OLD ARCHITECTS NEVER DIE

I remember first hearing the term "well adjusted" as a kid, and for some reason thinking that there was something I didn't know about or hadn't had done to me yet, in that I couldn't remember ever being "adjusted." My mother, bless her, tried to ameliorate my confusion by drawing the analogy of a recent visit to the doctor, where he had given me a shot on the promise that it would keep me from getting very, very sick. Now, that didn't go down very well, as the shot hurt, I was mad as hell about the whole thing, and my five-year-old's mind wanted to find some way of blaming the pain on the doctor and/or my mother, and so formed a simple conspiracy theory that my mother had given me some sickness, and the doctor was taking it out of me with the needle. Later on, when I learned that "badly adjusted" was a euphemistic term applied to people who lead badly mismanaged and self-destructive lives, I vowed that I would never, if I could possible manage it, go out of adjustment.

It is perhaps because of this, perhaps due to some other anomaly of my psyche, that every once in a while I will find myself having great difficulty adjusting to some facet of my normal, everyday life, and that inability to adjust will throw me into a temporary tailspin. Like, for instance, the morning that I became aware I am bald.

Now, mind you, this fact did not creep up on me, nor did I emerge one morning transformed, Kafka-like, into a bald man. I was told by a barber, at the tender age of seventeen, that I had male pattern baldness. After a brief moment of denial, in which I told myself that he couldn't possibly tell anything from my full head of fine brown hair that I would one day be bald. Then the decade and a half of training kicked in: everybody knows that there is nothing more pathetically funny than a bald or balding man attempting to cover up his condition, and nothing finer, braver, or more irresistible to women than a bald or balding man who has accepted, or even embraced, his fate.

To that end I steeled myself to a future fading hairline. As the years pressed on, I went from parting my hair on the side to sweeping it back across my head, so that when the eventual recession began it was a more even and less noticeable process. The recession was evident by the time my wife and I met, so she was aware of the condition, so I didn't have the fear (reported by others in my condition) of the wife one day becoming disappointed and depressed about the ordeal of being betrothed to an egg-head, a chrome-dome, and moving on to greener pastures, so to speak. By the time I settled into adulthood (to the degree that it can be said that I have settled at all), I had grown accustomed to my baldness, planning haircuts around it, avoiding the sun, using sunscreen when necessary, and convincing myself that my look was distinguished. That last wasn't hard, either, since-- not to be vain, by any means-- my remaining hair has settled into a becoming semi-circle around the back and sides of my head, my forehead rising in thoughtful ridges from my brow, the crest of my skull brimming over the whole affair as if with sheer genius.

Okay, maybe I'm making too much of it. Suffice to say: I ain't a dog. I look pretty good for an old, bald white guy.

So one morning, a Wednesday if I remember correctly, I found myself looking in the mirror and thinking, of all things, Does everyone else know I'm bald?

As strange, as bizarre, as unfounded as the thought was, coming as it did out of virtually nowhere, what disturbed me more was how difficult it was to banish it from my consciousness. I went through my morning ablations, drank my coffee, had toast with butter, read the paper, all the while thinking, very deliberately and to no avail, Who cares if everyone else knows you're bald. I don't know if it was maybe the wrong antidote for the malaise, or if maybe I didn't really want to banish the thought, but I was terribly conscious of the thought running through my head. Does everyone else know I'm bald? Ridiculous.

On the way out of the house I stopped very briefly at the front hall closet, surveying the small collection of hats I had gathered over the years, knit hats for cold weather, floppy canvas and nylon hats for hiking and camping, a fedora I picked up for the sole purpose of wearing to the gallery crawls or play openings we might attend. I selected from the collection a red cloth ball cap I had picked up some years ago on a vacation to the beach, gaining protection from the sun and wind on the advice of the operator of a charter boat, that had just happened to fit me exactly. Feeling a bit more silly for having covered my shame, I fled the house and headed to the office.

On the way into the office, I expected a less than enthusiastic reaction to the hat. Perhaps nervous glances, maybe squeamish attempts to avoid looking at it, maybe even censure by the upper echelon for wearing unbusiness-like attire. Jill at the front desk beamed and told me she liked it. Allan, who happened to be sharing my studio that week, said something silly about the appropriateness of men who drove convertibles wearing hats. A partner spotted the hat before I had doffed it and declared to the knot of partners he was traveling with that it was yet another sign of Spring. Jim, also in the knot, opined that it made me look "jaunty."

After that, the hat became something of constant companion. Don't ask me why, precisely, but the red hat made me feel a little younger, a bit lighter. It put a bounce in my step, made the sun a little brighter, the sky a little bluer. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but she appreciates the bounce. Wandering around the streets of downtown Charlotte, strolling through a park, or going to the company barbeque, the guy in the red hat just has a little more fun than everybody else.

Even at on-site client meetings, where for some reason I was treated a little friendlier and a little less stiffly, and especially at construction sites, where the foremen felt they could talk honestly with the guy in the red hat. Call it voodoo, call in karma, call it fate, call it luck, call it primal instincts released by the sight of the color of blood, whatever it was, the hat seemed to do something for me.

Of course, that was before Allen quit. That was before Jim left. The firm was a little more businesslike then, a bit stiffer and more reserved. After Jim left, the firm seemed to get a little more relaxed, a little more assured. There was an air of, I don't know, call it arrogance maybe, a feeling that we couldn't lose. I would have thought the opposite would happen. Jim had been the old-school life of the party, the bonhommie and hail-fellow-well-met, and the wide-spread inner-office scuttlebutt had been that, with Jim and a couple of the other old-timers gone (in far less dramatic fashion), our next step would be a business plan and a mission statement. Instead, the ship bouyed as if from a loss of dead weight, and we sailed on to greater challenges and new shores.

