“Buon giorno, Mr. President,” Luigi says, his standard greeting, and whacks the worn seat with a towel for me to sit. Luigi has been cutting my hair for seven years now at Luigi’s, a small barbershop with one chair and dozens of calendars, none current, nailed to the walls. He often plays opera—usually my favorite, Don Giovanni—on a boombox from a cassette that stops in the middle of the piece, shifts to some Latin dance music for a few seconds, then goes back to opera, although rarely the same piece we were listening to before.
In front of me there is a map of the Mediterranean, and I can’t help but notice how my own hairline has come to resemble Italy over the years. Since my freshman year of college, 23 years ago, two little coves at the temples have been eroding into my scalp, month by month, year after year, leaving me with a full-blown peninsula. Part of the peninsula is, in fact, being cut off from the mainland, and soon I will have Sicily as well, a stupid little island of hair tufting from a vast sea of baldness.
Every time I sit in this chair, I contemplate asking Luigi to shave it all off. One time I did, jokingly, and he refused, saying, “You have-a plenty hair. You have-a nice-a hair.” He didn’t want the responsibility of a white, middle-aged guy leaving his shop bald. Maybe he knows my wife and daughter threatened to leave me if I came back with my head looking like a baby’s butt.
It’s not like middle-aged, bald white guys have many role models. Let’s face it, black men look better without hair: Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Jordan (and a third of the NBA, for that matter), Laurence Fishburne, Tony Dungy, Cuba Gooding Jr. They are dignified men, not to be trifled with. Who are the hairless white role models? Well, there’s the Pillsbury Doughboy, Nosferatu, Mr. Clean, Gollum and the Michelin Man. There’s G. Gordon Liddy, a horde of skinheads and my poet hero, Philip Larkin, who once described himself as “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on—depressing, depressing, depressing.”
The only positive role model I can think of is Patrick Stewart, but even he seems to realize that the completely bald look is unbecoming on a white guy: He often retains a wee bit of fringe on the sides, like crushed velvet.
The only thing that looks stupider on white guys than baldness is dreadlocks.
Most totally bald white guys fall into one of three categories:
1) The ears-sticking-out gremlin look
2) The Poppin’ Fresh look
3) The angry fascist look
There is occasionally the pink Silly Putty look (our grade school janitor was bald and pink and his name was Floyd, so obviously we called him Pink Floyd), but this bald category is rare.
Nonetheless, perhaps falling into one of these three categories isn’t as bad as being partially bald: the treasured tuft, that isthmus of hair, the shriveled thicket in the desert of scalp, the dwindling fringe of the self-punishing monk. As my father-in-law is fond of saying about pathetic attempts to hoard one’s few remaining follicles, “I’ve seen more hair on a bar of soap.”
Of the states of semi-baldness, the comb-over is obviously the worst. Our high school science teacher had a comb-over, and once on an especially windy day we watched him walking through the parking lot to his car, six feet of hair flailing from the side
of his head like the tentacle of an enraged giant squid.
I probably have more hair growing out of my ears and nose than I do out of my head. Even my eyebrows are denser than the hair on top. I wonder if I will soon look like my grumpy old poetry professor. With his dour white mustache and wide, wing-like, white eyebrows, he scowled from the podium like a giant moth. Sometimes when he got excited, I wondered if the eyebrow-sensilla would catch wind currents and lift him above the auditorium.
One might ask, solicitously, “But wait, my follicly challenged friend, have you considered the hair alternatives for men?” To me, these are phony. I’d be more likely to wear mascara than a hair weave. I’ve contemplated Rogaine about as long as I’ve contemplated having my back waxed. And even if no one else suspected, I would be constantly aware of my own chest hair spurting from the top of my head.
I have no idea what I would look like shorn shiny. In Luigi’s chair I strain through the thin mists of hair to get a glimpse, like reading an oracle. Which depressing figure stares back at me? My best guess is a cross between Bull Shannon and Elmer Fudd—the angry fascist with a dash of doughboy. In shock, I peer closer to discern Edvard Munch’s screamer.
The guys I play basketball with are also balding. When I go up for a rebound, I can’t tell who is on my team and who isn’t, since we all look the same from the top: receding hairlines, bald patch toward the back of the skull. None of us ever mentions baldness in our litany of twisted ankles, bum knees, jammed fingers and other middle-aged complaints (we tend not to get too personal), but I wonder who will be the first to shave. At least he’ll be easily recognizable.
Luigi has lived in the United States for longer than I have been alive, but his accent can be tough to break through. Today he doesn’t need to say anything.
“Same?” he asks.
“How ’bout shaved bald?” I venture.
In the mirror I see Luigi squint his eyes, furrow his brow and wag an Old World “no, no” finger.
At some point in a man’s life, he must relinquish his remaining vanities, realize he will never again register on the grocery store checkout girl’s radar screen and resign himself to middle age with dignity, if not pride. He must recognize that it is unseemly to check out 18-year-olds—at least too obviously. He must reconcile himself to mortality, put aside his peacock ways and concentrate on more honorable characteristics: courage, perseverance and compassion.
“Same?” Luigi says again. “Leetle trim on sides?”
“The same,” I say.
