Doug Lief Lief is a fourth-year English student
who will soon look far more distinguished than he actually is.
Contact him at dlief@media.ucla.edu.
Click Here for more articles by Doug Lief
I’ve never found Julia Stiles to be particularly
attractive. She just seems to have an overabundance of forehead
that constantly threatens to head-butt right out of the
“O” poster. I, however, am in no place to criticize,
since over the last year I have become the victim of male-pattern
baldness, or what I like to call a French hairline. Apparently
it’s not just for grad students anymore.
Right now it’s just a little thin up in the front, so it
hasn’t yet become too severe, but since it’s only the
eve of my 22nd birthday, time is not on my side. I decided to share
this with you all after an alert reader responded to my previous
piece on President Bush with the utmost political discourse saying,
“Since you’re obviously fond of hurtful prose, let me
offer some of my own: “˜Good luck with your receding
hairline.'”
I could have taken this to heart, but instead I’m going to
use what’s left of my head. My first concern was what exactly
was causing my hair to flee from the only home it’s ever
known. Having hair escaping says about my scalp what people in
inner tubes in the Gulf of Mexico say about the quality of life in
Cuba. And what about the hairs that remain? Why are they going down
with the ship?
KRISTEN GILLETTE/Daily Bruin
The obvious answer to me was stress. Now I’m the first to
admit that being an English major requires perilous adventuring,
covert infiltration, mastery of disguise and stealth, and being
able to kick the Nazis’ ass with a bull-whip, but it’s
all in a day’s work for Doug Lief. Another option was that my
intellect was so powerful that my frontal lobe was burning the hair
out from the inside. Then I locked my keys in my car and was forced
to rule that possibility out.
That meant the cause was medical. Doctors like to call what I
have male-pattern baldness or lack of adequate follicle retention,
but these are just euphemisms for what I and millions of men
already know: my head is dying!
There is also a single white hair that sticks straight up from
the front of my hair. I call this one the leader, because it
doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but serves as a pale
harbinger of what is to come. What worries me most about the leader
is his permanence. I mean, I’m glad to have the hair, but
it’s still white. I could assassinate him, but I fear a new
leader will only rise to take his place.
What concerned me most is that thinning hair would be a massive
blow to my dating life, which is already on life support. As we
Jews say, “This I don’t need. Feh!” In order to
compensate, I thought I would have to go by my alter ego, Captain
Jack Badass. Girls will tell you they think Anthony Edwards is
cute, but let’s face it, they ain’t renting “Top
Gun” for the 19th time for Goose.
Fortunately I’ll soon be going to law school, which can
make up for some of the lost points. Most college girls’
requirements for a boyfriend are that he be 26 years old, have a
sloping brow, a high tolerance for alcohol and stories about
you’ll-never-guess-what-my-friend-Vanessa-did. Captain Jack
Badass, Attorney at Law, is sounding better every day.
Bearing all this in mind I finally made my way down to a
dermatologist’s office so he could perform the last rites. He
took a look at my head the way art critics look at a canvas with
two lines, a red dot, and a triangle on it: a lot of excessive
hmmms and aaaahhs. I was sure he was either going to tell me I was
a clear example of the neoclassical Austrian diaspora pretentious
Bruunfrumpven movement, or was trying to figure out whether my
scalp would be better as a coaster or tea cozy.
Instead, he gave me a prescription for Propecia. Propecia is a
drug which blocks an enzyme that causes hair loss. Basically, my
scalp is a junkie, so I’ve got to maintain its habit.
So it looks as though Captain Jack Badass has made his scalp
safe again for hairkind, but for how long?