David Blumenfeld Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

or, How I Lost My Hair and Got It Back Again

Anthropologists have discovered a wide variety of attitudes about the way our

hair should be cut or configured and about the significance of its loss. A widespread

attitude connects hair with strength and vitality and identifies its loss with the loss of

these traits. Conquered peoples were often required to cut their hair as a sign of

subjugation in the belief that hairlessness made them weak. When Genghis Khan

conquered China, he required the women to cut their hair in order to keep them timid

and self-effacing. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, virtually every school child learns

that Samson, superhero of the Hebrews whose power resided in his long locks, lost

that power when he received a haircut from the beautiful Delilah. Samson's haircut,

which is surely the most famous one in western history, cost him dearly and literally

brought down the house.

Understandably, then, from time immemorial, people have sought methods to

restore hair or prevent its loss. As early as 1550 B.C., Egyptian physicians devised a

remedy for hair loss that included hippopotamus fat, boiled porcupine hair and the leg of a female greyhound sautéed in oil. Eleven centuries later, the Greek physician

Hippocrates experimented with a mixture that included beetroot, horseradish and

pigeon droppings, and there are many other examples of drastic or farfetched

remedies for hair restoration. (See Jennie Cohen www.history.com/news/history-

lists/9-bizzare-baldness-cures). Barring success in producing the real thing, balding

people have resorted to wigs, toupees, perukes, hats and laurel wreaths to conceal

their missing hair. Balding men, and in some cases women, have reacted against hair

loss anxiety by embracing hairlessness, extolling it as beautiful and shaving whatever

remaining hair they have.

Hair loss is one of the many changes that aging can bring about so gradually

that it isn't noticed until an advanced stage. Occasionally, it isn’t gradual. I had a

friend in college who was totally bald by the time he reached high school. He said it

was as though it all fell out overnight. Another friend had alopecia areata universalis,

which left him with not a single hair on his body. Bald head, bald chest, bald balls.

And, of course, there is the misfortune of rapid and complete hair loss due to

chemotherapy. But while hair loss can be sudden, and complete or incomplete, for

most men it occurs gradually, leaving healthy hair only around the back of the head

and along the ears, a condition known as male-pattern baldness. These days the most

common remedy for male-pattern baldness is to shave your head completely and

achieve the fashionable cue ball or “bald is beautiful” look. When I was in high school

in the 1950s, the movie star Yul Brynner was one of the few men who shaved his

head. Back then the Yul Brynner look was considered pretty exotic. Now the shaved

head is so common there is a virtual Yul Tide.

Apparently, I was born without a hair on my head and remained that way for

many months. For my mother often told me that I walked and talked before I had a

hair on my head or a tooth in my mouth. When I eventually did develop hair, it was a

handsome headful of large, soft, luxurious curls. At my first haircut my mother

forbade the barber from sweeping away my shorn, golden-brown locks, which she

carefully preserved in a cellophane bag stapled to our family photo album. My

nickname was “Davey Wavey.” When I reached puberty, my hair became coarse (as

did my fantasies) and my curls tightened like a clenched fist. I was barber's nightmare

and none of the local barbers were able to give me a decent cut. A friend of my

father's recommended a fancy barber in Chicago who was said to be able to "work

miracles" with even the unruliest hair. He took one look at me and said, "Son, I

couldn't possibly do a thing for you for under twenty-five dollars," the equivalent of $250 today. I decided I'd stick with the local buck-twenty-five version. In high school

in the 1950s, I wore my hair in a D.A. (Duck's Ass): the two sides in the back combed

together with a sharp vertical line separating the "tail feathers." With very curly hair

like mine, this took a lot of work at home. When I was an undergraduate, most male

students were wearing fairly close-cropped hair, almost a crewcut, and by the time I

was a philosophy graduate student in Berkeley in the 1960s, beatniks and hippies

dominated the scene and very long hair was de rigueur. My long curly hair yielded a

bon fide Afro. Or rather what would have been a bona fide Afro had I been African-

American. In addition to being in style—along with sandals, shades and a hookah for

smoking grass—my Afro was economical, since I almost never got a haircut. In the

spirit of the time and place, I just "let it all hang out."

Eventually, my mane started to thin and I began a gradual descent toward

baldness. My friends never pointed this out to me and, apart from a short period in

my teens when I inspected myself for zits or other girl-discouraging blemishes, I have

never spent much time gazing at myself in the mirror. Consequently, by the late

1970s when I was in my forties, my hair had thinned considerably, though I was more

or less oblivious to it.

After I became a philosophy professor, this led to an embarrassing encounter

with my students. One of the things philosophers do is define concepts. How to define

justice, truth and goodness, for example, are three important conceptual questions.

