I've known Leopold for more than thirty years. He's a good guy. We met in high school, in the late 1970s, when our hair grew aggressively. In early 1987, when we were young professionals and our hair was a bit more kempt and less dense, we watched the Cleveland Browns play the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship game. The infamous Drive game, when John Elway drove his Broncos 98 yards in a couple minutes to tie the game and went on to win it in overtime, thus depriving the Browns of their, to date, best chance at reaching a Super Bowl. Any true Clevelander over the age of 28 knows exactly where he or she watched that game. For Leopold, he quite rightly dates his life to pre-Drive and post-Drive. Next time I saw him was two weeks later, when we got together to fulfill our man duties and watch the Super Bowl, as painful as it was that day--even the Broncos' blow-out loss didn't salve too many wounds. Leopold looked awful--in two weeks time he had lost all his once thick mane of hair but for two wispy clumps of dried out, colorless locks, one above his left ear, the other in the back of his head down by his neck.
"It's just fallen out in clumps," Leopold explained to my dumbfounded face, as I fridged the beer and he uncapped two-week-old chip dip, "ever since that night. Elway probably hadn't even dried himself off from that post-game shower before the first handful dropped off my head." By the Pro Bowl the next week, Leopold was completely bald, as he still is, nearly 26 years later. Two marriages come and gone since then, the Browns themselves gone and come back, with nary a Super Bowl even sniffed for 20 years, and Leopold is still bald. Enough time has passed that Leopold's shiny pate doesn't stand out at high school reunions, but the pain is still there. Or really, the pine.
"Phantom lock pine," Leopold explained to me, in strict confidence, a few years ago, when I caught him in the middle of a round of golf taking off his cap and running his hand through sweaty hair that wasn't there at all. "It's constant. The yearning to sweep hair off my forehead, tangle and untangle a few strands idly when I'm at work, and, oh, the best, most painful, to do that double-handed, simultaneous quick flick of the hair from off the sideburns to behind the ears. You know that feeling you get when you realize you should have gotten a haircut two weeks ago? Constant. I constantly feel like I need a haircut, but I had a permanent haircut years ago! I need a straitjacket. You cannot believe the strength and willpower it takes for me in public to resist the urge to play and tousle and tease my hair that isn't there, that hasn't been there in decades!"
He was in pain, obviously. "Why don't you--"
"Eighty-five dollars an hour. I did go see someone, a psychiatrist specializing in follicle issues. I was the first male client she had seen in six years. Her advice? Wear a hat and take up smoking. She laughingly dismissed my claim that Phantom Lock Pine was a very real and incapacitating disorder."
I see Leopold about two or three times a year now. At first I was self-conscious, but finally he said, "Go ahead, do what you have to with your hair--you've got a little cowlicky thing going on on the right--I kind of enjoy the vicarious thing." Poor guy.
Then there's Graciola. I met her a year and a half ago. She works the nightshift at a Speedway gas station cum convenience store. We struck up a friendship over our mutual love of Brisk lemonade. One time I stared too awkwardly at her ever-moving hands and fingers as we waited for my debit card to be authorized. "I'm sorry," she said, clearly embarrassed. "I've got this thing about wielding clippers." My debit card cleared and I hastily took my lemonade and Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar with Almonds and drove off. Two nights later, she was waiting for me. She was on break, she had bought me some lemonade, we sat on the sidewalk out near the ice freezer and the propane tanks. She told me her sad story. As near as she could tell, she said it all started in childhood. She always played with dolls in her backyard, and was always hearing it from her mother to pick them up afterward. One day, as she ate her breakfast--Fruit Loops, she's pretty sure--she looked out the window just as the landscaper was mowing the back lawn. A doll, Molly Malarkey, lay face down in some pachysandra, with its red hair spilling over onto the lawn. The landscaper, who it turned out was colorblind, red-green deficiency, didn't see a thing and mowed off Molly's red hair. "Ever since then, I've had this love-hate thing with hair, with the cutting of hair. All I want to do is cut hair, but I have a tremendous, physical aversion to hair, which explains this," she said, and pointed to her own butch-cropped pale brown hair. "I lasted fifteen whole minutes at the beautician academy. Now I'm nothing but an air barber," she said, and quickly clipped her fingers away at the night.
Well, four months after that night, after many calming, delicate conversations--separate--with the two of them, I finally managed to get Leopold and Graciola to meet. What seemed like a disaster the first five minutes, has transformed into a great friendship, the depths of which I know not nor care not; I'm just happy these two forlorn souls have met. Last night, as I plunked down my Brisk and Hershey's on the counter and asked Graciola how it was going (it in the general sense, not necessarily the Leopold sense), she just grinned and said, "Like this," and showed me her phone with the latest text from Leopold: "Big presentation later this week. Think u can take a bit off the top n sides?" I looked up and Graciola smiled, and her hands were peacefully hanging at her sides.
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