‘I’ll call a buddy of mine,’ I say on my way out. ‘Twenty-four-hour lock guy, for your door and mine too. Until he gets here, I’d keep the noise down. You don’t want to attract any undesirables.’

In spite of my day, I’m smiling on the steps. There’s not a word from Delano’s apartment. Not a peep.

CHAPTER 6

Before I had more serious things to worry about, I often spent the days leading up to the first transplant session searching my past trying to figure why I wanted hair plugs so badly. Why does a shiny skull prey on my mind so much? I’ve spent enough hours on the couch to know that these wants often have their roots in my own history.

I could never come up with anything. My father was dead before he got the chance to go fully bald. No bald guy ever beat me, or humiliated me that I can recall. I don’t have any hairy heroes that I want to be, or hairless guys that I don’t want to turn into.

It’s in the subconscious, Zeb informed me one night in the park. The two of us were sharing a pint of Jameson after the bars closed. A hefty ox like me squashed into a child’s swing, chains cutting off the blood flow to my feet. I must have been drunk.

Believe me, Dan. Something happened.

I know what happened. Zeb offered me a good deal, started showing me pictures, got my vanity stoked.

If you got hair, then maybe you ain’t so old and your life ain’t so over.

Zeb could sell shit to a sewage plant. Zeb is such a good salesman that he can literally charge a guy to inject him with the fat that he just sucked out of his ass.

‘Bloody bastards. This is a sterile environment’ were the first words Zeb ever spoke to me, and I knew straight away by the scout boots sticking out of his scrubs that this guy was Israeli army, something Sergeant Fletcher was too busy to notice as he had a finger jammed halfway up his nose.

‘I got this bump in my nose, see?’ he said, voice muted by the digit in his nostril. ‘Makes me snore something terrible. I need you to fix it.’

The doctor looks a little like the Bee Gee who married Lulu, if he had just run into a sheet of plate glass. You either get that or you don’t.

He finished injecting the unconscious guy’s penis and petulantly threw the syringe into a metal sink.

‘Come on, guys. I’m doing dick fat here. It’s touchy work. This man is a big shot in some militia or other.’