A Series of Hair-Raising Tales, or Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, or The Sad Tale of The Hairy Potter (I Got a Million of’Em, Folks)

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE Alaska—(Weekly Hubris)—4/11/11—Pity the poor, follickly-challenged male. Someone’s got to. He is the unsung schlemiel of our trendy society, and no amount of depression or anger or lame, self-deprecating humor on his part keeps him from being a joke in the world.

Something there is that loves to laugh at bald guys.

We have given up making fun of people because they are fat or funny-looking or uncoordinated or have big feet or warts or some other awful affliction. We have actually become somewhat sensitized to these things. But the bald guy is still legal fodder for fun.

No one knows this better than I.

I have been a bald guy now for some 30 years or more. You can’t tell it from my picture at the top of this column, because I cleverly and somewhat obsessively wear a hat whenever possible. I do live in Alaska and so my head does get cold if uncovered. And it is true that much of your body heat escapes through your head. So I can justify covering my head in most situations. I like to think that I look cool in my various caps and hats, that I am keeping warm, that I am fashionable in some geriatrically chic circles, but the truth is, if I really want to analyze it (which I rarely do), I wear my hats largely to disguise my glaring, shining, round-headed baldness.

Sad, I know. You would think that, after all these years, I would have accepted my affliction. And, for the most part, I have. But there is still that hope that the cute young barrista making my lattés in the morning thinks that maybe there is a thick, white, Phil Donahue-ish mop of hair concealed under my British tweed or baseball or Greek fishermen’s caps and that she might, if given enough drinks, want to run her fingers through it all.

In my pathetic old bald fart’s fantasy, I never quite get to the point where she actually removes the cap to reveal the shining pink orb beneath. It is best for my emotional well-being never to go there.

And just when I think I have finally matured enough to accept my hirsuteless head, someone–usually an old guy with plenty of hair! —will make a comment that he thinks is hilariously witty. I have heard them all.

“Man, I need my sunglasses. The glare in here is fierce!”

“You must have a very busy street, ‘cause there’s no grass on it!”

It’s too painful to go on, but you get the idea.

Now, mind you, I think it is a given that I have a pretty good sense of humor. People often find me witty. Sometimes they find me downright good-humored and good-natured. My uptight Southern parents were adamant about my being a gentleman, polite and charming to all. I have all that down pat. I can even be charmingly self-deprecating. But sometimes, I must confess, I have a little trouble being good-natured about the nearly daily bald jokes.

“Do you shine that head every morning?” someone asked me recently.

“F**k you,” I replied. No, I’m not proud of my lack of an effective, witty response (and my mother would have a stroke!), but that one seemed to work. He said nothing more.

What most people don’t know—or, I should be more specific—what many women and many men with hair on their heads don’t realize is that EVERY bald man is sensitive about it. Some are even beyond sensitive about it —they anguish over it. It is true that, as you get older, you do develop a grudging acceptance of it all, but that is part and parcel of just the grudging acceptance you get about being old in general.

But I can assure you: there is not a single bald man in the world who wouldn’t trade places with some guy with great hair.

Yes, yes, I know. Guys are shaving their heads now. But that doesn’t count. Some of those guys have full heads of hair that they CHOOSE to shave. It’s a mystery to me why anyone with hair would choose baldness, but they do. If I could grow hair on my head, I would let it grow down to my knees. But the catch is: if you have hair and choose to shave it, that is cool. If you are bald and shave your head to cover that up, that is not cool. It is a cruel, harsh, and critical world out there.

Think of the bald man in romantic history. He is nearly non-existent. I cannot think of a single hero in literature, swashbuckling, attractive, interesting, romantic, who is bald. Usually, thick, lustrous hair is a requirement for a romantic hero. Or even an unromantic hero. Look at Fabio on all those covers of romance novels. His long, flowing, golden locks are part of his sex appeal. You’re not going find some bald guy on those covers. Even in realistic novels of note, with heroes who are real people rather than swashbuckling exotics, there is rarely (as in NEVER) a bald head among them. John LeCarré’s eponymous spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold is an old, shabby, rumpled, baggy-eyed hero, yet he has a full head of thick gray hair. And he can still be rumpledly attractive, in an old seedy way, as long as he has hair.

Movies are even worse. How many bald movie stars do you know? Well, we all know there are a lot of them, but they rarely reveal their awful, alopecious selves to public scrutiny. They hide under hairpieces and implants and plugs and rugs—anything to avoid the awful revelation of a shiny pate. Yes, yes, I know. There were Yul Brynner and Patrick Stewart, two sexy bald guys. But they shave their heads. Patrick Stewart may well be bald—who knows? —but he has been shaving his head for so long that it is cool. Yul Brynner was one of those really annoying dudes who had a full head of hair, but chose to shave it off. It worked for him.

