no, anthony kiedis, i wish i saw

When I went into the waiting room, I thought I’d be comically out of place as a twenty year old at the most heavily advertised hair replacement center in all of Metro Detroit – Doctors Tessler and Aronowitz, Hair Replacement Specialists. Imagine my disappointment when I entered the office in southfield only to find it filled with homely, badly dressed west bloomfield girls and their mothers. Perhaps the dermatology was a discretionary practice in order to disperse the excess of self-consciousness across a broader demographic of embarrassment.

The nurse led me back for my consultation after I had filled out a number of forms designed to determine my desperation’s depth and suggested I take a look at the booklets full of poorly printed before and after pictures. I quietly assumed the lackluster image quality was an intentional but gentle hand hold to lead the words hair and plus apart, to close the door softly after plugs. Dr. Arnowitz arrived a short five minutes later, which was remarkable for any doctor’s office, especially so because I was not paying for my initial examination. As I stood to shake his fleshy paw, I found myself puzzled with his counter-intuitive male pattern baldness, but refrained from commenting on the remarkable sheen of his liver-spotted scalp, although I may have reflexively squinted a little.

In addition to this concern kept company by buck-toothed dentists, overweight physicians, and male lesbians, upon squirming in his floppy handshake, I had a horrible thought. Maybe the softness of his skin was not maintained in the priestly regiment of non-scented, hypoallergenic hand creams so as not to abrade the comfort hungry parish, but instead a result of touching people’s greasy heads all day; this notion of a different type of all-natural moisturizer forced me to fake a cough while I actually gagged a little. While he flicked my hair around in search of the scar, I was a little jealous that he got to meet my bald spot when my acquaintance with that part of myself was essentially a glory hole finger fuck when I got nervous.

Maybe I wouldn’t have picked the scab so much if its single sense (touch) accessibility, or maybe limitation, wasn’t so fascinating, and sometimes it even felt like I was pulling out infant segments of skull. It got so bad and uncontrollable that nubs for fingernails wasn’t prohibitive enough, so my mother knitted me a tiny hat small enough to be mistaken for a misguided yarmulke. Two weeks earlier it had healed enough for my own dermatologist to deem that particular pasture of my head to be infertile and salted in the form of overabundant scar tissue growth, which is how I ended up at Tessler and Aronowitz. Upon his referral to the Hair Specialists of Metro Detroit, I saw the entire Bernstein family, even the cross-eyed one, in my head, and wondered how many people good ole Sam had sent over to T and A.

My inability to decide whether it was funnier to be a twenty year old with hair plugs or a twenty year old with a bald spot on the top of my head began to shift, as if Aronowitz’s description of the hair transplant process – involving slits with scalpels, microscopes, and tweezers – was easing out the clutch. It sounded gross and not at all funny in its pattern of two grand wait three months two grand wait three months two grand wait three months. Even though I’d never met the bottom boundary of my scalp either, I knew a change of location wouldn’t change that.