The Only Haircut I'll Ever Have
Zack Stovall calculates the cost of vanity and vintage comb overs
Losing my hair was never a tremendous deal.
I’m not vain, but objectively speaking, I was never an Adonis. I never had a flowing, Gaston-like mane descending down glistening pecs and abs, framing a perfect jaw and a plunging chin cleft that could cure typhoid.
Also, I was prepared. My mom’s dad looked roughly 45 years old on his wedding day, but he was 20. The rate of my hair’s descent would quickly surpass my dad’s own hair loss, but I remember being at a pool with him when I was a kid the first time he needed to apply sunscreen to his scalp. He was torched so badly he had to go to urgent care. Always a lesson learned one pool too late.
My corpulence and my shag made me look like John Belushi from Animal House the summer before college, which is the absolute best time to look like a 30-year-old alcoholic freshman.
My all-boys Catholic school had strict dress codes and hair policies, so naturally, after graduation, annual contests arose to see who could look the most unrecognizable. My corpulence and my shag made me look like John Belushi from Animal House the summer before college, which is the absolute best time to look like a 30-year old alcoholic freshman.
During those halcyon days of hair, my dad was quick to remind me of a Cardinal Rule of Losing Hair: the shorter it’s kept, the less noticeable it is as it goes. I nervously caved, retreating to my routine Catholic school cut during holiday break: short on the sides, just enough to comb over on top.
This severe trim shocked my classmates. Going so starkly and abruptly bald immediately after college rendered most of my their memories of me with the same bald ‘do I have now, but on a younger face. Like a Mandela Effect, but if Nelson had a horseshoe haircut.
***
Like many terminal illnesses, the hair loss progressed gradually enough that I could have end-of-life conversations with loved ones about when to pull the plug and buzz off what little remained.
My first hunch that my hairline was nearing hospice was when I went to my barber Fantastic Sam for my standard: short on the sides, enough to comb over on top.
I was initially impressed by what he did; I didn’t look as bald as I felt. But I recoiled when I realized the uncombed truth: the left side of the hair at my part was much longer than the right, creating an absurd diagonal hairline across my brow.Short on the sides, enough TO comb over on top. Note the verb. Sam, whose fantastic-ness was waning by the minute, had given me a noun.
A comb over. The horror.
I went to my sister-in-law’s salon and gave her the same explicit instructions, this time with more verbal emphasis. She plied her trade normally, gathering swaths around the sides to sharply trim with scissors. But as she ascended, she slowed down. Grasping became more desperate until she finally had four lone hairs, which she executed one by one with ruthless precision.
I stopped her. “Buzz it.”
She paused, knowing my wife would not approve.
“I’m sure,” I told her.
A No. 3 guard, a whir of clippers, and 30 seconds later I, at 23, had the only haircut I’d ever have for the rest of my life.
***
The comb over is the sign of ultimate cowardice. It is pure, abject folly. It is a lie that cannot help but reveal damning truth. For example, I once shared an office with a man named Rick whose head was the size of a microwave turned on its side. The right side grew a brilliant white meter of hair that was painstakingly crafted up, over, and back down his gargantuan noggin.
Vintage comb overs have been all but extinguished due to advances in men’s vanity, for better or worse. Turkish transplants. Toupees gorilla glued to human heads every month. And, of course, buzzing and growing a beard.
I was eager to turn 30 and shed this discomforting co-existence with people who look their age. It seemed to put the world into its natural order if I, a rotund hairless lad, was NOT in my joyous 20s.
Beards do wonders for bald men everywhere. You know those tests where they show an upside down head with the smile, nose, and eyes right-side up, and it looks okay? That’s a beard for balds; what matters is the hair is somewhere. An ironic defeat in the lives of bald men is that we cut our hair more often. Go too long, and, as any bald man will tell you, you begin to itch — and you resemble a baby bird.
These aforementioned vestiges of vain denial are further underscored by some mistakes made by the less follicularly challenged, like that alt-right Nazi cut. A buzzed side yielding to a long, over-stylized coif, like Brad Pitt in that WWII tank movie, Brad Pitt WW2 Tankman™, or something like that.