When introducing this sort of analysis, it's common to point out that some concepts

have borderline cases where it isn't clear whether the concept applies. Running is an

example. Did Jessse Owens run? Boy did he! Does your ninety-two-year-old

grandfather’s gait qualify as running? Not a chance. What about my moderately-

paced activity on the track or in the road? Well, that’s a matter of dispute. It’s a

borderline case. Baldness is another such concept. Someone who has just a little hair

or no hair at all is bald. But how little? You can't draw a precise line. To get this topic

going in class, I'd introduce the baldness example with this spiel:

“Consider someone like Yul Brenner. He’s clearly bald. Next, take someone

with a full head of hair” and I’d point to the student with the fullest mop in the class.

“Joe over there in the corner is clearly not bald. But imagine that he loses a

few hairs each year over a very long time. Eventually, he'll be as hairless as Yul

Brenner. Yet you can’t specify an exact point where he becomes bald. Somewhere

along the way he's a borderline case.”

Armed with this idea, I’d move on to borderline cases of more consequential

concepts.

Here’s how I got myself into trouble. Back in the 1960s, when I still had a thick

head of hair, instead of pointing to a student in the class, I’d often use myself as an

example. After mentioning a famous person who was completely bald—in the late 60s,

it was Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or Lew Alcindor as he was then known—I’d continue my

shtick:

“Now take someone with a really full head of hair. Me, for example. If I lost a

few hairs each year, over a long time I’d eventually become as bald as Lew Alcindor.

But you can’t specify an exact point. . . .”

I used myself in this example for many years to come, laughably blind to the

fact that along the way I was losing a few hairs each year, slowly becoming bald (or

nearly so), and thereby living out my own example.

One day after my hair had thinned very noticeably, I trotted out the baldness

case but this time when I said, “Take someone with a really full head of hair, me, for

example,” I saw a couple of students snicker. An innocent-looking young woman in

the front row seemed astonished, even slightly frightened, as if to say: “Good God,

has our professor lost his mind? He’s almost bald. Even my father, who is considering

transplants, has more hair.” I gulped, realizing at last what had happened.

Embarrassed, I pushed on to the end of the lecture but when I returned home, a look

at the back of my head in the mirror made clear just how foolish I must have seemed

to my students. I never used myself in that example again.

Eventually, I became fully bald. Not a borderline case, typical male-pattern

baldness: some frizzy, lackluster hair around the base of my head and a few flimsy

straggling hairs on the crown. It had taken quite a while but I had finally gotten there.

My father Max had gotten there at a much younger age than I and had sorely regretted

his hair loss. Although Max couldn’t bring himself to consider a toupee—this was long

before the era of transplants—he was acutely attuned to others who were wearing

toupees, or rugs, as hairpieces were then often called. If your hairpiece was imported

from Persia, I guess it would have been an oriental rug.

A couple of my gay friends claim to be able to spot another gay man the minute

he walks into the room: They call the knack “Gaydar.” Max had "Baldar." Which was

inspired, I suspect, by hair envy. Max wouldn’t cheat by wearing a hairpiece but, by

God, others weren’t going to cheat and get away with it either. “See the guy over

there at the corner table,” he’d say in a restaurant where we were having dinner,

“he’s wearing a rug—and it’s a bad one.” I'd look and see nothing. The man's hair

seemed perfectly natural. Then I'd walk by the be-rugged man’s table, take a closer

look, and realize that Max was right. Though I occasionally spotted a man I thought

was wearing a hairpiece, I never developed my father's knack of Baldar.

Despite Max's slick pate and sparse remaining hair, he was fastidious about

getting regular haircuts and very concerned about the grooming of his hair. "That Fred

Schimmer gives a much better cut than Steve Kappas, who I've been using," he'd say.

"I think I'm going to switch barbers." Max had so little hair to work with that I couldn't

see how switching barbers would make a difference. He always looked the same to

me no matter who had trimmed his hair, Fred, Steve or anyone else. I thought I could

do as good a job with our home scissors and save my dad a few bucks, though I knew

better than to suggest it. It took so little time and effort to cut my father's hair that I

wondered why barbers didn't give a "male-pattern" or "bald guy" discount.

I've always admired people—especially ones in the spotlight, such as actors or

actresses—who gracefully accept signs of aging like wrinkles or hair loss and don't try

to "fix" them even if they pay a price in the public eye. Ray Milland, a movie star who

won an Oscar in 1945, had a gorgeous shock of lustrous black hair, which he lost in

late life. Thereafter, he accepted his baldness. No toupee, no comb-over, just a plain

bald pate. His look was colossally different from his look in the heyday of his career.

