The Rug
Jessica Brunt
My father lost all his hair when he was 18. When I say all, I mean he was left with a wide landing strip of skin on the top of his head with thinning fluff on the sides. Although this is a fairly uncommon, albeit weird, problem for a teenager, instead of treating the situation with the grace and humility required, my dad decided no one would be the wiser. He was determined to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and have the general population believe ever after he was blessed with a thick, bushy mane.
You can’t imagine how much energy he put into this. He had a very impressive collection of hats, but not all at once. My father is the type of man who doesn’t believe you need more than one of anything, so he would wear his hats until they literally rotted off his head. Only then would he – begrudgingly – replace them. Very rarely would he actually pay for them; he would either steal them or find them in a back alley somewhere (the kind of places you would never go and certainly never pick anything up, let alone place it on your head with a sort of “eureka!” kind of swing in your step. He’s immune to garbage. It doesn’t faze him). There were lots of baseball hats and a straw panama for a while and a felt fedora one winter. His outfits never changed (some kind of dress shirt not buttoned high enough, brown belt, jeans and work boots) so the hat either worked or looked totally ridiculous.
He wore the hats during the day and used all manner of hair-regrowth potions at night, so the hat served a dual purpose of disguising the baldness and hiding whatever damage he had done to his scalp the night before. He had read about a remedy of saffron mixed with spring water and gold flakes, so he would make the mixture, shake it in an old water bottle and apply it to his scalp with the sport-cap spout. He would rub it in until his scalp turned orange with little sparkly bits. He didn’t cover his head with anything so all the pillows in the house had bright orange head-marks all over them. When it didn’t work, he tried colloidal silver, which made him look like the Tin Man. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, my father got fed up with the hat-and-potion routine and decided to go the route of the truly desperate: He bought a toupee. Of course, he put an immediate moratorium on the word “toupee” and told me that the proper name for it was a “rug”. Cheesy Frenchmen and retirees in Florida have toupees; gentlemen like my father have rugs. Okay, fine. I pictured my dad going down to the wig department in The Bay and picking out one that had a thick black pompadour. In reality, it was actually quite a sophisticated transaction. First they came and measured my father’s head; they asked him questions about tone, colour, thickness, etc. Then they custom made it out of real human hair. They dyed it and styled it and shipped it insured back to my dad’s house in a discreet brown paper wrapped package. All this cost three thousand dollars. We were broke. My dad had priorities.
It was quite the miracle of engineering. When he pulled it out of the bag we both took a breath: it looked like a small furry animal that was fast asleep. The ends of the hair were curled Beatles-style, and the toupee was brown with auburn highlights. My dad’s hair was black. I don’t know why he told them to make it brown with red; I guess I’ll never know. The important part was my dad was overjoyed by the rug; finally he could go out and have everyone think he had the full head of hair that was his birthright. He couldn’t wait to slap it on and go out for a stroll.
Now we had a new problem: How to stick it on? I absorbed a lot of information on this subject very quickly. There are a million ways to stick fake hair to your head. Almost as many as there are ways to say I love you. The one that stood out the most for me were the snaps: people actually had the male end of a metal snap sewn into their scalp and affixed the female end to the rug so it would never fly off in the wind. This is desperation. There were other, less dramatic solutions: spirit gum, surgical tape and good old fashioned needle and thread. None of these solutions were good enough for dad. He decided tape was definitely the right direction to go, but that surgical tape was a waste of money. He was an electrician at the time, and thought the overabundance of double-sided, thick, black electricians’ tape at work was a sign. He stole rolls and rolls of it and kept them in their own drawer in the bathroom. He used to cut strips of it off the roll and line them up along the bathroom counter like my mom did with Scotch tape when she was wrapping presents. He put three long strips horizontally across his head and two strips lengthways on the sides. He would then take the rug and carefully lower it onto the tape, then tamp it down on all sides to make sure it properly adhered. Even though it was a fairly fool-proof operation, we still didn’t go out of the house on windy days.
Though I could not dispute the rugs’ obvious quality, it still looked impossibly fake. As I mentioned before, my dad’s hair was black, so the contrast of the two colours revealed the lie more than anything else. But you couldn’t have told this to my dad. He was back in the saddle again and looking better than ever in his own eyes, and how can you burst someone’s bubble like that? My family and I decided that ignorance was bliss and we would let dad continue to believe that he looked smashing. Who could it hurt?
Shortly after I had made my peace with the fact that the rug was here to stay, it started having a larger impact on my life. My dad decided he didn’t like the curly-Beatles bits, so he asked me to straighten it for him. I knew if he did it himself he would melt the thing, so I was happy to oblige. I used an iron and a little ingenuity and got a result that didn’t look too bad, considering I was 11. Part of the three thousand dollar price tag was twice-yearly maintenance, where my dad mailed the rug back to the manufacturer and they spruced it up and put new hair in, and recurled it. So as soon as it came back, out would come the iron and we would start the whole process over again. I found the best iron setting for this process was “acrylic”. Once I accidentally burned a clump and it all stuck together like a big auburn scab. I managed to comb it out and it looked half decent. I really did spend a lot of time working on that rug.
My dad had a habit of falling asleep in front of the TV at night, and right before he was unconscious he would take the rug off and leave it on the floor next to the couch. Sometime later I would walk it the room, and in the twilight of the TV light, it looked like a live animal. I would jump a good two feet in the air and scream, oddly this never woke my dad up. Even though it happened over and over, I was always equally surprised. The rug was turning from something innocent into something sinister. It would lie on the floor after I screamed and – I swear - give me the evil eye. I know it didn’t have eyes, but nevertheless I felt watched. It unnerved me. Sometimes I would see it peering out at me from behind the couch, looking like it was about to pounce. Lurking is the right word for what it did.
Years passed, and my dad became less enamored with the rug. It was becoming a chore now; the tape and the wind were getting to him. He wore it less and less, only taking it out on special occasions and relying on hats again for the rest of the time. He is now sporting a hat that says “WRSS” on the front emblazoned over a star. If you look at it fast or out of the corner of your eye it looks like it says “WUSS”. I asked him what it meant, and he said it stood for White Rock Senior Secondary. He found it in the alley. It has the name “Chad” written on the inside in black marker. I haven’t seen the rug in years. Thank God, because my dad’s hair has turned from black to salt and pepper, so if he wore the rug it would look even worse. Plus, by my calculations, the rug is now 16 years old. It’s old enough to drive. It’s time to give the rug a proper send-off. It’s done it’s time; it’s served its purpose. It was good to us over the years, but now it’s time to say farewell.
My dad is onto a new idea anyway: Hair plugs. He has told me on more than one occasion that with all his salt and pepper fuzz, he’s a “hair transplant surgeon’s wet dream”. Never mind the fact these surgeries cost thousands, and he’s currently unemployed. He’ll make it happen anyway. He always has.