The process began slowly, creepingly, but of late it had begun to pick up steam. It had taken years before he had even noticed and now, all of a sudden, there it was. His hair was going missing. Losing plausibility. Becoming thinner and less appealing. Steve was balding. He could no longer pull off a convincing haircut, although he attempted it from time to time, growing his hair out, then cutting it all off, then growing it out again.
At certain moments he still occasionally indulged in a half-hearted disbelief in his baldness, suggesting to his reflection that it was just the harsh lighting in the bathroom, an effect of fluorescence. Sometimes he took out a hand mirror with which to gaze upon the top of his head, confirming his theory. Or disconfirming it, usually, except in moments of heightened denial. In such moments he could not trust his mind. He really could not.
It was in a more practical frame of mind that he purchased the hair thickening shampoo, which could not claim outright to save even one follicle of hair from eventual desertion. It merely produced the appearance of healthier hair, an outcome attained by the formation of a coating bonded to each strand. The effect was one of increased fuzziness, not entirely satisfactory, but an effect he clung to, nonetheless, as being better than nothing. Eventually the shampoo would have nothing to cling to, aside from the remaining hair on the sides of his head, and no amount of thickening of that hair would do the least bit of good.
Did Garfunkel resort to this, he wondered? Did thickening agents exist in Garfunkel’s heyday? He tried to imagine what Garfunkel might be doing right now, and couldn’t imagine him doing anything other than weeping.
He tried to accept the inevitable, that one day he would be completely bald on top with nothing left but a fringe, a fringe that would serve as visual confirmation of the permanent loss of youth. This acceptance was tenuous at the best, grudging at the middle, and false and furious at the worst. The ideas that arose from such an acceptance were born with the smell of fraud already on them. For example, he considered shaving to the scalp and compensating for the total absence of hair on his skull with a goatee. He had never shaved his head all the way to bare skin and wasn’t sure that he did not have strange bumps and crenellations. What’s more, he did not have a face for a goatee. Nor did he have the right ears for earrings, nor a body for leather jackets. None of these decorations suited him; in fact, each one conspired to make him look like a fool, like an accountant in a motorcycle gang. His face was too soft, his features too bland and benign to support the promises made by such adornments. Short in stature and deeply average in bearing, his presentation of baldness could never even approach the coattails of appeal.
Sometimes while lamenting his fate aloud, his audience would respond with disbelief, as when his cousin incredulously asked, “Are you going bald, Steve?” This did not encourage him. Rather it increased his anger and despair because, despite flirtations with outright denial, he held the knowledge of his baldness with a bottomless conviction. It had become a thing upon which he could rely in life; more reliable in fact than the meager interest generated by his savings account. While he could scarcely accept his baldness, he understood without doubt that it was as real as the ground or the sky. And he knew that he hated it.
Hate and fear can motivate us strangely. Steve was not a religious person, not even in the easy sense of attending church for major holidays or muttering “Jesus Christ” during moments of irritation or risk. Indeed, he had no conception of God whatsoever, regardless of His occupation as a watchmaker or a mysteriously moving interventionist. God was not even a blank space in his mind, but rather a blank space occupying another blank space, zero subtracted from itself. And yet his growing distress at incipient baldness, and the venom that distress produced, led him one day to pray.
“God,” Steve prayed, “Fuck this balding shit. I can’t take it anymore. Just make the hair grow back; I’ll do whatever you want in return. Go to church, do volunteer work, whatever. Just make my hair grow back. Um. Amen.”
He did not know that today, of all days, God chose to listen.
Project: Get a Job
14 years ago
