TO BE OR NOT TO BE BALD

A Bald Man’s Thoughts on the New Cure

Remember those yellow, triangular “BABY ON BOARD” signs that hung in car windows? When I was a kid, I found a parody version for my dad, a bald man, that read: I’M NOT BALD. I’M GETTING MORE HEAD.

I gave it to him proudly, like a cat presenting a dead mouse to it’s owner. My dad received it with the same lack of enthusiasm. At the time, I didn’t know it was a double entendre. I thought it meant his head was simply growing larger. A top tier bald joke! So good, in fact, that I repeated it everywhere: “My dad isn’t bald, he’s just getting more head.”

It got mixed reactions. Which makes sense, because I was in the fifth grade, telling people a blowjob joke about my Dad, who often was in the same room. Some relatives looked at me like I was announcing I was in a cult. Others laughed so hard it made me feel like a comedy prodigy. I couldn’t understand why my dad refused to hang the sign in his car, so I made it my mission. Every ride, I’d suction cup it to the window of his Volkswagen Beetle, and every few days it vanished. Eventually, he figured out a way to rid himself of it; he gave it to me! It was the perfect gift. I pinned it to the corkboard in my bedroom, beside a picture of an Ewok and a hockey jersey clad Alyssa Milano.

Years later, I spotted another bald guy at Bumbershoot wearing the same slogan on a T-shirt. That’s when it hit me: OH NO! I had forced my dad’s car to become a rolling blowjob billboard. And even worse, it was a bald joke.

The Last Acceptable Punchline

Bald jokes are the final socially acceptable form of appearance based humor. No one blinks. It’s not even a stereotype, just a declaration: You’re bald. A fact dressed up as a punchline. The unspoken add on: You’ll always be slightly less than. You bald sonofabitch.

And think about how many times we’ve seen single women in movies lament that there are no eligible men left. The bar is always absurdly low, gainfully employed, reasonably kind, maybe not a serial killer—and then comes the kicker: and please, for the love of God, with hair.

But try and fix it and you got another set of issues. Toupees are hilarious. Wearing one is performance art. Everyone knows it’s fake, yet the confidence of the man wearing one is unmatched. A man in a toupee could stand over a corpse with a smoking gun and still say, ‘Wasn’t me. Hair transplants are trickier: a good one is invisible, which is probably why the freshly refollicled behave like nothing ever happened. They expect you to believe they sprouted a new hairline over a long weekend.

What makes baldness different from nose jobs, boob jobs, or Ozempic? We congratulate those changes: You look great! No one interrogates the process. But grow back hair, and suddenly you’re a cheater. I think, deep down, we don’t want people to fix bald. You got dealt a bad genetic hand, and the world wants to see you play it out. Any other body part can be negotiated, but hair? Hair is destiny.

Follicular Panic

Like most bald men, I started with hair, much to the surprise of anyone who sees a childhood picture of me and always comments, “Oh wow, you had hair!” Childhood photos of me are shocking: thick, luxurious hair, the kind of mane strangers commented on. Mousse, gel, spikes—I ruled benevolently. So when I first noticed a pale patch at the crown of my head, I convinced myself it was an angle issue. Or maybe, I thought hopefully, I really was just getting more head.

I panicked, of course. I needed to fix this. First stop: Eastern medicine. A Chinese doctor tapped my scalp like he was typing a novel on a manual typewriter and told me the hair was still there, just “asleep.” He prescribed a nightly self head tap (that was supposed to be “hard enough to be painful”) and a nightly tea made of twigs, dirt, and what looked like the contents of a bird’s nest. I gagged it down every night, convinced it was working. It did not.

Then I moved to Western medicine. My pharmacist dad warned me about Propecia: “Once you start, it’s for life.” Okay, I’m in. For months I would squeeze 5ml of this syrupy substance from a dropper onto my scalp and rub it in, it was gross. At the time I was a single man in New York City sneaking out of bed in the middle of night during “sleepovers” to baste my head like a Thanksgiving turkey, which wasn’t as erotic as it sounds.

My head was always sticky that it could double as a fly trap, for fear of anyone experiencing it first hand, I got into a bad habit of recoiling whenever anyone tried to touch my head. So I gave off a real stand off-ish vibe. I hated how Propecia made me feel. I felt like I was in service to my scalp 24x7. So I eventually quit, and it felt freeing.

Now while I was off the potions, that didn’t mean I didn’t still try things. I made the rookie bald mistake—clinging to the front, cultivating a tuft island, a tragic unicorn of hair. I then embraced Friar Tuck, I wasn’t bald if my sides were that bushy! Then I pulled the Ron Howard, wearing hats to formal events, even on Christmas morning.

There should be a welcome packet or manual for bald men. At a minimum, a pamphlet.

A CURE

Now, decades later, science may have delivered the holy grail: PP405, a molecule that allegedly wakes up dormant follicles. If it works, baldness becomes optional.

How do I know? Because every friend I have has sent me the article, as if I were their one bald relative on a group text. Each note ends the same way: Would you do it? Baldness has become my version of Would You Rather.

When I was eighteen, I would’ve mainlined PP405 if it meant keeping my hair. Back then, baldness felt like the end of the world, not just the end of a hairline. Now I’m less sure. Being bald has shaped me. On Human Giant, producers hid me under a hat so children wouldn’t recoil. Later, after not booking a Sean William Scott tennis comedy, a manager gently floated the idea that I ‘get something done.’ These are the humiliations men with hair never face—because no one has ever told them their scalp needs a costume.

So I ask myself: Would regrowing my hair make me whole, or would I feel like a fraud, an undercover bald person?

The Big Question

But if there were a cure, it might rob me of the thing that makes me distinctive. Maybe baldness isn’t about being broken at all—it’s a unique stamp, like Barbra Streisand’s profile, Joaquin Phoenix’s lip scar, or Eddie Murphy’s gap. Which, full disclosure, I also have… but that’s another essay.

I’m sure if PP405 really works, we’ll see what happens when one of humanity’s oldest insecurities becomes elective. Will we all choose hair? Will baldness become rebellion? Or will no one care anymore?

As for me, I’m skipping the molecule. Instead, I’ll get a new car sign:

I’M NOT BALD. I’M AN EARLY ADOPTER.

My NYT Bestselling Book, Joyful Reccollections of Trauma, is available at bookstores, online, and via audiobook and even Personalized…Also, it’s now out in Paperback.

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