So there we were snuggling up against each other on my family couch while my yaya sat across us wearing a facemask owned by my fiancée’s father, ready to smack my derriere with her tsinelas if my fingers traveled to any areas not yet sanctified by holy matrimony.
I stared into the gentle pools that were her eyes, cupped my hands around her face and thought, “I can’t believe yaya is still up making me bantay, I put enough sleeping pills in her coffee to knock out Manny Pacquiao.” My fiancée ran her fingers through my wavy, luxuriant locks. “Oh, my love,” she sighed. “You’ve got so much oil in your hair that you could open up your own gas station.”
She playfully twirled her fingers around my hair, extracting enough oil to lubricate her car’s engine. Then suddenly, a jolt shot through her fingers that left my brain slightly ajar. “Oh, my God!” she gasped.
“Why, love!?” I jiggled my head slightly. “My balakubak isn’t that bad, is it?”
The gentle pools that were here eyes turned into Signal Number 3. “Love,” she spoke slowly as if measuring her words, “You have a bald spot.”
I felt my heart pop.
I swiftly brushed her hands off my head and careened off to the bathroom. I sifted my fingers quickly through my scalp and, for the first time, I touched my mortality.
“Wait, this must be some mistake! I just came out of puberty 23 years ago!” I thought. I took my hands from my head. “Maybe my hair was just out of place.” So I began to shake my head furiously.
After 15 minutes of head-banging and splattering oil all over the tiles of the bathroom wall, I cautiously replanted my fingers back into my scalp. I pressed on the crown of my head, and it was as empty as an administration promise. All that shaking I did was for naught. I had a bald spot. And the edge of my vision grew dim.
“Love!” she howled from outside the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there? You know, I will still love you even when you are old, bald, and have a 40-inch waistline. Now please open up the door before you have a heart attack.”
“Wwwaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!” I slammed open the bathroom door, held on tightly to my scalp and ran towards my parent’s bedroom. I kicked open the door to their room and saw my dad slumped in his La-Z-Boy watching television, his entire scalp reflecting the screen. I ran up to my dad, curled my fingers around his seven-inch long chest hairs and, with a burst of adrenaline, lifted him up.
“Why, Dad, why!? Don’t you love me?” I sobbed inconsolably and looked away from the family curse that glared from his head. “Isn’t there anything that we can do, Dad? Can’t we pray for ancestral healing?” I blubbered.
“Don’t worry, son,” he said. I loosened my grip on this chest hair and lowered him to the ground. He gave me a nice, firm hug. “I am sure your wife will love you when you are old, bald and have a 40-inch waistline.” My dad was a master at empathy.
I slumped down on the floor and cradled the thousands of hair strands I had left. “My precious! My preeccciiiooouss!” I wailed until I finally passed out.
I wore a cap before I hopped into bed that night, hoping against hope that no more treacherous hair strands would make a mad dash for freedom. As I switched off the lights, I looked towards my bed. “Yaya, I need time for myself. I think I can sleep naman by myself tonight,” I sighed. “And please take off that facemask of my future father-in-law. It makes it hard for me to sleep at night.”
But it wasn’t the image of my fiancée’s father with a pair of rusty pliers aimed at my nether regions that kept me up that night. Instead, it was the thought that I was being confronted by the peak of my adulthood in such a brutal fashion. All those indications of age that were creeping up on me were merely a prologue to this point. I first noticed that I could no longer pass myself off as a high school student at 25 when those ridges started etching themselves across my forehead. And I think the dead giveaway that I was no longer an office worker straight out of college were the crow’s feet that planted themselves around the corners of my eyes (and not just because I was wearing baggy pleated pants and a blousy polo barong).
However, it was this mutinous bald spot that was the climax of what was now my exponential descent into old age. What was next? Comb-overs? Hair plugs? Pelukas? Saggy man breasts? Erectile dysfunction? How will I ever fulfill my dream of becoming a Bench model at this rate unless Bench starts making adult diapers!?
I wondered why God didn’t give me any choice as to what body parts I could shed for good. After all, I did inherit those unseemly seven-inch long chest hairs that disproportionately grew on the right side of my chest. Why couldn’t have God struck down those hairs instead? Or at least command my chest hair to travel up to the crown of my head? “Why such an inequitable punishment, my Lord?” I brooded. “Is this the fault of my paternal grandfather’s DNA? Is this the result of radioactive waste? Is this my karma for writing about DOMs!? Lord, you needn’t be so cruel. Take my appendix instead!”
God could have even given me one of those Hobson’s choices — the kind of choice where there really is no choice available — like do I want a bald head or do I want white hair? At least if he gave me this choice, I would still have ample time to figure out which option would be cheaper and more dignified for me to hide from public scrutiny. But I was afraid that if I kept on questioning God, he would give me a bald head with white hair.
I thought of resigning myself to this hairless fate. After all, by the time my dad was 30, a full head of hair for him was merely wishful thinking. All the gugo that his yaya religiously massaged into his scalp when he was in his mid-30s couldn’t arrest what was inevitable for my father: that his body had eaten away the hair from his scalp for protein. And now, it would merely take some more time, stress and higher interest rates until I would face my body starting to gobble up my hair as well.
Then again, I thought about my poor fiancée. I had read in the book Why Men Lie and Women Cry that when men go bald as a consequence of higher testosterone levels, this turns their scalp into an ultra mega-male signal. A bald head is a powerful masculine beacon that highlights the sex differences between males and females and ends up stimulating women and small domesticated animals. So for the sake of my impending marriage, I asked myself: Did I want to become a super bald sex magnet, attracting barely post-pubescent women who are only two thirds my waist line and four times my chest size? Or do I find a way to defy biology, retain my wavy, luxurious locks and remain in the loving clutches of my wife-to-be for the rest of my lawfully wedded life?
The choice was obvious, my three female readers, especially since my fiancée reads this column and passes it on to her friends.
After I wrote a column a couple of months ago entitled “The Brave and the Bald,” in honor of my dad and his beacon, I received offers from clinics for a private consultation.
“No, no, I wasn’t writing about myself,” I chuckled at them nervously. “I was writing about my dad’s problem!”
“Yes, of course,” they smirked. “Of course. My number’s at the back of the card.”
And here I was, several months later, making that phone call that I thought I would only make in a bad dream.
“Hello, are you still up?”
“RJ!! How are you doing?” the clinician asked excitedly. “Why are you whispering?”
“Umm, my yaya might wake up. I would (ubo ubo) like to go for that free consultation. Is it still available?”
“Fantastic!! So, RJ, what were the signs that your hair was already receding? Let me make a checklist”
“Ah, can we postpone this discussion until I get there? This phone line isn’t secure. Vengeful DOMs everywhere.” I immediately put down the receiver and buried myself underneath my sheets.
Before I dozed off, I offered a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, finder of lost articles, for all the hair that had left me since I hit voting age. Later that night, I dreamt of a bevy of barely pubescent woman waving goodbye to my hair strands as they marched down my scalp, to the tune of Raymond Lauchengco’s Farewell, and proceeded to march up the scalps of DOMs whom I had mocked in previous columns. “Your time has come! Your time has come!!” they bellowed as my hair strands embedded themselves into their scalps.
I woke up the next morning a man slightly bewildered but renewed. A man with a few less hair strands, but a man renewed nonetheless. And, hell, if GMA could win the presidential election, then I could win my hair back as well.
* * *
Next time: “The Hair Not There.” For comments, suggestions or cures for hair loss, please for the love of God e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com.