“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 and chortle, but until my mid-twenties, I had a well-furnished widow’s peak as sharp and defiant as the prow of PT 109. All I had to do was to rake back the thick, glossy wings of hair that fell over my cruel eyes and full, disdainfully curling lips. Men eyed my hairline with envy and resentment, and 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, "Bald, Bad & Beautiful"
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 gazpacho and arugula at some fine restaurant like Elaine’s or Applebee’s. The evening’s date, a nude and previously convivial starlet-of-the-hour such as Zooey Deschanel or Lindsay Lohan, would start to shriek and hop. Fat, gorging diners froze in mid cud. Then they all began to howl in a ghastly crescendo of raucous laughter. The door to the men's room swung open, and there stood Leather Man! (This is how all my dreams end.)
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 tuft, a shrinking island, a dozen sparse, survivalist hairs, remained, daily further separated from the mainland. Inhabitants inbred and demented, twisted by the gusty winds of the open sea, speaking their own indecipherable patois.
Eventually, a hatchet-faced, SuperCuts employee, uninterested in the pointless vanities of middle-aged Walter Mittys, sneered, “You want me to shave these off, Mister?”
“What! No!” Is she fucking crazy?
Within the half hour, I stood distraught before my bathroom mirror, fluffing my forelock, tilting my head this way and that, trying to recapture the morning’s unruly shock of hair. But the scales had fallen from my eyes: 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.
The next day, a different, harder man walked out into the callous light. Glimpsing myself in the hallway mirror, I admired the bony skull all too obvious beneath the slick, glabrous skin.
Boo!
So now I rock hands on hips like a Telly Savalas character—say Kojak or Maggot of “The Dirty Dozen”—staring the world in its crapulous face. My mouth stretches into a snide, rubbery-lipped smile, and when I feel the smirking eyes of the world upon me, I'll break into a short Thriller-style moonwalk. “I’m balding, hairball, so what!”
No more baseball caps in fine restaurants. No head shaving. No goatees for the arty, ex-con look. No plugs, toups, trumpet bumpers, mutton-chops, pony tails, head rags or “magical hair sheaths.” 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.
“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 trash of my sanity, 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 freckled and furrowed expanse of one’s naked pate, 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 mirthless hilarity, “I do whatever I fucking want!” Bar stools empty around you, Hell’s Angels scurry from your path like squeaking mice, 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.
By Henry E. Panky
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