Heart of Baldness

“With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)” – from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

In the film “Apocalypse Now,” Dennis Hopper’s cracked photojournalist alludes to the poem when he recites, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

I peer out my slat blinds. “Murray Hill… shit.”

Seriously, it's a more abrasive place than Hill 937. We even have our own punji sticks; broken broomhandles and other varieties of spike-like street-side garbage the wanna-be-alpha-male investment bankers shank each other through the Armani with, outside East karaoke bar at 4:01 a.m. As with Hamburger Hill, there's hardly strategic value to this mid-town highland.

Midnight. I click on cable to watch “Frasier”. I ensconce myself in a blanket and watch several syndicated episodes. Watching two balding brothers quip wittily while conducting affairs with intelligent, toothsome women makes me feel whole; like I'm part of a big, happy, balding family.

I pop open a Magic Hat #9. (Cap reads, "Transplant your rant". Auspicious, ironic words.) All of the sudden, I catch a glimpse of my head in the mirror, and I see the thinness. A cold blue-electric snap jolts my heart, and I'm struck with a phantasmagoric sensation, like I'm a victim during the finale of a “Twilight Zone” episode. A syndicated sitcom playing on my television, the beer, the baldness. This triumvirate is history folding back on itself: I am manifesting into my grandfather. An urge to smash the mirror, like the head-haired Willard in Apocalypse Now, crosses my mind. But, I realize I am already at the end of that twisted river.

Below, on the street, an inebriated twenty-something investment banker of the solipsistic Murray Hill ilk is stumbling over her firetruck-red Monday-night heels after her Bombay Sapphire Blue Tuesday-morning martinis, and crying and caterwauling at a 91 dB level into her Blackberry because it crossed her mind that her boyfriend might be cheating on her whilst she was letting men grope her in exchange for drinks, all night in Mercury Bar. (Note: prolonged exposure to noise above 90 dB can cause gradual hearing loss.) This nymphet’s uncanny ululations evoke the sounds of angry monkeys in the heart of darkness (if only Klaus Kinski were with us to throw her off her raft). So there I sit and listen to the wild thing, hunched in flickering, crepuscular TV light, motionless and knowing like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. (Although I am less corpulant, more like the Kurtz in Conrad’s novel, but that doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if you’re smart and discerning when you’re balding, the point is you’re balding.) I cup my hand and rub it over the glabrous crown of my wet Buddha-head. God, don’t let me succumb to the darkness. I have, as Eliot laments, “grown slightly bald”. Should I eat a fucking peach? Ah, peach-fuzz, I didn't get that line when I read it in high school when I had all my luscious glory. I’m a couch-slug on the razor’s edge. The horror, the horror…

Hey, speaking of razors, anybody know the best way for balding men to shave their heads?

(Pictured: the Congo... er... Mekong... er... Hudson River. PHOTO: by Modern Bald Man.)

Pink Eye

My foray into the terror, horror-horror, and existential tyranny of the Heart of Baldness has been postponed due to pink eye. That's what happens when you're on the Nellie, or Amtrack, and a baby-mama sits next to you and lets the daddy's gooey baby crawl all up in your grill.

Stay tuned...

Stay tuned next week as Modern Bald Man sets off down the Mekong (ok, Hudson) River (to flee his parents' questions about joining Facebook), gets off the boat, faces off against his infernal stove, and enters the nightmarish Heart of Baldness...

Jack Nicholson: Thin Hair, Still Cool

Bald culture should hold Mr. Nicholson in esteem. But the point of this post is, I've developed a complex. Before I leave my apartment, I check the stove. But checking just once is no longer copacetic.

First, I examine the burner-knobs. I make sure that each line on each knob is aligned with each OFF marker. Fractions of a centimeter irk me. Next, I visually inspect each burner for even the smallest hint of lingering flame; following this, I touch the burners to make sure they are all cold. My hand goes back and forth, even re-checking burners like an autistic game of Pop Goes The Weasel. Lastly, the smell-test, lest there is leaking gas (I could have inadvertently cocked a knob askew). Oh God, the knobs! This brings me back to double-checking... everything. 'And so on...' as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. I might as well be baking a trout, since this obsession can keep me at the stove a long time. 'So it goes.'

