So many things seemed to happen at the party at once that it
was almost impossible to take stock of them all. However, I was able to recall a few of the
highlights. The part of the story that
everyone knows was that the Red Sox did indeed win. It was a thrilling game that went 12 innings
before David Ortiz hit the game winning home run that sent roughly half of the
people at the party into a bedlam-like state akin to delirium. At first I had simply figured that they were
all Sox fans, but it turned out that what they really all had in common was
that they’d bet right. By 10:30, the
winners had all proudly shown off their betting tickets and the losers had
littered the floor with theirs. I’d
checked my ticket, to confirm my own wager and that’s when Les suddenly popped
up next to me, grinning madly.
“Mikey!” he yelled.
“You’re a genius!”
“I am?” I replied.
“Abso-fuckin’-lutely!
I used your system and look!”
Les pushed a betting slip in front of me that indicated he’d
bet $1000 on the Sox to beat the Yankees.
“A genius! That’s what you are!”
he cried.
“But my system called for a bet on the Yankees,” I
protested. It was true. The Yankees had won the last 3 games, as
opposed to the 3 losses suffered by the Sox.
Their record in the playoffs was 6-1 to Boston’s 3-3. Hernandez had gone 8-2 during the regular
season, as compared to Lowe’s 14-12 and no matter how you looked at it, the
Yankees had beaten the Sox for the AL East during the regular season,
again. The only factor that favored the
Red Sox then was that they had played at home.
I’d bet on the Red Sox out of love, not because I thought they’d win,
thus proving that deep down I was a sentimental idiot. What, pray tell, could Les’ excuse be?
“Sure, I know that!” Les said, his smiled broadening even
further. “But then, I always thought
your system was junk. I just used it to
figure out how not to bet. It
worked pretty good, didn’t it?”
It was clear that Les had adapted Allan’s theory about my
innate lack of a sense of direction to gambling. I began to wonder if I was ever right about
anything. I hadn’t paid much attention
to it, but the Astros had already won their game that same day on a Carlos Beltran
home run in the 7th, making me the proud owner of a second winning
betting slip. Once I realized that, it
took some of the sting out of what Les had told me anyway.
Allan spent a good deal of the evening talking to Kristin
Mueller, the editor of the Journal of Hair Replacement. She was a very attractive woman in her early
forties and she had really taken to him.
This was no great surprise. Allan
was a good-looking guy, athletic and in his mid thirties. But of even greater importance, had an innate
talent for actively listening to people.
He held their attention by making sure that whoever was speaking to him
knew that he was hanging on every word.
Kristin basked in Allan’s smile as he listened to her next question for
the feature she was going to write about SlipNot. I’m sure Bosco had invited her to the event
and it had been a good idea. The concept
of giving the product away would be easier for our clients to swallow if they
also got our explanation for making the change from a third party source. Allan was selling Kristin and from the look
of it, she was buying. He let her
control the conversation, all the time smiling and holding her with his
gaze. Kristin was in so deep that she
didn’t notice what Allan’s hands were doing while they talked.
As I may have mentioned, Allan had more hair on his head and
face than anyone I’d ever met. He kept
it all quite long, but well kempt. In
many ways, he resembled the lead singer of the Black Crows, Chris Robinson. Just try to imagine Robinson
after a $200 styling session and you’ll appreciate what Allan looked like to
Kristin. But while she was looking into
his eyes, Allan was fiddling with his beard.
I watched as he attached one and then two braided hair extensions,
giving the effect that he had two long pigtails hanging from his chin. As Kristin looked down at her notebook, Allan
glanced over to me and flashed an evil grin.
He then swung one of the pigtails in a circle, just as Kristin finished
writing. When she looked back at Allan,
he was once again smiling at her, looking intently into her eyes, the
extensions hanging almost motionless from his beard.
To Bosco’s horror, the photograph that accompanied the
two-page feature on the SlipNot conference in the next issue of the Journal was
of Allan, smiling into the camera with one of the two extensions that appeared
to grow from his immense beard fixed between two fingers. He held it much the same way Groucho Marx
used to waggle his signature cigar, as he leered into the camera.
We had left the door to the suite open, so that we didn’t
have to run to answer it every time someone new showed up. The sounds of a large party drew a few
hangers-on and not so surprisingly, they too were involved in the hair
business. They included the Inoues, a couple
from Japan who were hawking a line of surgical instruments that were designed
for hair transplants.
As is the case with any transplant, donor material must be
harvested before it can be moved to wherever you want to put it. Kidneys, hearts, lungs, arteries and
virtually everything that belongs inside of your body must come from someone
who either can donate it alive (kidneys, for example) or who no longer needs
those organs, as they have just passed on.
But hair doesn’t really work that way.
In order to harvest donor hair, you must remove hair follicles from the
person who needs the transplant. Each
patient must “self-donate”.
A single follicle is almost an insignificant thing. You never notice as one dies on your
head. However, pattern baldness occurs
when enough follicles in one general area do so, initially causing the thinning
of the scalp and in more advanced stages, what we all know to be a bald
spot. However, if you can remove
follicles from another part of the head and insert them where thinning takes
place, you can effectively repopulate that area. In most cases, the donor follicles are taken
from the back of the scalp in thin strips.
The individual follicles are then separated and one-by-one, they are
inserted where they are needed.
Needless to say, this is fiddling work and the sale of the
instruments that do it are big business.
The Inoues were hoping to sell their wares to what was then a rapidly
growing surgical hair replacement business in Las Vegas. Keith was particularly interested in what
they had to say and after a little prodding he prevailed on them to go back to
their room and to bring in some of the tools they’d designed.
Maybe 20 minutes later, the Inoues reappeared with a large
metal suitcase and a brown grocery bag.
Keith had cleared off some space at the bar for them to lay things
out. Mr. Inoue, who was somewhat shorter
than his wife stood to one side as she unpacked the case of its glinting
contents. These were among the smallest,
most precise looking devices you could imagine, but they all resembled the same
kind of instruments you might have seen, either in a hospital or on a prime
time TV medical drama. In other words,
there was nothing really new, at least at first glance.
However, once the instruments had been laid out, Mr. Inoue
reached into the grocery bag and removed a ripe cantaloupe.
The next installment will be posted on March 24.
If you'd like to read the book today, GO
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