There was a whole vocabulary for the brown heads of every seven-year-old boy I knew, mine was referred to as mousy, which made me think of small creatures, of hedgerows, of goblins that pass unnoticed. My mother cut it herself at the kitchen table, a pudding bowl affair she was proud of. It looked like every other boy’s hair in our street.
Hair is dead. Each strand, every dyed or product-worked piece, is resting in peace. I used to believe the myth that it continues to grow after we die, but the only part alive is inside the follicle under the scalp. And it sounds made up, or just gloriously apt, that head, pubic and armpit hair is known as terminal hair. Keratin, the protein that forms its basis, is the same one found in animal hooves, reptile claws, porcupine quills, and the beaks and feathers of birds. Wing tip to split end, fetlock to forelock, we mammals are a menagerie of polypeptide chains. Each strand contains everything that has ever been in our bloodstream. Are memories there too, lurking between medulla and cuticle, embedded in each lock?
Not dead, but terminal. Protein and protean. Hair has been used to define men as virility, as rank, as threat. Cut it and you unman them. The logic runs through Absalom, whose abundant hair catches in the branches of an oak as he rides beneath, leaving him hanging between earth and sky, neither escaped nor returned, killed by the thing that made him beautiful. His hair was his vanity and his sentence at once. Samson we remember as a cautionary tale about a woman’s treachery, but read it again and Samson was a man who could not stop talking. He told Delilah everything. What undid him was the need to be known.
I know something about that.
I started losing my hair on a Tuesday in February, and that is the day I began my long relationship with the mirror. I told myself it was vanity, a simple stupid binary to look sick or look normal. I understood neither would change what was happening inside. The leukaemia didn’t care about hairlines. But I did. I cared with a desperation that surprised me. I’d never thought of myself as a man who cared about his appearance. I’d spent years carefully not caring, not looking, passing through rooms without catching my own eye.
The mirror was not about vanity at all. It was about recognition. There are two kinds of sick people. Those who can look at themselves and see what is there, and the other sort. I spent too long learning which kind I was.
Heavy doses of a drug called idarubicin. I heard the name as Ida Rubinson, and imagined a stern and kindly woman in a good coat. Not all chemotherapy takes the hair. Idarubicin does.
It doesn’t fall out in an instantaneous cartoon moment. There is no KAPOW and it’s gone. You wake up with it on the pillow. You brush it and strands come away in clumps in your hand. You watch it slip from your scalp and there is nothing to be done. The decision to remove it came down to the practical affair of my own eyes. The constant shedding irritated my lids, and my vision was already affected by the drug regime. I asked the nurse.
“Are you sure?” she said.
I had been sure of less important things with far more confidence.
“A wig,” the kind saleswoman on the phone explained, is considered a prosthesis. “Like a leg.”
I thought of the World War One amputees who reported phantom limbs, convinced that a missing extremity of bone and flesh was still attached and reaching. I never felt the wig that way. I had chosen something neither close to what I had lost nor far from it — dark, nondescript, the hair of a man who had not yet had to think about his hair. A consultant hairdresser in a quiet room on Burnside trimmed and clipped it as though it were real.
The toupee I wore more, but not much more. Glue, position, blow dry. Some days I wore it to the pharmacy, to the endless appointments, to the grocery store where I bought the same things each week because decision-making still cost more than I had. Other days the mirror won and I put on a cap instead. Most days I didn’t leave the apartment.
Inside came a hairpiece, adhesive, a small brush, and an instruction sheet with diagrams. Thin even strokes. Thirty seconds until tacky. Position carefully. Blow dry on low heat. I laid everything on the bathroom counter and unscrewed the adhesive cap. The chemical smell filled the small room. I dipped the brush. Drew a line of glue across watched it go from white to translucent.
Pressed it down, smoothed it back. The blow dryer turned the glue invisible. The hairline looked almost natural. Almost. I turned my head in the mirror, checked the angle from the side. The man looking back was not a stranger. Here in the hair of some Eastern European to match my wavy texture, was a man I recognised, but who was not myself.
At seventeen, I’d cut my hair to the scalp for the first time. Not illness. Choice. Or what passes for choice when you’re seventeen and have discovered, recently and catastrophically, something true about yourself, and the only response available is to alter your surface as radically as you can.
In London in the late 1980s, the skinhead had been reclaimed. I knew this, having read about it in the music press, and seen it myself in certain pubs in certain parts of the city I had only recently begun to navigate. The shaved head as queer signal. Defiance made visible. A refusal to look like what was expected.
At school there was outrage. Enquiries about my health. Jokes I didn’t find funny then and don’t find funny now. The questions men asked, and it was always men, when they saw me.
What did you do to yourself?
Are you ill?
Are you one of those?
I walked through those years with a shaved head and I passed, if not as straight, then as unknowable. Which was good enough.
