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In the years following high school, Saturday nights became my nights with Brian. Mostly, we went to see movies, whatever was on the biggest screen in town--a seventy-millimeter at the Pacific Hastings--or whatever science fiction film Brian wanted to see or whatever art film or comedy that I wanted to see. Sometimes, we stopped in at a computer store so that Brian could look over the new games. Sometimes, we went to the music store and stared at CDs and tapes; occasionally, we bought one and spent the evening listening to it. Sometimes we went bowling or grocery shopping. Or we ate at the Big Earth Restaurant, whose claim to uniqueness was its emphasis on health food. Sometimes, Brian's brother Dave, who had graduated high school three years ahead of us, joined us, not that that made much of a difference. Both Brian and Dave were known, among most women, as being somewhat odd, different, weird. "I went on a date with Dave ------ once" was something one woman I knew once said to shock guests at a party.
But mostly, what Brian and I did was watch life pass by. And we waited, waited for something to change it, some girl to pay us attention, some new job or pleasure. Nothing changed, though, except this:
Brian was losing his hair. I don't know when I first noticed it. In high school, senior year, Brian had started combing his hair back rather than to the side. At the time, I had thought he was just trying to be hip. After he was kicked out of college or flunked out or quit (he was never particularly open about what exactly had happened), once he had reentered my life after a year of being away, I noticed that his hair had receded in the usual spots, at the two corners at the front of the head. But then, as we hung out for the next few years, the recession didn't stop. The rest of the hair in between began to leave also.
Two things I wanted most not to happen to me were the following: I wanted never to lose my teeth, and I wanted never to lose my hair. I was happy that I was not in Brian's predicament.
But I was kidding myself. After a bath or a shower, I had begun to notice hair gathered at my drain. I had never had so much hair pile up after a bathing when I was younger. And then, over the course of months, I began to notice that the hair at the top front corners of my own head was becoming less dense. But it wasn't noticeable, I told myself, only to the touch.
One night, driving to a movie with Brian and Dave, Dave commented on the amount of dandruff that had piled up toward the front of my hairline. I had had dandruff problems since adolescence. But Dave's comment was prescient: "The skin always seems to flake off where the hair is falling out."
My hair loss was no longer a secret.
By this time, however, Brian's hair was in a much greater state of loss. For myself, I held on to this hope: My dad's own hair juts out in the center, receding just at the two corners. My hair, I figured, would probably end up like his, and that was okay. It was mostly there. Certainly, there was enough to run one's hands through.
But it was not to be. Years later, after Brian had moved to Illinois and I had moved from California to Mississippi to Texas, Brian came to visit. Or rather, he came on business, and he just happened to be on business in the same metropolitan area as that in which I lived. It was to prove to be the last time I would see him. We had barely corresponded in five years, and getting reacquainted seemed difficult. Our lives had taken different paths, and our interests, we probably came to both realize, were no longer the same, had in fact not been the same since high school. The last years of our friendship in California had been ones of mutual depression, mutual waiting. We didn't much care to look back at that portion of our lives.
What struck me, however, as we sat eating in a Chili's restaurant in Mesquite, Texas, was that Brian was completely bald on the top of his head by then. He was also a bit overweight. And the grumpiness that had begun to be part of his personality in the years after high school had taken over. He had become his father. Any high school student would have seen him as a typical adult.
This was, of course, one of those moments, those times, when one realizes that one is no longer a kid, that one really is part of the adult world now. Inside my own head, it is easy to think of myself still as one of the fifteen-year-olds, a bit unsure of the world, a bit slick and cool, knowledgeable on a few hip subjects, waiting for life to begin. When people note my own baldness, it still comes to me as a bit of a shock, even though I can see it in the mirror every day. No, I think, I still have hair--I'm not really bald. Spending an evening with a high school friend a decade after graduating, however, makes things clear. I am an adult. I am bald.
This is your life. Stop waiting for it to begin.
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