Happy anniversary to the time I killed my old self
Metaphorically. I'm still alive.
I started losing my hair when I was 21. That’s a horrible age to lose your hair. The best time to lose your hair is never. The second-best time is after you lock down your soulmate. (You signed a government form, sucka.) The worst time is when everyone on campus except you is the most gorgeous they will ever be. When her choice is between the Pi Kappa Alpha with golden locks and the newspaper nerd with a comb-over, it’s not really a choice, and I wouldn’t blame anyone, I’d pick Bryce, too.
This is where I should stop and tell you where I’m going with this one. It’s a story I’ve told in bits and pieces over beers with friends but have never written down or told all the way through. It’s the story of when I decided to shave my head, which, by my reckoning, happened 25 years ago this week. This is a tale – an epic tale – of sadness, fear, regret, heartbreak, pitiful choices, denial, adversity, hairspray selection, risk, triumph and true love. I can trace every good thing that has happened to me as an adult back to this decision. It’s a turn of events worth sharing because maybe – just maybe – there is something inside all of us that needs a shave.
Cruel Winds
Growing up, I had thick wavy brown hair. Like a Roman god, if Roman gods wore backwards baseball caps. Girls said they liked my hair. Those who cut it fawned over it. I could comb it with water and a wet brush, and it would hold all day, naturally. That hair was part of my identity. It was glorious. It was strong. It was too good for this world.
The summer before my senior year at Ohio University, I remember THE MOMENT. I was at work, in the bathroom, not working, when I looked in the mirror. Beneath my wavy brown hair, I could see scalp – a concerning amount of it. This can’t be real, I thought. I am dreaming a dream that is transpiring in intensely startling detail. I will wake up and enjoy my hair for decades. But I knew. Not a dream. Lots of men in my family were bald. This was happening. It was real.
Naturally, I did what any man would do in my situation and didn’t think about it for a few weeks and pretended it wasn’t happening.
For some reason, that didn’t work.
So I tried the shampoo they said would help men keep their hair.
Would it shock you to learn that didn’t help either?
My senior year of college, I came up with a temporary solution. I wore a baseball cap and never, ever took it off. Because it was the 90s, so did every other guy on campus.
It wasn’t a problem.
Well, one time it was a problem.
There was a girl. We made plans to meet at a track meet and hang out. So I get there, and we’re hanging out, and I realize that in my reverie I forgot my hat. How I realized this was – it was suddenly very windy, and the wind was blowing my comb-over flap up and down off the top of my head like a recycling can lid in a windstorm. At one point, I put my hand on my head to keep my fair from flaring up. The look of death on her face indicated to me that perhaps she had noticed. There was no second track meet.
That’s the moment I decided to shave it off.
Just kidding!
That would have been the smart thing to do.
For reasons I will never be able to fully explain, I went all in on a comb-over.
My Comb-Over Era
I felt a deep embarrassment standing in the hairspray aisle of the drug store for the first time. Out of place. Confused. Like I might get caught. And with so many questions. What kind of hairspray does a young man with rapidly thinning hair buy? Is there a particularly well-suited hairspray for this tragic and desperate situation? Aqua Net? Salon Selectives? I went with Rave because the bottle was blue, which at least offered a fleeting hint of masculinity. The bottle also held out the promise of “Ultra Hold,” which was the kind of hold I needed. No Medium Hold for this guy. Ultra, baby.
Friends, I took that bottle everywhere I went. I had a green Jansport backpack, and that bottle was in my backpack, along with a brush, and that backpack was either on my person or in my car. FOR YEARS.
This was the era before NBA and NFL guys carried clutches.
This was the era before men shaved their heads.
This was before there was social media and you might see embarrassing photos of your own floppy hair flopping around, thus forcing you into an agonizing reappraisal of your life choices.
When I began my career as a journalist in Washington, DC, I was in Full Comb-Over Mode. The bottle. The bag. The brush. The trips to the bathroom to refresh my crispy lid. The showers after which all of my hair would hang off one side of my head. The many, many baseball hats. Checking the weather for wind reports. Dreams at night where I still had hair but when I woke up it was back to reality.
One time when I went home to Cleveland while still in Full Comb-Over Mode, my friend Joe suggested I shave it all off, and I looked at him like he was crazy. It is important for you to know that Joe is a hair stylist, and we were standing next to a barber’s chair. Hair and the general attractiveness of the human head is his stock and trade, and he looked at my head and like a good friend said we needed to rip it down to the studs. It would have taken 5 minutes right then and there. But no. Why would I shave my head when my comb-over was going so well? Couldn’t he obviously see that if you looked at my head ONLY directly from the front, and the wind wasn’t blowing, it still sort of looked like I had hair? Why would I give up a triumph like that?
I wish I could tell you what I was thinking, but the truth is I didn’t want to think about it. The story I told myself was – you’ll find a woman, and she’ll love you no matter how you look, because you want someone who is not caught up on looks, who loves you for your character. That all sounds nice, but it’s also exactly the kind of bunk a man tells himself to blame the other sex for issues he doesn’t know how to fix. Yes, yes, yes. It is OBVIOUSLY every woman on the planet’s fault for being so shallow and not falling in love with a chubby guy with a comb-over. It’s CLEARLY half the population of earth. Not me.
