I GOT a buzz cut last July, four days before radical open surgery to remove my cancerous prostate. I told family and friends that I did it for reasons of ease and style: I wanted to avoid the heartbreak of hospital hair, that lank and greasy thatch that repels visitors.
But I was lying.
In a time of utter vulnerability — having already weathered three months of post-diagnosis ups-and-downs — I needed the primal ferocity that a buzz cut proclaims. I needed to look like a soccer thug or an extra from “Prison Break” to help get me through surgery, the physical indignities of post-op life, and my subsequent radiation and hormone therapy. I still do. My prostate cancer and its treatment have transformed me — in body and spirit — and the buzz cut has helped me cope with those changes.
I agree with the late Anatole Broyard, who wrote in his memoir “Intoxicated by My Illness,” “It seems to me that every seriously ill person needs to develop a style for his illness.” And the buzz is what I want to wear, what I need to wear, in this wicked waltz with cancer.
I’m an optimist, but not a day goes by in which I don’t wonder whether I’m going to die before I ever imagined. The buzz cut helps me scowl, glower and say “No!” to that thought.
Broyard, a New York Times literary critic who died of prostate cancer, also wrote, “Only by insisting on your style can you keep from falling out of love with yourself as the illness attempts to diminish or disfigure you.”
In some ways, I’ve already fallen out of love with my old self.
There’s a book-jacket photo taken of me early last year, before I learned that I had cancer, and I can’t stand to look at it. Can’t bear to look at my floppy mop of Glen Campbell hair, the innocent grin. I want to smack that cheery and naïve face and bellow: “Boy, you don’t know nothin’!”
That poor guy, at age 50, doesn’t yet know that he has cancer, that it will prove to be shockingly aggressive and that, among other indignities, his libido will take a sabbatical (on Ibiza, I hope).
For me, the buzz cut is a visible bulwark against the tide of emasculating side effects caused by the treatment for prostate cancer.
More ...
