Walter Rego was bald. His was not the proud and beautiful bald like Mr. Clean, Michael Jordan or Yule Brynner. It was the unpleasant and unattractive bald like the mange, open pit mining or the first look in the mirror after a $5 haircut. Walter’s type of bald left the top of his head devoid of follicles, except for an island of stubble that stubbornly clung to the center of his ever-expanding forehead. All that remained was a withering tress oasis in the center of a spreading scalp desert.

While his once proud Nordic mane made an unruly retreat to a point roughly aligned with the apex of his bumpy noggin, the few remaining hair-raising places on Walters’ body went into over-drive. What Walter lacked at the top of his head, found other, less desirable places to manifest itself – including his ears, nostrils and knuckles. The unkempt arc of mud-gray frizz, still clinging to the small space at the back of his head, spread down his neck and merged with a back pelt resembling a Lake Michigan beach covered in washed up alewives.

Walter was not oblivious to his deforested visage. Early on, in his struggle against follicle shortfall, he practiced a convoluted comb over routine, involving a ridiculously long, dual winged mane-stretch. It was an arduous process, but he managed to route his minimal locks up each side of his head, entangle them at the summit and merge them with the handful of follicle resistance fighters still clinging to the middle of his severely extended forehead. However, this idea was a quickly abandoned due to it being a time-consuming process with minimal results (mostly derisive snickering from all of his friends — and many strangers).

In a desperate attempt to make lemonade out of lemons, Walter shaved his head. His hope was to rise from the level of bald and scruffy to the venerable status of clean and glossy. He shaved it as smooth as a polished spittoon — except for the nicks, scratches, and styptic stick repairs. However, with the over abundance of chest, back and neck hairs sticking out from the collar of his white T-shirt, he resembled less of a Mister Clean and more of a Petoskey stone wearing a fur collar.

He considered getting a hairpiece, hair plugs, or a gimmick he saw on a late night television infomercial. However, with a toupee, Walter figured everyone that already knew him would immediately know it was a “rug” and would probably laugh behind his back (and he would have been 100 percent correct on both counts). With hair plugs, Walter feared the transplants would take, but the few remaining hairs on the back of his head would continue to escape, leaving the top of his head looking like a fur yarmulke. The late-night infomercial gimmick involved sticking his head through a hole in a piece of cardboard and spraying the protruding scalp with something resembling fuzzy primer paint. Even Walter knew that was just a stupid idea.

Ultimately, Walter Rego decided to embrace his baldness by keeping his remaining fuzz regularly trimmed, neat and short. This approach was low maintenance, inconspicuous, and allowed him to comb his hair with a damp washcloth. However, he did make one purchase from one of those late-night infomercials — a device for trimming his ear and nose hairs.