Read by Adam Diggle
My hair feels thin. When I scratch my head, I tend to lift the existing hair, sparse as it is, and delicately score the itchy scalp with my fingernail. I hope in some way this will arrest the speed of hair loss.
I’m going bald. I’m going bald. My friends call me Aslan, which doesn’t really make sense. In pointing this out, I look bitter. Bitter and bald. What would I look like if I just shaved it all off? My name is Fred. Would my friends call me Right Said Fred? Deeply dippy about male pattern baldness.
This hat I wore from time to time, it was great. But very of the age. My age. I can’t wear a hat like that now. Everyone would know that I’m wearing it because I’m bald. If only there was a way to cover up the baldness without drawing attention to me being a balding man. Fucking sparse hair. When I go for a jog, my hair frazzles, stands up on end so that I look like a dandelion. A dandelion at the end of a blustery day. I am a dandelion at the end of a blustery day.
I used to leer into my Facebook, looking at pictures of women I’d slept with. Some ex-girlfriends too. But no good came of it. I knew that no good would come of it and yet I felt compelled to do it. I don’t do that any more though. Now I look at pictures of myself with hair. No good comes of it. My hair feels thin.
I have no girlfriend. I should’ve scored one when I had good hair. She would be trapped now. But she would say kind things about how it makes me look distinguished. She would tell me how attracted to Woody Allen she is, and this would put my mind at ease that she wouldn’t go out and get a man with hair. She would kiss the top of my bald head and she would tease me about it. She wouldn’t have a great sense of humour but I would laugh politely when she called me something obvious like Cueball because she would be the supplier of blow-jobs.
My friend Nathan says that I’m so bald these days that when I wash my balding head I get brainwashed.
I met a girl today. She swiped the shit out of me on Tinder. I wore that hat to the date, but wished I hadn’t. The bar that we went to - full of men with long hair, with tall hair, with buzz-cut but really coarse hair - was fucking boiling. I was steaming under that hat, under that stupid fucking flat cap that makes me look like the top of my head has been sliced off and the only measure the operating surgeon could take was to place a flat cap on my severed skull. I look like someone has photoshopped the top part of a baseball cap off. And I’m boiling under there.
“Aren’t you hot in that hat?” she asks.
“What makes you say that?” I reply, as a stalagmite of sweat dangles in front of my right eye.
“Stalagtite,” she corrects.
“Wait did I say that out loud?” I ask her and try to block out that joke Nathan makes about me being so bald people can read my mind.
She looks at me and condescends to a smirk. “You’ve been doing it all evening. I thought it was a bit of a quirk; narrating your thoughts. Why do you think I’ve been laughing? And who’s Nathan?
There was nothing else for it. I took off my hat and let her have it, the full uncut money shot. The little hair I have that sits atop my forehead, slicked to the left and soaked through with sweat. Vast gaps in between slumps of hair revealing a bleak white scalp below. If my hair at this current moment was a film it would be directed by Mike Leigh, it’s that fucking bleak.
“I love Mike Leigh,” she interjects.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I say.
“Look,” she starts, and I await further instruction that never arrives, “I actually like bald men.”
“What, like Woody Allen?”
“What? …No, not like Woody Allen. Though I loved Kingpin. Like Bruce Willis. I love Bruce Willis. He is an attractive bald man.”
I nod, hoping to show that I’m taking on board what she’s saying, before I say, “Listen,” as though the conversation requires some sort of MS DOS command, “I get what you’re saying right. Some bald men are attractive. But answer me this about Bruce Willis: Was Bruce Willis more attractive when he had hair?”
I let back in my chair as a Mike-Leigh directed silence fills the air. “The prosecution rests.” I declare, before tonguing out a morsel of leftover dinner from between my teeth.
The serenity of that moment, in which I had proven without doubt that she wasn’t attracted to me, was broken when she came clean. She told me she would rather that I had more hair, but that’s life. Usually these Tinder dates are one-drink-and-escape or back-home-for-a-bang sort of affairs. She hadn’t been expecting this sort of… session. She understood that it was hard for me to be losing my hair, and that Nathan’s japing didn’t help, but that nobody is perfect, right? She told me, Look, and this time instruction followed: “My tits … aren’t as big as you’d probably like them to be, right? But it’s tough shit. Maybe this is a deal-breaker for you, I don’t know. But between my undersized boobies and your dandelion head maybe they cancel each other out.”
I’m balding. I’m aging. I have a girlfriend. Her name is Susan. She likes Die Hard. She has small tits and doesn’t know who Woody Allen is.
(c) Sean Preston, 2016
East Londoner Sean Preston edits short fiction magazine Open Pen, considered “unpretentious, edgy, and utterly readable,” by author and broadcaster N Quentin Woolf. Sean is an ex-pro wrestler, Dockland aficionado, full-time thing-maker for record label Ninja Tune, troll, and short fiction writer (obviously).
Adam Diggle graduated from the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts in 2009. Since then he has mainly worked in theatre and voice-over. Credits include Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men and Happy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
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