He autodialed Jeff. After he repeated his name to the receptionist, she put him through.
“Hey, Ish. Last-minute audition for today, two o’clock at Caster’s. Commercial, national. Pretty straightforward. Spokesperson, warm, friendly, blah blah blah. For Chicken in a Can.”
“Oh, a commercial?”
“Well, beggars can’t be choosy.” Jeff had a way with clichés.
“All right. What’s the spot about?”
“A young man and his father open up emotionally over a hearty helping of Chicken in a Can. The usual. You’re reading for the father.”
It took a few seconds for Ishmael to register what Jeff meant. “Father? How old is the son?”
“Mid-twenties.”
“Mid-twenties? But I’m only thirty-four. Is my character a hillbilly? I can’t have a son that old.”
“Logically, yeah. But, you know…you do look older.”
“I look perfectly good. I look younger than thirty-four in my opinion…and others…have that opinion…”
“Ish, face it. You’re just one of those guys who look older when they lose their… When they become…You know…”
“Bald?” Ishmael exclaimed shrilly. “What, I lose my hair and I’m Wilford Brimley all of a sudden? So what’s left for me? Quaker Oats ads and Viagra infomercials?”
“Hey, life’s unfair. Suck it up. You want this audition?”
“Yes,” he said, a tad petulantly.
“Okay, then. I’ll email you the script and the details. Good luck.”
Jeff hung up on him.
When he got home, Ishmael was still incensed. This is how I’m being defined as an actor, he thought incredulously, stepping into the shower. The bald guy who looks older than his years. Maybe I should update my résumé. Ishmael Moby—Caucasian, brown eyes, bald. Under his special skills (which included juggling, horseback riding, and squash—three things he had never done in his life), he could add: Can play twice my chronological age.
As he toweled off, Ishmael wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror and took a long, hard look at his reflection. I do look older. If I could only afford a better exfoliant, he thought. That’s the only reason I look a little weathered. But mostly, he had to admit, the aging was due to the premature grey. More salt than pepper now. The horseshoe haircut didn’t help. He was a good-looking man with a strong chin, great cheekbones, and flawless skin. Unfortunately, the skin went a little higher on his head than he would have liked. Ishmael thought that he had come to terms with his hair loss, but obviously he had been fooling himself. But he wasn’t the one who needed to come to terms with it. Casting directors were. It was unfair that society couldn’t look past a lack of hair, even more unfair that the entertainment industry couldn’t. Ishmael equated his struggle with that of Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Oscar. Except for the major differences, their stories were identical.
Ishmael’s audition was only a fifteen-minute walk away, but he started to make his way there an hour before his scheduled time. He was notoriously early for everything—auditions, parties, medical appointments. Partly because he thought it showed enthusiasm and a willingness to get down to it, partly because he usually had the time.
As he turned onto Macauley, a tree-lined boulevard full of shops and cafés, he noticed a store that hadn’t been there before. Under a green-and-blue striped awning, the sign on the window read “Hair by Rachel” in a lovely serif font. Ishmael looked through the leaded panes at artfully displayed mannequin heads, bedecked with toupees, wigs, and extensions. They were unlike anything Ishmael had ever seen before. They looked incredibly real—no, better than real. They looked alive. Silky, glossy hair, of every color and style. One took Ishmael’s interest right away. It matched his natural Manila Ice Chocolate brown shade perfectly and looked so luxurious he was overcome with a desire to walk barefoot through it. Ishmael stood there for a full thirty minutes transfixed by its beauty. The sign on the door said “Closed,” or else he might have gone in. He finally managed to tear himself away and reluctantly crossed the street to his audition.
Ishmael’s heart sank when he walked into Caster’s. It looked like Yul Brynner Tribute Day. About thirty men, in various stages of hair loss, paced around, practicing varied interpretations of the line “It’s Chicken in a Can!” On the other side of the room, another group waited for a different audition. Not a chrome-dome in the bunch. In fact, if you put a line straight down the middle of the room, it looked like a before-and-after shot for Rogaine. The only thing both groups had in common was the reek of desperation.
“Hey, Moby!”
Ishmael cringed. Jackie Fleming! Fleming was a constant pain in Ishmael’s ass. He was always competing for the same parts, though he was a completely different physical type. Fleming was a big man, close to three hundred pounds, if not more. Three of those pounds may have been actual muscle; the rest was two hundred and ninety-seven pounds of comfortable living. His head was the size of a baby Rottweiler and was stuck onto a body that looked similar to the Pillsbury Doughboy’s, if Poppin’ Fresh had totally let himself go. Ishmael didn’t know how the two of them actually ended up competing for the same parts, but it seemed to happen all the time. Fleming usually came out on top, and he was never a gracious winner. Ishmael despised him.
“Hey, Fleming. What are you auditioning for?”
“Movie of the Week. Third billed. Could be really good.”
“Great,” Ishmael said, relieved. He forced his lips into what he hoped was a supportive smile.
“You part of the Shiny Brigade?”
