My Sentiments Exactly

With a Buzz Cut, I Can Take on Anything

GOT a buzz cut last July, four days before radical open surgery to remove my cancerous prostate. I told family and friends that I did it for reasons of ease and style: I wanted to avoid the heartbreak of hospital hair, that lank and greasy thatch that repels visitors.

But I was lying.

In a time of utter vulnerability — having already weathered three months of post-diagnosis ups-and-downs — I needed the primal ferocity that a buzz cut proclaims. I needed to look like a soccer thug or an extra from “Prison Break” to help get me through surgery, the physical indignities of post-op life, and my subsequent radiation and hormone therapy. I still do. My prostate cancer and its treatment have transformed me — in body and spirit — and the buzz cut has helped me cope with those changes.

I agree with the late Anatole Broyard, who wrote in his memoir “Intoxicated by My Illness,” “It seems to me that every seriously ill person needs to develop a style for his illness.” And the buzz is what I want to wear, what I need to wear, in this wicked waltz with cancer.

I’m an optimist, but not a day goes by in which I don’t wonder whether I’m going to die before I ever imagined. The buzz cut helps me scowl, glower and say “No!” to that thought.

Broyard, a New York Times literary critic who died of prostate cancer, also wrote, “Only by insisting on your style can you keep from falling out of love with yourself as the illness attempts to diminish or disfigure you.”

In some ways, I’ve already fallen out of love with my old self.

There’s a book-jacket photo taken of me early last year, before I learned that I had cancer, and I can’t stand to look at it. Can’t bear to look at my floppy mop of Glen Campbell hair, the innocent grin. I want to smack that cheery and naïve face and bellow: “Boy, you don’t know nothin’!”

That poor guy, at age 50, doesn’t yet know that he has cancer, that it will prove to be shockingly aggressive and that, among other indignities, his libido will take a sabbatical (on Ibiza, I hope).

For me, the buzz cut is a visible bulwark against the tide of emasculating side effects caused by the treatment for prostate cancer.

Wearing my buzz, hiking boots and a rugby shirt, I don’t feel like prey to the cancer. I can still fix my wife with my blue eyes, drop my voice into a Barry White register, and say, “Hey, baby.”

It was only after the fact that I learned that my hair-shearing reaction to having cancer wasn’t so unusual. I understood that the buzz cut spoke of a new me. It still reminds me that I’ve been tempered in the crucible of cancer, that I have changed.

But it’s also part of a muted tradition that’s consistent with the transformation, transition and trauma that I’ve gone through.

Nuns and monks cut their hair, as do saints and rape victims. Soldiers, prisoners and mental patients have their hair cut for them. And issues of hair and appearance are often uppermost in the minds of cancer patients.

“The challenge with cancer is to find a new sense of self,” said Dr. Robert Klitzman, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, “because the narrative of yourself has been disrupted.”

Dr. Klitzman, who has explored issues of serious illness and appearance in several books, most recently “When Doctors Become Patients,” added, “Often, when a woman wears a scarf instead of a wig, she’s owning her cancer, not resisting it.”

That idea of ownership is crucial. My treatment hasn’t made my hair fall out, but partly I wear the buzz to show solidarity with my sisters-and-brothers-in-disease who have no choice.

And the buzz lets me set the social terms of how I face the disease. I’m not interested in the wan and weepy Romanticism of the 19th century in which the patient stoutly wastes away in a soft bed of pity-whispers.

I’m not interested, either, in keeping stoic secrets, in which cancer becomes the fetus of shame buried in the root cellar, or the insane uncle shut in the attic of fear.

Secrets were an epidemic in my rural New Hampshire family — silences about cancer and alcoholism, about bastards and near-bastards — and those secrets and silences killed people.

The buzz grants me the power to look people in the eye and matter-of-factly say: “I have cancer.” Most people who know me will tell you that my current feral style — looking like some vintage N.F.L. middle linebacker — doesn’t reflect my personality.

I am basically a cream puff. But I like the contradiction, the tension, that the buzz cut seems to represent between my inner and outer lives.

The buzz cut is a kind of veil or, perhaps, a mask hiding my secret identities: one of which is being a cancer patient.

But to be honest, I don’t think I’m hiding anyone. We are, all of us, a bundle of apparent contradictions. Even though I’m a dreamy pragmatist, I need the guy with the glare, the shaved skull and the brutishly broad forehead to help me through the day.

I walk into Balonze Barber Shop in Upper Montclair, N.J., every three weeks and tell the owner, Dennis, that I want the “one-zero” buzz, which is even shorter and tighter than the traditional No.1.

As I settle into the familiar chair, Dennis clicks the blade into place, then flicks on the shears. In a way, that chair and the soothing hum of the clippers are just as important a part of my cancer treatment as the TomoTherapy machine in which I received my seven weeks of radiation.

I revel in the smell of alcohol and shaving cream, shiver at the scritch-scratch-scritch of the straight-edge razor on my neck and sideburns. Dennis is preparing me for the next three weeks, the way James Bond gets prepped for a mission.

Besides the faux surface ferocity, the buzz cut also energizes me, puts an extra bounce in my step. And that metamorphosis also carries me back to childhood, when I’d get my summer “whiffle” cut.

So, too, it’s oddly redolent of the Monkees, neighborhood stickaburr fights and going to the stock car races at Star Speedway in Epping, N.H.

In the Bible, Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with an angel of the Lord. And, after wrestling with the dark angel of prostate cancer, I, too, have a new name: Cancer Patient and eventually, I hope, Cancer Survivor.

A new name demands a new look, a new style. In my case, it demands the “one-zero” buzz.