And TV? When have you last seen a bald guy on TV? Even those annoying sitcoms where fat, homely, slovenly guys are married to impossibly beautiful women don’t dare show a bald man. Jim Belushi, Kevin James, even Jackie Gleason and William Bendix in the 50s, all had full heads of hair. The only bald Dad on TV is Michael Chiklis, who shaves his head, so he doesn’t count.

Ted Danson wore a toupée on Cheers. But they finally addressed that in one of the last episodes of the series, where Sam, the ladies’ man, the stud, the resident Attractive Man, reveals to Carla that he is as insecure as everyone else and would rather be dead than bald.

Scientists don’t help much, either. They are quick to tell us that baldness is a sign of virility, that men who go bald have an excessive amount of testosterone and are, in fact, oozing and leaking masculine sex appeal. Don’t believe it. I have never known a woman to reject a guy with thick lustrous hair because he just wasn’t balding enough. That just doesn’t happen.

The one and only fear I hear men admit to having is the fear of impending baldness. My own son, now 35, still has a full head of curly hair (the little prick!), but he lives in fear of inheriting his father’s condition. I know what you’re thinking. You have been told, as was I, that baldness comes down through the mother’s side of the family. I took great comfort in that as a kid, only to be sideswiped as an adult. My mother’s father and brothers and grandfather all had thick, curly white hair all their mature lives. My father and his father and grandfather were as bald as goose eggs. Go figure.

I was then told that the baldness gene can be inherited from either parent, just like eye-color, so a guy with a bald dad has a 50-50 chance. My son Seth is safe, I think. No signs of the curse, yet. By the time I was 35, though I was well on my way to Cueball City.

When I was teaching high school students, I was constantly approached by panicked, stressed-out adolescent males, who figured I must be an expert.

“Mr Mergler! Mr Mergler!” they would say, slicking back their hair to show their hairlines. “Do you think I’m going to go bald?”

I would assure them, if I could, that their hair looked pretty healthy to me. But I was well aware (and often mentioned it to them) that they clearly thought that to look like me someday would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to them.

One boy, who clearly was balding, even at the tender age of 18, was not comforted at all when I said, “It’s not the end of the world to lose your hair. You could get leprosy or malaria or bubonic plague or boils or something. Wouldn’t that be worse?”

“No!” he declared emphatically. Losing his hair would be the worst fate that could ever befall him.

I, feeling much like the Elephant Man, just lurched home, unable to help them in their adolescent angst.

I remember too well those adolescent days of hair. Even in my most attractive youth, when I was a pretty cute kid, had a nice slim body, was tall, personable, all that stuff, I never had good hair. I always wanted great hair. I wanted hair like Ricky Nelson’s or Elvis Presley’s or Clint Eastwood’s. And I wanted to grow into a cool old guy with thick white hair, like Phil Donahue. (Remember him?) I never liked my own hair. It was thin and limp and boring. No matter how I tried to comb it, it didn’t work out to my satisfaction. So, at least I can’t say that I lost something fabulous when it finally fell out. But, Jeez, even bad hair is better than no hair. Unless, of course, you are one of those shave-headed dudes but, like I said, they don’t count.

I was in my late 20s before I started to show signs of baldness. I remember well when it first happened. I was combing my hair and I suddenly scraped, with my comb, a painful spot.

“Ow!” I said. I called my wife Maureen over and asked her, “How did I scratch my head? Is there a scratch there?”

She looked at me and began to laugh (in that cruel way that women do) and said, “Your head isn’t scratched; it’s sunburned.”

That was the beginning of the end. And thus began the various steps that most men go through when dealing with inevitable and impending baldness. It’s kind of like the steps of dying and grieving.

First, denial. You convince yourself that you are not getting bald. There’s some other explanation for sunburned scalps. You hair isn’t thinning. Your barber must be to blame. He’s cutting it differently. Something!

Next is the realization that maybe you are going bald and that there must be some way to prevent this. I was never one for hair products—no sprays or gels or any of that stuff. But, suddenly, I was frantically searching for help. I bought a scalp massager and massaged my head every night until my brain vibrated. I remember seeing a commercial on TV for a shampoo that they guaranteed would thicken a guy’s thinning hair into rich fullness. I drove all over town looking for it. Finally, after searching in almost every store that carried hair products, I found it. I went home, shampooed and shampooed again; then I applied the guaranteed-body gel. I spent hours in the bathroom, to the great amusement/annoyance of my parents, and waited for the fullness to set in.

And I waited.

And waited.

No fullness ever set in. In fact, my hair seemed to come out in greater quantity with all that washing and combing and brushing and gelling and massaging.

