Hemingway Fights Male Pattern Baldness
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or The Short Happy Life of Frances’ Comb: To Have and Have Not Hair
Frances’ comb was an old comb and he used it alone. He had not combed his hair for eighty-four days and the hunt for hair was getting harder all the time. When he had been younger, in the days before he got older, the hair had been as plentiful as the fish in the Gulf Stream.
He reached for the comb and took aim. The comb used to be just a small part of his fine arsenal of hair care products. Before the comb had proved its solitary worth he had used it in tandem with the sleek Remington blow dryer and a fine vent brush of the type made by the Italians that practically forced the hair into submission. The Italians, he thought to himself, were fine chaps even though they could be a bit aggressive but he did not think it was politically correct to say so any longer.
When you had a lot of hair you had to use all the weapons a soldier could bring to tame the wild hair to do as it was told. If you were lucky enough to have had brave hair and a powerful arsenal of truly excellent hair care products, you used them all and even took them with you for the aficionado of grooming knows that hair care is a moveable feast and if you were lucky enough to have had very brave and very strong hair as a young man, then it stayed with you forever. Sometimes.
The hair line, Frances noted, was also A Moveable Feast and in that way it was much like Paris. The truly difficult thing was that unlike the experience of being a young man living in Paris, the hairline did not stay with you forever. You could almost count on betrayal. Women. Paris. Critics. Then the hairline. If you made the mistake of living long enough, no matter what you did, everything would betray you.
The hairline was moveable and yet not with you forever and this was the problem. The hairline he faced that morning was one that of late had been retreating back away from his forehead even faster than the Greeks had retreated from the Turks back in Smyrna. Ah, they were damned fine chaps, those Greeks, even in retreat. He did not think much about them anymore because he had seen them back in the days before he was famous, so it must not have been very important.
Frances thought about how hard it had been not being famous while he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror that morning, In the morning that came just before the afternoon because that is how many of his mornings were in those days.
Mornings and afternoons were something like wives and writing great books, first one and then the other and then another one. On and on. You tried to have grace under pressure and deal with the mornings with honor. In this way, too, they were also like wives, you wanted to have honor. Get on her and stay on her, he thought to himself, because that morning he was positively stinking with honor. He was manly that morning, more so than his reflection as it stared back at him. Main thing a reflection did. Stared right back at you. He noticed that it was the same reflection that had stared back at him last night from the clean, well-lighted windows of Harry’s Bar in Paris and he didn’t think it was right that the reflection seemed to follow him everywhere he went.
He made a swift jab with his left and wiped away some of the steam off of the mirror and there was that damned reflection again, underneath the steam. It was something like the iceberg principle and writing, the best part of it was underneath and invisible but there was that part of it that showed through the waterline and the steam which was something like dead water. Everything died in those mornings, even the water.
And somehow his morning and his heart grew cold and icy and broken and alone, much like a Delaware-sized iceberg.
“Damn insolent reflection,” Frances said aloud because he was ready to fight because he was a man and a man fought stuff. Main thing a man did.
The reflection mouthed the words with him but made no sound.
“Damn insolent silent reflection,” he said.
His freshly washed hair stood on end, having barely survived the morning attack of the strong, relentless Shower Massage jet-spray. His wife had spoken to him about the great pleasures of the Shower Massage but he did not gain pleasure from how certain of the finer strands of his thinning hair swayed like the short grasses of the Serengeti Plain. Now there were also bright shiny patches of skin showing through the fine strands of hair just as if they had been mowed down by a stampeding herd of wildebeest. Only the hair had not been ravaged by wildebeest, not quite, really. Rather.
“Male pattern baldness,” Frances said, even though there was no one to hear him other than his reflection and his now solitary comb. Frances liked to think that he was the strong silent type but he could never be as strong as the Shower Massage or as silent as his reflection, no matter how hard he fought.
“They say it is the fault of the mother. Damn insolent mother.”
Many things had been her fault, like the playing of the cello. Many things had been her fault because she had been a first-rate bitch and he had said so, more than once. Then he realized that made him a son of a bitch and that he would fight anyone who said so, even his reflection. But it was better not to think about the Mother and how she’d made him wear dresses until he was an eight-year old boy. Not now.
Now was the time for the running of the comb and to be brave like the big bulls at the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona. You took the comb and ran it through the hair and had to fight not to think about the retreating hair line or the retreating Greeks or even the one he called Mother. Even though the comb was his only remaining weapon, it was a good, clean comb with strong lines and the lines of the comb stood firm like the lines of Nationalistas in Spain. He had worn more hair back then in that war back when he had thought that you were what you wore and that this was true even in war. That was back when he was young and had still believed in truth. Now there was less hair and even though there was less, more of it was white like the color of surrender and he could not make himself surrender.
He picked up his comb and made another pass at the hair, going in boldly and strongly, in the manner of Belmonte moving in for a quick kill after the picador had finished his work or perhaps like Gertrude Stein doing anything. Certain strands of the hair gave themselves fully to the attack and ended up captured in the comb. Of course Frances knew that there was nothing to be done for those imprisoned by the enemy tines of the comb. Being caught was the same as death, worse, really, in a way, because then you had to clean the comb and you got that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, the way you do when you know that your hair is done for and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. There was the hair club for men, but there was no glory in that, and you weren’t really fooling anyone, not even your reflection.
So you did the only thing a man could do, you used the comb to arrange the hair to cover as much of the scalp as possible, but gracefully.
And you knew that truly, like the earth, like living in Paris, and like a reflection, the hairline did move.
Scott Stavrou is a PEN America Hemingway Award Winner and the author of the literary satire: Hemingway Lives: the Super-Secret, Never-Before-Published Blogs of Ernest Hemingway
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