The decision to shave, naturally, involved someone. She also lived in DC, and I liked her, and we went out now and then. The final time we hung out, she ran her fingers through my hair – well, she tried to. She couldn’t break through the Ultra Hold. It Ultra Held. Rave Ultra Hold really should be used by our armed forces to protect our homeland from missile strikes. I called her a few times – and she called back weeks later and was very nice, but whatever I hoped would happen was clearly not going to happen.
It, finally, was time.
Training Montage
I knew, deep down, I needed to change. Something big. Something to give me the type of confidence that is attractive. Something that would offer me a new identity. A total game-changer. If only I could put my finger on it.
Yes.
I got it.
I’d start going to the gym.
That was the change I needed, I told myself, and nothing else.
If I got in shape, all my problems would be solved.
This was my “Rocky” montage era. I went to the gym, ran laps, lifted weights. Healthy food. Good choices. For the first time since high school football, I wouldn’t look like the guy in the movie who is the supportive friend of the guy who gets the girl.
My hair, meanwhile, was still a disaster.
Let me tell you about showers.
When you comb all of the hair from one side of your head over to the other side of your head, the hair on one side of your head gets really, really long. Like, it flops sideways down past your shoulders. When you look in the mirror, you see your actual bald self, and it’s not a good look. The movie that captured it best was the Ernie McCracken character in Kingpin.
Imagine Ernie McCracken every time you get out of the shower.
It would also get so long that when I deployed Ultra Hold Mode my combover would curl back up on the side and need to be cut.
The side curl was like this lady, but on just one side, and I’m a dude.
My poor barber.
His job was to organize the deck chairs on my Titanic.
One day, I got out of the shower, saw all that hair dangling there, really super long and psychotic, and asked myself, am I really going to do this again?
I felt sad walking into the barber shop because I knew it would be the final visit.
Shave it off, please, I said.
He looked hurt. He knew this was the end of the road for us. How many times does a barber know he is giving a man his last haircut?
When he was done, he said he understood why, and he wished me well.
Back when I shaved my head, the only other guys in America who had shaved their head were Andre Agassi and Michael Jordan. It was those two guys – and me.
On my life, I am not making this up. In the weeks after I shaved my head, on my walk to and from the subway for work, random black guys nodded at me or rubbed their own heads and said something to the equivalent of, “Right on, man.” This is the highest honor the world can bestow on a white nerd. I don’t know what it’s like to win an Oscar, but I imagine the feeling is similar.
For Memorial Day weekend, my friends and I had a tradition of going to Nags Head, N.C., and renting a house and swimming, grilling and drinking as much beer as is possible. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to shave my head. I just did it and drove down a day or two later. When I entered the living room in all my bald glory, my brother Tom dropped his margarita on the ground like the kind of slow-motion scene you’d see in a movie, and then we hugged.
There was no going back.
Bald Love Wins
When I went to Chicago that summer to meet my friends for a Jimmy Buffett concert, I didn’t know I’d be starting a relationship with my future wife, but that’s what happened. We had a great weekend together. We stayed in touch on the phone. She flew out to see me. I flew to see her. Again and again. It was the beginning of a long and adventurous relationship that eventually included a move to Los Angeles, a wedding with not one but two receptions, kids, dogs, a move back home to Cleveland and a house. Jen has told me many times that she loves my bald head. We live in a world of great hair. If hers is not true love, I don’t know what is.
But it all traces back to that weekend in Chicago.
That weekend, I was full of confidence, having fully embraced what I later came to call The Program. 1.) Shave your head. 2.) Get in shape. 3.) Stop being an idiot. The Program is good. The Program is solid. The Program gets results.
Today, there is no longer any Rave Ultra Hold in my backpack. I carry a hat to prevent sunburn (take care of your head and it will take care of you), random CVS receipts longer than the Epic of Gilgamesh and photos of my kids. I don’t dream about having hair anymore. I dream about early bedtimes.
But every now and then, I’ll be at the store, walk past the hairspray and see a bottle of Rave Mega Hold.
Yes, they have Mega Hold now.
Time marches on.
It’s a good reminder – what other idiocy am I Mega Holding onto?
Read more:
Consider the fact you once had a fine coif a blessing. My days were spent waging a useless battle against what folks officially call, "Dumb Hair" and could only be tamed with enough hair spray to turn it into a hard lacquer shell.
Until I turned 23.
Then it started falling out. Then at 30 jumping off.
Shaving was liberating at 55.
Turn white at 65, slick it back like every old, bespeckled man with false teeth and a limp.
Now, get off my lawn!
This was a great piece, Joe. 2 of my favorite men of all time shared your 20-something hair challenges. My grandfather had the gorgeous dark waves you too describe until it all started falling away in his 20s; and my husband looked like Matt Dillon in Singles - with the long, wavy, musician-in-the-grunge era locks - when he was 19. Those were shaved away a few years later when his male pattern baldness set in. They would both relate. :)