In an interview on the Johnny Carson show, he reported with a laugh that one evening

while he was seated at a famous New York restaurant, a diner passed his table,

paused, and with a puzzled stare asked, "Didn't you used to be Ray Milland?" Now

that's lack of vanity!

I’m convinced that whether a toupee is detected or taken as the real thing

depends as much on the confidence with which the person wears it as on the quality

of the hairpiece itself. This is no different from a lot of other things in which success

is a function of the aura that self-confidence projects. Occasionally, homely people

who act as if they are good-looking are so successful at pretending to be attractive

that no one takes them to be homely. They dress well, are poised, well-spoken and

walk with an air of owning the space they inhabit. I once knew a woman who was

especially plain, yet her self-assurance and infectious smile lit up a room and

everyone thought of her as attractive. She always had a good-looking boyfriend.

Sometimes two.

Here is an even more striking case. I once had a philosophy colleague, whom I

shall call Morty, who was very nice looking. Morty was slim and muscular, had piercing

dark brown eyes, high cheekbones and a headful of thick, beautiful, coal black hair.

He was fastidious about every detail of his life: his lecture notes were flawlessly

typed, without a smudge or penciled-in correction; the books on his shelves were

meticulously organized by category and lined up neatly; his shirts and slacks were

crisply ironed; and he never had a hair out of place. Everything about Morty was just

right—perfect.

Morty was also exceptionally intelligent and supremely self-confident. Most

philosophers are intelligent but Morty was at the very top of a very intelligent heap.

He was the smartest of the smart: razor sharp, aggressive in argument and invariably

successful in philosophical repartee. He was also a little smug about it. Not quite

obnoxious perhaps but close. His colleagues were intimidated by him and on guard if

they had to take him on in philosophical debate for fear that he’d score a point, twist

the knife, and they'd go down in ignominious defeat. Face-to-face argument among

philosophers is sometimes like a school yard brawl and in it everyone knew that Morty

could kick your ass. Because of the awe he inspired, none of us was aware, and only

later learned, that Morty was bald and wore a toupee. The coal black hair around the

sides of his head was truly his own but the bounteous black crop in the middle had

once belonged to someone else. We never noticed any change in the length of his hair

and perhaps assumed that, in his perfection, he got a weekly haircut. It would have

been so like him to stay fastidiously trimmed.

As time went by Morty began to grey at the temples and only at the temples.

Yet we were so much in his intellectual thrall that we didn’t realize he was not

authentically hirsute but completely bald beneath his luxuriant rug. This failure to

recognize the obvious persisted even when the hair on the sides of his head began to

thin and turn a little silver, though not a single silver thread appeared on his still

sumptuous black crown. Yet even with the contrast between his real hair and his

toupee so plain to see, we still didn't see it. Until one day an outsider who wasn't

under Morty's sway made everything clear for us.

One semester a new philosophy faculty member joined our group and brought

his wife, an academic from another department, to our weekly discussion sessions.

After witnessing Morty hold forth a few times, pontificating authoritatively and laying

down the law on various philosophical topics, she could abide it no longer. On her

third visit, when Morty had to leave early, she burst out: “Thank God that smug little

asshole is gone. I’d give a lot to snatch that phony looking toupee right off his head!”

Toupee? Morty had a toupee? Suddenly the truth became obvious to us all. So

obvious, in fact, that we felt like fools not to have seen it ourselves. It dawned on us,

too, that Morty, who seemed so in command of everything, so invincible, was as

vulnerable as the rest of us. It must have threatened him terribly to have such an

imperfection as baldness. Eventually, he had his toupee "corrected" to produce a

more perfect match between his rug and his greying temples but that was not until

later.

None of us ever let on to Morty that we had learned his secret and he certainly

didn’t reveal it to us. We continued to respect him for his fine intellect and treat him

as the friend that he was. But we never again thought of him as invincible or accorded

him the level of deference that had blinded us. It was clearly a case of the Emperor’s

New Rug.

Even after I recognized that I was bald, I never considered getting a rug. Of course, by the time I was fully bald, toupees were passé. Newer remedies, like hair

plugs, are far more realistic than even the finest toupee and can’t be blown away by

a strong wind or snatched off by a practical joker. When a high school friend of mine

eventually became bald, he remedied it with scores of plugs. He looked great.

Seemed ten years younger at least. His new hair looked so much like the hair that had

abandoned him that people like me who hadn’t seen him since he’d lost his original

crop didn’t have a clue that he had been “plugged.” I wouldn’t have known it if he

hadn’t told me.

