The Last Strand
After ten years since I’ve been in remission. I wake up one morning let out a stiff yawn, rub the sleep from my eyes, and move my hands through my bedhead and misshapen hair. Strands of hair come undone like stowaways, pretending to hide but point to a security breach.
All I can think is no, no, NO. I’ve already been here. I put in my hours. I’ve done my time. The notion of losing my hair a second time feels like a cruel joke. I forgo any blame to a deity; instead I yell into the void: I put in my time. I sacrificed the locks once before already. I can’t go through this again!
Much like the first time from chemo, I don’t have a choice. The only difference is this time it will most likely be permanent. Many are unprepared to handle certain tragedies: divorce, the death of a loved one, and – perhaps a very unsettling and sensitive subject – going bald…and the stages of grief attached to it.
The signs are all there: mother’s paternal side are mostly bald men. Male-patterned baldness is coming for me. Much like all other life-changing events; you never know it’s coming for you.
At first, I don’t notice I have a problem. The barber says something about my thinning hair. I don’t believe him. I don’t respond. My grandmother makes a comment about my thinning. I don’t believe her. I don’t respond. As if I’d become a vampire, my reflection fades from all mirrors, particularly the few spots on my scalp where hair used to be full. I just think I need to eat better. Twenty-six is approaching and my ignorance is peaking. I have little time left with my remaining hairs atop my head.
Before these mitigating circumstances, at the peak of hair-dom, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I embraced a short-lived songwriting career. I was eager to look like rock n’ rock idols. I intended to look like Jimi Hendrix; a mild, but full-fledged afro at the height of 1960’s counter-culture. Any attempts at an afro fall short. I don’t have the right genes. I embraced the free-flowing locks that my Eastern European ancestors gift me. I began to treasure strutting around like Jesus.
Clump by clump, strand by strand, all the years of growing an extension of my masculinity, my youth, my virility, I am struck by the notion that hair is as essential as a limb. It will be a hard lesson in borrowed time; nothing is certain and everything is temporary. I grip for dear life, waiting, wanting, wishing that the few strands of hair that easily come undone from my scalp, like soot after a forest fire, will magically stop falling.
I hadn’t looked at the back of my head until the barber shaved much shorter than I expect. I arrive for a clean look and I leave in utter shock and dismay and I see it: death has come for me. I well up as I pay, leave in shame, and come to terms with my mortality and the fact that the days of long, luscious hair are behind me. Under hair color, my driver’s license will now read the words: Bald.
I would have bargained for death instead if not for the love of my life walking me down that ledge. I fear my newfound relationship will accuse me of a “bait and switch.” One upside to all of this is, my other half will accept my new do, and drastically new face.
A woman who accepts you as a bald man, after falling in love with you, is a woman worth keeping. Which truly means, I CAN NEVER LET HER GO. EVER!
The day I shave my head, I am shaken, stunned, and taken aback. I’d made a quiet, unrelenting confession to Jason, one my closest friends. I call him after a botched haircut. I realize both of my best friends are bald and I am just the last one to join the club. Do I need to fill out a form? Do I get a membership card now? I know he’s put in the practice. I get in my car and race over to his house in tears as if I am getting over a recent break up. My heads hangs low as he opens the door. He embraces me with open arms as if he’d been waiting for this.
I sit in the chair. He pulls out the clippers as I sit in the living room watching his parents look on like spectators. The sound of the buzzing pierces my ears. My hands grip the sides of the chair, and I swear my heart is beating so hard I can see it almost crawling out of my chest. I tell him I don’t want to look in the mirror until it’s done. There he goes! There I go! He’s really doing it. The sound of the clippers is sharp, piercing, and quite honestly, unnerving. I feel hot. Can someone please turn the damn AC up! I can’t tell if I’m sweating or crying or both. He moves the clippers across my head like a lawnmower. Every forward motion across my patchy head hurts – well, emotionally. He’s laying to rest the last of what is left.
The loud buzzing stops. The clippers are set down. And he hands me a mirror. Without hair covering my head, my face looks different. Like meeting someone I haven’t met. I am getting accustomed to this new person looking back at me. My eyes swell up. I don’t hide my feelings well at all. I’m what you call a textbook heart-on-my-sleeve type of guy. Who am I kidding? I can barely contain myself like I’m watching the memorable ASPCA commercial; a montage of the saddest puppies with the moving voice of Sarah McLaughlin urging me to empty my bank account to save these canines in need. I immediately excuse myself to the bathroom.
