Beyond the Mask by Brian P. Walsh

Author:Brian P. Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7:

Throw the First Punch*

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.

—Ethel Barrymore

Whether I grew into the person I was always destined to be or some hybrid of Before Fire Brian Walsh and After Fire Brian Walsh, I knew this: I could not be embarrassed. I wouldn’t be. Even when I should have been, I wasn’t. I’m completely bald now, but when I started to lose my hair, a development that makes many men self-conscious, I started taking Rogaine. My hair began growing back because the loss was caused by a certain type of alopecia. It wasn’t coming in fast enough for my taste, though, so I thought, Screw this, and shaved it and bought a toupee (the cost covered, by the way, by workers comp). I guess you could say that many toupee- and wig-wearers are engaged in a form of mask-wearing, hiding behind something in plain sight. So I guess back then I still could be embarrassed.

And then, before you knew it, I couldn’t be. I don’t know the exact moment it happened, but the toupee stopped being a mask and instead became a prop. I would be out at a bar with friends or sitting in the passenger seat of a car at a red light. If I noticed people looking at me too long, which was always, I was sure I knew what they were thinking: What the hell happened to HIM?

And I realized, Wait, I have a great prop! On my head! I would grab the back of my toupee and pull it down toward my neck. Then I would push it forward until it hung over my eyes. The same people who couldn’t look away? Now they really couldn’t look away. As a final flourish, I would lift the toupee from my head, almost as if it were taking a bow, and put it back on.

***

In the fall of 2017 I was out in Los Angeles visiting my son Matt, and we decided to see a movie. I let him pick because I didn’t care; I’m always happy just to be with my kids, and I see Matt least of the three since he’s in California. The theater lights dimmed, we sat through a few trailers, credits rolled for the feature, and in the opening scene a bear runs through the woods.

On fire.

I leaned over to Matt. “You’re kidding me, right?” I whispered.

“What?” he said.

“You brought me to this movie?”

“Oh, you’re over it. Stop.”

We watched Only the Brave, based on the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, starring Josh Brolin, about the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona in 2013, one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history. I enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong. It was well done. But afterward, as we were leaving the theater, I said to Matt, “You brought me to a movie about nineteen firemen dying in a forest fire.”

He looked at me. “You’re over it,” he repeated.

He was right. I was over it by then, more than thirty-five years after the event.

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