Istanbul is not only known, as the ignorant foreigner might think, for its many mosques, its syrupy pastries, or its myriad of grand steam baths and even grander spice markets. Istanbul also happens to be, somewhat more surprisingly perhaps, the hair transplant capital of the world, which is why I’m finding myself inside a sleek hair clinic on the outskirts of the historical megalopolis.
“Where do you want it?” the agent says, translating for the hair surgeon who’s standing next to me with a Sharpie in his hand.
“What’s that?” I stutter as if waking up from deep slumber, straightening my posture in the dermatology chair. “Which one do I want where?”
“The hairline. If you’re transplanting hair, Tabib must know where to put it.”
I’m just waiting for him to reveal that he’s joking, that I must try to relax, maybe something along the lines of gotcha buddy, but in the absence of a worn-out punchline, I have to presume his question is real.
“Isn’t that up to him?” I ask.
“Oh?” the agent says, turning to the hair surgeon with a surprised face. “You’re sure you wanna leave that to Tabib?”
“Well, isn’t that his job? I mean, this is what he does, right?”
“Absolutely. As far as hair transplants go, he’s one of the best in the country. But Tabib’s, you know, a craftsman, not an artist. You might wanna make the aesthetic decisions yourself.”
“Right,” I say, nodding but not necessarily agreeing.
“It’s gonna be hard to get a refund once he’s done, if you know what I mean, so let’s make sure you’re one hundred percent comfortable with this particular decision before we proceed.”
“Can he just put it where my hairline was originally?” I ask after giving it some thought. “Before, you know, it began receding.”
“I suppose,” he says, dragging out the word slowly, then says something in Turkish to the hair surgeon, who responds by raising his eyebrows and shrugging as if to ask what the hell’s going on. “If you’ve brought a really good photo that Tabib can study, he might be able to reproduce your original hairline. He’d need to see a close-up, preferably. Or, even better, a series of close-ups from a variety of different angles.”
My silence is probably more than enough to let him know I’ve come unprepared. “Can’t he just,” I finally say, pointing at my scalp, “I don’t know, trace where it once was?”
Many more words in Turkish are being exchanged between the two men.
“I’m sorry,” the agent says, surveying my head with a wrinkled forehead, “but it’s pretty much… gone. Any trace of a hairline you might have had, it’s, yeah, very… gone.”
The hair surgeon is rubbing his own neck, sighing audibly, trading glances with his two assistants who frequently exit and enter the room with different tools and instruments ahead of the surgery. We might not speak the same language, Tabib and I, but what we lack in terms of verbal communication, he certainly makes up for with his rich vocabulary of body language.
Okay, I mumble to myself, since I have no one else in the room trustworthy enough to consult. What’s the situation I’m dealing with here? I have about a minute to instruct this guy where to draw my new hairline with a marker, a hairline that will decorate my forehead for as long as I live, perhaps the most distinctive feature of my entire physical presentation, no biggie, a cosmetic procedure that can’t be erased, can’t be reversed, can’t be tweaked even in the slightest in case I change my mind, because that’s the whole goddamn selling point of hair transplants, isn’t it – they last forever.
I feel a wave of dizziness come washing over me, my head growing heavy, limbs going numb, the people around me blurring, I think I even black out for a second. I do my best to pull myself together, drawing elaborated breaths, two short inhales followed by a long exhale, that’s what I’ve been taught to do in situations like these.
While faced with this sudden responsibility, a decision made in seconds but with consequences lasting a lifetime, I watch my hands, as if during a psychedelic high, pick up the phone from my pocket and click the browser and open a tab, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, only that I’m probably looking for some kind of photo reference, that’s about all I know, or even that I’m not sure about, it’s just guesswork really, but I keep watching my fingers moving and to my surprise they’re moving with determination, I follow their journey merely in the role of an observer and nothing else, pure unconscious guiding me, until the thumbs have typed a number of letters into the search bar, and I have to shut my eyes because I don’t have the nerves to stomach the thrill.
After enjoying the tranquility of pitch-blackness for a few seconds, I open one eye, and I reluctantly glance at the phone, and there it is: David Beckham. I keep staring at the two words on the screen for a good minute, still one eye closed, without knowing how to react to these very alien combinations of characters let alone what to do with them.