He also informed me confidentially that the process was so painful that if he

had he realized the agony it involved, he never would have gotten plugs, even taking

into account their positive cosmetic effects. The pain I saw in his eyes as he described

the excruciating experience of hair being sown into his scalp killed any thought I

might have had of doing likewise. I just resolved to accept my baldness. It’s not so

bad, I told myself, falling back on the idea that baldness is a sign of virility. This old

saw no doubt is as much a myth as the opposing one that equates hair with vitality.

There are men with mounds of hair on their chests and backs and shoulders and

protruding from their ears who swear that, like Samson of old, hairiness makes them

strong and virile. We choose our myths to suit our needs.

I went on for a long time not giving my baldness a thought, when the saga of

my mop took an unexpected turn. Like so many older men, I suffer from an enlarged

prostate whose inconvenient effects include frequent trips to the bathroom and a less

than copious urinary flow.

1 Sometime in my sixties, my urologist prescribed a series of remedies, including the drug Avodart, which had some welcome effects like reducing the number of my potty visits and increasing my urinary flow. (Fellow sufferers: Don’t get too excited, I still get up a lot during the night and certainly don't piss like the waterfall of my youth.) To my great surprise, after a few months I also thought I noticed some short, flimsy hairs sprouting in the front of my head just above my forehead. There were just four or five tiny sprigs and they were such pathetic little things that at first I wondered whether they were real. Was I seeing things? No, when I looked again, this time more carefully, they were still there. In another couple of weeks, I saw a few more. They too were as spindly as the first few, just flimsy, fluffy peach fuzz, but now there was more fuzz than before, all clustered in a small spot on the front of my scalp. When the process continued unabated, I called it to the attention to my urologist, who said casually that, yes, this was sometimes a sideeffect of the treatment. He asked if it bothered me. Hah! I was pretty excited about it. I was on the way to getting my hair back. He also inquired with concern whether any new hair had emerged on parts of my body where I didn’t want it to be. He didn’t say which parts he had in mind but I imagined great, chemically-induced tufts of hair ________________

1 For a closer look at my prostate and a laugh at its expense, see "The World's Biggest Prostate," https://www.monofiction.org/post/the-world-s-biggest-prostate-by-david-blumenfeld-non-fiction.

protruding from my elbows or my nose. “No” I said, "just my head." I later learned

that, in addition to its salutary urological effects, my medication is the leading drug

used by cosmetologists for hair restoration. I was therefore getting a two-for-one

bargain: a smaller prostate and a new crop of hair. Three-for-one, in fact: Since mine

was a medical rather than a cosmetology prescription, the cost was covered by my

insurance. Granted, my new growth wasn’t much to brag about but, damn it, it was

hair and there was more of it every week. Soon, I happily assumed, I'd have all my

hair back.

In time the peach fuzz gained body and encircled my head, leaving only a

large, slick and shiny bald spot at the back, which I expected to fill in eventually. The

problem was that I looked like a monk and even many more months generated no

growth in the circular gap at the back of my head. Friar Blumenfeld: The look was not

pleasing. I had looked a lot better bald. Yet I couldn’t let my new hair wither away by

discontinuing my medication without foregoing its prostatic benefits. I considered

returning to my roots and becoming an orthodox Jew. Wearing a yarmulke would

cover the hairless gap and make it appear that I had a full head of hair! The futility

of this dawned on me, however, when I considered the inconvenience of all those

required rituals, the many trips I’d have to make to the synagogue and all the gefilte

fish I’d be served. So, I considered going for the cue ball look instead. Before I could

get the razor to my head, however, a friend suggested a more fruitful solution. He

pointed out that the topical drug minoxidil was reputed to produce hair for 85% of

men but only in the middle of the back portion of their heads. I couldn’t believe it. It

was as if this marvelous chemical, this wonder drug, had been intended precisely for

me. There was still, of course, a 15% chance of failure but, trembling with

excitement, I raced to the drug store and purchased a year’s supply of minoxidil and

immediately slathered a big, foamy blob of it where it was needed most. The

directions said it normally took about three months for results to appear. And, yes,

three months later, tiny sprouts exactly like the ones my prostate drug had produced

in the front of my head began to appear in my monk’s gap. In the ensuring months the

new crop blossomed and burgeoned and eventually filled the hitherto bare portion of

my scalp. The new crop wasn’t the hair of my youth. It was softer, frailer and

mellower, as indeed I myself was. It was an old man’s hair but I was happy to have it.

The one-two punch of Avodart and minoxidil had done the trick. Shortly thereafter I

joyously went for my first full-pate haircut in many years.

And that's how I lost my hair and got it back again.

David Blumenfeld

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is a retired philosophy professor and associate dean who writes short stories, poetry and children's literature. His publications appear in a wide variety of magazines and journals.