“Go up, thou bald head”
2 Kings: 23
“But it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald,
with a baldness full of grandeur.”
Matthew Arnold
You look at my threadbare skull now and you might snigger, but until my mid-twenties, I had a well-furnished widow’s peak as sharp and defiant as the prow of PT 109. Like Andy Garcia, I would rake back the thick, glossy wings of hair that fell over my cruel eyes and bud-like ears -- or swing my heavy tresses back and forth like the Breck girl, allowing the light to play upon my lion's mane. Men eyed my hairline with envy and resentment; women sighed and swooned and opened like lush orchids in the hot, moist Tahitian morning.
“Male pattern baldness is an indigestible part of God’s incomprehensible design,
and each hair I lose is in concert with my higher Power."
Henry E. Panky, "Bathroom Sink Wisdom"
“Male pattern baldness is the mark of the Beast.”
Henry E. Panky, "The Unauthorized Autobiography"
But by thirty, the widow’s peak was a ragged Nixonian peninsula, scraggy coastlines eroded by the ceaseless ebb and flow of worried forehead skin. The once-dense population of follicles stood thinned and decimated by genetic pestilence and freak weather patterns. At night, I dreamt of great hanks of hair fluttering like dying sparrows into my arugula at some fine restaurant like Elaine’s or Applebee’s. The evening’s date, a previously convivial (and this being a dream state, oft-times nude) starlet-of-the-hour would start to shriek so hard her face would begin to melt. Cigarette girls gaped; waiters dropped platters of ribs and oysters; fat, gorging diners swung their bovine heads around and froze in mid cud. Then they all began to howl in a ghastly crescendo of raucous laughter. Arms over head, I ran through the madhouse hilarity to the men's room -- where funhouse mirrors reflected a thousand nightmarish pates from which hairy clumps fell like tarantulas abandoning the moon. With a horrible creaking, the door to one of the toilet stalls swung slowly open to reveal...noooooo! Leather Man! (This is how all my dreams end more or less, albeit after a long chase scene of sweaty, throat-choking terror.)
I started to wear saucy do-rags like Stevie van Zandt in his E Street days. I tried the Gallic beret and baguette look, cigarette hanging from a disdainful lip. But home alone, I began to make anguished, anonymous calls to The HairClub hotline, and those kindhearted professionals talked me through many a dark night of the soul.
“The word ‘premature’ has no place in my lexicon.
I am balding right on schedule!”
Henry E. Panky, "Languaging Bald-Headedness"
By 35, only a weird forehead tuft remained, a shrinking island besieged by rising seas, its inhabitants a dozen sparse, survivalist hairs, inbred and demented, twisted by the gusty winds of the open sea, speaking their own indecipherable patois. With every day that passed, further separated from a distant mainland on a receding horizon where forests yet grew thick and impenetrable.
Eventually, a hatchet-faced, SuperCuts employee, uninterested by the pointless vanities of small-tipping, middle-aged Walter Mittys, sneered, “You want me to shave these off, Mister?”
“What! No!” Is she fucking crazy?
Distraught, I stared at the mirror she held before me in hip-cocked, gum-snapping boredom. I fluffed my sparse forelock with both hands, tilting my head this way and that, trying to recapture the morning’s unruly shock of hair. But the scales had fallen away: I would never see myself as Elvis or 007 again, even after five or six drinks. Self-deception, my last ally in a mean-spirited world, had deserted me like all the rest. "Do it," I muttered.
The next day, a different, harder man walked out into the callous light. Glimpsing myself in the hallway mirror, I admired the pentimento of bony skull all too obvious beneath the slick, glabrous honeydew of my head.
Boo!
So now I rock hands on hips like Telly Savalas— say, as Kojak or crazy Maggot of “The Dirty Dozen”—as I absorb the taunts and stares of a jeering world. My mouth stretches into a snide, rubbery-lipped smile, and when I feel the smirking eyes of the world upon me, I break into a short Thriller-style moonwalk, sensually caressing my head like the globular orgasmatron in "Sleeper." “I’m balding, hairball, so what! Way too much testosterone! Hoo wah!”
No more baseball caps at the Opera. No head shaving; no goatees for the arty, ex-con look. No plugs, grafts, toupees, trumpet bumpers, mutton-chops, pony tails or Dr. Phil mustache. I let the few angry hairs scattered over my bulging, dented cranium grow crazy wild. They wiggle in the wind like the last rank blades of marsh grass missed by the developer’s bulldozer. Hitchhikers stopped accepting my rides; Mormons with dying smiles backed away from my door; godchildren no longer clamored to play horsey on Uncle Henry's knee.
“Hairless before birth and hairless again.
Hair is but briefly seen between two great unseens.
Why in this simple truth find sorrow, O’ Sanjay?”
One of the Lesser Vedic Sages
And now the endgame approaches: I stand alone amid the swirling detritus of fanciful illusions, at a bleak crossroads on the noisome edge of self-respect, to consider the final threshold from which there is no return to polite society. Yes, my friend:
Nothing says fuck you to the universe … like a comb-over.
When one lacquers a sheaf of lank side hairs, long enough to stand up like a fin in a stiff breeze, over the bumpy, freckled, furrowed expanse of one’s naked dome, and can still grin unblinkingly into the dubious faces of co-workers, women in bars, and trick-or-treaters, then nobody can ever touch you or hurt you again. Your head proclaims, with insane, mirthless hilarity, “I do whatever I fucking want!” Bar stools empty, Hell’s Angels scurry from your path like squeaking mice, wiseguys kiss your hand in respect. And there’s always a table waiting at Sizzler—even on Lobster Tail Night.
Is this my destiny? To take the step no loved one can understand. Have I earned the right to live free, high on icy mountain crag, like the solitary eagle? Like the hoary, rogue elephant demented from loneliness and ostracism? Do I have the nuts?
[A clarification at the suggestion of my editor: the elephant is not, of course, usually found high on the icy mountain crag, but instead prefers the steamy jungle or grassy veldt, where he can scratch his leathery hide against the baobab tree. Other than that, he lives much like the eagle. Except for his diet: that’s different too. Now, let’s hurry back for the powerful wrap-up.]
So (to quickly reprise), do I have the nuts?
I don’t know.
Who knows?
...only time.
Henry E. Panky
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