-by Frank Macdonald
After watching back to back commercials for products/methods to save men from the terrible fate of hair loss, I find myself wondering when the first man went bald.
In a cave somewhere in the year 10,000 B.C., I suppose, some guy rose from his bed while his wife screamed, pointing to the creature that was curled up like a porcupine on his comfortable sabre-tooth tiger pillow. To ease her distress he drove a stone-tipped spear through it. Her moment of gratitude became a continuation of her earlier scream when she looked at her husband whom someone had scalped during the night.
He went down to the placid pool that reflected him so well every morning…until this morning. His scream joined his wife’s in two-part harmony. He and his kind spent the next 12,000 years trying to correct DNA’s practical joke. Since then, more money has been spent researching hair restoration than has been spent on finding a cure for cancer for every type of cancer.
I know that caveman’s trauma.
Don’t let the present serve as an example of what I mean by the word “trauma.” The world is full of bald-headed old men. But try being an 18-year-old grade 12 student with already thinning hair watching the Ed Sullivan Show when he introduced North America to a British phenomenon called The Beatles!
All through that last school year, you have been made aware by classmates that you have grown widow’s peaks and the back of your head resembles the Sahara Desert as pictured in our geography books. Suddenly, it’s not just a thinning-on-top social embarrassment. Within months, all your friends have shunned the town’s barbershops to become the envy of their sisters. And you stand out like Margaree Island out there all alone in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
So I get what that unfortunate caveman awoke to (probably a distant cousin of my own).
Oh, I waged all the predictable wars all young men suffering my fate have fought all the way back to that aforementioned cave. I envied actors in period films where wearing the whitest, ugliest wigs was all the fashion. I squandered my allowances on back-page magazine advertisements for the perfect cure for this horrible social disease. I even bought Lanolin, falling for its sales line, “Have you ever seen a bald-headed sheep?” The end result of various experiments was that I learned how many forms snake oil can take.
Eventually, I surrendered, accepted my fate as one of those men who simply grew taller than his hairline, and watched younger men go through panic attacks every time they glanced in the mirror. I did not tell them it was hopeless. They could tell that just by looking at me.
Then men possessing that particular physical shortcoming simply took charge of their condition.
I suspect that some guy, suffering insomnia over the daily deposit of hair he was leaving on his pillow, entertained his sleeplessness by watching a late movie. Undoubtedly one of the great dusters from movie archives titled The Magnificent Seven. Among its all-star cast was Yul Brynner, Hollywood’s bald movie hero!
Why not, thought that one-man audience. The next morning he was scraping his scalp clean with his razor. The results didn’t look much better, having a head covered with small pieces of toilet paper, but it was a start.
And once one guy did it, the look caught on. Not prematurely bald any longer, but bowling ball bald by choice. Who would have thought that the cure for baldness was baldness.
As for myself, in middle-age when this trend began, why not try to catch up with this hairless fashion?
I didn’t because once, a very long time ago, I saw a picture of Isaac Hayes on his Hot Buttered Soul album and thought I would experiment with that very Brynner look. I quickly abandoned it. I told myself that I am who I am, and what I am is a man who does not need Brylcreem.
Besides, during that wholly bald experiment I discovered that my scalp wasn’t wholly unemployed during all those years. It wasn’t growing hair any more, which left it with lots of time to experiment with the growing of other things. Shaved, I discovered that under the fringe or halo bald men are left with, was a sort of laboratory. My scalp was experimenting to see how it could compensate me for its failure to allow me to join the Beatles’ generation.
Those experiments being conducted on my scalp weren’t in any way pretty. They were of a size and shape, moles and liver spots that can cause other health worries, the kind that keep dermatologists in their BMWs. So I encouraged the fringe to grow back, which has turned out to be an inadequate camouflage.
So I will leave the fight against baldness to much younger men while I change commercials.