Ishmael’s blood began to boil. His hands clenched and unclenched as he tried to control his temper. “Yes. I am part of that group.” He started to turn away.
“No kidding. Should have worn my sunglasses. The glare…my God, the glare.”
Ishmael whipped around and thrust his head a few inches from Fleming’s. “Really, Fatso?”
Someone gasped. One of the hirsute group. Ishmael spun on them.
“Really? That was worth a gasp, was it? He does five minutes of bald jokes and that’s okay? But I make one fat joke and I’m the insensitive one?”
“It’s genetic,” Fleming mumbled.
“Genetic if your parents hated salads!” Ishmael pointed to his head. “What do you think this is? You think I shave my head every day into this lovely horseshoe pattern because I’m a Secretariat fan? Why is it fine to make fun of us? Why aren’t bald people protected by the politically correct!”
Shouts of “Tell it, brother!” and “Shame the hairies!” rang out from the other side of the room. All of a sudden, Ishmael didn’t care about the audition; he just wanted to get out of there before he started beating on Fleming with one of the folding chairs in the corner. He ran from the room.
Out on the sidewalk, Ishmael braced his hands on his knees and took long breaths trying to calm himself down. He started for home but then saw that the sign on Rachel’s door had been flipped around to “Open.” He crossed the street and stood beneath the awning to gaze in the window. The exquisite hairpiece called to him, like a siren seducing an ancient mariner, “Try me, try me, try me.”
What the hell, Ishmael thought, I just screamed at a fat man in a room full of people. Walking into a hair store is going to embarrass me? He pushed the door open, and the bell over the door tinkled merrily. There was no one around. Good, he thought. Last thing I need is a pushy salesperson.
The toupee was even more breathtaking up close. The light from the window caught the strands and made it shimmer. He wanted it. He touched it, and his hand shook with desire.
“Nice, isn’t it?”
Ishmael spun around. Behind the counter stood a woman who could have been anywhere between forty and seventy. Her eyes were black as coal and shifted rapidly from side to side. She had the most untrustworthy face he had ever seen, but her hair was spellbinding. Definitely her best feature, though to be truthful, it did
n’t have much competition. It was jet black, full, and silky, and it moved with an almost lyrical beauty with every head tilt. She was like a better-coiffed Medusa.
“Beautiful,” she said, pointing to the toupee. “That one’s my baby.”
“Your baby?”
“All of them are my babies. I gave birth to them. Metaphorically speaking.” Her eyes ceased their roving and bored into his. “It took months to make them, strand by strand.”
“You must be Rachel.”
“Yes, I must.” She grinned lopsidedly, flashing dull teeth. “Are you interested in adoption?”
“Adoption?”
“Yes. You do not buy my babies, you must adopt them. They give so much more when they know they are loved. It’s just simple paperwork. A quick signature and presto.”
Hmm, Ishmael thought, loony-toon. He smiled slowly so as not to alarm her.
“Well, I am interested in…uh…adopting. How much does this one cost?”
Rachel stroked the side of her face. “Ten thousand.” Ishmael’s heart stopped. “Ten thousand dollars?”
“My babies are of the highest quality. This little beauty will be the only hairpiece you will need for the rest of your life. It will grow with you, go gray with you.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s possible.” Rachel looked away and her eyes resumed their flickering.
“Ten thousand dollars,” Ishmael repeated. “I can’t. That’s…a little beyond my budget.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Rachel picked up a newspaper and trained her eyes on the text. Ishmael wondered how she could read. He turned and headed to the exit and his eyes took in the toupee one last time. His heart beat like a snare drum as he pulled open the door. Rachel laughed softly behind him.
For the rest of the day Ishmael was consumed by thoughts of the toupee. He thought about it as he ran off some new résumé shots. He worried about it all through his shift at the Steer and Stein. He obsessed about it during his “Audition with Balls” workshop. I’ve got to have it, Ishmael thought, but ten thousand dollars! He’d have to forget about it. He had no access to that kind of money.
But he couldn’t forget about it. He dreamt about it that night. Dreams of how it could transform his life.
The next day Ishmael decided to go back to Rachel’s and see if he could set up a payment plan. The worst that could happen was that she might say no. As he turned onto Macauley, he saw Rachel on the sidewalk in front of the store sweeping up broken glass.
“What happened?”
She turned to him with ping-pong hate-filled eyes. “Robbery. Someone stole my babies.”
Technically, that would be kidnapping, but Ishmael felt that Rachel wouldn’t care for the distinction. He looked into the store through the smashed window. His toupee no longer occupied its prime spot. Most of the inventory was gone.
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
Rachel kept her eyes still long enough to look at him disdainfully. “A ring of bald thieves, I suppose. I saw many of your kind across the street there, yesterday. Perhaps the lure of luxuriant hair overcame them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! They’re actors. Actors don’t steal.” Rachel smiled coldly and made Ishmael shiver. “It makes no nevermind. I will get them back. All my babies will be returned. Every single one of them.” She snorted and went back to sweeping glass.
