It started one morning, no different than any other morning in the most recent series of mornings. But on this particular morning, upon escaping the security of a warm bed, Jerry noticed he was bald. Yes. BALD! Yet he knew, without a doubt, that last night, when he went to bed after the Stephen Colbert Show, he’d been attached, inseparably, to a full and thriving hair forest.
What happened!? Where did my healthy 40-year-old-looking hair on a well-preserved 62-year-old body go?
He had no way to comprehend the new face in the mirror… everything was the same; a manicured 5-Oclock shadow, droopy Al Pacino-eyes… a boxer’s nose though he’d never boxed. Everything else was the same, but his hair was gone.
As he showered, he was relieved to notice that his body was normal.
He brewed a pot of coffee and called his doctor.
“Doc! Call me back as soon as you can. I’VE GONE BALD! I’m afraid to go out of the house! Call me.”
He panicked. How would he explain his sudden baldness?
He looked through the peephole; It was Gina, the sexy neighbor. A brown-haired divorcée in her late thirties, as hot-to-trot as Mae West in her mythical hot-trotting heyday. Way out of his league even 25 years ago.
Gina’s living-room window faced his home-office window, from where he watched her dance to the faint sounds of Tito Puente. Until the day when she knocked on his door with a smile and a bottle of wine. “You like to watch me dance,” she said raising the wine in front of his eyes, “and I like to watch you typing at your desk. Time we met.” That was just over a week ago, about the same time that the current series of mornings began.
“Gina,” he said without opening the door, “I’m kinda busy right now…”
“Jerry,” she interrupted. “Remember you said I could stop by for a tune-up…”
He let her in, not wanting to go back on his word, and thinking that, eventually, people would have to see his new bald head.
Gina threw her arms around him before he could confess his sense of shame… her clothes suddenly on the floor and her body urging him to postpone worrying about his folic tragedy.
At some point, while they made love, she put her hands on his head and said “I love this bald head…” which surprised him and made him think that maybe he heard incorrectly, though he made sure not to lose momentum. Around that time the phone rang in the next room, and he could hear the phone’s warning that it was “Dr. Remedios.” The call went to voicemail.
Later, as Gina dressed to go to work, she gave him a kiss and, again, ran her hands across his hairless head.
Jerry didn’t know what was happening, but he now had a smile on his face. He listened to the message from his doctor, who thought the first call had been a joke. He left another message with Dr. Remedios and tried to go back to work on his novel. Tried.
He stood by the window and made a mental checklist of things out of place.
President Trump? Real.
Xenomorphs? Not real.
Gina? Real. Probably.
Harry Blossom? A character searching for hidden gold stolen by three thieves 30 years ago, the last of which died in jail recently. Not real.
Novel in progress? So real it’s unreal. Do flowers blossom in darkness?
Approaching deadline? The deadline’s real but seems like a distant thought in a thought balloon.
Hair? Gone today, here yesterday. Real.
He spent the rest of the day taking long sips of Courvoisier and smoking bowls of California-grown weed while pondering the inner-drive of his main fictional character, wondering why he didn’t hear back from his doctor, and considering whether to order dinner or just microwave something.
After two episodes of Breaking Bad (Season 5), he went to bed and entered a much-needed recycling process. Closing his eyes he thought about Gina’s hand on his bald head, as if she’d done this before.
Jerry woke up the next morning at the same time he usually woke up in the current series of mornings. Only he immediately noticed that, today, he had a full head of hair. It wasn’t exactly like it was before he was bald, though he no longer had an active memory of any hair on his head prior to his day of baldness.
Everything else was almost as anticipated. Except that instead of worrying about why he was bald, now he was worrying about why he wasn’t. Hair just made him look different. Not younger or older. Different. Less like himself and more like that face in the mirror.
He rationalized that baldness didn’t happen overnight. You can see it coming like a truck on Highway 1.
Half-way through his first cup of coffee, as he considered calling his doctor, the doorbell rang.
I knew it was her before I looked through the peephole. I noticed the way her dress embraced her body, and for a long second, I wondered if she would notice that now I had hair, and whether this would prevent me from being able to fulfill our unwritten Tune-up agreement. I was glad it didn’t.
Their affection was real and passionate, as if both were married to other people (though he’d been single for decades and she’d been divorced for years). She didn’t seem to notice or object to his hair. And he stopped thinking about it seconds after she walked through the door.
After a comprehensive morning tune-up, she sipped coffee, picked up her clothes from the floor and got dressed. As her clothing began to hide her body from his eyes, he observed the scene as a beautiful painting with perfect colors and abstract lines. And her beauty, again, surprised him. But then…
Is her hair color different today than yesterday? He was suddenly shocked.
“You look like you’ve never seen a woman get dressed before,” she said. Then she approached him, put her arms around his head and kissed him goodbye. She ruffled his hair with both hands. Then she walked towards the door.
He didn’t know what to think. Was this the same woman? Does she only accidentally resemble Virginia Madsen in Slam Dance?
“You didn’t even notice!” said Gina, standing on the other side of the door and holding it open. “Such a delightful morning and you didn’t notice…”
He looked at her and played along. “Of course, I noticed your hair. It looks lovely.” Younger men don’t know how to use words like “lovely.”
She smiled and stepped through the door, letting it start to close on its own. But she stopped herself and pushed the door back.
She leaned her magnificent backlit frame into the apartment. “Thank you, sweetie. These tune-ups are very refreshing. And they keep me from having to sleep with any of the losers I date.”
“When you’re happy, I’m happy,” he said to her, trying not to show the puzzlement of being compared to a good vibrator.
The door closed and she was gone.
“I’m glad she didn’t say that when I was bald.”
A good writer knows when to allow what seems like insanity to mutate into what passes for inspiration. It feels the same and tastes the same, so Jerry focused all he had on his novel.
Time flew by. There was thunder in the sky.
Ideas fell like lightning, and he tried to channel them into words as quickly as he could, pushing them down through his keyboard, rearranging them into a narrative that fits the maze.
After a productive afternoon it was suddenly dark and cold. He went from room to room closing windows… thinking about his novel… his approaching deadline…
Back at his desk, it occurred to him that the basic goal of his main character was to find the gold hidden in the past… to escape the doomed reality of today and find happiness… that he had created the very problems the gold could solve and for which, inevitably, he had to die at the end of the story. Everyone dies at the end of their story.
Too bad, thought Jerry in loud spoken words. Too bad he can’t just go bald.
The next day he woke up at about the same time he did during the current series of mornings. It was one of those days that’s not Saturday or Sunday. Maybe Tuesday.
When he began to brush his teeth, he was shocked to find a different face looking back at him in the bathroom mirror. It was a new face different from the face he had yesterday, with a Richard Gere chin and George Stephanopoulos eyes. And a regular, ordinary, know-nothing nose.
The hair resembled yesterday’s hair, but longer, as if the haircut had been allowed to grow a few weeks. But the face was not his face, though it did remind him of someone he might have seen. Or created. Once upon a time.
Later, as he sipped his first cup of coffee, the doorbell rang. He knew it was her.
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