Hair

The guy on the left is a maybe. Meaning he’s smarter than the other one. Who’s running?
When you get to be an old guy, you start thinking about hair. The facts are pretty daunting. Percentages matter. Age in Years = Percent Chance You are Bald or Balding. For a long time I thought I might be immune. Had that Dorian Gray thing going for me. Until I got to be 60 and saw it was going to be a delusion eclipsed by the laws of probability. My dad had the nickname “Baldy” in college because he had what looked like a receding hairline even back in his salad days. When he died at the age of 77, he still had a full head of hair, much to the chagrin I’m sure of old friends who had parted company with their own locks many years before.

Thought I had that particular statistical game beat since I had the same hairline he did. Wrong. It’s all about genes. You get them from mom and dad both. My dad genes said hair to the bitter end. My mom genes said her dad’s hair was equally important. Never noticed that Grandpa Miesse had the same hairline as Dad and Boppa, which represented in the Miesse case as extreme thinning in the latter years. Which is okay. I’m used to what’s happening now. Losing my hair, just as the laws of gene-itude say I was always destined to. When Grandpa died at the age of 91 he still had hair too, meaning something that could be combed and looked kind of like hair, but you would have said, to a man, that he was a balding old gent. Where I’m going. As I said, I’m okay with that.

The thing. My point. You start to notice. All the men on TV, in the movies, on the news. There they are, getting old right in front of you, and they all have hair, lots of it. Can’t be. You become a toupé hound. And, yes, there are guys who are not losing their hair, a very few who, like my Sephardic friend Rob, who had a dad who looked like a hobbit with an abundantly thatched roof (not kidding) and will die some day from all kinds of painful physical ailments but with a full head of hair. Which is also okay. I have painful physical ailments of my own that will kill me one day. Hair won’t be one of those. (Rob has also promised to mail me my college diploma before he is in extremis, which would be okay too, just saying. Long story.)

Where was I? Mostly, the men out there are not Sephardic and as they grow old do not have hair. Well, there’s hair but it’s always thinning, thinning, thinning, from the 40s on. Unless they’re on TV. You start looking at men about your own age with, well, suspicion. Come on. That’s a toop. That is NOT his hair. It’s not so much that he has hair. That’s plausible. What isn’t is how much hair he has. Way too much hair for a movie star or news anchor in his sixties.

You start to appreciate the honest ones. And, yes, I’m going to be naming some names. It’s okay if they’re just fighting the inevitability. Joe Biden. Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Willis wears a toop in some of his movies like nobody. It’s great when they just say to you I have times when I need hair. Not as bold and brave maybe as Sean Connery and Jason Statham, yet bold and brave in their own way, kind of. Trump comes to mind. He knows that we know and he does not care. But the guys who are making fun of Trump’s giant combover when they have been tooped to the nines for years, that’s a little bit much. Does the name De Niro ring a bell? Just saying.

There’s more than one kind of closet. The picture up top. It’s comparatively easy these days to be out of the gay closet. What I dislike more and more these days is guys who won’t come out of the bald closet. They must know that most guys know they can’t have that much hair at their age.

You see, all us old guys know. Where the part is and what it means when it’s that low.. The color difference between your hair and the other hair. Where that thickness has to come from. The amount of time that has to be spent every day pretending you still look ten (or twenty or thirty) years younger than you are. The little plastic head in your bedroom where the toop sits waiting for tomorrow.

Where was I? When you’re an old guy, the mind wanders. Mine is just wandering a bit now, and wondering, about the honesty issue. Can we afford more dishonest old white guys? And what is more important to be honest about than what you really look like?