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.)