Other affronts to God include white dudes with dreadlocks and ironic mullets. Like comb overs, those haircuts make me glad to be bald. Winston Churchill once famously told a woman that while he wouldn’t be drunk tomorrow, she would still be ugly. So, I may still be bald tomorrow, but at least I can avoid whatever that is.
***
Being a bald, heavy man ages you by decades, full stop. But how the world treats you is much more subtle. Every boss I had after I went bald related to me as a lower-ranking peer.
Once, when some hit TV show had a middling finale, my boss Stacey made cubicle rounds, talking about it with my coworkers. Stacey wasn’t great at whatever her job allegedly was, but she was phenomenal at loudly having the same conversation six separate times while avoiding said job and snapping her Spanx the eye-level of anyone sitting.
I was prepared for her critiques of this finale, but when she got to me she hit me with a curveball: “They do NOT make finales like they used to. Remember M*A*S*H?!”
The M*A*S*H finale aired three years before I was born. My dad recorded on VHS every rerun that any channel aired in haphazard, non-chronological order, which is precisely as old-fashioned as saying, “I saw the M*A*S*H finale live.”
So, I was able to humor Stacey and could even detail the nuances around Alan Alda’s direction or Hot Lips Houlihan’s turn or why Jamie Farr’s spinoff didn’t work, without making Stacey feel ancient.
But Stacey sucked, so I did it anyway.
After nodding in polite agreement when she proclaimed, “They don’t make ‘em like they used-tah!!!” I noted how much older M*A*S*H was than the portly bald man filling her cubicle with ill-fitting khakis and drawing countless doodles on company time.
Her expression withered like Matt Damon dissolving into an old man at the end of Saving Private Ryan. She demanded proof. All it took was a glance at the year I graduated college listed on Facebook.
“Well,” she replied, gnashing her teeth, “I’ve never felt older.”
My grandparents have walked by me without a whiff of recognition of the old gentleman before them. An aunt once began to introduce herself to me when I was wearing a hat.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that my visage made others feel disproportionately aged. While most people dread the passing of decades, I was eager to turn 30 and shed this discomforting co-existence with people who look their age. It seemed to put the world into its natural order if I, a rotund hairless lad, was NOT in my joyous 20s.
My 30s have yielded new developments. I’ve had what others may call aesthetic improvements — or a “glow up.” I’m willing to accept that low bar, given a mutual understanding: there was nowhere to glow but up.
I’ve gotten in better shape; working out, dieting, and not drinking like a Belushi cartoon. I’ve never had what doctors call a “metabolism,” not even when I was a kid. I weighed about 230 lbs standing at a stout 5’4” in my freshman year of high school.
Balding and weight fluctuations are nothing new for me, but they are wild new frontiers for my peers. Friends who can’t spell ‘treadmill’ are find their bodies betray them as they consume weekly gallons of alcohol. They wonder what’s going on while they scroll through TikToks detailing THE hack to the eight-pack of their dreams that’s JUST four creatine suppositories away.
My days without hair are outpacing my days with. Friends and family with Mandela-Effect imaginings of a horseshoe haircut boy? They have been around for almost two decades. My grandparents have walked by me without a whiff of recognition of the old gentleman before them. An aunt once began to introduce herself to me when I was wearing a hat.
It’s hard to be vain with this haircut. I feel required to be smart, funny, or some self-deprecating version of both. But is that vanity, too? What is it worth, to me or anyone, to measure myself by my clippers? Is the admission that I dwell on these things – even though I say I don’t – a psychological comb over that positions me the way I’d like to be seen, since I can’t control the way I’m seen?
I don’t have answers. I just know that every Thursday, I go into the bathroom and give myself a haircut, clean up, and apologize to my wife for not cleaning well enough.
But every now and then, I still move my fingers over my scalp, running them through a phantom part that hasn’t been there in 15 years.
