That enemy within

PICTURED ABOVE: First, proof that I once had hair: Me at age 17, giving my newborn niece Sarah her bottle. (Sarah now has three little boys of her own.)

Then, me in my salad days, e.g. age four.
(That's been one of my biggest problems in life:
after kindergarten it was all downhill.)



In the course of the past 10 years I have spent $6,738 undoing the damage my parents did.

Some of you who have known me for a while will probably argue that I didn't spend enough.

But I was screwed four ways at birth, and unlike members of previous generations, who tended to just accept their fates and move on, we baby boomers in our bottomless, fathomless self-regard have made a regular industry of self-improvement, defined as the resolute refusal to accept getting old.

Or to accept much of anything else, for that matter.

Hey, don't bug me. The philosopher Paul Tillich (or was it Liberace?) said "Always believe in the possible." It's a short leap from there to "Always believe in whatever you can persuade yourself is true."

As I was saying, I was screwed four ways at birth, three of them having to do with DNA. One had to do with a brain-fart on the part of my mother.

You just can't wait to hear what they were, can you?

Okay, we'll start with the brain-fart. When I was born, my mother stuck me with a first name which, if you think I'm going to tell you what it was, you have another think coming.

Actually, you can find out what it was fairly quickly, because I came out of the closet right here on the blog site a few months ago. Just search my blog for the title Growing Up With A Funny Name and read all about it. By the way, I should have dedicated that posting to my old friend Holly Inder, who spent most of an afternoon talking me into coming clean. Holly has known my secret for years. Way back when we were both much younger, Holly and I dated for a short time, and one night while we were dating, the sneaky little dickens got the secret of my horrible first name out of me by promising to reveal her supposedly just-as-horrible middle name. (She may also have been nibbling on my ear like Mata Hari. It was a long time ago.)

Holly's middle name turned out to be "Lynn." (What's known in the advertising industry as a bait-and-switch.)

Okay, on to the other three ways I was screwed at birth. All three of them were my father's fault. Mom 1, Dad 3.

I inherited my father's narrow, slightly receded lower jaw. No big deal, you say? Hah. If I'd had Arnold Schwarzenegger's jaw, two of my biggest embarrassments would not have to have been addressed.

Because I inherited my father's too-narrow jaw, I also inherited his mouthful of crooked teeth. The jaw was too narrow, so the teeth climbed all over each other, just as his had.

This is a common problem with kids, which is why orthodonists drive Jeep Cherokees. And my parents, to give them some credit anyway, had planned to do something about it. When I was 12 they laid the groundwork for having braces put on my teeth. My remaining baby teeth were pulled out, and when my adult teeth came in I was supposed to get braces. But as so often has been the case in my family, there was no follow-up. We moved, and somehow my teeth fell through a crack. My older sister Carla had a pretty serious weight problem, and since she was my mother's favorite, I have always suspected that her girth trumped my mouth. They dragged her off to a doctor to have her obesity treated and forgot all about my teeth.

So I grew up with a mouthful of crooked teeth. I did figure out some ways to have fun with them. Sometimes I'd bite ever-so-lightly into a slice of cheddar cheese and admire the weird pattern they made in its surface. Corn on the cob was also an interesting experience -- somehow the cob never came completely clean because my teeth tore the kernels off unevenly.

Then came adulthood and the Dies Irae: my wisdom teeth started to come in and my narrow jaw didn't have room for the lower ones. After two nights of excruciating pain, I went to the same dental surgeon who had pulled out my baby teeth ten years earlier in preparation for the braces I never got, and he dug out and removed my lower wizzies. (Marine that I am, I insisted on a general anesthetic for this procedure.)

So there you have Items One and Two. My mother stuck with me a first name that made me sound like I had emigrated to the earth from the Planet Zorgon, and my father gave me his lousy teeth. But they weren't finished. (My parents, that is. Not my teeth.)

My father was also bald. In fact I don't think he ever had a full head of hair. I can't find a photo of him in any family album in which his hairline is doing anything but receding. I mean, I have seen pictures of him that were taken when he was in the Coast Guard. This was way back in 1935 -- he was only 21 -- and he's already balding.

Until I was about 20 I had a gorgeous, luxuriant head of hair. I'm not kidding. When I was in high school my hair was so thick that when I washed it I had to wring it out like a towel. Then, just about the time of my 20th birthday in 1975, I was over at my friend Charlie Berigan's house and his father remarked, "Kelley, you're losing your hair."

"I am not."

"The heck you're not." Mr. Berigan had spotted a spot -- you know the spot. It's on top of your head at the back, guys. That's where The Spot begins. And The Spot grows. And grows. And grows. Until you look like Richard Deacon, Mel Cooley on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. You know, the poor billiard-domed schmuck that Morey Amsterdam was always giving a bad time, calling him "Goldilocks" and such.