Reading Gaol had cut the hair of Oscar Wilde on arrival. It was part of the degradation in that machinery of correction. Not rehabilitation. Correction. The prisoner’s head was shorn to mark the boundary between the man he had been and the criminal the state required him to become. Wilde wrote about how they had taken his clothes, his name, his books. The hair was almost an afterthought. Almost. De Profundis goes on about what the prison took. Every outward sign of a man, stripped to something raw, but it couldn’t remove the insides. No, that part remained his own, never allowed to slither its way out. He had to sit with it, which was the real punishment, and the real work.
I thought about Wilde often during the months in and out of hospital. Not because I found the comparison apt, but because of what he said about sitting with yourself when the outward scaffolding is gone. When you cannot perform your way out of a room. When the mirror gives you only what is there.
I was released from the hospital in June. A friend had found me a sublet in a city that didn’t know me. I had always wanted to see Portland. More than that, I needed a city that held no prior version of me up for comparison. Los Angeles, where I had been living, has a long memory for bodies. I needed somewhere that didn’t care.
The studio had a single bathroom with a mirror that caught the morning light too directly. I stood there each day, bare-chested, and made myself look. Bald. Ribs showing. Collarbone like a wire hanger. A man at six-two who weighed barely eleven stone and still woke up each morning surprised to be still standing.
The neighbourhood smelled of coffee roasting and the roses that give the city its name. I walked slowly in the mornings because I had to, my legs still finding their range, the dog pulling ahead on the lead and looping back to check on me. Some afternoons I sat in the yard under the plum trees while the bees worked the lavender along the fence. A woman in the house behind mine played cello in the early evenings, slightly imperfect in the way that meant she was playing only for herself. There was no one here who remembered what I had looked like before.
After bone marrow, hair is the fastest-growing tissue in the body. I discovered this later, when there was a later to discover things in. The body, having survived its own correction, turns first to this: the small, the terminal, the dead thing that keeps insisting on return.
The dog never had an opinion about what I looked like. Had never had one. He had stayed through the toupee and the caps and the mornings I couldn’t get off the bathroom floor. He had stayed when the ex left, stayed when I moved cities, stayed through the whole duration of what I was beginning to understand was not a chapter but a revision — of the self, all the way down to the follicle.
There is a beach along the Columbia River, east of the city, where people go to be free of things. I thought about going for several days before I went. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. Some confrontation, maybe, with the body I had been avoiding in glass and in other people’s glances. I had spent so long waiting for judgments of test results, scans, the shifts in my oncologist’s expression, that I’d come to believe judgment was simply the shape of the future. A sentence always about to be handed down.
The path wound through tall grass and thick brush, sandy and uneven. I walked slowly. Other people moved past me. I let them. I had stopped being in a hurry, which was either a symptom or a cure, and I was no longer sure it mattered which.
When the path opened onto the beach I stopped. There were beautiful bodies, yes, and there were other bodies too. A man with a long scar along his sternum. A couple in their seventies, walking. They were all here, all bare, all apparently unbothered by being seen.
I sat for a long time. The dog slept caked in sand at my feet, which is what he always did, in health and in illness and in whatever was coming next, which I was beginning to allow myself to imagine. He had no opinion about what I was, nor ever required a version of me that was better than what I was.
Eventually I stood and he lifted his head. We walked toward the water. He broke into a run and I ran after him, my thin legs carrying me further than I expected, further than they had any right to. The sand was hot and then cool where the river met the shore. He plunged in and I followed. The water was cold, shockingly cold, and I waded forward until I was waist-deep, and he swam in circles around me, his whole body working without hesitation.
I dropped below the surface and came up into the light. My body was thin. My body was moving.
Hair grows back. This is both a fact and, for a while, a kind of faith.
Mine came in differently. Softer. A different texture than before, as though whatever had been treating the illness had revised other things as well, further down in the code of me. I stood at the bathroom mirror and watched it return, week by week. Not the hair I had performed myself through. Something underneath it.
I have a dog with a considerable coat. Every evening, in the house I’ve lived in, a city again, a life again, though smaller than what came before, I sit on the floor and brush him out. He agrees to this with the suspicion of an animal who knows it’s good for him but reserves the right to be sceptical. I work through the tangles section by section with a wide-toothed comb on the thick parts and a soft brush for the rest, which is not unlike how I learned to approach most things that had knotted on me.
Samson’s story ends with him pulling down the temple. His hair grows back in captivity, and he destroys the thing that destroyed him, and dies in the rubble. We’re supposed to read this as triumph.
The dog tips his chin up, which is his way of saying enough, or perhaps of saying that this is enough. The room is quiet. Outside, someone is walking home late, footsteps on wet pavement. My hair, where it catches the lamp, is a colour that has never had a name for itself either.
Jeff Radwell has short fiction in Consequence Magazine, Foglifter, Hobart, and elsewhere. Find him at jeffradwell.com