now, but heightened self-awareness is the bane of anyone who feels defective.
One of the near-universal aspects of going bald, especially at a young age, is the all-consuming desire to stop or reverse the process. Late night TV is awash with commercials that promise to bring your hair back to life. Surgical procedures, prescription medication, and all manner of snake oil are available. In my case, I kept pretty much every option on the table, but right from the start I skipped ahead to the most drastic one. I convinced myself that I needed a hair transplant.
It seemed like such a quick fix, and so cutting edge. Doctors had successfully transplanted chest hair onto patients’ heads for chrissake. With that sort of ingenuity, they could probably raid your taint and really fill out the top if need be. Regardless, the procedure was no cakewalk. It involved scalpels, blood, stripped flesh. I’d read about lots of botched operations leaving folks permanently mangled. And besides, with an average cost of five to ten thousand bucks, there was no way I could afford it, so I turned instead to Plan B: Propecia.
Propecia is a hair loss medication. It comes in pill form and costs about fifty bucks a month. The bottle bears the following warning: “Pregnant women should not take Propecia and should not come into contact with broken or crushed tablets.” I wondered why that was exactly. Were they alluding to possible birth defects? Flipper babies? Cleft palettes? Little werewolf children bursting out of the womb with matted hair from head to toe? Surely anything capable of mutating an unborn baby can’t be good for anyone, pregnant or otherwise. But at the time that wasn’t my primary concern. Instead it was the second part of the warning label that caught my eye, the part that read: “Sexual side effects that have been reported include: Decreased sex drive, impotence, and decreased ejaculate amount.” To be fair I didn’t care much about that last one. (Does anyone really want to jizz like a fire hose?) But with the other two warnings fresh in my head, I took to jerking off a few times a day, like clockwork, to assure myself that my libido was still intact. Self-gratification can be a boring, ho hum exercise to begin with, but by my second re-up it had devolved into total, robotic joylessness. It was so clinical I may as well have been administering a scoliosis test.
There was another problem, too. I felt a growing disconnect with the way I presented myself to the world and the way I actually felt. I was hewing to the empty embrace of vanity even as I outwardly tried to project a fuck-all attitude. I wore a punked out leather jacket and did plenty of stupid, nihilistic shit but back at home I had a bottle of anti-balding meds waiting for me. How bourgeois, how shallow.
So I let my prescription expire and entered the third stage of my voyage: Complete and utter spite for all things hair-related. I figured if my body was going to rebel against me, fuck it, why resist? I adopted a scorched earth policy, attacking my head with a pair of clippers and feeling pretty great about it. But when I was done, holy fucking Moses, take my word for it: Nothing will make you look so gaunt and sickly, so patently ridiculous as shaving your head for the first time. It recasts your facial features in a whole new light. The angles are all wrong. Each divot and bump on your head are fault lines that throw the entire picture out of focus.
There are other negatives too. Like, say, when your friend gives you a box of his old skinhead clothing and you decide, oh what the hell, some of this stuff looks cool, what’s the worse that could happen? Well, let me assure you: Wearing a bomber jacket and a Blitz t-shirt when you have a shaved head will, I repeat will, ensure that a group of real skinheads threaten to kick the living shit out of you.
Another drawback to having a shaved head is that it leaves you vulnerable to the elements. I learned this the hard way when I shaved my head down to the scalp with a Bic razor prior to a trip to Bloomington, Indiana. It was mid-summer and I spent two days wandering around in unforgiving heat and glaring sunlight. Within a day I was so sunburned that my scalp broke out in blisters and oozing kernels of pus. By the end of the weekend I looked like I was wearing a diseased baboon ass on my head. Truly horrific.
But in spite of resistance from skinheads and Mother Nature, I continued to shave my head for a couple years, until I eventually got bored with it and moved onto the next incarnation: bearded combover combo. It’s a beginner’s combover, you might say.
Last year I TA’d for a professor who had the real deal, a wispy bridge of near nothingness spanning an ocean of pink, dappled flesh. It became all the more cartoonish when he and I walked around campus together. Fighting harsh winds near University Hall, his hair would break free from its moorings and flap around like a creature ensnared. One time, after we’d made it indoors, I watched in horror as he licked his fingers, ran them through the frazzled, upended mess, and slathered it back onto his scalp. But hey, when you’re sixty-something-years-old who the hell are you trying to impress anyway?
Which leaves me to wonder if my anxiety had been bound up in youthful conceit all along. That would be my guess, and I assume that most everyone has their own hang-ups, their own self-flagellating assessments. Maybe it speaks to the fixity with which we cling to our youth, to our conception of a static self sealed away from the onward march of time. But alas, teeth rot. Skin weathers. Hair falls out. The selves we knew cease to be. And really, who gives a shit?
When it comes down to it, we should all be so lucky to have a chance meeting with an old friend years down the line, to queue up at a gas station and marvel with humor and a little bit of venom at the ways they’ve changed, and in turn receive an affirmation of our own change, our now-ness, all the while accepting the inexorable truth that to be alive is to decay, and that there are far, far worse things in life than a bad combover.