When I do escape out the door, down the stairs, onto the street, the unsettling feeling that I have left a burner on has been known to ambush me like the Viet Cong. My heart is sold, and it won't listen to the ratiocination of my brain. It's like Sarah Palin is controlling me with radio waves; history and logic do not matter. My heart enlists my stomach to attack me with that non-negotiable deep-pit sensation, and then I'm cooked. I have gotten as far as the 6-train, even as far as Houston, before succumbing to this lunar madness and repairing to my apartment for reconnaissance.

I have a theory on this disorder: that my thinning hair is the, ahem, root cause of my OCD. Because the uber-traumatising condition of hair-loss is something that's out of my hands (and scalp), I've fixated on matters I can, well, control.

If only my stove had the 'shining'. Then I'd always know for sure. Unfortunately the only thing around here 'shining' is my scalp.
(Art by Modern Bald Man.)

Dear Doctor

"Oh help me, please, doctor, I'm damaged..." - The Rolling Stones, the anti-Beatles.

I used to consider the instruments at right, barbaric. To clarify, at face value, they seem pedestrian, ordinary medical tools. But it's where they go that gives them their Dark Ages flair: up my nose. If you've seen Total Recall, that's what were talking about here. Last July, I underwent nasal surgery to correct a deviated septum, the result of a bar fight (sucker-punched), as well as to remove a golf-ball sized mucous polyp, the result of an Atlantic City-induced sinus infection (won $600, lost $600), from my sinus cavity. (My starboard side was full, my portside empty; the MRI looked like a black-and-white cookie.) The surgeon said this polyp was perhaps the largest he'd seen of its kind. On a recent post-surgery check-up, one of the pictured hypodermic needles was slid into my nostril, reaching a point in my cherry-red sinus wall latitudinal to my pupils. This was done to numb my nerves before a tandem intrusion of laser and miniature video-camera entered the same way, to extirpate an inflammed membrane. Lastly, amidst the odor of burning flesh, the pictured tongs were crammed in to twist, bite, tear, rip, yank the slimey thing out. Schwarzenegger ain't got nothing on me.

I used to think this incongruous dovetailing of brutality and technology was nonpareil. That was until I took a recess from Manhattan and its nose-picking specialists, rode Amtrack up the Hudson, hooked to Syracuse, and visited my family doctor.

I sojourn at my parents' house; the quietude and the home cooking are condusive to, uh, blogging. According to my mother and her doomsday outlook, although thinning hair is common and - if I remember the statistic correctly - affects an astounding 25% of men before their 22nd birthday, my particular case could possibly be caused by a number of horrible albeit irrational scenarios, including toxins lurking in my blood from histamine sprays which I used after the aforementioned surgery. Alas, my trips home are also condusive to hair-loss-causing stress from hypochondria. So my mother, the tributary of my defective genes, made me an appointment.

Here's the news the family doctor delivered. Rogaine works, kind of, for 30% of those who take it. Propecia, which TV ads warn against pregnant women even touching, is rarely effective and at its best tends to regrow hair in a monk-cap-shaped patch at the back of the head. That won't "cover" me. Plugs never looked right and could look worse than baldness. However, there was another option.

This option was a a kind of modern-day scalping; an ominous echo of my very first post on this blog.

In a proceedure part Cro-Magnon brutality, part transhumanist/post-humanist science fiction, a scalpel point is placed behind one ear, thereupon the blade cuts around the back of the head, lascerating a bloody rictus straight to the other ear. A scrap of flesh is torn out, and the wound is sewn up.

The hair-cells around the sides and back of the head are different, being longer-living and more durable, than those cells populating male-patern-baldness areas (hence the Bozo-the-Clown-ring-around). So, cells from the flesh-scrap are transplanted into that bare summit, and, after a few sessions of grafting, your perennials are ready for their first bloom. (The scar from the initial incision remains obscured under hair. Like a secret; a dark, hideous secret.)

