Baldy Pubes

Moving me forward a year in primary school didn’t work out to be the best idea. OK, it was recognition of my early brightness, but more negative consequences were soon to become apparent. Moving into secondary school I was, of course, a year or so younger than the other boys in my class and important biological changes were afoot at least for them but not, disastrously, for me.

There they would be in the changing rooms (for swimming, where removal of underpants is a prerequisite unless one is willing to spend the rest of the school day wearing sodden trunks under one’s trousers) flaunting and comparing their budding pubes while I attempt to hide my scrawny, chicken-headed pre-pubescence. The boys soon caught on.

Thus, I found myself one evening at home in the bathroom attempting a somewhat inept remedy for my shame and humiliation (to make things worse I was at least six inches taller than the other boys which made my pubic baldness even more of an oddity to them). Luckily, I have head hair and not bald like the boy with alopecia in a previous school. Although, maybe if I was bald all over this would give some exotic allure like maybe I was space alien. Being considered a space alien was more attractive to me than my current identity as ‘baldy pubes’.

“Hi! My name is Baldy Pubes. You may have heard of me from the other boys. Would you care to go disco dancing with me one evening? Go on! Share in my shame”.

I would remove cuttings from my head hair and apply these to my pubic area to create the simulacrum of surging maturity. But, how to do this? Glue? We had no glue in the house that I knew of and asking my parents for it would give the game away.

“Da, we got any glue in the house?”

“No’ sure, son. Whit dae ye need glue fur?”

“Disnae matter. Sellotape?”

I managed to find the family Sellotape myself. I considered masking tape but that would be somehow too industrial and a tad obvious. No, Sellotape would be grand. It was next to invisible next to the skin. I had envisioned a job a cosmetic surgeon would be proud of: pseudo-pubes curling elegantly and ostensibly against a background of apparent skin.

I cut the hair; I attach it to the tape, but this concoction is not readily accepted by my skin. Next morning, I have my pants full of hairy tape which is not all together secured and anchored down. Still, I am desperate and will try anything.

I thought pubic baldness was humiliating but what followed in the changing rooms was something that has entered the folklore of the school. I might even have made the alumni list, but I didn’t wait around to check.

“David Wylie attended this school 1972-74. Started in the highest class and finished in the lowest but what he is most remembered for was….”