I stand in front of the mirror hanging over the bathroom sink. The midday sun shines in through the window as I look straight into the eyes of a broken man reflected back at me. The hair is gone. My hair is gone. Like all gone. I’m twenty-six and I am bald. I am ashamed. I am devastated. I am weakened. I am broken. Will Jamie leave me? Will I leave her and become a recluse? Will I be single for the rest of my life? Will I be overlooked in job interviews, promotions? Will I ever be recognized for employee-of-the-month? Do they even do that anymore? Those dreams of becoming a musician are gone. The only musicians who are successful are the ones who first arrived on the scene with hair. What about my secret dreams of becoming an actor? Not unless I audition for villain with little to no lines. Like the characters standing in a crowd, behind the main villain. This is what I look like now? This is what I look like now! This is what I look like now.
I step out of the bathroom with my head down, a much lighter head at that, and my arms like kielbasas hung from the deli section of a grocery store. I can’t look him in the eye. I can hardly look at myself in the mirror. He smiles and couldn’t be more than gracious in the moment. Maybe his relief comes from the fact that he may now be able to commiserate in young male-patterned baldness. I help clean up the small clumps of trimmed hair on me, the chair, and the floor.
At 11 or 12, getting a haircut is an event. Like buying new clothes or new shoes, getting a haircut is often enough to make me stand out for a day or two. I walk in the door as the sound of the golden bell announces me...well, everyone. Supercuts is like waiting at the doctor’s office, no matter how early I show up, I can still wait there for hours to be seen. Some of the hairdressers just sit there chatting away with an empty seat as I’m looking at the time, looking at them, then looking back at the time, and look back. No one ever makes eye contact. So I wait as I flip through books and magazines resting on a table in the open waiting area, studying the models faces I desperately want to resemble. I scour the pages looking for just the right haircut. Mark? Mark? The hairdresser is ready. Usually different people every time I go. Fernando. Claudia. Ivan. Rosana. I lug the 30lb book under my arm. I open to the page I bookmark, point to the face, the hair: I want that! That being the look of a chiseled man with thick gelled hair; parted hair, messy but edgy, disheveled but refined.
They point to the chair gesturing to sit down. They wrap the reverse cape and begin. I make small talk. Or I don’t. I am anxious for conversation or silence. It’s done. It doesn’t take long. It takes longer to wait for the haircut than it does getting one. It usually never looks like the photo in the book. I end up looking more like Lloyd Christmas (aka Jim Carrey from the film Dumb & Dumber). Simply put, a bowl cut.
I never really concern myself with the signs. By the time I burn a hole through my pocket on preemptive remedies, I am too late. The strands of hair jump ship, disappear forever. Then the stages of grief start to settle in.
Denial is the first to unapologetically welcome me. Days and months pass as strands of hair shed from atop my head. To say I’m in denial might be mild. Sheer panic emerges. I’ve been here before. Aside from reemerging anxiety, reoccurring depression, I feel fine. I regularly see the doctor. I begin to tell myself it is just a phase. I’m getting older. I may be losing a couple here and there, but it’s not going to happen to me. But I don’t go to the doctor, relying on the next best thing: the internet! I’m talking, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and the app formerly known as Twitter, all of it! I know this is a bad idea. But this is what denial looks like. The unmitigated resistance to reason, logic, maybe even a mirror. Then, there’s the maybe I should get a new shampoo phase. I tell myself, maybe my hair is thinning! Maybe it is the shampoo. Maybe it’s the diet. Take some B12. Overdose on the stuff if you have to. Eat more protein. Screw being vegan! Eat a piece of steak if you have to. I don’t want to go shopping for toupees. Damn it, I’m too young!
Once I come to terms this is actually happening, I begin noticing how many bald people there are. I see crowds of them hanging out everywhere. I see crowds of them walking together the other day. Is that a meet-up group for bald people? Do I have to join? Or is it a neo-Nazi get-together? Oh no! People are going to think I’m a skinhead! And I can’t tell anyone else I’m feeling this way. That would mean I have to admit it. And I live in Miami; beautiful people live here, beautiful people with hair! I’ll be shunned, be sent to Cuba and will have to start a new life, learn Spanish. Get a hold of yourself, Mark!