My father took me out to dinner on my 20th birthday and we talked about this. "I'm gonna be bald because you're bald," I said in an accusing tone.

"No, no, no," he said reassuringly. "You don't have my hair; you have your mother's hair." (This was the night I realized my father could have had a career as a con man.)

Yeah, right. If I had my mother's hair, I left it someplace. You could find me by following the trail of "my mother's hair."

I've learned to live with it. When I was posted at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia during my Foreign Service career, I was issued an I.D. badge to get me past the Marine guards and into the building. Where it said "hair color" I wrote down "bald." The FSNs didn't catch that, and so that's what my I.D. badge said for three years.

Hey, I'm not bitter.

And finally, when my father's parents were assembling him, they placed his chin just a little bit too close to his neck. Jay Leno my father was not. Perhaps to get even with them, he turned around and did the same thing to me. Again, no big deal? Well, for the first 30 years or so of my life it wasn't. But believe me, your genes are a ticking time bomb. They're gonna get you sooner or later. For most of his adult life my father had a wattle under his chin that made him resemble, ever-so-slightly, a pelican. By the time he was in his seventies he could have carried the mail in it. Don't take my word for it, ask his grandchildren. By the time Dad was in his seventies, my nephew Ricky used to enjoy climbing in his grandpa's lap and batting at that wattle, you know, like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Wattle, wattle, wattle. Yech.

Picture a bald pelican with crooked teeth. Now picture his son. You're getting a picture of me.

Now, men of my father's generation were fatalistic. You played in the uniform you were issued, you died and then you went to the crematorium. End of story. Name changes were strictly for criminals dodging the law. Cosmetic surgery was for sissies, and orthodonture was only for kids.

We boomers. We're such fighters.

In 1999 I finally got around to doing what I had to do as far as finding a remedy for my parents' first treachery. I went to the courthouse in Arlington, VA, paid a $38 filing fee and then a $2 notary fee, after which a judge stamped a piece of paper and suddenly my name was "Alexander Kelley Dupuis."

I only use the "Alexander" part for legal documents. To friends and family I've been "Kelley" since I was 15, and that's fine with me. I just wanted to get that horrible moniker off my Social Security card and driver's license once and for all.

I had always wanted to get my teeth fixed, but there was never the money for it. Then, in 2005 my father died. The family house in California was sold and I was sent my share of the proceeds: roughly $100,000. I gave most of it to my wife Valerie. Really, I did. She went through it paying bills and now I'm penniless again, and she keeps telling me to go out and get a job at McDonald's.

But when I got that money I decided there were three things I was going to do with it before handing the lion's share of it to Valerie: (1) Buy Valerie a diamond ring, since I hadn't been able to afford one when we were married. (2) Buy myself a really nice road bike (I'm a cycling buff) and (3) Get my teeth fixed, at last.

At age 50 I went to an orthodontist and dropped $4,000 having braces put on my teeth. Once I got them off, I found that for the first time since I was ten years old, I wasn't self-conscious about smiling. Now just give me something to smile about.

I wrote a poem about all of this, how I had braces put on my teeth at the same age that my father was having most of his pulled out. Poorly educated, my dad assumed that at some point he was going to lose his teeth anyway, so he decided to head nature off at the pass, so to speak, and spent the rest of his life suffering with an upper plate. Smart, Dad.

But about this time, I could see my father's genes preparing to launch another attack. That's right...the turkey wattle. When I was young I was able to control it with diet and exercise. It was merely a tendency toward a "double chin" that I had to fight like you'd fight any other kind of fat. But eventually Dat ol' Debbil DNA started to get the upper hand: no amount of jogging or cottage cheese was going to keep my father's turkey wattle off my chin.

Bravely, I leapt into the breach again. Just this month I hied myself off to Lifestyle Lift in Reston VA and paid them $2,700 to Cut Away. A young punk of a doctor who looked like he spent more time playing racquetball than working got under my chin with a scalpel, a syringe, sutures and an assistant. Within 30 minutes they had cut an incision, gone in there, liposuctioned off some fat, snipped away some skin and then sewed me up. It didn't hurt much, really, and the small amount of pain involved was a small price to pay for not looking like my dad.

For now, anyway. In five years I might be back there for a "tune up."

Now, I told my wife, the next step is to saddle up and head off to the Hair Club for Men and get fitted with one of those super-convincing toupees that fool everybody. I figure with straight, white teeth, no turkey wattle and a full head of hair I'll be able to pass for 35 again. That's a boomer's definition of Nirvana. Or Shangri-La, anyway.

Ha! You thought I was serious, didn't you? No, there's a place where even I will draw the line, and wearing a rug is it. After all, lots of cool guys were bald. Yul Brynner was very cool. So were Henry Miller, Sergei Prokofiev, Julius Caesar and Richard Deacon.

Well, four out of five ain't bad.