I was scheduled to deliver a talk to all of the conference
attendees and I had applied myself to the task with my normal level of
diligence. Simply put, I had nothing
prepared. My somewhat lackadaisical
attitude about the whole affair might have caused Bosco some consternation, had
I shared the news of my sloth with him.
Of course, I did nothing of the kind and I left my meeting with Bosco,
promising him a stirring talk on Web marketing and an appeal for all of our
clients to buy into using the theresnohaironmyhead.com site as part of their
marketing efforts. Who was I to ruin his morning with the fact that I had no
idea what I was actually going to say? I
headed to the conference room that SlipNot had leased. It was set up like a classroom, with rows of
chairs behind long tables that ran from one side of the room to the other. It looked like there was enough room for more
than twice the number of attendees we had registered though, which was a drag. I set out to fix the situation by rearranging
the tables and chairs into a horseshoe facing the podium, which effectively
eliminated about half of the seating up front, while taking up the maximum
amount of real estate. I stacked the
unused tables and chairs along wall the back of the room. The whole time I did this, I was reminded of
the famous scene from the Jerry Lewis film, The Bellboy, where Jerry’s nerdy
character, Stanley miraculously sets up hundreds of folding chairs in the
Fontainebleu Hotel Grand Ballroom in less than one minute. I think it’s important to visualize a
positive role model when you tackle a particularly daunting task.
The first attendee arrived just as I had finished. It was Joey Romano.
He practically ran toward me, his right hand stretched out,
and he had a big, goofy grin on his face.
I don’t think I could ever recall seeing Joey smile before that
moment. It wasn’t a pretty sight
either. When he parted his lips to
reveal his teeth, his face took on a distinctly predatory expression. Consider what Wile E. Coyote might have
looked like if he had been tripping on acid and you will get the basic picture,
with the one major difference being that Joey’s head was covered with buzz-cut
short white hair. This was remarkable
enough until your realized that like all of his clients; Joey wore hair, in his
case – yak hair. The color was almost
silver, which would have been impossible to replicate with human hair. The dye would have caused the hairs in the ultra
fine membrane that was glued to his head to become too brittle and they would
have quickly broken or fallen out. But
Joey had one of SlipNot’s super-premium quality yak creations and so he had
nothing to fear on that account. If you
looked very closely, which I began to do as he neared, you could see what an
expert job his technicians had done. The
hair was dense enough that it masked the membrane that held it all in
place. Unless you really looked
carefully, just behind the front hairline, you would have had no idea that
Joey, who had been born with fine blond hair that started to fall out when he
was in his early twenties, was completely bald underneath. The story was that he didn’t even have to
have his head shaved when his unit was replaced. His scalp was completely and naturally
clean. For that particular image, picture
Telly Sevalas on acid, without a lollipop.
The apparent impertinence of
my half-second analysis of Joey’s hairline wasn’t all that socially
inappropriate, given the setting. People
in the hair replacement industry always talked to each other while their eyes
cased out the other guy’s forehead in an attempt to figure out what kind of
hair he wore and how it had been cemented and styled. Lots of owners wore hair, but not all of them
hired technicians that were particularly skilled at servicing it. Case in point: The father/son team of Ron and
Steve Breckenridge ran a studio in Cincinnati together. Ron had started the business in the early
1980’s, having taken Bosco’s advice to close out his styling salon and to reopen
strictly as a hair replacement studio.
Steve was his heir apparent, although it was far from clear how that was
going to work out. The quality of their
work was so unpredictable that they burned through clients and had to spend
enormous amounts of money on TV advertising to replace all of the customers
they lost. Fortunately, they weren’t
afraid to shell out the money and they sustained their business. But if Ron, who actually knew a thing or two
about the technical side of the business passed everything on to Steve, who was
more into the marketing side – it might not make any difference. Bad work was bad work and that could kill
you. I recall running into them a year
earlier in New York, on 6th Avenue near the Hilton. They’d been in town for one of our seminars
and they stood out from the crowd, at least to the trained eye. The membranes on their heads showed right
through the hair and their front hairlines were unnaturally straight. Steve’s dark hair didn’t match the color of
his eyebrows, which were quite light, although not exactly blond. Ron’s hair
was actually frightening. The hair was so wispy and it seemed to float just
above him, gently undulating as he moved.
It looked like someone had affixed an enormous salmon fly to the top of
his head.
“Hey, Michael!” Joey
exclaimed as he reached me. He grabbed
my right hand and began pumping it furiously.
“How you feeling today?”
“A little gritty.”
“I hear ya! That was a
fuckin’ excellent party last night, boy!
I mean it! Where the hell did you
find that act?”
“What act?” I asked.
“You know, that couple with the hairy melons! They were hilarious! I’ve seen some real freak shows at these
conferences, but they beat all.”
“Joey?”
“Yeah?”
I looked at his excited and, for once, friendly countenance
and decided against explaining to him that the Inoues were serious
manufacturers of fine surgical equipment.
He probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway and that was likely to make
him angry. It was best not to do anything to confuse him.
“Nothing, Joey,” I said, looking to get off that
subject. “It was cool you could make it
though! You looked like you had fun.”
“Yeah,” Joey replied, his voice turning serious. “Listen, I wanna talk to you for a minute.”
The next episode of SlipNot will be published on September 15th
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment