I am eight when my head starts to itch soon after we move from Brooklyn to Lynbrook. The Lynbrook doctor says I have a ringworm infection, adding that I probably caught it leaning back in a Brooklyn movie theater seat; he emphasizes Brooklyn. It is highly contagious and I will miss a month of school.
As we wait for the doctor to write a prescription, I devise a plan to go to lots of movies and single-headedly turn Lynbrook into a village of scalp-scratchers. I stop smiling when the doctor orders my head shaved so salve can be applied daily. And, a nurse will come to the house every other day to give me a shot in my backside.
My father insists on shaving me himself so I won’t be humiliated in a barber chair. The walk to the bathroom feels like a march to the electric chair; my mother even let me choose pizza for supper. I sit on the closed toilet bowl, and my father cuts as much as he can with scissors. I keep my eyes shut and imagine I am a soldier who won’t squeal no matter what. My father plugs in the electric razor and starts shearing. When I feel my scalp exposed I begin to cry.
My father is thirty-five when he shaves his son’s head in the new house in the suburbs. He leaves the room, and I sit there wondering if I will have to finish the job myself. He returns with his Kodak Brownie camera—which I’ve had my eye on—and says I can have it.
I run my hands over my bald head and start to cry again. My mother comes in and hugs me, singing a Yiddish song I haven’t heard in years: shlof, mayn kind. My father says he has to do the books for his milk route, and he leaves me in my mother’s arms, bald and crying on the closed toilet seat.
Before the diagnosis, I checked out a thrillingly illustrated version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from the school library. My mother tries to return it, but the librarian says I can keep it “as a gift.” My father buys me a stocking cap, even though it is April. A kid teases me and I get into a fight. The cap comes off. No one wants to fight me after that.
I ride my bike in the early afternoons, and many days vow not to be home when the nurse arrives to inject my backside with a burning needle. But I never pedal so far that I can’t make it back on time.
I come up with a new plan: I’ll tell the toughest-looking kids how ringworm gets you out of school, and I’ll spread it to them through a head-rubbing initiation. I will lead a gang of elementary school dropouts. We will charge the enemy—whoever they may be—wearing our matching stocking caps. Then we will stop, bow, and tip our hats before letting loose a blood-curdling yell as we initiate the vanquished, emptying the schools and filling the streets with bald boys on bikes. All will be captured by my Kodak Brownie.
Instead, I ride alone. Eventually my scalp clears, my hair grows back, and I return to school.