It wasn't something I wanted to contemplate, nor something I would want to admit. I didn't want to think that losing Jim, especially the way we lost him, could ever be a good thing. I liked the guy, enjoyed his company, and while I always knew he was more a salesman than an architect, I could think that he had a strong appreciation for the art and a reverence for good design. I also didn't want to think of Jim as washed up and drummed out, which is how he last appeared to me, on his last, pathetic day of work. The first report I heard about him after he left the firm, from one of the partners who still golfed with him, came about a month after he left. One Sunday morning on the links the partner happened to stumble over the question of whether he was still looking for work or whether he had an offer from another firm yet. Jim paused, lost in thought, then broke into a grin, bellowing, "Oh, screw it, I'm rich!" and falling into that deep, booming laugh of his.

And it was true enough. For a man in his late fifties-- or better, I could never keep track-- he had amassed a fair amount of wealth over time, despite having spent, in his assessment, too much on his house, car, kids and colleges. This was all bourne out in his Christmastime confessions, which always centered around some extravagant gift or another his wife wanted to lavish on their friends or family or kids, which always ended with a dollar figure that made one or another of us gasp or whistle, after which he Jim would say "Oh, I'm good for it, OH-WAH-WHA-WHA-WHA-WHA!" (Which is as close as I can get to describing Jim's booming laugh, and that still doesn't do it justice.) So it looked as if he would spend his days playing golf or improving the homestead, making investments and maybe babysitting grand kids. Perhaps he would develop some soul-investing hobby, although he was already one hell of a gardener, as those of us who had visited his house could attest. So it was a bit of a shock when, seven months later, his name turned up in a building permit that floated through our office on the flimsiest of purposes.

It was just one in a batch of documents someone or other had requested, for purposes of due diligence regarding zoning compliance on a commercial development that was barely out of pre-design. We weren't even sure if it was one of the documents we had requested. All we really could say is that it was present in the office, pressed between the fingers of Elizabeth the intern as she stood over the copier reproducing them for the design team. In a soft voice she said, to everyone and no one, "Could there be more than one Jim Still?"

Elizabeth had not been around for Jim's defrocking, but naturally the tales had been told. Those of us present-- and I was not one of them-- gathered around to look at the permit report, just a quick skim of the relevant details of the project proposed, verifying the name and wondering over it. The gossip flew, as it always does, and in a matter of hours we had learned that Jim had, in fact, put out a shingle and was working as an independent.

I didn't get around to actually seeing Jim for another month or so. Some friend of a friend of Bryan's got us invited to the country club, where I found Jim in a growing state of insobriety. On spotting me, he insisted on telling his tale, just as soon as I assured him I was doing fine. It came out in a slurred torrent through a toothy grin, and amounted to "Oh, I was toddling along just fine, but then people wouldn't stop calling me, and before you know it I'm starting my own architecture firm, OH-WHA-WHA-WHA-WHA-WHA!" He had been so well known and so well connected that, having left the firm, he was one of the people people thought of when they thought about architects.

It was a pretty common story. I had seen it happen before. He went out, made some deals without contracts, hired a kid right out of architecture college, teamed up with a CAD guy for detailing and specs, and before he knew it he was signing on dotted lines and turning designs over to the zoning board. Before I knew it, there were signs going up on future sites of thus-and-such center, 2,500 square feet retail/restaurant space available next to the pizza joint or the discount shoe store. These were the only evidence of his existence I saw for the most part. We ran in different circles, and still do, and the kind of people he spends his time with are not likely to be in the places I tend to be. After a while a spot or two of red clay and scrub brush came forth and was fruitful, bearing a strip shopping center, occasionally with a pretty good restaurant, mostly with well appointed storefronts and attractive decorative streetlights and plazas to stroll between the shops to encourage window shopping.

Once I ran into his college student. I had gone to a colloquia on urban design, mainly as an excuse to get out of the office for most of a day, and was introduced to a Brad Somethingorother of Designata. We shook hands and he made small talk, mainly complaining that partners do all the talking and non-partners do all the drawing, with me certifying, "This is true, this is true." It wasn't until four or five minutes after he left that it dawned on me that Designata was the somewhat puzzling name Jim had chosen for his new enterprise. A bit after that my wife, while going through the Sunday social section as she does every weekend with no plausible motivation or explanation, saw his name and his firm name mentioned in the presence of some famously politically connected Charlotteans. At the time, my wife remarked that he must be on his way up in the world. At the time, I agreed, but said nothing.

Because maybe I'm making it all up. Maybe I just want a happy ending for him. Maybe I don't want to think of him as someone I knew sometime, someone who orbited within my solar system for a number of years and was afterwards absent. Perhaps, ridiculously, in the back of my mind, I want to hold in reserve the possibility of a moment in the future when I can go to my old friend and mentor Jim Still, now compatriot and intimate of the powers that be, and, requesting help, have him confide, over a fine brandy and with a knowing smile, "Well, I suppose I can find a way to accommodate an old friend."

(Lifting the glass, not quite winking, with a knowing gleam in his eyes, saying to me over the toast, "Old friend.")

I had a point here when I started, but I'm not sure what it might have been. Always wear a red cap. Yeah. That'll do.