I scroll down the image results with an increasing sensation of astonishment mixed with nausea. David Beckham? I’m no soccer fan, and I’m definitely no follower of reality shows, if that’s what he’s up to, I swear to god I’m barely aware of this guy’s existence, but apparently, when control is being handed from the more sensible part of the brain to my unconscious, David Beckham is the unthreatened role model for hairlines, a poster child for the thickness and sharpness most middle-aged men could only dream of.
Still functioning solely on autopilot, and fueled by the adrenaline of sheer humiliation, I hold up my phone to the hair surgeon with shivering hands. He peers at the screen with a blank expression, then nods, smiles emptily, faces the agent, smiles again, faces the assistants, smiles a little more, then all four of them start smiling and nodding at each other and back at me.
At this point, my paranoia is skyrocketing. Why is the hair surgeon smiling, I think to myself, now sweating excessively. Is it a polite smile, I wonder, or a spiteful smile. Is he smiling because he’s imagining how David Beckham’s hairline will serve as the perfectly curated ornament to the rest of my facial features, or is he smiling because he’s picturing a full-on disaster. Wait a minute, don’t tell me he’s smiling because David Beckham is the one reference he gets from all his patients, like, literally all of them, to the point it’s now a cliché, an internal joke, or worse, a long-standing anecdote he’s sharing with all his surgeon friends at every single dinner party in upper crust Istanbul. Is that it? He’s smiling his smug fucking smile because he knows there are thousands of emotionally fragile, incurably insecure men out there with impeccable David Beckham hairlines but none whatsoever of his charisma?
By now I’m ready to abort the whole thing altogether, rise from the dermatology chair and get the hell out of here, wear my prematurely escalating baldness with pride, never to look back. On the other hand I’ve gone through a great deal of inconvenience in order to get here. I’ve arranged this whole trip, haven’t I. I’ve flown an airplane. I’ve made a transfer even, which means I’ve flown not one airplane but two airplanes. And what’s more, I’ve paid a substantial amount of money for the deposit, money I’ll never see again in case I storm out that door. I should not be rushing things, not right now, not before I can see them more clearly.
“What are they saying?” I whisper to the agent, even though eavesdropping is not a concern for obvious reasons.
“They didn’t say anything?” he responds in bewilderment, his eyes ping-ponging between me and the surgeon and the two assistants. “I didn’t hear them say anything.”
“But they’re thinking something,” I wheeze at him with suspicion. “I can see they’re definitely thinking something. Can you try to figure out what they’re thinking?”
“Relax,” the agent says, patting my shoulder. “This’ll be just fine. Okay? You’ll be very happy once it’s over.”
“You think this is a good look on me?” I ask, shoving my phone into his face.
“Oh, absolutely,” he responds, although there’s no way to tell if he’s being sincere or simply trying to secure that agent’s fee. “That’s a really good hairline you’ve got there. Trust me, you couldn’t have chosen a better hairline.”
“I know it’s a good hairline,” I sigh, increasingly frustrated by his unwillingness to show honesty in this critical moment, “but is it a good hairline on me?”
“Exquisite,” he says, pouting his lips as if he were sampling a vintage Cabernet.
Next I let the two assistants wrap my body in something of a straitjacket before shaving my head with disposable razors. I let them inject no less than forty-five thirty-gauge anesthesia needles into the scalp, inducing a kind of hellish burn that I couldn’t in my most paranoid fantasies imagine being any less severe than the pain they’re supposedly sparing me from. Finally, I let them make three thousand tiny cuts across the already sore skin, after which they use surgical tools I don’t want to know the name of to extract hair follicles from the back of my neck and implant them on the bald area.
Five hours later, the metamorphosis of my masculinity is complete. I have finally healed my wounded manhood, although some would of course argue being bald is as manly as it gets. While it’ll take a few months before I can enjoy the full results, the surgery I must say has been carried out flawlessly, with impressive precision. A razor-sharp hairline, nearly identical to the one of the British tabloid athlete, is now accompanying the increasingly bald patch on the back of my head. What once was a source of great despair, a demeaning reminder of excessive testosterone, has now been reduced to nothing but a little souvenir of my former self, a precious artifact I will forever wear as a badge of honor.