Part 7: Calvo.

There is only one known cure for baldness, so said PG Wodehouse, it was invented by a Frenchman, he called it the guillotine.

And believe me, I’ve considered it. I’ve run the occasion through my thinning head several times. It wouldn’t be a big affair. Some light bunting. Cake. Perhaps a band playing Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”, except “Weird Al” Yankovic’s version, “Why'd I have to go and get myself decapitated?” A puppet show for the kids, maybe? Bouncy Castle. No magicians though, ostentatious disappearances are what got me here in the first place. Maybe someone could say a few words, eulogising my hair? Hang a few photos. Maybe an exhibit of old combs and brushes?

When I was eight, we got back to school after the Christmas break and my teacher informed the class, with the tone of man who spent the holidays alone, ‘by now you should all know that Father Christmas isn’t real…’ The kid next to me burst into tears. I held my dignity a little better than that, a lone tear rather than the deep sob but still, I was wounded. Something was taken from me with that that I could never get back. I mean, I suspected. I had an inkling. But you don’t just come out and say it! You have find out on your own, so as to properly, mentally take the news in.

And so it was a few months ago. A Sunday night, already a sombre affair, I’m in the bedroom with my wife and she drops it. Boom. ‘You’re going bald’. I listed. Like a rope-bridge in strong winds. ‘What?’

‘Gimme your camera. I’ll show you.’ That’s right folks, she took a picture and showed it to me. Well, that’s it then. The magic is over. Father Christmas isn’t real. I slept in the spare room that night and dreamed of Louis XVI’s last haircut. 

‘I think it’s bad manners for a man to keep his hair after thirty,’ I mused, making dynamite dinner party conversation, ‘vulgar, even.’

‘You should see “The Columbian”’ my pal ventured,

‘Eh?’

‘My friend got treatment off a Columbian “doctor”. Simply; he was bald. Now he’s not.’

‘Come off it,’ I said, the back of my head burning like a chip pan fire, ‘what is this, plugs or something?’

‘No surgery, nothing like that. Just shampoos and some injections in his scalp.’
‘And the tent was properly clean, was it? They flush the buckets twice a week?’

‘You can laugh but the fact is… he was bald. Now he’s not’

‘Well, I’m not sure I could do anything like that,’ I remarked, gently touching my crown, the ruins of a once great empire.

‘What are the details?’ my wife piped up.

Where did she get that pen and paper?  

We had spent our first Mexican Christmas in the Oaxacan coastal town of Puerto Escondidio. If we’d previously visited pueblas of rich, retired artists and hippies, this was where their kids came to show off their youth. Annemarie and I, the eldest people in this town by a decade, marvelled at these young, wealthy, beautiful college-kids playing dress up as bare-foot hippies. These little back-packer-style havens are incredible for their timelessness. If I’d have shown you a photo of these kids and asked you to guess the decade, you could have said, seventies, eighties, nineties, noughties or today and you’d have been correct on all counts. Baton dancers, ukulele players, white people with dreadlocks, they’re all here selling falafel and homemade jewellery.

The familiarity of these faces was to such an extent, we were able recount, ‘well, I was trying to cop off with the waitress with the glasses and the curly hair but I ended up with her friend, much to the disappointment of both of us’.

‘I went for the guy in the yellow t-shirt with the highlights but should have gone for the guy in the bucket hat,’

‘Of course! Yellow t-shirt is scoundrel, and he knows it!’

‘I know, I know. And Bucket-hat gives it all mouth and trousers but he’s working with his Dad at KPMG six months from now’

We sighed in our own scenes from The Ghost of Christmas-Past while we ate Pad Thai and Quinoa salads.

You’d think it was all this youth and nostalgia that made me feel bald, but no. It’s the horses. Inexplicably, Annemarie and I have really gotten into horse riding. This is extraordinary, as six months previous I couldn’t tell a horse from a llama. It comes from increased visits to the countryside where, despite what outdoor enthusiasts will tell you, there’s actually very little to do except look at the scenery. We are city people. Always have been, always will be but with Covid running rampant across the globe, cities are closed. How can you be a city person when there is no city? So we’ve started jumping in the saddle and taking an eyeful of the breath-taking vistas this magnificent country has to offer. Mexico is truly beautiful. From deserts, to mountains, to beaches, to plains, forests of pine and rain, this country has everything. It’s constantly surprising and horseback is such a great way to see it, because you’re sat down. Puerto Escondidio has the longest and one of the most picturesque natural beaches in world. The waves reach twelve feet high, like something out of a surfing video. Galloping down these on horseback is incredible but take a left and you’re in forest covered mountains, striped with run-off rivers, natural hot springs and cenotes. Splashing through all this in a saddle is exhilarating and you feel like you’re in a movie, though more ‘City Slickers’ than ‘The Searchers’ in our case.

