Hair Piece

Hair, a.k.a. human plumage, may be dead stuff on our head, but it is also the original status symbol, a hood ornament indispensable to the car’s value. Having good hair is critical to success. When I started losing mine I was young. Issued a standard older image, I needed to adjust. From being the hero of my own story, I became a sidekick to no one in particular, a bit player in a blockbuster epic titled “Everyday Life.” Hair loss is a life-changing injury. It does not alter how you walk or talk, but how you are perceived, thus damaging your social persona, which informs and motivates all that you do. When your hair goes, you are demoted from the physical elite, exposed as defective, abased by nature, spoiled by age. It is a social law. I have heard men say they look at woman’s body, not her face, and women often focus on a man’s eyes—but both genders care about hair.

Hair loss is fate made manifest in a first impression. Other flaws escape censure—for awhile. Bad teeth can be whitened, capped or hidden—if they are molars. Obtuseness can be muted by reticence or improved with coaching. If you are mean, incompetent, witless, or insane, people might not catch on if you are discreet. But hair loss is public and in plain sight, a matter of record. People you meet may not remember your name or the color of your eyes, but they will recall if you had hair. You cannot hide or run from hair loss. Try at the risk of ridicule.

Americans believe in human perfectibility, but hair loss is that curious exception. With most defects, people appreciate any effort to improve. If you are ignorant they admire your initiative to read a publication or to do a word puzzle. When you have halitosis, you are respected for using mouth wash, chewing gum or popping mints. But the mere attempt to improve or mitigate hair loss with hair weaves and toupees heaps abuse on men who wish to thus elevate their status.

This is no abstract law of human behavior, but based on empirical evidence. I once stood in a Kinko’s behind a distinguished Asian man in a suit and tie. He had the nervous manner of a junior professor running late for the key presentation of his career. He also had a hair weave puffing up in back like the neck of a mating frigate bird. The hair to which it attached had grown and now the weave was levitating off his head. He needed it “restrung” like a tennis racket. Other customers on line, hardened by boredom, pointed, tittering, at the weave in limbo between hair and hat. Fortunately, the distinguished man was too nervous to discern their mirth. His preoccupation with color copies and lateness shielded him from humiliation. However, a day of reckoning was on this professor’s agenda. He was on a collision course with a grim discovery—his hair weave was stabbing him in the back.

Toupees are also objects of ridicule. They are called “rugs” for a reason. A floor covering now sits on your head. If a man wears a toupee two things must be true: he has great fortitude and confidence; and his toupee is imperceptibly natural. Otherwise he will suffer great torment, since people are ruthless about outing a toupee. An incident comes readily to mind. A corpulent, ugly man I know with mephitic breath and poor social skills, considers himself superior to bald men because he has a full head of hair—and he has no compunctions about “pulling rank.” At a Barnes and Noble “Meet the Author” reading, this hair supremacist heckled the popular author of a self-help book because the man wore a toupee. During the Q&A, the hirsute lout asked the speaker, “How dare you give people advice when you have a dead musk rat on your head!”

Why will people let you improve your mind but not your head of hair? This prejudice does not apply to women with dyed hair, wonder bras, and compressing body shapers. We do not care if the results are factitious; to the contrary, we credit these women for valiantly trying to improve their assets and make themselves more appealing. However, bald men are held to a higher ethical standard. We are compelled to flaunt our flaw everyday. It must be a conspiracy to oppress the masculine majority, who share this common defect, and to uphold a hair-centric social order. Hair might seem an odd and impractical organizing principle, but it has one powerful attribute—simplicity. Hair is a symbol for power, a sexual marker, and a symbol of youth. Hair retention and loss therefore is a fast and easy test of natural selection and a sign of divine favor. A full head of hair on a man is rare enough to suggest genetic election to nature’s elite, while hair loss is common enough to provide a massive under-class, essential for paying taxes, making war, and doing the menial tasks that keep society running.

Why do we need such an arbitrary social marker? Because there is too much equality in the world and it confuses people and makes us unhappy. There is a surfeit of educated men, strong men, men with jobs, cars, a proficiency in foreign languages, a taste for good food and wine. A quick and easy way is needed to separate wheat from chaff. If men are allowed to cheat on their appearance with fake air, how can women weed out the losers?

Of course, hair is more complex than having it or not. Among hirsute, young men more subtle comparators rule—good hair, bad hair, weird hair, irresistible hair, hair better kept short. However, such distinctions fade as follicles die and their mention can arouse memories and regrets in men wish they could still make them. My hair is now sparse and though I want to claim I once possessed a magnificent mane, the Polaroid documentation does not exist. Even when my hair was abundant it was a mixed metaphor—doing too much at once. It was a bramble, not a rolling meadow—dense, difficult, tortuous. It was turbulent and wavy as high tide on a rocky shore with cowlicks, like eddies and water-spouts, in inconvenient places. It was never neat and attractive, or even as straight, greasy and uncomplicated as the rock star hair I tried to emulate. In short, my hair never served me; it was not my extension, just dead stuff on top of my head. Maybe that was not such a bad thing because it saved me from missing my hair too much when it started to go. You’re hurt less by what never helped.

Such a matter must seem too trivial to ponder in detail, and I am the first to wish the quality of a man’s hair were not more important to most people than the quality of his mind. And while the cosmos is more profound than a mosquito, a can of Raid will do more good in woods than a telescope. Surely many people have held my hair against me until wrinkles and eye circles shared the weight of negative attention. Conversely, I might have more success with better hair, but I am reluctant to use hair as an excuse.

It would be unfair to my other flaws.