Next is the most embarrassing of the steps, the most pathetic and psychotic of the steps—the inevitable comb-over. Sadly, we all go through it. Most men who are balding will, at least for a while, try the comb-over, that hideous attempt to cover baldness with hair from the sides of your head. You comb it over, arrange it carefully so that it looks somewhat like a dead possum on your head, and then you spray it with enough hair spray to remain static in the midst of Hurricane Katrina. And then you walk around with a ridiculous lacquered muskrat on your head, thinking that, in fact, you look really fine.

Oh, my God, the embarrassment of it all! And it’s not even that people don’t tell you. EVERYONE tells you. (“What the HELL is that on your head, Wayne?” one of my friends exploded one day.) But you don’t believe them. You are still convinced that it looks better than a bald head would and that, really, no one can tell. As long as you stay out of fierce windstorms or don’t go swimming or stand on your head, you’ll be all right.

But, inevitably, the day comes when you look in the mirror and you suddenly see what everyone else has been seeing for months and years. You look like an absolute ass! Worse, you look like an absolute ass with roadkill on his head. And then, out come the scissors and you whack away at that long cascade of side hair that has been plastered to your dome long, long enough.

Afterwards, there follow several degrees of gradual and grudging acceptance of your fate. Accept it: you are bald. You don’t have to embrace it, but you can at least accept it. But it does take some men longer than others to reach this point.

My dear friend Haskell, whom I have known well for 50 years, is as slick-headed as I. We are the same age and have gone through many of life’s, um, little changes together. From adolescence to senility, we have been there in each other’s lives. Haskell now seems to have accepted his baldness with confidence and style. He shaves his head, dresses elegantly, and carries himself like a celebrity. I remember when he had blond hair and freckles and looked a little bit like Howdy Doody or Alfred E. Newman. Those days are long behind him. He thinks that I should shave my head, too. It would give me, he insists, a more “today” kind of look (as opposed to my “yesterday” look, I suppose). But I cannot do it. I have a head shaped something like a beach ball. It is large and round and would look only larger and rounder if I shaved it. He forgets what he used to call me when we were in high school. He always said that I reminded him of a “French balloon.”

“What the hell is a French balloon?” I remember asking him. He shrugged. He didn’t know either, but I reminded him of one. It was because I was (then) very skinny and tall and had a round, gigantic head. That explained the balloon image. The French part came from his opinion that I looked French. “You have that certain Continental Frenchiness,” he said, never having been to France.

So if I was a French balloon then, I would now, if I shaved my head, be a Russian balloon or maybe a Sumo wrestler balloon. I will pass on that.

But even Haskell has not always been as cool with his baldness as he seems today. He sometimes reminds me of that period, the comb-over period, when he even went so far as to buy a custom-made toupée to combat his condition. He had his head measured and had the thing made exclusively for him, for which he paid an exorbitant amount of money. He finally went for his fitting. The wigmaker put the dark blond toupée on his head, combed and fluffed it, adjusted it, settled it, pronounced it “magnificent” and then sent Haskell home in all his new tonsorial splendor. He told me that he spent a very long time staring at himself in the mirror, trying to make the golden fluff thing on his head look respectable and anything other than ludicrous. Finally, he peeled it off of his head, threw it in a drawer, and never again wore it.

“I felt like a woman in falsies,” he said. Or, at least, how he assumed a woman in falsies would feel.

Then there is the sad case of Hairy Potter.

Hairy is a friend of mine here in Alaska; an artist, specializing in pottery. He was always a big, rugged, good-looking Alaska outdoorsman, and was famous for long, lustrous blond hair. Women used to go wild over that hair.

Once when he got a haircut, his then-girlfriend moved out of their cabin and wouldn’t speak to him until it grew back in. His gorgeous golden locks came to define him. He has been called, by his friends, everything from Gorgeous George to Goldilocks to now, more recently, Hairy Potter.

But once he got into his 40s, Hairy Potter began to be no longer so hairy. His lustrous locks thinned out and then fell out altogether. He was devastated. He shaved his head, but that didn’t help. Women complained that they could not believe he had shaved off his gorgeous hair. He did not have the heart to tell them that he had no choice in the matter, that Nature and heredity had robbed him of his lion’s mane. That would be unthinkable. As long as they thought he’d shaved it and that he could grow it back anytime he wanted, they would still be enamored of him. However, if they knew the awful, awful truth—that he is really just another aging bald guy—that would be the end of Hairy Potter, the Gorgeous George of the Alaska arts community.

Imagine how different biblical history would be if Delilah had met Samson 30 years later. She could have saved money on shears and he would never have had to tear down the building that wiped out all those Philistines. In his own way, one bald man could have changed the world—if he just weren’t so ashamed of his hairlessness.