A bald man's lament

I’m here to talk about the plight of the bald man.

It’s one of the few demographics that doesn’t have its own advocacy group, probably because most people don’t give a crap. It’s not an affliction as daunting as poverty, or as heart-wrenching as a serious disease. Schools don’t start bottle drives to raise money for bald dudes; comedians don’t host telethons and ask for donations to the American Cueball Fund. Still, if there’s one thing an advocacy group is good at, it’s getting stuff. So I propose a coalition of baldies, hair-loss sympathizers, and spouses of the bare-headed – a group whose sole focus is to procure that one commodity essential to sufferers of feckless follicles.

Hats. It’s getting cold, man.

There’s disagreement over whether a person loses most of their body heat through their head, as the old saying goes. The latest research indicates that’s a myth, like Bigfoot, or a decent fruitcake. Regardless, a head without hair is like a sockless foot – without that warm, protective barrier, a slight chill translates into icebox conditions, enough to make a man feel like the hanging beef carcasses in a Siberian slaughterhouse.
Now, I was never that distressed, psychologically speaking, about my receding hairline. My hair began to thin, little by little, strand by strand, when I was as young as 15, and so I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea. I knew when I was a sophomore in high school that I would eventually shave my head completely, thus looking like some impossible lovechild of Howie Mandell and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Having been accustomed to the absurd aesthetic of my bare pate for about half my life now, it’s not the look that bothers me – it’s the feel. That post-Halloween, winter-chilled feel.

Admittedly, there are certain advantages to sporting a full-on chrome dome. Rain and wind, for instance, are far less of a bane than they used to be. There’s something liberating about walking out to the car in a raging spring rain and not having to readjust unruly cowlicks or storm-dampened curlicues. Split ends are a thing of the past. And the money I save on shampoo could be used to build a school in Haiti, with enough left over for a Sham-Wow and a Blu-ray box set of Battlestar Galactica.

That’s to say nothing of the time saved by not getting haircuts. I sat in a hair stylist’s chair for over 20 years and never felt fully comfortable. Part of it was the forced banter – “Oh, your son just had a boil lanced? Awesome!” – but mostly it was the feeling that I was an experiment of some kind, a special project. Truthfully, the back of my head was uncomfortable with such a high level of scrutiny, as if it were some fuzzy, fleshy diamond being inspected by a jeweler.

On balance, having no hair at all is a relief. Until the winds change.

You baldies out there know what I’m talking about.

Picture it: You’re walking around hatless all summer, your scalp a distinctive bronze (protected by sunblock, of course), your body temperature normal. You get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, and the slightly cool air of the wee hours feels pleasant on your head, a background sensation felt through a haze of semi-consciousness. Then summer turns to fall, October leaves are piling around your feet, and you feel the very tips of Jack Frost’s fingers tracing lightly over your scalp, both a tease and a promise. Inevitably, one day, it happens: You walk outside and are blasted by winter wind, the skin on your hatless head pulls taught like a nylon stocking, and you spend the rest of the morning hunched over a space heater trying to feel your face.

Happens every year. You hairy people have no idea how good you’ve got it.

It’s a curious fact of human evolution that baldies have come to live in cold climes. You’d think they’d all be huddled down near the equator, with Maine and Canada and all the rest populated by pompadours and heat-trapping mullets. But we’re here, and we’re freezing. So as your contemplate gifts for your bald-headed loved ones this holiday season, consider something woolly, with earflaps. The outpouring of gratitude will last until May.