Funny Money by Laurence Gough

Author:Laurence Gough [Gough, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Homer Bradley had started losing his hair in his mid-forties. Baldness attacked him from all sides. He dreaded stepping in front of the shaving mirror in the morning. His hairline receded so fast he was surprised he didn’t get a ticket. The widening expanse of worm-white, glistening skin never ceased to shock him, even though he came to expect it. He learned to comb his remaining hair as delicately as if it were made of spun glass. He stopped using the hair dryer because the blast of hot air seemed to have the effect of clear-cutting his scalp. Soon his time in the barber’s chair was reduced from half an hour to less than ten minutes. No drop in price, however. He took to wearing a fedora, soon discarded it in favour of a beret. He secretly wasted a great deal of money on restoratives and other arcane, laughably unlikely treatments. Finally he bought a cheap wig, which he tried on in the safety and comfort of his bathroom. Oops. He burned it in the fireplace, and had to open all the windows to air out the house. After sulking for a week or so, he went out and bought a hairpiece so expensive that he had to finance it with his Visa card, over ten equal monthly payments.

He wore the wig for the better part of a month, until he happened to overhear a halfwit Crown prosecutor compare his head to a clear cut.

That same afternoon, he drove miles out of the city, nailed the wig to a tree and spent the better part of an hour and three twenty-round boxes of nine-millimetre hardball ammunition blasting the damn thing to pieces no larger than a vole.

That was it for Bradley. No more pills or ointments, pricey fad diets, hats, toupées, or comb-overs. He suffered from male-pattern baldness because he was a man!

His hairline continued to recede until he had an ear-high fringe of hair around the sides and back, like a villain in a Charles Dickens novel. As the years slipped by, his hair turned from a murky brown to a pristine, snowy, high-altitude white. For two decades he looked old before his time, but then his age caught up with him, and he was transformed almost overnight into distinguished and wise. A flurry of articles relating premature balding to astronomically high testosterone levels made him feel even better about his new self.

But now, suddenly, without warning, he was losing what little hair he had Left. His GP nervously referred him to a specialist, who told him a transplant was his only hope. Bradley paled, and for good reason, because the only decent-sized patches of hair he had left were under his armpits and smack dab in his pubic region.

Bradley leaned back in his chair. Oak creaked under the weight of his body. He folded his arms across his chest, and contemplated his future. Eddy Orwell and the rest of his crew were already referring to him as Inspector Picard behind his back.

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