I laugh at people who are bald. Strangers. Old people. My grandfather. My uncle. The former, slim build, standing at 6 foot something, gold-rimmed Ray-Ban’s: his face, incomplete without them, groomed with the cheap, strong, musk of Brut, paved along his bald head and jagged face similar to Hunter S. Thompson. The latter, often pacing, weighed down by a beer belly with his trademark look: a fine-looking ponytail, always neatly tied back hanging below his deserted crown, with a diamond stud worn on his left ear to pretty up his face. I make jokes about them. Now I am them. I don’t expect to be laughing at...well, myself. I don’t think I will ever join club this early. The Dad Club – sure! The Homeowner’s Club – great! A membership to Costco – proud cardholder since 2016. The Club for the Follicly Challenged – not entirely something I am keen on embracing. I have a face for somebody with hair. Right? Well, I had a face for somebody with hair. So, THIS is my big break? I was told I was born nose first. I need to be somebody with hair! I had long, beautiful brown locks that draped past my shoulders. I should have savored it. Every. Last. Strand. I don’t even have a chance to see them off.
And now I’m thinking how I’ll break the news to my family. Will this be a coming out kind-of-thing? How do I tell them? They probably know? They probably knew before I did. Do I even have to say anything? Yes. Do I sit them down, take them out to a restaurant? How does my community share this kind of news? Is there a guide that the newly bald follow? We don’t live in the same house; I can just send a picture! I do none of these things. Instead I do the honorable thing: nothing. I have since moved away, taken a new name, have not seen my family for years, nor will I ever see them again.
Then anger sets in. I don’t get mad at God, because I don’t believe in God. I start to think of all the things that humans have accomplished or succeeded in and then I think about how treating hair loss is still somehow unthinkable. Self-driving cars. A man on the moon. A sophisticated robot landing on Mars. How is it that an object can fly nearly 34 million miles away exactly where it’s supposed to land and yet…I am still having to wear a very old invention called a hat to cover up.
If I can call it bargaining, then there’s having to find a magician–I mean, a barber. Or, for those who are brave enough, a hairdresser—yes, a hairdresser. The stigma behind a straight man saying I’m going to a hairdresser feels like an inconvenience at the very least. I don’t want to tell my friends I was just at the salon getting my hair done. But if anyone knows how to cut, style, or lie to a man who’s hair is thinning, it’s a hairdresser. They’re experts, right? It becomes an anxious ridden affair every time I walk in. They all know it. I can feel their eyes on my thinning head. I sit in the chair. The woman who cuts my hair knows me by now, but it still overwhelms me. When is this going to be over? Can you hurry up? I wonder if she’s thinking I should just shave it already? I bet she’s thinking this is easy money since there’s not much work to do. I crack a smile. I sweat profusely. And then regret the overpriced cut. Every single time.
At least my hair used to hide this protruding genetic ornament called my nose. The underdog of the face. I’m told I was born nose first. This might explain a lot.
Years before, just old enough to drink, I see an Ear, Throat, and Nose doctor for the relentless and ongoing sniffles that makes it seem like I’m sick all the time. I’m not. It’s the damn nose with no warranty! I’m tell the doc I’m tired of not being able to breathe...you know, like what noses are supposed to do! He tells me I’m a great candidate for a Septoplasty. Basically, fix my deviated septum so I can breathe like a normal person. I might have said “again” except I’m not even sure if I know if I was ever able to breathe normally. I agree to the surgery. Days later I’m lying on a gurney, prepped for surgery, and on my way to the operating room the ENT doctor asks me to perform a rhinoplasty while he’s already opening the hood. I’m sure he’s kidding, but the thought of giving up this nose upsets me. Even though this nose is really just a furniture piece, it’s something I’ve grown attached to.
I lean into the stereotype, embrace the monstrosity of a nose I will eventually grow into. Evolution puzzles the Jewish people. Why is the nose such a big deal? What did we do in a past life to deserve a reputation for big schnoz’s? I grapple with Judaism, with its philosophy, traditions, the guilt, but the one that has given me more angst is the nose. The bigger, the better they say – except when it comes to noses. It proves to be less of an asset and more of a permanent exhibit on my face. You think it at least proves to be a worthy hunting device. It is most certainly not. It’s just for aesthetic purposes, not functional whatsoever. Now it just sits there saying Look at me, everybody! I’m loud, proud and the star of the show! This, coming from a family of, mostly, big noses. The only hair I manage now is my beard. It’s the only hope I have left to hide this schnoz. I groom it. I comb it. I spend too much time and money trying to use it as a distraction.
But now I can’t even wear a hat as a fashion statement. I have to wear it for practical reasons! I actually need to wear a hat because I can’t bear the chill of cold air breathing on my naked scalp. Now that I am without hair, as if a phantom limb tears, tingles, and wrings my head, I have naturally entered the next stage: wearing hats. To think this would be the exciting part: accessorizing. Like much of my life, even the easiest tasks come with challenges.