The only problem with horses is the photographs. It’s difficult to take a photograph from a horse at the best of times, as the damned thing keeps moving. The streams and the mountains from a horse are hard enough but pictures of your partner, who is also on a horse, are damned near impossible. The only way of doing it is to ride behind them, getting a shot from the rear. The back of the head. The epicentre of bald. After a brilliant day pretending I’m Clint Eastwood, the only remnant I have is a bunch of wonky, blurred photos of my bald spot bobbing about on the back end of a horse. A patch of scorched earth in all this jungle. A horse’s arse, on a horse’s arse.

Christmas day itself is worth noting. In the main, Puerto Escondidio is a bohemian, dropout, free spirit, nonconformist, bad food, back-packer paradise. It’s stunningly beautiful, relaxed and friendly but sometimes in life, all you want a really good glass of red wine, served by someone wearing an ironed shirt, who looks like they’ve taken a shower in the last week. Youthful, hippy, gap-year towns don’t often provide this but Mexico, as I say, will always surprise you.

In the TV show, “30 Rock” they have a joke there is a secret European country where rich celebrities go on holiday where the likes of you and I will never know where it is. Well, in Puerto Escondidio at least, we found that place. Through hushed words, friends of friends and associate’s associates, Annemarie was slipped a folded-up napkin with the name of a restaurant and a telephone number. She rang, she name-dropped and booked us in for Christmas day. It’s not on Google, this place. It’s not listed anywhere. When you enter its address into your maps app, it’s just a dot in a sea of green nothing. How were we even going to get there? As we tried to nab a taxi, the drivers looked at us blank. They had no idea. Eventually we had to ring the and ask, ‘say this to the driver’ came the reply. And when we did, the guy beamed, like he knew he was about to get a huge tip.

We were driving for an hour down the coast, away from the town, away from anything. Suddenly, the car veered off to the right, alighting on a dirt track that I could have driven past a hundred times and not seen. Half a mile down this stood a man guarding a piece of string crossing the road. Our driver whispered something and he peered at us through the passenger window. AM blurted the name on the napkin and he waved us in. Another twenty minutes on this dirt road and I was convinced we were being kidnapped. I could picture the call to my father, ‘we have your son…’

‘Do you now? Tell him Spurs lost again and to call his mother. Merry Christmas.’

All of a sudden, we see architecture. Modern architecture. Incredible buildings popping up out of the canopy. ‘Hang on,’ I say to Annemarie, ‘that was an art gallery!’

‘Si,’ said our driver, ‘Una galería para los residentes locales aquí. Tienen artistas de todo el mundo.’

‘No kidding,’

Then out of nowhere, a resort! A bespoke hotel! A string of condos! So here we are then, Valhalla. Behind the velvet rope. The room where it happens. A place where the hoi-palloi hide from us mere mortals. Dinner was in a grass hut set just off the golden sand beach, where an army of Japanese cooks served up twelve courses of the finest cuisine their country has to offer to twelve diners.

This is what I want in life. A rarefied existence that’s not about the price but about the know. Mexico is full of this, off grid luxury experiences that aren’t expensive, per say, just secret. We learnt early, the guidebooks and adviser sites know nothing of this country. The best food, the best parks, the best beaches, you can’t Google this stuff. You have to be told and you have to take it on trust. If you do, suddenly you’re in these places that seem like science fiction in their perfection. It makes you believe anything is possible in Mexico and maybe it is. Maybe they can cure baldness…

Annemarie was getting tired of my uncontrollable urge to throw sticks, so in the new year we rescued a puppy. This makes it sounds a lot more planned than it was. The truth is, Mrs E is a follower of “dog porn”. Various internet and social media sites that specialise in pictures of dogs. While you’re marvelling at the ugliness of your old friend’s new baby, she’s looking at dogs. Perusing one of these which feature adoptable street dogs in CDMX, she “liked” an Instagram image of a ragsy, white mutt with a dark patch on her eye. A cute puppy. In a “ping” she had a message asking if she lived in a house. She replied, bemused, in the affirmative and just like that, we had a dog.

Getting a rescue is always tricky. When thinking about dog ownership, there’s normally two bits of advice, don’t get a beagle and don’t get a rescue. To test this theory, our last dog was a rescued beagle and sure enough, a nightmare. He was beautiful, the most gorgeous animal you’ve ever seen but he was the Devil. We had teams, at one point literally a team of dog trainers working on him. We brought in specialists, we got in a pet psychologist, all of whom promised to fix this dog, all of whom ended up saying, ‘nope, sorry, he’s is nuts.’ Pongo Bongo (we named him after my grandfather) loved to destroy. Not just material things, though he’d eaten headphones, heirlooms and hairdryers over the years, but ethereal things. Concepts. Moods. Ideas. He used to go nuts whenever anyone came to the door. He’d bark loud enough to shake tiles off the roof. Well, we thought, at least we’ll know if anyone breaks in! Yet when someone did break in, a drunk who decided to sleep it off in our hallway, he did nothing. Not a whisper. He destroyed the pattern. He destroyed the notion of his own self and our knowledge of him. Incredible.

