Continued from The Penguin 3


After seeing the effect on Kenny Nails, Blue Book began doing a 360 around each of us once a week and giving us new estimates of how many years we had before the onset of irreversible hair loss. But even though he always wore his snap-brim hat on treatment days, the King Oscar’s sardine/Dole’s pineapple juice odor of that Mayo Hair and Scalp Clinic ointment passed right through it.

The guys would hold their noses and say, “What the hell do they put in that stuff, Penguin?”

One day Blue Book told Matt and me that the Penguin nickname and the nose-holding had begun to hurt his feelings.

“Well that stuff they put on stinks,” Matt said. “Make them tell you what they put into it.”

“I can’t,” Blue Book said. “It’s a secret formula.” He told us they wouldn’t let him take any outside the clinic except what they rubbed into his scalp and that they made him sign a new confidentiality agreement before every treatment. “It’s because they don’t have their patent yet,” he said.

 Matt just laughed. “It’s all a swindle,” he said. “What are they? Afraid you’ll sell your baseball cards and go into competition against them?”

That offended Blue Book. Matt was supposed to be his closest friend. He didn’t say anything at the time, but I sensed what he was going to do.

He’d given each of us a date certain as to when we'd begin to lose our hair. Now he consolidated all those individual dates into a year-by-year bar chart on which he graphed the date

of the onset of irreversible hair loss of all sixty-seven guys in the neighborhood.

I didn’t notice it at the time but it was the same month Syngman Rhee got elected president of the Republic of Korea and we began withdrawing our troops. We took our weapons with us, although we left our 2.36” bazookas. They hadn’t stopped German tanks, and our generals determined Korea was not suitable terrain for tank warfare anyway. The main thing was to make sure Rhee didn’t commit aggression against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The first bar on Blue Book’s hair-loss chart was for 1950. It went out to 1965, it peaked in 1962, and the names of each year’s victims were listed beneath that year’s bar. The 1962-bar was colored bright red, and the names of eleven different guys, including mine, were listed beneath it. What made it even worse was that 1962, according to Blue Book, was just when most of us would be looking for wives and getting the bottom of the barrel, because the best girls were never going to marry guys who’d started losing their hair.

Everyone laughed at Blue Book’s chart, held their noses and called him ‘The Penguin’ more than ever, and said, “Run home and get your umbrella. It’s going to rain.”

Blue Book just smiled to himself. He knew he was getting under our skin.

The week after Matt said all that about Blue Book selling his baseball cards and going into competition against the Mayo, Blue Book moved Matt’s name from the 1962 bar all the way forward to 1956.  It had an immediate effect. It was like Blue Book had made one of those little wax effigies of Matt and begun sticking pins into it.

To be continued in The Wrath of the Penguin

oldtimewriter.com

Article Source: http://www.discoveryarticles.com/authors/8714/herb-lobsenz

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