I asked my doctor, "What you're saying is, I've got two options. Find a wife quickly, or be scalped alive?" He laughed.

I'll never forget the sound of that laugh.
(PHOTO: by Modern Bald Man.)

Paging Dr. Robert

My clock-radio is locked on Q104.3, New York City’s only classic rock station. The alarm trips, as it has for years, at noon. The main perk of being a freelancer is that I can keep my own hours (not to mention my daily commute is only two steps, the distance from my bed to my desk). On week days I am woken by the mid-day Beatles block: a handful of Fab Four tunes played in seriatim, because, as the station opines, everybody should get to hear John, Paul, George, and Ringo every day. The Beatles used to be one of my favorite bands; but that was before my thinning hair transmogrified my mood into a cantankerous ennui. “Here Comes the Sun”? Go to hell, George Harrison, and take the sun with you; those rays, like a concerted salvo of Spartan arrows, pierce my thin strands and highlight my unsightly glossy dome. Rather than the sun coming, might as well be Jason Voorhees coming with a big machete for all I care; he's bald too, who knows, maybe we'd get along. “Octopus’s Garden”? What is it with you, George? No, I don’t care how happy you say we’d be, I’m not going into the sea with you; don’t you know that guys can’t swim with thinning hair? Looks terrible; especially the Rob Corddry patch that’s clinging above my forehead, it would end up resembling a drowned gerbil. And what’s that you sing, Paul? “Got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head?” I’d like you to try a day in this life, you mop-headed Blue Meanie. In fact, today, I might remain abed, bald, hiding under the covers. I’d be a bald-faced liar if I said I didn't feel just like Eleanor Rigby.

I’ve stopped enjoying the things I used to love. It’s time to see Dr. Roberts about some pills. No, not amphetamines or LSD or marijuana or whatever else the Beatles perchance were implying. Not this time. I’m talking Propecia.

(Art by Modern Bald Man.)

Milwaukee’s Best, M*A*S*H: The Double-Helix: God’s Sick Joke

The tale of the deforestation of my scalp begins (the copious amounts of hair don’t fall far from the family tree) …

Double-Helix: the structure of nucleic acid which Watson and Crick discovered in 1952. Judging by the patterns of hair-loss-patterns throughout my lineage, I’ve got my great-grandfather’s genes in terms of baldness, but also longevity. What I’m dealing with: my live-and-kicking great-grandfather was born 30 years before, and went bald 5 years prior to, the discovery of DNA.

M*A*S*H: the TV show that ran from 1972 to 1983. (My great-grandfather watched years of syndicated re-runs. What else to do when your genes let you outlive your friends?)

Milwaukee’s Best: the brand of beer my great-grandfather let me sip when I was 5, whilst I sat on his lap watching M*A*S*H re-runs.

God’s Sick Joke: a prank the Greek trickster Hermes wouldn’t have the gall to propagate: to strike me bald at 26, with 70 more years to go, just like my forefather. That this forefather, a widower and now a nonagenarian, has again taken up dating, further illuminates the unique ilk of God’s humor.

I am disconcerted to the nines. I decide to pop open a beer and watch some TV…

(PHOTO: Therein lies the problem. Public domain.)

The Monster I Will Become

A modest estimate: I have two years left to live. I mean, really live. I am 26 and God is scalping me alive. My hair is visibly thinning. In the accompanying photo, you can see what I will most likely look like before my 30th birthday. A marked man, I have decided to record my final days of the good ol' hirsute world before I am fully thrust into a shiny purgatory of "that guy we met the other night, you know, the bald one." Like Michael Herr in Dispatches, I'll record the attendant terrors and concomitant neuroses of my horrific new situation. I will, alas, explore whether bald men can contribute meaningfully to society. I'll try to keep a sense of humor along the way, albeit bald men live in the fullest sense of Shakespearean tragedy; even the light at the end of the tunnel mocks them by reflecting off their waxy pates.
(PHOTO: Man scalped alive by Sioux chief, late nineteenth century. Public domain.)