Uncle Willy’s Toupee

Karen FitzGerald

Word Count 593

It was 1967. I was a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday. Sixteen – an age of transformation. One morning, I overhear Mom on the phone with Aunt Sally. "Have you seen the hairpiece yet?” she asks.

I can only hear mom’s side of the conversation.

“Well, I can’t decide if I like it or not. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

Sally speaks a lot.

“Willy looks fine in it, but still, for the sake of propriety….”

Sally speaks for a really long time. My teenage hunch? She’s lecturing Mom.

My mother and her siblings were the trifecta of personality disorders. Sally was studious, dark, moody, and despairing. She wore black turtlenecks, read unrhymed poetry, and smoked Nat Sherman Cigarillos. Mom was hard-working, serious, and intellectually adventurous. She smoked Pall Malls. I’m not sure what my dear Uncle Willy smoked, but he was smart, witty, carefree, and given to long bouts of ecstatic delight. Looking back, I see there was something cavalier in his nature. He made it clear he didn’t give a rat’s ass what people thought about him. But then there was that hairpiece my mother and aunt were discussing. If he didn’t care, why did he wear a toupee?

“Well, you’ve just got to see Willy in this new hairpiece….” Mom said into the phone. “OK then, we’ll go together…. I'll pick you up.”

“What’s up?” I asked Mom.

“Aunt Sally and I are going to visit Uncle Willy tomorrow. Want to come? “

I didn’t ask about the toupee. I assumed Uncle Willy got a new one, and they wanted to see it. He did so every few months. Grandma thought Willy was a self-indulgent hedonist. “A vainglorious gadfly,” she used to say, and not in a good way.

Uncle Willy treated me like an adult. He’d talk about real things like the Bay of Pigs, the CIA, psychedelia --- stuff that flew over the heads of pre-teen me. He used to take me to the symphony, museums, plays. He insisted I pay attention to the world outside my “white, suburban, middle-class neighborhood of narrow-minded, country-clubbing bigots.”

It wasn’t until we picked up Aunt Sally the following day that I learned we were headed to a matinee at the Public Theater. “I thought we were going to see Uncle Willie,” I protested. I was going through a phase that included a hate-on for doing old people stuff.

“We are. He’s in a new show. It’ll be fun. We’ll go to dinner after.”

I never asked what we’d be seeing. We actually went through the stage door where Willy was waiting for us.

“About time,” he said, peeved, but then smiled when he saw me. “You brought Karen! Excellent!”

He yanked my ponytail and pinched my cheek. “Honey, get ready for it. Your metamorphosis is about to begin!”

“Where’s the new toupee?” I asked. “We’re here to see your new hairpiece.”

“Hairpiece?” He raised his eyebrows at his sisters.

Mom explained. “We’re here to see Willy in his new play, it’s called Hair. It's a musical. ”

Uncle Willy was right. That was the day of my dawning, my day of Aquarius. Not yet sixteen, and I was shaken out of a late bloomer’s pubescent slumber. It was wild, colorful, loud, raucous, and energetic. Naked bodies everywhere. Hair. Songs about love and death, war and peace, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. When the cast broke out with ‘Let the sunshine in. . . .’ I applauded wildly, flying out of my seat, out of my skin, out of my cocoon forevermore.

Karen is a genre fluid writer whose works can be found in slush piles across America as well as in a few anthologies. She was recently identified as an “emerging writer.” She has been emerging for 50 years.