The hair makes John Bina laugh. His own hair. He likes to smooth it, pat it, pass fingers through it. His own hair, to do with what he pleases. He could dye it, curl it, jell it, spike it, perm it. Mostly he just lets it grow. His wife taught him how to comb it. Fifty years old and couldn't comb his own hair. Bina had been bald most of his life; what did he know of combs?
The hair surprises him. Every morning when he looks in the mirror. Oh yeah, he remembers, I have hair. He's reluctant to part with any of it, so it was with a sense of hesitation that he slid into the hairdresser's chair.
"What's going on?" he asked his hairdresser, Patricia Mattera.
"Nothing big," she replied over the whir of a nearby hair dryer. "Same old."
Nothing same old about a haircut for John Bina, known as Big John Bina from his career on the radio, most recently at B101 FM. "It's unbelievable," he would later say of his haircut, "to someone who was bald for 30 years."
Bina is 53. He's stocky, wears rimless eyeglasses and speaks in a low DJ voice that has a rich texture, as if he swirls some of the words around his mouth before letting them out. His eyebrows are lightly frosted with gray, and the mustache is salt-and-pepper. The beard grows lighter as it moves south; the tip of his goatee is white.
Mattera combed, measured with her fingers, then gently snipped. Bits of silver hair glittered against the black smock over Bina's shoulders. The hair on top of his head is gray and a little squiggly. Bina's nickname may never be "Shaggy," but the hair is real, it looks natural, and it grows gamely across what had been a naked dermal wasteland.
The operation that gave Bina his new look is the latest technology. These are not the old plugs your Uncle Charlie tried in the 1970s, which gave transplants a bad reputation because the hair looked like rows of corn stalks. Today's procedures can move one strand at a time.
Bina monitored each snip in a mirror. His wife, Rita, sat with her back to him and read a magazine while chemicals set in her hair. The Avanti Dezigns salon in North Providence looked the way a modern hair care shop might have in ancient Rome -- with columns, chandeliers, huge mirrors everywhere and a decorative cornucopia in the window that faces Mineral Spring Avenue. People sat under dryers. Behind the noise and commotion, the Eagles song "Take it to the Limit" played softly.
There was a time decades ago when Bina needed regular haircuts. His follicles deserted him by the clump when he was a teenager. By his late 20s, all that remained was a ring of hair at ear-level, known as the "doughnut." He didn't want a toupee; he was terrified of plugs. A barber long ago persuaded him to quit the comb-over and accept what nature had decided. He grew used to it. He was not overly sensitive. Bald jokes didn't offend him, exactly, though they were irritating after a while. Some things are only funny the first 5,000 times.
In the meantime, hair-loss treatment evolved from toupees and plugs to infrared scalp stimulation, hair-growth prescription pills and micro hair-transplant surgery.
Excited about new technologies, Dr. Robert T. Leonard Jr. founded Leonard Hair Transplant Associates in Providence in 1989. His techniques worked, but he got little word-of-mouth business; too few clients, especially the men, were willing to tell friends about what Leonard had done for them. The doctor turned to advertising. And three years ago, the sales rep handling Leonard's account at B101 gently suggested to Bina: Would you like to meet the transplant guy?
Leonard is 46. He is genial, speaks gently, and doesn't seem hurried, though his practice, now headquartered in Cranston, sees an average of 30 new people a week. He'll sneak a glance at your hair when you meet him. His own hair is thick and black. He takes Propecia, a hair-loss prevention and hair-restoration tablet, and occasionally treats his scalp to infrared light that is supposed to stimulate blood flow to the follicles.
Hair is serious business for Leonard, beyond vanity. He believes hair restoration recovers self-image. Hair loss, he said, makes a person look older. "They look in the mirror and see an older person looking back at them, and there is a disassociation between how they look and feel."
Bina, who lives in Cranston, was 50 when he sought Leonard's help. That is the average age of the doctor's clients. Hair loss treatment is often "something for people as they go to the second half of their lives," he said. With divorce rates so high, many people in their 40s and 50s want hair for their return to dating. People of that age also tend to have money available for treatments that can cost several thousand dollars.
During his first procedure in 2003, Bina ate cookies and watched TV. Leonard numbed a section of scalp, removed a narrow strip of skin and hair follicles from the doughnut of hair around Bina's head, then sutured the cut. Other hair left behind shingled over what was taken and the harvest was undetectable.
Under magnification, Leonard diced the strip into tiny pieces with one, two or three hairs each -- no more than three. He numbed the top of Bina's scalp, made tiny incisions with a special scalpel, and then planted the grafts. The hair soon fell out from the shock. That was normal. The magic came 2 to 3 months later, when new hair sprouted. It grows about a quarter-inch per month, and should keep that pace. It shouldn't fall out because it's native to the doughnut area, and nature has already decided that ring of hair would stay.
Before the operation, Bina had worried he might not like hair. Seems ridiculous now. But after 30 years, was it so silly to wonder? "I liked myself bald," Bina said. "I thought, 'What if I didn't like myself with hair?' After you get it done, it lifts your mood a little, not that I was depressed. Mostly I chuckle when I look in the mirror."
He went back for two more transplants; each shrunk the bald spot on the back of his head. Now he notices bald spots on other men. He likes the feeling of control over what had been uncontrollable, and the sense that nothing is impossible. Next he plans to go to Russia to ride a MIG fighter jet to the edge of the atmosphere, a lifelong dream. "I want to see the Earth, the white and blue, from space."
After his trim, Bina reclined over a salon sink for a shampoo. Mattera expertly lathered the soap and warm water into his hair. His eyes fell shut, he grinned; the expression was a mix of pride and amusement. Bliss is what it looked like.
Your turn: Have you changed your physical appearance to defy aging?
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