I walk through the automated doors of the department store. I have one goal: find a hat to cover the naked crown. Something casual, but not too casual, can be worn on hot days, cold days, inside, outside. Basically, anything that fits my small head. Of course, I come prepared and clothed, I bring a hat of my own. I wear blinders, head straight to the hat section. I approach the wall with many hats. I look at the shrine for those who want to protect their heads from the sun, from the potential sweat; for those who want to accessorize; and for those who need to accessorize. I look around. I am alone. I am on a mission. Fitted hats, brand hats, sports hats, hats, hats, hats.
Every hat I try on is either too small, too big, squeezing my scalp, or feels like a soup bowl. There are hats I try that have the security tag right in the middle of the hat. How is anyone supposed to try on a hat with an obstruction?
I pluck out a hat that looks like it might fit. I’m hesitant, discouraged, and exhausted at this point, but do not lose hope. I slip it on, slide it down [the newly shaved head]. After what seems like I’ve tried on two dozen hats, I finally find the one that fits perfectly for my head. I take it off, in relief, and come across the bold letters stamped next to the price [on the] tag: YOUTH SIZE. The relief turns into devastation, and realize after all the hard work of trying on hundreds of hats, I officially find out that without my hair, I have effectively lost the circumference of a head that fits most adult hats. Luckily, I do find few adult hats that actually fit my head, but it feels like looking for a car...it feels like settling down....it feels like...While I have just a few as a reserve, I can always rely on my three-year-old son’s hat’s as hand me downs if I’m ever in need.
Oh, how I miss combing my fingers through my thick wavy curls. I don’t fiddle with my hair like I used to. I can’t press my hand against the top of my head and grab on to…anything. I can’t even pretend to mimic the impression of tearing my hair out. No prospect of that happening anymore. It’s a ghost town up there now. Just a sad graveyard where the strands used to be.
I still shake my head like people do in shampoo commercials – mostly for fun, but sadly, for nostalgia. If I never would have shaved my head, I would have looked more like my uncle. I don’t know my uncle before the bald stage; it’s almost as if he is born this way. The kind of look where the hair on the top of your head deserts you and relocates to the already populated lower boroughs. It’s like a mullet except it’s unemployment in the front and hardly a party in the back.
Finally, comes acceptance. I get it. I won’t be Clooney. I won’t be Pitt. I eventually come to terms with the inevitable. I am welcomed to the club with open arms and exposed crowns – and my two best friends are more excited that I’ve joined the club than I care to admit. They gift me hats, recommendations for scalp cream, lotions and a set of razors that give the smoothest shave. I wear it like a badge now – mostly because I can’t hide it.
Years later, my one-year-old son will walk over to his bookshelf and pull out a big book. He will lay the back cover face up on the floor. He will look at me then look back at the book. Look at me then look back at the book. He will do this a couple more times. With gusto, and the biggest smile on his face, he will yell out PAPA! No, I certainly will not be a Clooney. Nor will I be a Pitt. Instead I will be Shel Silverstein’s doppelgänger.
I worry about many things as he gets older. I hope he grows up to be happy, a good person and most of all, I hope he’s able to keep his full head of hair. I still feel I should prepare him for the worst. Not only am I incredibly envious of his locks, but when people complement my son’s hair, I tell them my intention is to shave it off completely. Because if he truly has his father’s genetic predisposition toward male-patterned baldness, I can’t salvage his last strands. So, while I half-jokingly project my own insecurities about balding, perhaps I can at least prepare him for what’s to come.
As I get older, I start finding excessive strands of hair growing in places where hair truly doesn’t need to be. My back, my shoulders, my ears, and again, my nose. I’ve often wondered to myself, I have never had hair in those places for the first twenty some odd years of my life. Why on earth would I possibly need them now? How could this even be an evolutionary trait? Is this like having wisdom teeth or an appendix? I actually do have all my wisdom teeth AND my appendix. Does this mean I’m evolutionarily inferior? I’m so screwed! While some of the disadvantages might weigh heavily on me, one distinct advantage is low maintenance. Some practical disadvantages include limited cushion after a blow to the head and a disproportionate feeling of piercingly unwelcomed coldness atop my head during the cold seasons. My hair used to keep me warm – as it’s evolutionarily designed to do. This really is a poor design flaw of male-human evolution!