Mom sent medicine a few weeks back. She’s willful in her ignorance there are at least five Walgreens within a one mile radius from our apartment. She can’t send money or gifts - at least nothing that I can use - so there’s the medicine. Within the box of band-aids and Tylenols and vitamins is a dietary supplement for hair growth.
It’s a not so subtle spotlight on my hair, which has been in retreat for a good five years. It’s only this year that we, my hair and I, have passed the Maginot Line. The platoons are thinned. Some are grey, ready to be plucked. There’s nothing I can do about it. I wonder what the French generals felt. Terror? Indignation? It must be something similar to my feeling of defeat and despair. They retreated, as must I. Vichy France isn’t so bad when you have no options left. Live to fight another day, or just grow old as the tanks roll in.
The supplement mom wrapped so carefully is labeled: 21st Century Dietary Supplement Advanced Formula Hair, Skin & Nails Natural Herbs, Vitamins and Minerals to Nourish Hair, Skin & Nails*
Mom willfully ignored the asterisk, which further detailed: 21st Century Hair, Skin & Nails is an advanced formula containing natural herbs with vitamins and minerals to enhance beauty from within for today’s active women. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
I wonder if mom knows that she sent her younger son dietary supplements intended for women. Probably not. It’s even funnier when measured against my conversation with her yesterday night, when she asked if my older brother was, in fact, gay, or not. It’s her most direct assault yet. I’m not the one to out my sibling’s desired orientation, but it has been thirty something years, a few propositions, legislations and revolutions — sometimes I do want to be his keeper so he can just be himself.
It’s gotten to a point where some of the stuff mom tells me would make a rational person insane. She visited him last week and found a "birthday suit" costume in his closet. “I asked dad if it was normal for a man to have a consume like that” she mused, “and he said some men are different and laughed his annoying laugh.” Then she asked me if I too had a costume that exposed myself like so. I told her that I do not have such a costume. But different strokes and all that.
She won’t let up. Sometimes I just want to tell her what she already knows. She just wants someone, anyone, to tell her: Those aren’t just my brother’s good friends, they’re his boyfriends. Yes, he does seem happier around them than being around her or dad. Yes, all those lotions and creams, his penchant for flamboyancy, those are definitely signs. No, all those girls he took as dates to weddings are not girlfriends. Your son is gay, mom.
But I have other things to worry about, like my hair.
Gone are the days of peroxide bleaches, shark fins, mullets, mohawks, bull horns and all the sines and cosines that found their way atop my head. Instead, I can only have the one John Kennedy - comb over style - that my dad consistently has worn since the 60s. I have to laugh, because dad called in Father Time to win the War of the Hair.
Growing up, the biggest source of rebellion against dad was my hair. Clothes were expensive, and as a kid without a lot of money, that was a war I couldn’t win. I was a reluctant preppy, but damn if I couldn’t make my hair the way I wanted it to, a different way than how my old man combed his hair. It was a battle of attrition. When he accompanied me to the barber shop, I got the haircut he wanted, but always asked the guy with the scissors to leave the bangs a little longer. When I got my own car and dad didn’t come along any longer, each month was a new hairstyle designed to terrorize the old man. And growing up in the late 80s and early 90s there were a lot of styles to choose from in the arsenal.
Now, dad has won. I look more like him each day. The nights where I can’t sleep thinking if I would turn out like him multiply. I called him last week. We talked about birds - his retirement hobby and my irrational fear - and the moon, which we both like to watch. “You have a lot of my traits,” he said with some pride. I shudder. With fear and guilt. His rage and machinations and lies shamed me. But also I know that he’s likely to disappear soon, and I dread having to confront the long twilight — the home care and doctor visits, the returns to my parents’ empty house and the smell of musty cells, shed from brittle skin, the inevitable calls from the hospital, the drooling, memory loss, bowel displacement, broken bones, watery blood, vacant eyes, dull hearing and yes, hair loss. I dread it. And I also want it to get over with. I can see my thirties and forties coming around the corner with swift and fearsome judgment, coming to collect the debts I owe from living my twentysomething years with abandon.
I wish I had spent my youth with more abandon. Before the walls come into view. I wish I had experimented more with my hair - tried more colors, told my parents to fuck off more, slept around and do drugs and love music and writing and painting more than I can ever love them now. I wish I can jump to another track, go on another car, but I can’t. I’m stuck on this ride. And however many supplements I take, the hair of my youth isn’t coming back.
I might as well try. So I pop a pill with each meal. Mom said the results were good.