Ishmael walked back the way he had come, confused and depressed. It wasn’t so much the theft of beautiful toupees that saddened him, but the thought that someone else would be wearing his hair. The thought that someone else had taken his baby and would be sharing those special father/baby hair moments filled him with deep despair.
As he passed an alley, he heard a familiar voice. “Try me.”
He stopped and peered down the alley but saw no one. He was just about to move on when he noticed a box partly obscured by a recycling bin. He could make out the lettering on the side of the box: “achel.” He ran to the box, squatted, and with trembling hands opened it. His toupee gleamed softly inside. Ishmael could swear it purred for a second. But how? And what of that voice that called out to him? Could it have been …? Ishmael laughed. Yeah, that’s it, he thought, the hair called out to me. It wants me. He laughed again, a little desperately, a little afraid. But full of hope. Holding the box tightly to his chest, he ran all the way home. It wasn’t till he was inside the apartment and standing at his kitchen counter, breathless, that he thought perhaps he should have returned the hair to Rachel. He felt a little sick to his stomach.
He immediately came up with a hundred reasons why he shouldn’t return the hair. The main one was that he didn’t want to. The hair was his.
Ishmael took the box into his bedroom, where the lighting was best. When he looked in the mirror with his new do, he wanted the full impact. He gently removed the hair from the box and turned it this way and that. Doesn’t look as impressive out of the store, he thought. He placed it on his head. It fit like a glove, like a head glove. But Ishmael was disappointed when he looked in the mirror. The Ishmael reflected back at him was just the same old Ishmael with a toupee on. Was he insane to hope that it might actually have transformed him? He sighed.
I’ll give it back to Rachel, he thought. Maybe I’ll get a reward. But just as he was about to put the toupee back in the box, he noticed a piece of parchment at the bottom. Pulling it out, he saw it was an adoption paper for the hairpiece. Ishmael remembered what Rachel had said: “You do not buy my babies, you must adopt them. They give so much more when they know they are loved.”
Ishmael looked over the papers. Seemed like your normal adoption contract, as if he would know the difference. He took a pen from his nightstand and signed on the dotted line. Why not? Couldn’t hurt.
Ishmael put the toupee back on his head and right away felt a difference. It seemed to hug his skull and it felt warm and soothing up there. Looking in the mirror, he almost burst into tears. He was a handsome man with a full head of hair. A new Ishmael. No matter how closely he scrutinized his head, from every angle, he could not see where his hair ended and the rug began. It looked like his hair! His body surged with energy and confidence that he had not felt in years, and his eyes sparkled.
“Looking good, baby,” he said aloud, snapping his fingers at his reflection. “Looking gooood.” He was immediately embarrassed by his cheesiness but couldn’t resist one more admiring glance.
The next three weeks of Ishmael’s life were golden. He booked two commercials, three major guest spots on popular TV shows, and the lead in a movie to be shot in France in the summer. His love life perked up too. Women noticed him and were charmed by his humor. He brought home one girl who remarked, after, “You make love like an ugly man. You know, you’re grateful. It’s so refreshing.”
Thank God everybody was so shallow, thought Ishmael delightedly. Yes, things were going beautifully. Well, mostly beautifully.
He had to admit that a few odd things had happened recently. A couple of nights after he started wearing the rug, while Ishmael was preparing himself for bed, he placed the toupee on the Styrofoam head that was on the nightstand, admired it for a few minutes, and climbed beneath the covers. In a few minutes he was fast asleep.
The next morning he awoke to the sun streaming though his curtains. He stretched and made his way into the bathroom. As Ishmael passed the mirror, he did a double take. The toupee was on his head. He stopped and thought back to the night before. He was sure he had taken it off; in fact he was positive. Was he sleepwalking? It’s second nature putting it on, he thought. I probably went to pee in the middle of the night and put it on then. He didn’t quite manage to convince himself. He also didn’t have a plausible explanation why the following day he found the toupee on the couch in front of the TV with a half-drunk can of beer beside it.
Ishmael didn’t dwell on it, mainly because he was enjoying his life too much. When his commercials hit the airwaves, his career
exploded. Jeff was calling every day with auditions and, best of all, straight offers. Things were looking up.
He started wearing the toupee all the time, not only for auditions and forays outside the apartment but 24/7. He immediately got new headshots, accentuating his luscious locks. He found that with his hair on, little perks came his way. Extra cinnamon in his Cinnamon Dolce Latte with soy milk. Complimentary starch in his dry-cleaned shirts. Memories of what it had been like to be bald fell away like his treacherous former hair. He was a new man.
Ishmael had an audition for a new series. Jeff said it was just a formality and that the part was his, but the producers just wanted to be sure. As he entered the casting room, he saw his old nemesis, Fleming, reading over the script. One of the most satisfying by-products of having hair was beating Fleming out on every audition.
“Hey, Jackie! How’s things?”
Not QUITE the Classics Page 3