The stress of owning that dog is probably what sent me bald in the first place. My Dad looked after him once and he’s been bald for forty years. Coincidence…?

So getting a new mutt did give me some pause. Could my dome take it? Fortunately, the new dog is lovely. Despite having a short list of excellent names, (Ronnie Barker, Pete Dogerty, Woofie Goldberg) she was already answering to Luna so we stuck a -tic on the end and got on with it.

Luna does not love to destroy, things nor psyches. She doesn’t jump in the bed, she doesn’t roll in fox shit, she doesn’t jump in the bed after rolling in fox shit. But she’s not a looker either. As she’s grown, the cute puppy looks have evaporated, leaving a gangly, rough, grimy looking creature. A gargoyle. A skinny version of the monster Sigourney Weaver turns into in Ghostbusters. So ugly, in fact, that when we were attacked by a pack of wild dogs, I kind of understood where they were coming from.

Once again, with a lack of anything to occupy us in the city, we jumped in the car and headed for the country. This time, the northern plains, just outside of San Miguel de Allende, apparently one of the greatest cities in the world to live, let alone visit… though we wouldn’t know as it’s closed. We opted for a cabin in the countryside where we could take long walks, let the dog run free and take more photos of my growing bald patch from horseback. It’s fantastic country up there, again different from anything we’d seen before. Rolling plains and scattered pine forests. Goats scaling rocky canyons, wild horses and yes, wild dogs. We were walking up the path of near dried river, getting equally baked by the harsh sun when all of a sudden, Luna’s grotesque appearance startled and panicked a sleeping pack of fearsome, yet handsome, dogs.

Without mincing my words, this was fucking scary. These guys were angry. They did not want our vile and hideous animal stinking up their territory and they didn’t mind telling us. Snarling and barking, I saw they were trying to circle us. Bizarrely, I wasn’t that afraid of getting bitten. I knew I’d be the one to get attacked, as I had to make sure Annemarie and Luna got out of there but it wasn’t the mauling that was concerning me, it was rabies. You can’t control what you think in a moment like this and what I was thinking was, if I get rabies, I can’t go to hospital. The hospitals are full of covid patents. So either I’ll get rabies and be unable to treat it or I’ll catch rabies, go to hospital, get The ‘Rona and die. And then in that moment, unbelievable but true, I thought, I wonder if my insurance will cover this? Only I, in that moment, could think, if I get eaten here, it’s gonna cost me a few quid…

There is a story football fans will be familiar with, where the formidable former Watford and Leicester City manager, Nigel Pearson, was attacked by wild dogs on a walk in the Carpathian Mountains. The rumour has it, Pearson identified the pack leader and killed him with his bare hands. Now, I’ve never bothered to check if this is true, or whether he just shouted and waved his arms about while his wife and dog could escape to a nearby road. My figuring is, who wants the black and white truth when lies are in Technicolor?

With that in mind, I killed those dogs with my bare hands. Each and every one of them. Nobody messes with my girls.

When you go through an experience like that you realise, life is short, and you better keep hold of the good things. Like your hair. I booked in to see “The Columbian”.

And you know what? The tent was quite clean, and they do flush out the buckets, more than once a week. Picking through the sawdust, I found myself at the desk of a nice young woman, who’d even taken the time to put “doctor” in front of her name. She took a powerful, telescopic camera to my head (why, I don’t know. You can see my bald patch from Mars, Perseverance Rover confirms) and once she’d stopped laughing, told me with a few potions, lotions and incantations, I might be able to save my thatch.

‘Well, it’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
‘y necesitarás algunas inyecciones en tu cabeza. Entre setenta y ochenta, ahora mismo’
‘Sorry, my Spanish isn’t great. Did you say eighty injections? In my head?’

‘Yes,’ she said, unholstering a magnum .44 handgun with a hypodermic needle in the chamber, ‘but it won’t hurt.’

Again, without mincing my words, this was fucking stupid. I have no doubt to the validity of the science nor the effectiveness of the treatment. But on the drive home, I had never felt so shallow, so vain, so affected and facile. I’m disgusted and embarrassed for myself. Why should a man, who has torn, limb from limb, a wild and rabid wolf with his bare hands, care about going bald? It’s a selfish, pathetic, desperate act. This is who I am.

And I regret nothing.